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She prayed as she entered her PIN that her account wasn’t overdrawn. Things had been so hectic lately she couldn’t remember the last time she balanced her bank statement. Please, please let the stupid machine spit out the money.
The machine whirred and coughed out the amount she’d requested—thirty bucks.
Whew. Hibernia Bank had just earned itself a place on her Christmas-card list.
Mary Paige popped back in line as the rude construction worker rolled his eyes and blew garlicky breath on her neck with theatrical exaggeration. Mary Paige shrugged at the cashier. “Happens to the best of us, right?”
The cashier held out a palm and gave no response, making Mary Paige feel like even more of an idiot. She placed a ten-dollar bill in the outstretched hand of the cashier along with three dimes and a nickel, the sum of all the change she could scrape up from the bottom of her purse. The cashier cleared her throat and looked pointedly at the money.
“Oh, sorry.” Mary Paige scooped two pennies from the take-a-penny, leave-a-penny container on the counter. “There you go.”
She grabbed the coffee and the plastic bag, swerved around Big and Beefy, desperately wanting to give him the finger—much as the old bum had given her earlier—and stalked out the door.
“Ow.” Hot coffee splashed on her fingers through the open drinking spout. “Double darn it.”
She shook the liquid from her fingers and caught sight of the cab out of the corner of her eye. Thank God he’d waited, and thank God the ATM had delivered the money she needed to pay for the cab. Shoving the bag with the socks under her arm, she held up a finger indicating she would be a minute longer, then headed around the corner to the old man.
As she approached the alley, she was swamped by a feeling of dеj? vu. How many other times had she done this kind of thing? Ten? Twenty? More? As much as she would like to be a hard-ass career gal, she knew her heart was of the Stay Puft variety. Not even rudeness would deter her from doing what was right.
“Yoo-hoo? Mister? I have a little something here to warm you.” She stood in front of a Dumpster bookended by two large cardboard boxes. Flaps hung over, providing little shelter, and the man seemed to be curled into a pile of wet newspapers. A broken cyclone fence stretched behind him, leading the way to an abandoned bakery showcasing yawning windows. Dismal wasn’t the word for the small corner of the world this man occupied in the frozen rain. “Sir?”
He said nothing.
“I’ve brought you some coffee.”
The papers moved. “What the hell ya want?”
“Just thought you might like something to warm you.”
“Coffee?” The papers shifted as the man unfurled like a gray troll from beneath a bridge, his grizzled face parting sodden sales flyers, pinning her with sleepy blue eyes. “Coffee, did you say?”
Mary Paige thrust the cup toward the man.
His eyes swept Mary Paige from head to foot, causing a flash of alarm within her, but then he looked away before extending a thin arm toward the steaming cup. As he leaned forward, the papers parted, revealing a body woefully unprepared for the frigid weather. His pants were thin and patched, his flannel shirt threadbare in a few spots, but most frightening of all were his bare feet.
Aw, heck, no. Not bare feet. Anything but bare feet.
The plastic bag holding the socks grew heavier.
Pretend like you didn’t see his bare feet, Mary Paige. Just hand him the coffee and go.
But she knew she would not. Could not.
Triple darn.
No time to get another pair. Plus, the only other socks inside were a pair of plain blue ones. There had been only one pair of perfectly horrendous Christmas socks, and she knew they hadn’t been intended for anyone at Uncle Fred’s house. Not Aunt Betty with her giant mole, or Cousin Trav with his ugly comb-over, or Mr. Dan the eccentric butcher, who showed up to Uncle Fred’s party every year uninvited. Nope, these Christmas socks were for the bum who had flipped her the finger.
She sighed and bent down, meeting his gnarled fingers with the cup. “You don’t have any socks. It’s awfully cold out here for bare feet.”
The man took slurping sips of the scalding liquid as if it were nothing more than lukewarm tea. “Yes, socks t’would help, I imagine.”
“Yes, well, I happen to have a pair right here. How about we put these on so you don’t freeze your toes off? And then, I can take you to a shelter where you can get some hot food and a warm place to sleep.”
The man peered at her over the rim, his disarming blue eyes measuring her. She ripped her gaze from his and dug the ugly socks from the plastic bag, eyeing his dirty but, oddly enough, well-manicured toes. She tore the tag from the socks and bent toward the man, uncertain as to whether she should actually lift his foot. “Should I help you put these on?”
The old man clasped her hands, stilling them as she picked at the sticker stubbornly gunking up a sparkly silver tree.
“You ever read A Christmas Carol?”
“I beg your pardon, sir?”
“You know…old Ebenezer Scrooge?”
“Oh, yeah, of course.” She nodded and the blunt ends of her bob swung into her eyes. She tucked the wayward strands behind her chilled ears. “The socks. Let’s get them on you.”
“Yes,” he said staring at the gaudy socks in her hand. “What I meant was the Spirit of Christmas.”
“What?” Mary Paige said biting her lip and scrunching each sock so she could jab them onto his almost-blue feet. “You mean the ghosts, like the ghosts of Christmas past?”
“They were all part of the Spirit of Christmas, right?” His voice was low, intense and raspy…and also quite refined. Odd for a street person. She slid the first sock on his right foot.
“Mmm-hmm.” She shifted her weight so she wouldn’t fall on her butt onto the slick concrete. She wasn’t the most graceful of gals.
“Well, you’re the Spirit of Christmas,” he said, jabbing a finger at her.
“Maybe so,” she said, hoping to pacify the old man, as she put the other sock on his deathly cold foot. She prayed she had hand sanitizer in her purse. No telling where the man’s feet had been even if he had trimmed his toenails.
“There. Nice and toasty. Let’s get you out of this weather.” She prepared to rise, but the man clasped her wrist. She pulled away but he held firm.
“I’m sorry I was rude to you earlier.”
“That’s okay. You’re enduring a hard time right now,” Mary Paige said, trying to wrench her arm from his grip, growing uncomfortable with his familiarity. “Living out on the streets makes a man defensive. I understand. If you will let go of me, I will see that the cab driver pulls around so we can find you a nearby shelter.”
The man ignored her. “What’s your name, my child?”
Mary Paige stared into his hypnotic blue eyes and responded without thinking. “Mary Paige.”
“Well, Mary Paige, can I offer you a gift in return for the one you have given me?”
She shook her head. Jeez. There was no telling what the bum would give her. Visions of grimy bottle caps or shiny pieces of glass danced in her head. What valuable object would soon be hers? “You owe me nothing. Now let’s get—”
Her words died as the man released her hand and fished around inside the pocket of his worn flannel shirt. Dear Lord, please don’t let it be his old socks. Or something dead.
She should get out of here. The old man could be nuts, rooting around for something more sinister than a piece of old junk. He could have a gun. Or a knife. Or…a piece of paper.
The man held a paper that had been folded several times and smiled at her, his teeth remarkably straight and white. A gold crown winked at her from the back of his mouth, sparkling as much as his blue eyes. “I needed to know your name, my child, so I know what to write on this.”
He unfolded the paper and extended it to her. She took it as if she were in a trance before finally glancing down.
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.”
