Military Romance Collection: Contemporary Soldier Alpha Male Romance (123 page)

Slinging an arm around Eve’s shoulder, Aidan beamed and said, “We haven’t been seeing each other very long.” It was true, she supposed, but how was she going to explain to her sister when he left abruptly tonight or tomorrow? Or even the day after Christmas.

“Well, my sister looks incredibly happy, so I guess I’m glad things are working out so far. I didn’t know Eve had a boyfriend, or I would have gotten you a gift.” Delia looked pointedly at Eve. “But if you’re going to be here for a few days, I’ll be sure to pick something up for you.”

“I don’t need a gift. I’m happy to meet Eve’s family. That’s enough of a gift for me.” Eve cringed internally as he kissed her cheek. “But if you’re going to be around, maybe we can all go out to dinner. I don’t have anywhere I need to be until after the new year.”

Eve turned her gaze to him, startled. He just smiled at her and said, “I was actually thinking about making other arrangements so I could stay longer. I think I’ve got something I want to stick around for.” He leaned in to kiss her cheek again, whispering, “If you’re happy, I want to keep it that way.”

Gulping as he pulled back, Eve searched his expression with wide eyes, trying to figure out exactly what he was saying. “What do you mean?”

He shrugged. “I’m a cop, right? I can find a job locally. And my lease is up soon. I could find a place here.” He moved in again, breathing into her ear, “Merry Christmas, Eve. I only have myself to give, but if you’ll accept it, you can have all of me.”

Trying to be discreet at that point was impossible as tears streamed down her face. Her sister had made it for Christmas Eve, and she had this incredible man offering to uproot his life just to explore what they had together. What more could she ask for? With a smile of absolute delight, she threw her arms around Aidan and planted a solid kiss on his lips. “I’ll take what I can get!”

***

THE END

Chapter One

“I hate you! I hate you, Santa Claus! You’re not real!” The tiny girl screeched, hauled back her foot and let Nick have it—right in the shin.

“Ow! Holy—not nice! Naughty! Ow!” Nick debated whether to grab his bruised leg or his pint-sized assailant first; in the end, he let her dash off into the children’s hospital Christmas party crowd, and hoped her parents did their jobs by making her apologize.

After a few moments, it appeared that no one was coming forward to claim the kid, and he couldn’t blame them. If she were his, he’d deny it too. In fact, he wouldn’t be surprised if they were hiding from the brat themselves.

And she was a brat. He knew it, because his Santa-Spidey senses weren’t just tingling, they were screeching like a police siren:
Naaaughty! Naughty! Naughty! Naaaughty!

Because damn it--he was real. This year, anyway. Next year, hopefully, his father would be well again and ready to hop back in the sleigh. But this year, jolly old Saint Nick, Sr. had sprained his knee during the annual reindeer tryouts, and he was out of commission for six weeks. Nick Jr. had been forced to leave his work in the real world as an e-book publisher, and go home to the North Pole to run “the family business”: Making lists, managing elves, delivering presents.

How convenient, Nick thought, and straightened with his hands on the small of his back. If he didn’t know any better, he’d think the whole thing was a setup. Because really. Who sprained a knee stepping in reindeer shit? Granted, the old man had slipped, performing the most graceful split ever seen at the North Pole—the Russian judges could have given it a ten, for Pete’s sake—but still. The whole thing reeked of parental conspiracy.

His father was Santa.
The
Santa. Three hundred years old or not, the guy was as flexible as a pipe cleaner. He could squish through chimneys. How he could sprain anything was hard to –
There she is!

Nick spotted his assailant peeking around the entrance to the room with big, blue eyes and a sweetly innocent face that belied her ability to impair an adult male with one blow from a shiny, patent-leather Mary Jane. He zeroed in on her and limped across the room before she could get away.

Except she didn’t try to escape. Instead, the kid stood her ground with her little bow-shaped pink mouth puckered into a pout and her small hands balled on her hips. Hoping she didn’t plan on kicking him again in an even worse and more highly cherished place, Nick put his faith in the universe and squatted down to meet her, eye to eye.

“Listen…” He used his temporarily activated Santa-senses to pull her name from her brain. “…Gracie.”

The girl frowned. “How do you know my name?”

“Because.
I’m
Santa, and I
am
real,” Nick said.

She narrowed her long-lashed china blue eyes at him. “No you’re not. You read my name tag.” She pointed to the generic, “Hi, my name is Gracie, age 7,” on the shoulder of her green velvet dress.

Oh. Yeah.
Nick sighed.
Observant much, Santa?
He pushed that aside. “Look, Gracie. You don’t go around kicking Santa. It’s not nice.”

She shook her head and her golden-blonde banana curls bobbed. “Santa is a lie.”

Fine. Whatever.
“Believe what you want, Gracie. Far be it from me to argue with you. But, you kicked me, and it hurt.
I’m
real.”

She pouted. “But you’re not Santa.”

“But I am a person.” Well, technically. He was all Elf on Dad’s side, part-human on Mom’s. Mom was half-human, half-Fae.

Gracie fixed him with a stare. “Yeah? So?”

“So it hurts when you kick me!” Nick stood up to his full, six-foot three height, towering over the tiny girl. She crossed her arms over her chest, unintimidated and maybe ready to kick again.

Nick took a step back, just in case.

“And anyway, you’re too skinny to be Santa. He’s fat. You’re just…
humph
.” Gracie shrugged. “
You
look like a movie star.”

Well, then. Maybe the kid wasn’t such a brat, after all. He smiled down at her.

“Grace Eileen O’Mara!” A woman’s voice interrupted their conversation. Finally, someone claimed ownership of the precocious kicker. The little girl turned to look at the woman bearing down on them from across the hospital lobby, and her shoulders slumped. She turned back to Nick.

“It’s my Auntie Callie.” She made a face.

The woman stopped, stared down at the child and then up at Nick. Her eyes widened as she took in his Santa suit, then the children’s ward party in progress behind them, and her expression changed. Waves of guilt emanated from her and washed over him, pushing his Santa senses into full empathy. He felt as if he were about to drown. Still, she made her face stern and tried to sound strong. “I told you to wait for me outside your sister’s room and that I’d bring you down here as soon as I could.”

“You were taking too long,” Gracie said. The brattiness began to fade, replaced by an overwhelming sadness and despair that made Nick’s senses tingle so hard, he began to shiver. He wondered how his father could stand it, feeling everyone’s emotions along with them—the ones
besides
Christmas joy and excitement, especially.

“Gracie, honey. I promised your sister I’d stay with her until treatment was over and she fell asleep--”

“It’s all about Katie. It’s
always
about her!” Gracie stamped her foot. “She gets
everything
she wants and I don’t get anything! I just wanted to go to the party!” She burst into tears, cocked back her foot and shot Auntie Calliea solid kick in the calf.

Ow!
Nick winced. It was as if his—her—shinbone had shattered.

“Ow!” Callie shrieked and fell to the floor, her dress hiked up over shapely thighs. One of her ass cheeks was exposed. Through his haze of empathetic pain, Nick noticed that Auntie Callie was wearing a lacy, red thong.

“Oh!” He tried not to look at the curve of her ass as he bent to help her up. He failed. It looked nicely round and soft, and he ached to nibble on it. But he didn’t let her know that. Instead, he asked, “Are you all right?”

She winced as she stood, ignoring his outstretched hands. “I— I’m sorry. This has been so hard on Gracie. Her parents were in a car accident last year, a week before Christmas, and now, her twin sister has cancer… She’s just a little girl and…” The woman’s green eyes filled with tears, and Nick’s throat closed up. Gracie’s sadness had made him shiver, but Callie’s sadness was a bleak, black void that made it hard to breathe.

He swallowed and gulped air like a landed fish. But then, a sudden realization came over him, and he knew exactly what was wrong with little Gracie, and why she didn’t believe in Santa anymore.

She had wished for the impossible.

Probably from a storefront Santa who couldn’t even deliver a lump of coal, never mind a miracle, and now her worldly-wonder and her all-important belief in magic was gone.

It had extinguished her soul. She would go through the rest of her life as a bitter, angry person, unable to love or trust or believe in anything or anyone until the day she died. It was a horrible fate made worse with the knowledge that she would end up alone.

“So that’s why she’s angry that Santa isn’t real?”

The tears spilled over Callie’s eyelids and down her cheeks; she had the gift of empathy too, Nick realized. “She asked Santa to bring her parents back, last year, and to make Katie better…” She began to sob.

Nick moved her out of the doorway and to one of the chairs lining the lobby walls, within view of the party. He could still see Gracie, huddled all alone in a far corner. His heart went out to the tiny girl, but her aunt’s needs were greater, just then. Gracie had her aunt to comfort her, kiss away her tears, hug her and tell her things would someday be okay. Callie had no one. Right now, she was carrying this burden all alone, her pain and Gracie’s, and it hurt more than anything he’d ever felt.

Nick squared his shoulders. “Even Santa can’t bring the dead back to life. Or cure cancer.”

She sniffed and looked at him with a hard-to-fathom expression, but he had a feeling it was along the lines of
no shit, Sherlock
. She blinked. “Of course he can’t.”

Nick felt stupid and tried to explain. “What I mean is, she asked for the impossible and…her faith was destroyed.”

Callie nodded. “The worst part is that I didn’t even know she’d asked, so I couldn’t talk to her, prepare her. So there we were, Christmas morning, and—”

Nick could barely stand the agony roiling off Callie. He took another deep breath and fought against the knife-like pain slashing at his heart. “And her parents weren’t there, and Katie was still sick.”

Callie put her hands to her face; her wavy blonde hair fell over her wrists like a curtain. “I got her Barbie dolls. She was expecting to see her mommy and daddy, and instead she got Puppy Palace Barbie and a fucking townhouse...” She made a mewling sound that turned Nick inside out. He wanted to cover his ears. He wanted to get away. But more than that, he wanted…to help.

“You didn’t know. And even if you did—you couldn’t have changed anything anymore than Santa could have.” He reached out to touch her, teeth gritted. He knew he was about to be assaulted by the worst grief imaginable, but there was no way he could let this small, almost-elfin woman carry this enormous burden. His parents hadn’t raised him to ignore other people’s needs—the assholes. It was part of being Santa; he’d accepted this responsibility when he’d donned the red suit, and the fake white beard that his father didn’t need. He steadied himself, and—not wanting to do it, but
needing
to—he touched her.

Pain rolled over him in waves of blue and black. Callie lifted her red-rimmed eyes to his; her eyelashes were spiked with tears. Then she sort of collapsed onto his chest, and he automatically put his arms around her. The scent of her shampoo—strawberry—and of her softly floral perfume—swirled around him. He relaxed and began sifting through her thoughts and feelings, hoping he could somehow heal her, make her feel something other than overwhelming grief.

Gradually, the colors of her sadness changed, becoming sort of sparkly, and red-tinged, with streaks of white, like lightening. It was weird, and something he’d not experienced as Santa. It was good. It
felt
good.

In fact, it felt awesome.

His stomach suddenly flipped and his stomach clenched; heat flowed through him. Suddenly, images of red satin and fur-lined handcuffs appeared in his mind and Nick’s body responded with an enormous and completely unexpected boner.

What the hell?!

Nick scrambled away from Callie before the erection springing up in response to this woman’s subconscious desires grew too large to hide. He stared at her quietly shaking beside him; the waves of her grief still splashed against him. She wasn’t all horned out…was she? Did she have some kind of freaky sadness fetish? And what was with the furry cuffs?

Cautiously, he reached out, hesitated, and then touched her again. Okay. Not at the surface, but deeper into her feelings…

Silk sheets, silken skin. Callie, her soft, warm breasts pressed to his chest, her pussy gripping his cock. “Kiss me,” she murmured, dropping her lips to his.

He gasped aloud, and this time he stood up. She lifted her swollen, red eyes to peer at him through the tangle of her blond hair and she sniffled, the tip of her small nose cherry red. Nick couldn’t not notice that her lips were also cherry red, soft and oh-so-kissable.

He yanked the fake beard from behind his ears and held it in front of his pants, afraid to look. Was his cock tenting red velvet through the white polyester strands? Now that he was looking at Callie as a woman—with breasts and everything—instead of the one in charge of a dangerously bratty kid, he realized that Callie was beautiful.

Holy shit.
This was just too weird and wrong and downright disturbing on so many levels. “I—I have to go. I’m so sorry for your loss.” He took a step back, and turned to hurry away; it was hard not to disassemble to the North Pole until he was around the corner, out of view.

*****

“I told you it would work!” Krista Kringle turned away from the
I-See-You
Scope and smacked her husband in the shoulder.

Santa winced.“Ow. Yes, my love, you did.” He rubbed his arm.

“He did it! He met a woman!”

“I know he did.”

“Finally! Do you know what this means, Kringle? Do you?” Krista jumped on the bed, as spry now as she’d been two hundred and eighty years earlier. “We’re going to have grandchildren!” She whooped and fell onto the mattress beside him, one of her long blond braids falling across his chest. He lifted it to his lips.

“Yay!” he cheered, without enthusiasm.

She lifted her head. “You don’t have to be sarcastic.”

Santa sighed. “I’m sorry, my love. I am excited about grandchildren. It’s just…I feel awful. Manipulating Nick this way…lying about my knee…”

“If we didn’t get him out into the world, he’d never have met her. Instead he’d be pining around for eternity, piddling around with those books. You know that as much as I do. He’s not getting any younger, Kringle. He needs a wife, a family to love. He needs…” She trailed off and blushed, lowering her eyes and poking her lower lip out in just that way that made him instantly hot.