The Mistletoe Promise (4 page)

CHAPTER

Seven

Why is it that we so easily confide secrets to strangers that we so carefully hide from ourselves?

Elise Dutton’s Diary

I once read that the secret to happiness is having something to do, something to look forward to, and someone to love. It must be true even if the love is contractual. The next morning was the first time in a long time that I woke happy. I followed my usual routine of shower, hair, health shake, then, looking at myself in the mirror, I took extra time for my makeup. I used to be good at makeup, but that was before I stopped caring. You don’t take care of things you don’t value.

I was a few minutes late to work, but, considering all the late evenings and unpaid overtime I’d pulled over the years, I wasn’t worried.

“You’re late,” Zoey said as I walked into the office. She was applying mascara.

“I know,” I said simply.

Around ten o’clock we were having staff meeting when the bell on our door rang. “I’ll get it,” Zoey said, standing. She was always the first to offer. She hated meetings.

Five minutes later, when Zoey hadn’t returned, Mark said, “Elise, would you please remind Zoey that we’re in the middle of a staff meeting?”

“Sure,” I said. I walked out into the front lobby. Zoey was just standing there in a room filled with flowers. “The man’s smitten,” she said, shaking her head in disbelief. “It took two deliverymen to bring them all in.”

There were twelve dozen roses, half white, half red. If Nicholas was making a point about sending me whatever he wanted, he’d succeeded. A minute later Cathy walked out. “Holy florist. We’re going to have to start charging this guy rent.” She looked at me. “What are you going to do with all those?”

“I have no idea,” I said.

“The delivery people said they’d be back to take them to your apartment,” Zoey said. “Here’s the card that came with them.”

I unsealed the envelope.

Day 4. Next time you complain that I’m spending too much I’m doubling it. Looking forward to tonight.

—Nicholas

I smiled.

“What did he say?” Zoey asked.

“He’s looking forward to our date tonight.”

“Where are you going?”

“We’re going to watch a play.
A Christmas Carol.
”

“That sounds . . . fun.” I knew that a play wouldn’t be her idea of a good time. She looked at me for a moment, then said, “You know what the problem with all this is?”

I looked at her. “No. What?”

“No one can keep this up forever. Someday it’s going to stop. And then it’s going to suck.”

“It’s most certainly going to stop,” I said. “The trick is to enjoy the ride while it lasts.”

Zoey looked at me with surprise. “When did you get this attitude?” Then she looked closer at me. “Are you wearing eyeliner?”

When I arrived in the food court, Nicholas was already there, sitting at our usual table. He must have been early; he had already bought our food. He smiled when he saw me. “I took the liberty of ordering the usual.”

“Thank you,” I said, sitting down. I took a bite of my salad. He wore a funny expression, and I guessed that he was waiting for me to comment on the flowers. I decided to play dumb.

Finally he said, “So did you get anything today?”

I looked at him blankly. “Anything? Like what?”

“A special delivery?”

“Hmm, I said. “A special delivery. Oh, you mean like a hundred and forty-four roses?”

He grinned. “That wasn’t too
excessive,
was it?”

“No. Just right. And once the delivery people return to get them, my apartment will look like a funeral parlor.”

He laughed. “We’re still on for tonight?”

“Yes.”

“The play starts at seven, so I’ll pick you up around six-thirty?”

“Okay,” I said.

“Then, if you’re not too tired, we’ll get some dinner after.”

“Sounds nice.”

“Anything in particular?”

“No. Surprise me.” Just going out to dinner was surprise enough.

It was snowing when I got home from work. As usual, my apartment was a mess, so I picked up the place or, at least, organized the chaos—throwing my clothes in a hamper and loading the dishwasher. I was about to freshen up for the play when the doorbell rang.
He better not be early,
I thought. He wasn’t. It was the florist. “I’ve got your flowers,” the man said.

I looked around my tiny apartment. “Bring them in.”

“Where do you want them?”

“Wherever they’ll fit,” I replied.

My apartment was on the second floor of the building, and it took the man fifteen minutes to bring all the roses in from his truck. By the time he finished, it was twenty-five after. I quickly changed into some more comfortable jeans and a sweater, brushed back my hair, then went to put on some perfume but couldn’t find any.
Girl, you’ve got to get back with it.

I remembered that I had an unopened bottle of perfume
in the bottom of my closet—a gift from the girls at the office for my birthday last spring. I tore open the package and was spraying it on when the doorbell rang. I looked at myself one more time in the mirror, then hurried out past the garden of flowers, grabbing my coat on the way.

I opened the door. Nicholas was standing there holding a bouquet of yellow gerbera daisies. I almost laughed when I saw them. “You’re kidding, right?”

“I wasn’t sure what else to bring you,” he said.

“Let me find something to put these in. Come on in.”

He laughed when he saw the flowers splayed out over my front room. “You almost need a machete to get through here.”

“Almost,” I said.

I couldn’t find a vase (other than the ones in my front room), so I filled a pitcher with water and arranged the flowers in it. When I came back out Nicholas was examining a picture on my wall of me with my sister.

“Is this your sister?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“What’s her name?”

“Cosette.”

“As in
Les Misérables
?”

“Yes. My father liked the book. Shall we go?”

“Sure,” he said. Then added, “You look nice.”

“Thank you. So do you.” He was dressed casually in a dark green knit sweater that was a little wet on the shoulders from falling snow. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen you out of a suit.”

“It’s rare, but I do dress down on occasion.”

I took his hand as we walked down the stairs. His car was parked out front, a white BMW sedan. He held the door open for me as I got in. The interior was immaculate and smelled like cinnamon. The seats and doors were two-toned leather, embossed like a football. He shut the door, then went around and climbed in.

“You have a nice car.”

“Thank you. I just got it a few months ago. The dealer said it’s good in snow. I hope he’s right. I turned your seat warmer on. If it’s too hot you can adjust it.”

“Thanks.”

He started the car. The heater and the windshield wipers came on simultaneously, along with a Michael Bublé Christmas album. “Is this music okay?”

“I love Bublé,” I said.

“Then Bublé you will have.”

“It smells good in here,” I said.

“
You
smell good. What is it? Lovely?”

“How in the world did you know that?”

“My paralegal wears it.” He pulled a U-turn, then drove out of my complex. “Thanks again for going to this with me. I’ve wanted to do this for a while.”

“It’s my pleasure,” I said. “I told Cathy where we were going, and she said she loves it. Her family goes every year.”

“Who’s Cathy?”

“Sorry, she’s our bookkeeper.”

“Are all of your friends from work?”

I frowned, embarrassed by the question. “Yes.”

He glanced over. “It happens. All my friends are lawyers. Except you.”

Something about how he had said that made me glad. “Tell me about this play,” I said.

“Hale Centre Theatre. They’ve been doing this for a long time. I’m kind of a sap when it comes to Christmas. I watch
A Christmas Carol
on TV at least twice every holiday season. My favorite television version is the one with George C. Scott.”

“Me too,” I said. “I mean, that’s my favorite version too.”

The Hale Centre Theatre was located on the west side of the valley, about fifteen minutes from my apartment. The place was crowded. We picked up our tickets at Will Call, then Nicholas asked, “Would you like a drink or a snack?”

I glanced over at the concession stand. “Maybe some popcorn.”

“Okay. Wait, it’s not popcorn, it’s kettle corn.”

“What’s the difference?”

“You’ll like it,” he said. “It has sugar.”

“How do you know I like sugar?”

“You eat it on your salad,” he said.

We got a small box of kettle corn and climbed the stairs to the theater’s entrance. The theater was in the round, and, not surprisingly, we had good seats, though in a theater that small I’m not sure there were any bad ones.

After we had sat down I ate some kettle corn and said, “Picking up our tickets at Will Call reminded me of something dumb I did.”

“Tell me.”

“When I first started at ICE, Mark, he’s the owner, sent me over to Modern Display to pick up some plastic display holders for a convention we were doing. He said to get them from Will Call. When I got there I went up to the sales counter and asked for Mr. Call. There were two men there, and they both looked at me with funny expressions. One asked the other, ‘Do you know a Call here?’ He said, ‘No.’ Then he said to me, ‘I’m sorry, there’s no Mr. Call here. Do you know his first name?’ I said, ‘I think it’s William or Will. My boss just said to pick it up from Will Call.’ They laughed for about five minutes before someone told me why.”

Nicholas laughed. “I did that exact same thing once.”

“Really?”

“No, I’m not that dumb.”

I threw a piece of kettle corn at him.

“So here’s some trivia for you,” he said. “Did you know that the original name that Dickens gave his book was much longer? Its real title is
A Christmas Carol in Prose: Being a Ghost Story of Christmas
. A carol is a song or a hymn, so the abbreviated title doesn’t really make sense.”

“I’ve never thought of that,” I said.

“It’s a much more influential book than most people realize. In a way, Dickens invented Christmas.”

“I’m pretty sure Christmas existed before Dickens was born.”

“True, but before
A Christmas Carol
, Easter was the biggest Christian celebration. December twenty-fifth was no more consequential than Memorial Day. In fact, the colony of Massachusetts had a law on the books prohibiting the cel
ebration of the holiday. Christmas was considered a pagan celebration, and observing Christmas might cost you a night in the stocks.”

“Why is that?”

“Mostly the timing, I suspect. The reason we celebrate Christmas on the twenty-fifth has nothing to do with Christ’s birth. In fact, we have no idea when Christ was born. The twenty-fifth was designated as Jesus’s birthday by Pope Julius I, in order to attract new Roman members to the church because they were already celebrating the day in honor of the pagan god of agriculture. Which is why Christmas not so coincidentally takes place near the winter solstice.”

“I had no idea,” I said.

“Also interesting is that historically, Dickens and Friedrich Engels were contemporaries. They were both in Manchester, England, at the same time and they were equally repulsed by the workers’ living conditions.”

“Who is Friedrich Engels?”

“He was Karl Marx’s inspiration for the
Communist Manifesto.
The early nineteenth century was a dark time for the workingman. The majority of the children born to working-class parents died before the age of five. So while Engels wrote about a political revolution, Dickens was writing about a different kind of revolution—a revolution of the heart. He was writing about the things he wrote about in his other books, the welfare of children and the need for social charity.”

“How do you know all this?”

“I’m a lawyer,” he said, which again made no sense to me.

“What does that have to do with—”

“Shh,” he said, laying his finger across his lips. “The play is starting.”

As the lights came up at the end of the first half, just before Scrooge meets the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come, I excused myself to go to the ladies’ room. When I returned Nicholas was standing near our seats, talking to a beautiful young woman. She looked to be in her late twenties, with big brown eyes and coffee brown hair that fell past her shoulders.