The Spirit of Christmas

It was a check.

She blinked.

It was a check for two million dollars.

Signed by Malcolm Henry, Jr.

The Malcolm Henry, Jr., of Henry Department Stores.

She blinked. “I don’t understand. Where did you get this?”

He grinned. “My child, you are the Spirit of Christmas.”

A flash of light blinded her, forcing her to squinch her eyes together. When she opened them, she found another man emerging from behind the Dumpster. The light was so blinding and her feet were now so numbed by the cold, she stumbled back, tilted and fell, landing hard on the icy pavement.

She tried to get up, but her legs failed to comply, so she sat there feeling water seep through the seat of her newest skirt, no doubt ruining the charcoal tweed and her favorite silk panties.

The elderly man stood and shrugged into a long cashmere coat the cameraman handed him while shoving feet still clad in the garish Christmas socks into a pair of lined hunting boots stored within one of the cardboard boxes. Then he extended one hand to her. She took it, bobbing her glance nervously toward the man filming the oddest thing that had ever happened to her—and she’d had plenty of oddness in her life…she’d once been bitten by a llama, for heaven’s sake. She still held the check, so she shoved it toward the older man, who didn’t look so much like a bum anymore. His coat probably cost a week’s salary. Maybe a month’s.

He waved the check away. “No, no. That’s all yours. I feared we wouldn’t find a kind soul at all. Been doing this for four straight days.”

She didn’t say anything. Merely stood there. Shocked.

“By the way, I’d like to introduce myself. I’m Malcolm Henry, and I must tell you I love these socks.”

CHAPTER TWO

BRENNAN HENRY STUDIED the huge Christmas tree towering in front of the glass elevator of his office building. The thing was nearly thirty feet tall and took up so much space on the marble floor everyone had to walk several feet out of the natural path to the elevators. And the lights blinked in time with loud holiday music that spilled from overhead speakers.

Ridiculous.

He would have his secretary pen a strongly worded letter to the owner of the building—who happened to be his grandfather. Didn’t matter. A letter would be official. After all, Brennan didn’t mind people enjoying the upcoming holiday season, but not at the expense of others.

The elevator shot up to the top floor and swooshed open, revealing the tasteful lobby of MBH Industries, the company bearing his great-grandfather’s initials. An attractive receptionist gave an automatic smile, which deepened when she saw him stride out. “Good morning, Mr. Henry.”

Brennan gave her little more than his normal clipped smile. “Mr. Henry is my grandfather, Cheryl.”

She laughed because it was a game they played every day. A small flirty little game he allowed himself, like an extra shot of cream in his coffee. He pushed on toward his office in a far corner, and entered his assistant’s area.

“Good morning, Brennan,” Sophie Caruso said, looking up from her keyboard and spinning toward the antique sideboard housing the coffee. The office smelled like cinnamon rolls fresh out of the oven and his stomach growled.

“Good morning, Sophie. You have those quarterly sales reports from Mark yet?”

She pressed the button on the one-cup coffee machine before sifting through the folders on the corner of her desk. “Right here. They were waiting for you this morning.”

She pulled a folder covered with lime-green and red paisleys from the stack of plain manila and held it toward him.

He looked at it as though she’d handed him a writhing rattlesnake.

“What?” she asked. “He’s trying to get into the spirit and swears paisleys are all the rage this year.”

“This is a place of business,” Brennan muttered, downing some coffee and heading toward his office, holding the ridiculous folder with the reports Mark had promised. Next time, Brennan would request his director of marketing send them as an email attachment. Mark was adamant about using a highlighter and doing things old-school. He swore it kept him from missing important trends, but if the man kept decorating his folders like a schoolgirl on crack, Brennan would insist on electronic versions.

He pushed the intercom button on his desk. “Hey, Mrs. Caruso, could you bring me a plain—”

The door opened and his assistant entered with a manila folder and his second cup of coffee.

“You’re wonderful,” he said, accepting the mug and placing it next to the nearly empty one, before sliding the stapled reports he’d already pulled from the colored folder into the much more businesslike one she handed him.

“I know,” she said, turning toward the door. She spun around and snapped her fingers, the motion making her silver-strewn brown hair stand out like a flying saucer. “Your grandfather called and said he was bringing by the centerpiece for the new ad campaign. Said you needed to call Ellen and have her sit in on the meeting. Boardroom B at ten.”

She shut the door before he could mutter a really dirty word under his breath.

Oh, sure. He had nothing better to do than to be at the beck and call of his grandfather’s shenanigans. What had happened to the hard-nosed captain of industry who had brought their company into the twenty-first century? Where had the iron-fisted, no-nonsense head of the most successful chain of small department stores in the South gone?

Because the man who’d flown a kite from the top of the building last week wasn’t him. If the past few months were any indicator, Malcolm Henry, Jr.’s cheese had slid off his cracker.

Hell, the man sat up front with his driver holding a wiener dog he’d named Izzy in his lap. If that wasn’t damning evidence, Brennan didn’t know what was.

He couldn’t wrap his mind around the change in the man who had skipped most of his grandson’s birthday parties because there had been work to attend to. His grandfather had even arrived late at Brennan’s graduation because of an emergency board-of-directors meeting about an acquisition of a small chain of stores on the East Coast. Malcolm Henry had been the sharpest businessman in the Crescent City…and now he called bingo at the local homeless shelter on Friday nights.

Brennan picked up the phone. “Get me Ellen. Please.”

The VP of communications and community relations, who was also his second cousin, answered on the third ring. “Bivens.”

“Ellen, tell me my grandfather isn’t going through with this crazy promo idea.”

“Your grandfather isn’t going through with this crazy promo.”

“You’re lying.”

“Of course I am. You told me to.”

Okay, so he had.

“We can’t throw money away like this. Giving a random stranger millions of dollars is irresponsible in this economy. We have investors who will flip when they find out MBH is handing out money capriciously.”

“Wait a sec, it’s not the company’s money.”

“You mean he’s using our money for this?” Something hot slid into his gut. It wasn’t as though his grandfather couldn’t do what he wished with his own money. But over the past six months, the man had shelled out huge chunks of money to pet nonprofit agencies. Giving money away to a perfect stranger, declaring him or her the Spirit of Christmas and mapping out some crazy publicity stunt sounded dangerously negligent.

Worry started eating away at Brennan. What if the heart attack his grandfather had suffered six months ago had done other damage—like to Malcolm’s head? Maybe a mild stroke that had gone misdiagnosed? His grandfather had always been extremely careful in spending money, both in business and his personal life.

Brennan wasn’t ready to watch his grandfather turn senile, ineffective and dotty in his advanced age. He wasn’t ready to let go of the one solid presence in his life.

“That’s what he indicated,” Ellen said, clearing her throat uncomfortably. “I assumed you had spoken with him about this. We’ve been working on this for three months.”

His grandfather had spoken to him. Brennan had just failed to “hear” the plan. “I have, but I was unaware of the particulars, and, honestly, I had hoped this crazy idea would fall by the wayside. After all, we have the Magic in the Lights gala coming up benefiting Malcolm’s Kids. Grandfather has plenty of charitable causes to pursue, all of which demonstrate the Spirit of the Season.”