Santa Series: Three Stories of Magical Holiday Romance Read online

  Copyright Information

  The Santa Series

  Copyright © 2015 by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  Published by WMG Publishing

  Cover and layout copyright © 2015 by WMG Publishing

  Cover design by Allyson Longueira/WMG Publishing

  Cover art copyright © Wavebreakmediamicro/Dreamstime

  Up on the Rooftop copyright © 2015 by Kristine Kathryn Rusch. Published by WMG Publishing. Cover art copyright © Wavebreakmediamicro/Dreamstime.

  Visions of Sugar Plums copyright © 2015 by Kristine Kathryn Rusch. Published by WMG Publishing. Cover art copyright © Victoriaandreas/Dreamstime.

  Dressed in Holiday Style copyright © 2015 by Kristine Kathryn Rusch. Published by WMG Publishing. Cover art copyright © Nicoletaionescu/Dreamstime.

  This book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. All rights reserved. This is a work of fiction. All characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental. This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission.

  Contents

  Introduction

  Up on the Rooftop

  Visions of Sugar Plums

  Dressed in Holiday Style

  Newsletter Signup

  About the Author

  More Books by Kristine Grayson

  Copyright Information

  Kristine Grayson’s popular Santa Series—Up on the Rooftop, Visions of Sugar Plums and Dressed in Holiday Style—together in one volume.

  The magic of Christmas takes a lot to pull off, even for Santa. Enter the elves and humans of Claus & Company, who help Santa make the big day happen.

  But any time an elf or member of Santa’s family walks among the mortals of the Greater World, risk follows. The risk of discovery. The risk of failure. And most of all, the risk of falling in love.

  Bestselling author Kristine Grayson makes Christmas magic with these three stories of holiday romance—no mistletoe required.

  1

  JULKA STOOD ON the roof, hands on her hips, feet covered in snow. She was tired, she was cold, and she hadn’t felt the tip of her nose in hours. She was staring at yet another fancy-pants chimney, a narrow little pipe sticking up out of a lovely square pile of fake bricks, and she wanted to kick it.

  Which wasn’t very festive of her.

  But seriously, who felt festive on October 30th? It was New England, for heavens sake. There wasn’t supposed to be snow for another—oh, what? Two weeks? She really didn’t know, except that she had checked the records going back to the 19th century, and never found a snowfall as deep as this one before Halloween. She wasn’t supposed to be this cold for another month, and by then, she should’ve been moving south. Where she would have to deal with freezing fog, sleet, and sheets of ice.

  Oh, joy. Ho-ho-ho and all that.

  It was her own damn fault that she was standing here. She was the one who had said, I don’t have the skills to run a workshop, but I can find problems and solve them.

  And then, of course, she had to go too far, because she always went too far: Besides, I don’t want to stay here for my entire life. I’d like to travel. I need to see the world. I really, really do.

  She sighed. When she had said she wanted to see the world, she had hoped she would be placed in one of the many year-round outposts. She would receive toy shipments, interview local children, and make certain that the back-up sleighs were in fantastic shape. She would scout local products and find great toy factories that didn’t even know they would be enlisted.

  She had wanted to be one of the Ambassadors for Santa’s massive worldwide operation.

  She hadn’t meant that she wanted to be a minion in Entry Access Quality Control, someone who had to view each and every house with children in it for the appropriate entrance. Appropriate, in Santa’s rather medieval mind, always meant a chimney.

  She sighed and clutched the tablet to her chest. It was a real paper tablet—one of the millions of Big Chief tablets that someone in Santa’s North Pole headquarters had stocked up on in the 1960s, along with stubby Number 2 pencils that she refused to use.

  She wanted an electronic tablet—a gizmo, with bells and whistles and access to the worldwide web (even though, she’d been told, no one called it that any more). The workshop had hundreds of those as well, but not for the elves or the human support staff, but for the tech-savvy children who didn’t want a dolly or a train set, but who wanted the latest in computer gadgetry.

  Everyone at the North Pole had to be careful with gadgetry. Many types of magic—particularly fairy tale magic—weren’t compatible with electronics. Elven magic also had difficulty with electronics. Santa always had the Fairy Kingdoms design his systems, and that didn’t always work well.

  Delbert popped his head out of the invisible sleigh. She hated the effect. It made him look like he’d been beheaded, and she had gotten stuck with the head part. She wondered what the civilians on the ground saw. Whatever it was, it couldn’t’ve been pretty.

  Entry Access Quality Control wasn’t supposed to call attention to itself. That was why the invisible sleigh, which was the same size and shape as Santa’s (only without the reindeer; they hadn’t needed reindeer since 1930 or so, but they kept the reindeer for form’s sake. Besides, the reindeer had a hell of a union).

  Delbert usually remained invisible as well. He was an S-Elf, sharing a lineage with Santa. Delbert hated his heritage, and would’ve fled long ago except that he couldn’t hide who he was, no matter how much he wanted to. All those photos of Santa vacationing on the beach, of Santa in Hawaii in the summer or lounging in Monte Carlo instead of driving his sleigh—well, they weren’t Santa.

  They were usually Delbert.

  And as punishment for tarnishing the Santa brand, he had to spend one year on Entry Access Quality Control.

  “Well,” Delbert said, “do I have to put my boots on?”

  “No,” Julka said sourly. He might have been punished by doing Entry Access Quality Control, but she was the one who suffered. She inspected, kicked, shook, and fought with more chimneys than she wanted to consider. Yes, she had the best boots and gloves that magic could conjure, but she still got cold and wet and grumpy.

  Delbert only had to emerge when there was a likely chimney, which there hadn’t been all day.

  The rules of Entry Access Quality Control were pretty simple: if the chimney didn’t work, and the skylight looked too dicey, then Santa got to use any available door. And Delbert didn’t have to check the doors. With the growing obesity problem worldwide, the entire slew of Santa Advance Teams no longer had to worry about doorways being too narrow for the Jolly Old Elf.

  “I’ll boil up some lunch then,” Delbert said. “You gonna want any?”

  “No, thanks.” She couldn’t stomach a second day of Peppermint Veal Stew, even if the elves did think it a delicacy. Her stomach didn’t. Neither did her taste buds. That was the other problem of traveling with elves. They preferred sweet foods to almost everything else, turning the most disgusting things into candy.

  She’d grown up with it, but that didn’t mean she liked it. After the last few days, she deserved something made here in the Greater World, not that it was greater than the North Pole’s magical universe. The Greater World was just bigger—and lacked the magic.

  Which she was really beginning to appreciate.

  Because magic—what little of it she had—was making her cold.

  2

  MARSHALL COLLIER SHADED his eyes with his right hand, and looked up at the roof. It wasn�
�t a trick of the light. He was seeing a slight figure holding some kind of notebook kick a chimney. Tiny runnels of snow trickled down the side of the rooftop, like the precursors of an avalanche.

  Or at least, a severe loss of roof-snow that would ruin the shoveling work he had managed earlier this morning.

  Marshall had a narrow flatbed truck that could hold a small Caterpillar tractor with a large shovel on the end, and two different size snow blowers. He also had real honest-to-God shovels tucked into the back and three changes of clothing, including pairs of boots.

  He’d been out clearing side streets and sidewalks since 5 a.m, calling the power company every two blocks or so to report downed lines, and doing his best to be a Good Samaritan.

  This freak pre-Halloween blizzard, and his parka, had given him a kind of anonymity that he hadn’t had since the Great Recession began. It hadn’t mattered that he hadn’t worked for the fraudulent companies that caused the meltdown. What mattered was that he had made a lot of money (too much money) as an investment banker and venture capitalist. It also didn’t matter that he had retired from that business in 2007 at the age of 34. What seemed to matter to all these folks who were struggling to pay their now-overpriced mortgages on their meager unemployment benefits, was that he had once worked in that industry, and that meant he was one step above Satan.

  And maybe he was. When he worked in the industry, he hadn’t thought that there were actual people behind the numbers. He wasn’t a sales guy. He had been an analysis guy. He hadn’t dealt with people; he had dealt with numbers.

  As the economy tumbled into darker and darker places, he had watched the news reports with horror, realizing that each number he had played with had represented someone else’s money.

  The thing was, he hadn’t been told that when he was hired straight out of Harvard. No one said a word as he had manipulated the numbers, stroked and fondled them and made them grow—legitimately—until the returns he got weren’t good enough for his bosses. They wanted him to cheat on the math. He never cheated on anything. Not on tests, not on girlfriends, and certainly not on something as important as his job.

  So he got fired for not taking enough risks. But he had already taken a big risk: he had put some of his earnings into a buddy’s company. The company looked dicey from the beginning, but a friend was a friend, right? He had then invested in a few other companies, calling himself a venture capitalist, when really he was a depressed fired former investment banker.

  And then his buddy’s company became a huge success. And Marshall, as one of the early investors, made a fortune.

  He pulled out of the venture capital business because he didn’t want to make his fortune into an obscene fortune, especially not while his neighbors were starving. So he concentrated his efforts on helping charities become more efficient—manipulating numbers again, but for a good cause. (And giving away money.)

  But he never talked about any of that, and everyone in this rather toney neighborhood thought of him as that investment banker guy. Hated, as if he had robbed all those funds all by himself.

  He had no idea why he kept trying to ingratiate himself with the people in this place, but he did. He kept telling himself it was because he liked his house and he didn’t want to move—which was true—but honestly, it might’ve been because he was trying to ingratiate himself with himself. He had let himself become part of the problem, and he really hadn’t tried to implement a solution, back when there could have been one.

  Guilt. It went a long way. Including getting him out at 5 a.m. on a blizzardy morning, clearing roads and driveways for people who would spit on him if they knew he was the one behind the wheel of the snow blower.

  Still, six hours of work later, he was feeling pretty good. He wasn’t cold, he wasn’t wet, and he had managed to clear miles of roadway and driveway by his own rather mighty self.

  Sometimes good physical labor felt a lot better than massaging numbers. Even if that meant he was seeing the same people over and over again on rooftops.

  Although that wasn’t really accurate. He was seeing the same person over and over again on rooftops. She was tiny, slender, and stylish, wearing a little red cape with fur trim. (He hoped it was fake fur trim. In this neighborhood, wearing fur could get her killed.) She also had on reddish pants tucked into knee-high boots. She was wearing fur earmuffs and no gloves at all. And she looked cold.

  When he had first seen her, he thought she was a child. She was so slim and so regal, and her outfit so outlandish for someone going from roof to roof, that he figured she had to be about twelve. A few houses ago, he had gotten closer, and realized if she was twelve, she should’ve been locked inside the house.

  She had a curvy figure appropriate to her small size, and golden blond hair that he hadn’t seen outside of shampoo commercials. He couldn’t quite see her face, but her body language wasn’t twelve either. It was exasperated adult—or it had been, until she gave the chimney in front of her one frustrated kick.

  He frowned at her. He had no idea why a woman dressed like she was heading for a Macy’s Christmas photo shoot would travel from rooftop to rooftop in a MacMansion-filled Connecticut neighborhood. Nor did he know exactly how she was doing it. Or what angered her about it so much.

  He did know that he found her fascinating, from the tip of her golden hair to her impractical boots. He wondered if he should yell up at her and warn her that too many sudden movements would cause the snow to slide off the roof—and her with it.

  Then she stomped away from him, toward the back of the house. She reached the peak of the roof, stepped up some kind of ladder that he couldn’t see—and vanished.

  And not a wink-out disappear complete with little sparklies. Nor was it like a transporter vanish in Star Trek where the entire body fuzzed into a multicolored light show. It was as if she got swallowed by something. First her head and shoulders disappeared, along with one of her feet and an arm, then her torso, and finally the remaining foot. All that remained was a disturbance in the Force (as Obi-Wan would have said), which looked rather like a heat mirage, floating briefly next to that chimney.

  Then nothing. Nothing at all. Not even the house next door. At least, not for a few seconds, anyway. It was as if someone had set up an opaque wall, designed to match the snow and the gray cloud cover (which was threatening even more ugliness).

  He blinked and the neighbor’s rooftop reappeared. And so did a few more rooftops he hadn’t known were missing.

  Okay, that was it. Six hours of physical labor in the cold, moving tractors and snow blowers and piles of snow, subsisting on stale (lukewarm) coffee, breakfast bars, and one apple, had not done him any good.

  It was time to take a break. It was past time to take a break.

  He sighed, rubbed his eyes, and headed to lunch.

  3

  IT HAD TAKEN Julka fifteen minutes to convince Delbert that she needed to stop at the Burger King two miles away. He just wanted to go to the next rooftop. He had some vision of getting done before nightfall. Like that was going to happen. They wouldn’t be done until the morning of December 23rd. Although to be fair, he was only referring to this town, and in this town they only had 35 houses left to go.

  Besides, they had already earned hotel money. Julka liked that best of all. The teams that couldn’t get their quotas done in the time allotted had to sleep in their sleighs. But Julka and Delbert were one day ahead of schedule, partly because of the blizzard. They’d worked around it, using the North Pole Navigator to let them know when and where the worst of the weather would be. Then they would go to the safest part of their region, get the work done, and move onto another area, avoiding most of the snow the entire time.

  The Burger King’s roof had been shoveled off. It had a single pipe that spewed smoke that smelled of frying beef. A gigantic Halloween pumpkin balloon had been shredded by the blizzard’s middle-of-the-night winds and hung off the roof like orange streamers. Since reddish orange was one of Burger King’s prima
ry colors, the streamers looked planned.

  Nothing else did. The parking lot was jammed. Julka had to convince Delbert to land on the nearby health club’s roof. She had hoped to land in the parking lot.

  But the parking lot—which was huge—was also full.

  She sat on the roof’s edge, feet crossed, watching as locals streamed into that Burger King. Rules dictated that she wait until no one was around, so that she wouldn’t be seen, which was one reason why she chose the health club’s roof. But if she waited much longer, she’d eat shingles.

  A guy with a huge rig filled with all kinds of snow-moving equipment parked in the auxiliary parking lot, as far from anyone as he could get. He climbed out of his four-by-four, pushed the hood of a parka off his head, and wiped his face.

  He had beautiful black hair in need of a trim. He was tall and broad-shouldered, and moved with the ease of an athlete. He didn’t look up as he walked, and she felt oddly disappointed. She wanted to see his face.

  She had a feeling she’d seen him before, but she had no idea where.

  She lost sight of him in the scrum of vehicles in the main parking lot. He had been the last non-magical person in her line of vision. She grinned, then launched herself off the roof.

  Jumping from rooftops had not been one of her magical skills until she took this job. Then she got an augmentation just so she was protected from accidental slippage or falls of more than three feet. This was the best perk of all—that feeling of floating through a cushion of air. It made her feel like she could fly if she would only put her mind to it.

  She landed on the sidewalk outside the health club. She adjusted her hair and her ear muffs, hoping she looked enough like a regular person—a regular American person—to get by.

  This was the one thing she had little experience with, the one thing she valued the most: the opportunity to mingle with regular people, the kind the Pole was designed to help. She knew she could never quite blend in, but she could at least experience everything like the tourist she was, making memories, snatching moments out of other people’s every day lives and wondering what she would have been like if she had been born in New England instead of the North Pole.