The Billionaire's First Christmas - Contemporary Romance (9 page)

“Santa Claus?” he said, trying to
re-direct me back to the subject at hand. I did have a tendency to
get off track, especially with so much stimulus going on around
me.

“I’m getting there,” I told him. “Be
patient.” We were passing the booth to buy tickets for the carriage
rides and I stopped and said, “Ooh! Let’s go for a carriage
ride.”

“What about the story?” he said. I
could tell right then that patience wasn’t one of his virtues. I
guess when you’re Aaron Winters; you rarely had to wait for what
you wanted.

“I’ll finish the story in the
carriage. Come on, it doesn’t feel like Christmas without at least
one carriage ride through the park.” Aaron was eyeing the horse and
the cart suspiciously. He seemed to be checking the wheels on the
cart to make sure they looked like they’d hold up. “It’s safe, I
promise. Have you never been for a carriage ride?”

“I’ve never seen the point,” he said.
“I have several cars and…”

I laughed, “There is no point. It’s
just fun. Don’t you ever do anything spontaneously just for
fun?”

He looked like he was thinking about
that and then he said, “Rarely.”

CHAPTER EIGHT

~

ROBYN

I was having a hard time imagining
what a sheltered life Aaron must have led. I wondered if he had
been one of those children who grew up in private school and with a
nanny. I pictured him in a mansion in upstate somewhere with two
driven, focused parents that rarely had time for him. My heart
ached for the lonely little boy who grew up not learning to have
any fun. I’m sure that was where he learned how to be so serious,
he watched his parents work hard and succeed, not having time for
much else… even Christmas for their child maybe. I didn’t know any
of that for sure. It was all just a theory. But, there had to be a
reason that as an adult, everything Aaron did seemed to be
carefully thought out and planned in advance. There was never
spontaneity involved. That may be good for business, but it was not
conducive at all to living life. I realized that my imagination was
getting away with me, but where Aaron was concerned it was really
all I had. He didn’t seem to be opening up much about his life
other than how much he disliked Christmas. I wished that he would,
I’d really love to know him. I hoped if I kept plugging away, he
would crack and it would all spill out. My motto was always that I
only got one chance at this thing called life. I was going to do it
right.

“You really need to work on trying to
be more impulsive,” I told him. “Life’s so much more fun if it’s
not all planned out. Plans are necessary sometimes, but other times
they actually get in the way of trying new things. Come on, let’s
get a hot chocolate and go for a ride.”

“And you’ll finish the story?” he
asked.

“Yes, I’ll finish the
story.”

Once we bought our hot chocolate and
were snuggled under a red blanket in the white carriage, he said
again, “So, are you ready to finish the story?”

I laughed and said, “Yes, I’m ready. I
have to say though that for a guy who hates Christmas, you sure are
interested in hearing a Christmas story.”

“I don’t “hate” Christmas,” he said.
“I just don’t care for it… and I don’t like the cold weather.
Anyways, I’m not interested in the Christmas part of the story. I’m
only interested in finding out about your Santa Claus
obsession.”

“I’m not “obsessed” with Santa Claus,”
I told him with a grin.

“Whatever you would like to call it,”
he said, smiling in return.

I resumed my story.

“So, my mom and I baked the best
cookies in the world while we waited for my dad to get home. I
think I ate like ten of them. I loved to eat back then, anything
sweet especially. I was a pudgy little thing…”

“You’re getting off track again,” he
said. I think he was actually getting frustrated with
me.

“That’s another thing,” I told him.
“Sometimes it’s more fun and more interesting to go off track. Life
doesn’t have a script you know. Some of the greatest places on
earth have been discovered because someone went off
track.”

He shook his head at me, but he was
still smiling. “Okay, I have to say that you “pudgy” is a hard
picture for me to draw in my head, but if you say so, I’ll believe
you. Did your father arrive eventually?”

“Hard picture or not, it’s true. I
dieted the whole summer before high school to lose twenty pounds,
it was excruciating.”

He laughed and said, “Good for you.
Now, did your father arrive home?”

I sighed at him; he was as
relentless as I was sometimes. “Yes, he did. He looked so tired
too. The poor man worked sixteen hours a day sometimes back then.
He built cabinets and he was really good at it. I think maybe they
over used him a little bit at the plant where he worked. I feel bad
now when I think about it. He was doing it all for us and I never
realized…” Aaron was giving me that “off track” look again. I
rolled my eyes, took a sip of my chocolate and went on,
“But anyways, while he had some of my mother’s
cookies with a glass of milk, she told him about the kids at school
telling me there was no Santa Claus.”

“She wants to know the truth, she
says,” my mother told him. “I didn’t see her wink, but when I think
about it now, I’m sure that she probably did.”

My daddy stopped chewing mid-cookie.
It had to be important to get my daddy to stop eating a cookie. He
liked sweets as much as I did. He took a drink of his milk and
stood up. “Get your coat,” he told me.

“Where are we going?” I asked
him.

“You want to know the truth about
Santa Claus, right?” he said.

“Yes, the absolute truth,” I told him.
I didn’t want them to think I was too young to hear it, so that’s
what the big word was about.

“Then get your coat and
stop asking so many questions,” he told me.

“I was also a bit inquisitive…”

“Shocking!” Aaron said with
a grin. I narrowed my eyes at his sarcasm and went on.

“I did as he asked and put
on my coat and hat and boots. It was a really cold winter that
year, the coldest that I ever remembered. It snowed every day for
weeks… but I digress again,” I said with a grin. He grinned back,
“Daddy and Mom had that look when I came back into the kitchen; I
knew they’d been talking about me. Mama kissed us both and said
that supper would be ready when we got back. Daddy and I got into
the car and drove into town. We went to a little five and dime
store… I grew up in a small town in Pennsylvania; we didn’t have
malls or department stores. Anyways, he took me into this store
where they sold everything from clothes to groceries and handed me
twenty dollars.”

“What is this for?” I asked
him. We weren’t poor, but at eight years old I already knew that we
didn’t have twenty dollars to throw around right before Christmas.
My parents taught me how to be responsible with money from a young
age. Daddy knelt down so we were eye to eye and he said,

“I want you to think really hard,
Robyn. I want you to think about everyone you know, or who you just
might see every now and then. It’s up to you to decide who you know
that might need something very dearly, something that they are
unable to buy for themselves. Then, I want you to take the money I
gave you and buy it for them. Have the store wrap it up too,
okay?”

“Okay…but Daddy…”

“Go on,” he told me, “The store will
be closing soon.”

Aaron was listening to the story
intently and as the carriage carried us across the park. Suddenly
it began to snow. It was just light flakes, not a storm and to me
it added to the romanticism of it all.

“Oh my goodness! It’s snowing! The
first snow if the year. It’s magical, you know. You have to open
your mouth and catch it on your tongue and make a wish…” I told
him. He shook his head again, but he still had a grin on his
face.

“One story at a time,” he said. “You
can tell me about Christmas snow later. Right now, you’re telling
me about Santa Claus. Are you going to finish?”

“Okay.” He was right; when
it came to Christmas I had so many stories. It was hard to stay on
track. I went on, “So, I took my twenty dollars and while Daddy had
a cup of coffee and a piece of pie at the counter, I thought and
thought about who I knew that as Daddy said, “Needed something
dearly.” I thought about my mom saying she needed a new vacuum, but
I was old enough to know that twenty dollars wouldn’t buy that. I
figured my daddy would buy her one soon enough anyways. I
remembered that my granny said she needed a new sewing machine, but
the store we were in didn’t carry any of those and twenty dollars
probably wouldn’t cover it. Then I thought about this girl in my
class. Her name was Lisbeth and she was always wearing old clothes
that never looked like they fit very well. I always wondered why
her mother didn’t just buy her new ones. I didn’t understand money
at all back then. Anyways, it was really cold that winter, colder
than I ever remembered it being and Lisbeth used to come to school
every day in the same pair of canvas sneakers that she’d been
wearing since first grade. I had no idea how her feet still fit in
them. I had gone through three sizes by then. I also didn’t know
how her feet didn’t freeze. It snowed every day and Lisbeth walked
to school. Her shoes were always wet and she always had a runny
nose. I remember one of our teachers had given her a coat that had
been left in the lost and found the year before, it was pink and
puffy and Lisbeth didn’t care that it was second hand, she loved
it. Some of the other kids used to make fun of her, but I never
did. I did my best to try and be her friend. She didn’t talk about
her home life, so I didn’t know why she needed hand me downs, but I
didn’t care. She was a nice girl and the other kids were so mean
sometimes. I took my twenty dollars and I went to the shoe
department. I found a pair of pink galoshes. They were the same
color pink as her coat.”

“You bought them for her?”
Aaron asked. He looked like he was really into the story. I was
glad.

“I did. I asked the lady
for a pair of them in a box and she asked me what size. I had no
idea. She asked me if they were going to be a gift and I told her
they were and that they were for a girl in my class at school. She
asked if the girl was about my height and weight and I said yes, so
she gave them to me in my size and said that should work. I asked
the lady to wrap them up really pretty and she did. She put a big,
pink bow on top and a little card that we could write on. When I
went to find my daddy he asked me what I’d bought. I remember not
understanding why then, but he got tears in his eyes when I told
him.

Daddy drove us to Lisbeth’s
house and we ducked behind the car in their driveway. Daddy stayed
there while I went and rang the bell. I dropped the package on the
doorstep and ran back to where Daddy was. We waited and then I saw
Lisbeth open the door and look around. She bent down and picked up
the package and took it inside. Daddy had written on the tag. It
said,
“To Lisbeth, From Santa
Claus.”

I was excited, but I was also eight. I
still didn’t really understand what it all meant, what the
significance was of what we had done. She smiled really big and ran
back inside. It made my heart feel good to see her so happy, but I
wanted to know why we’d done all of this.

When Daddy and I got back
in the car I asked him what that had to do with Santa Claus. He
told me first that he knew Lisbeth’s daddy. He asked me if Lisbeth
ever talked about him. I told him “No,” and that some of the kids
made fun of her because she wore old clothes and hand-me-downs that
teacher gave her. I wondered why her mother didn’t take better care
of her. Daddy looked sad and said her father was sick and in a
wheelchair. He said that he’d gotten sick right after Lisbeth was
born and he wasn’t able to work. Her mother worked at the diner in
our town. When I got older, I found out that he had Lou Gehrig’s
disease. Lisbeth finally told me and she told me that she knew
since she was little that he was going to die. We were in eighth
grade when he died. It was so sad… I’m sorry,” I said, knowing I
was getting off track again.

“Back to the story: Daddy told me that night that they had three
other kids older than Lisbeth and money was probably very tight for
them, especially around Christmas time. He said that he thought
Lisbeth’s mother probably took the best care of her that she should
and that I shouldn’t ever judge people by what they wore or how
much money they did or didn’t have. People were people. He told me
then that Santa was not so much a person as he was a feeling. He
lived in our hearts and minds but not in the flesh. He wasn’t the
man in the red suit. That man was a symbol of good will and
generosity. He said that every time that one person did something
nice or helpful for another person it was because we held the magic
of Santa Claus in our hearts. He said it was proof that he existed
and the kids at school were wrong.” I had tears in my own eyes when
I finished the story. That had been my very favorite Christmas.
Daddy and I had left several more things for Lisbeth and her family
that year. We made a tradition of picking out a family in need
every year after that until I graduated from high school. I looked
forward to it more than my own presents.”