Santa Series: Three Stories of Magical Holiday Romance Read online

  Or maybe he just wished it were off. Nissa had managed to unsettle him, and he didn’t want to go on TV rattled.

  A production assistant he’d never seen before, clutching a ubiquitous tablet and wearing a pair of wireless headphones around her neck like jewelry, leaned in the door. “Ready, Doctor Palmer?”

  “As I’ll ever be,” he said with a guaranteed food-free smile.

  He took a deep breath and followed the PA through the door. He hadn’t even known that acronym a month ago, and now he understood that good PAs were his best friend. This PA led him around the two gigantic cameras into the small studio.

  An audience awaited, which surprised him. He didn’t think afternoon faux-news chat shows had audiences. He’d only seen audiences on afternoon shows like Ellen.

  But he had long ago given up the fantasy of watching the shows before he guested on them. He was about to give up the fantasy of sleep. His stomach, however, hadn’t given up the fantasy of food.

  Then his eyes found the real fantasy.

  She wore the same dress, but in this light, it moved like a decorative piece of art. It accented her breasts, minimized her hips, and made her legs look even longer. She had dumped her tablet somewhere.

  She matched steps with him from the opposite side of the studio. Plus she looked a hundred times more confident than he felt. She probably wasn’t hungry or tired either. She looked like a woman ready for battle.

  He felt like a man who needed his Christmas vacation to start right now.

  The smattering of applause registered only because he saw the red “applause” light as he walked to the empty center chairs. He and the Beautiful Nissa would sit next to each other while they battled over imaginary holiday creatures. He didn’t like that either.

  Behind them, a green screen showed…green. He wondered what people in the booth would design as the backdrop, and decided he didn’t want to know. The people in the production booth could make him seem brilliant or ridiculous with the words they put beneath his name on the crawl. They could do worse damage by placing images of tearful children facing Santa Claus on that green screen behind him.

  The hosts, two men and two women, all stood. He recognized all of them from the nightly newscast. One was the in-house medical expert, Doctor Patsy Rayder, who (he thought) had a my-way-or-the-highway vibe. She was shorter than he expected. Next to her stood the show’s host, Joseph Becker, a slick silver-haired talking head who always seemed to be gunning for the latest controversy.

  They both reached out to Ryan as they guided him to the correct chair. He wasn’t able to greet the other two until he sat down.

  Next to Nissa.

  Who smiled at him, and made him shiver with delight.

  Dammit.

  The other two nodded their hellos. The show’s cohost, Adele Grippa, a tall artic blond with cold eyes, and the studio’s media expert, Erik Naiten, both smiled as if they had caught him in a trap.

  Ryan should have eaten a cookie, if only for the fifteen minutes of fortitude.

  He’d already missed his introduction, not that he needed to hear it again. They would have rehashed the YouTube video, maybe shown a clip, held up his book (which was sitting innocuously on the end table beside Joseph), and talked about the “controversy” he was stirring up.

  What he felt bad about was missing Nissa’s introduction. He had no real idea who she was, and that always made for a bad debate.

  Adele Grippa leaned forward, welcomed him to the show, and launched right in.

  “Doctor Palmer, in some circles, they’re calling you the man who hates Santa Claus,” she said. “What do you think of that?”

  And by the way, how often do you beat your wife? He hated loaded questions.

  He smiled, hoping the smile wasn’t as cold as he felt. He said, “I’m a professor of public health who used to be a gap-toothed little boy, giddy with delight on Christmas morning, hoping that Santa arrived. I don’t hate Santa. In fact, I think Santa is an extremely important icon, or I wouldn’t have used him as just one example in my book.”

  He should have said the book’s title, Healthful Imagery, but he was feeling rebellious. He didn’t look at Wendy in the audience, even though she was probably mouthing the title just to set him off.

  Instead, his gaze caught Nissa’s next to him. She raised one eyebrow, a skill he had tried and failed to learn after watching his first Star Trek episode.

  “Important?” Nissa asked in that rich voice, with that sexy, sexy accent. “Do you always attack important people, Doctor?”

  And do you try to stab your wife after beating her, Doctor? He was on the ropes before he even had a chance to open his mouth. Time to change the direction of the conversation, and no matter how much he disliked being here or how greatly he was attracted to the gorgeous woman beside him, he had a job to do.

  “I wrote the book Healthful Imagery because of my concern about the state of public health in America,” he said, foregoing any mention of Santa Claus at all and getting the title in, not for Wendy, but because he was annoyed. “Almost twenty percent of our children are obese. Not overweight. Obese. They have heart disease, diabetes, high blood pressure—the diseases of late adulthood—before they reach puberty. This is a public health crisis—”

  “We’re well aware of that, Doctor,” Joseph Becker said as if Ryan had just pissed on his shoes. “We’re not here to discuss that. We’re here to discuss your attitude toward Santa Claus.”

  Ryan had stepped into an alternate universe. A news-talk program didn’t want to talk about a real issue? They wanted to talk about a made-up icon? Really?

  Nissa turned that sexy eyebrow on Becker, and her other eyebrow joined it. She seemed as startled as Ryan was.

  “I love Santa Claus,” Ryan said. “If you pick up my book, you’ll see that statement on page 157.”

  He knew the page because he’d been in this circle of hell before.

  “If you look at the index in the back of the book, you’ll see that I devote three pages out of 387 to the imagery we use to describe one of our great childhood icons. The rest of the book is about the ways we can retrain our thinking to help our children grow up healthy—”

  “Imagery has nothing to do with health,” Doctor Rayder snapped. “Any good doctor knows that health is a collection of facts and figures, not fantasy. It—”

  “Exactly, Doctor,” Ryan said. He was not going to be the butt of this conversation. “That’s why I’m concerned about the 12.5 million children who are obese in this country. Fact, figure, reality. It’s important.”

  “Yet, you spend all your time attacking Santa Claus,” Grippa said snidely.

  “Actually,” Nissa said, loud enough to quell the cross-talk. “I’ve been watching Doctor Palmer on his media tour. He doesn’t attack Santa Claus. He questions Santa’s habits.”

  The panel was stunned into silence. He was stunned into silence. Nissa the Beautiful had, after all, been brought in to argue with him, and instead, she was defending him.

  “In other words,” she said, clearly aware of the effect she had had on the panel, “he has a point.”

  “A point?” Grippa asked, her tone even colder. Five minutes ago, Ryan wouldn’t have thought that possible. “Aren’t you supposed to defend Santa Claus, Ms. Kealoha? Your company Claus & Company seems rather protective of his brand.”

  “We are,” Nissa said with incredible cheerfulness. “And we certainly don’t want Santa’s brand to be associated with things that harm children.”

  “Are you saying that eggnog harms children?” Becker asked, sounding more befuddled than angry.

  “Well,” Nissa said, “eggnog usually has rum in it, and I for one don’t believe in giving children alcohol, do you?”

  Ryan had the urge to giggle. He hadn’t had the urge to giggle since he was six, maybe younger. Some of that was sleep deprivation and hunger, but the rest of it was sheer surprise.

  And relief.

  He really hadn’t exp
ected anyone to take his side on national television, certainly not a woman who had brought up Tony the Tiger and Sesame Street as rebuttal witnesses not an hour ago.

  “I didn’t say I wanted to give children alcohol,” Becker was saying.

  Everyone was talking over him, and the panel was getting louder. The audience, barely visible under the lights, was leaning forward, and even the camera crew seemed riveted. But Ryan’s gaze was on Nissa. She had a small smile on her face. She was enjoying the chaos.

  Then she winked at him.

  His breath caught. He hadn’t expected that at all.

  “There’s no need to fight,” Nissa said over the bickering panel. “Doctor Ryan is talking about very real problems in his book and on his videos. He’s talking about public health, for gosh sake’s, and while most people find that phrase rather dull, it’s important as all get-out.”

  Gosh sakes? All get out? Who said those things? Maybe it was like an adult man almost saying goodie to a limo driver.

  That urge to giggle returned. And he hadn’t even had a drop of eggnog.

  “I try to make the topic interesting,” Ryan said to her as if they were alone over dinner. “And maybe I went too far with the Santa example. I—”

  “You never go too far when you get the attention of the public,” Nissa the Beautiful said. “I personally think it’s time to re-examine some of Santa’s brand. After all, he’s all about helping children, and we certainly don’t want to help them into a diabetic coma.”

  “No, we don’t,” Ryan said, “but we don’t want to jettison Santa with the bathwater either.”

  He was mixing metaphors, but no one mentioned it.

  “Actually, Santa can be very useful here,” Nissa said. “The commercialization of Santa Claus has gotten worse in the last fifty years. When you think of the Ed Gwenn version of Kris Kringle, he wasn’t too fat, he didn’t overindulge, and he had a very gentle magic. I think if we return to that, children will still relate, and they won’t get the wrong message about greed and overeating. That message disturbs—I mean, would disturb—Santa greatly. I think he would be happy to return to the 1940s version of his image.”

  Ryan frowned just a little. She spoke a bit too much like a true believer, as if Santa really existed. Although if Ryan worked with branding Santa day-in and day-out, the image might become reality for him as well.

  “You’re saying he’s right?” Grippa asked Nissa, sounding stunned.

  “Yes, I am,” Nissa said calmly.

  “Media images can be extremely powerful.” Erik Naiten jumped in, clearly feeling like he needed his fifteen seconds of fame this afternoon.

  Ryan was happy to let Naiten talk. He couldn’t really focus on what the man was saying; instead, Ryan was getting lost in those dark, slightly upturned eyes beside him. Nissa lowered her lashes slightly, like a satisfied cat.

  “If Santa were real,” Becker said with startling belligerence, “why would he let any problems exist? Poverty, hopelessness, war? I know that kids ask year after year for solutions to those things, and Santa never gives them.”

  “Santa has magic.” Nissa’s tone was practiced, as if she had said this a lot. “He isn’t a deity, and he can’t change behavior. His magic is very specific and Christmas-oriented. He also can only work with children whose families want his presence. If the parents don’t celebrate Christmas, then he’s not going to impose it on them. Slowly, he’s been trying to change the practice of gift-giving to help the impoverished—wishing trees, presents given through charitable functions—but he can’t do everything.”

  “He’s something we make up,” Doctor Rayder said. Clearly, she was bitter about the pounding she had taken earlier. “Can’t we change how he does business?”

  “That’s what we’re discussing, isn’t it?” Ryan asked. “Small changes in his personal habits. We can’t make large changes in the image or more kids will get disappointed. We can’t expect our fictional creations to save the world, no matter how much we want them to.”

  “Good point,” Naiten said, and launched into some study of disappointments growing in the holiday season.

  Nissa seemed to pay attention, but Ryan couldn’t focus. At least, not on the discussion. It was different from all the others he’d had in the past few weeks, and he was grateful for that. It had kept him awake. Although, he probably would have been awake even with the same old discussion so long as Nissa was beside him.

  A beautiful woman was galvanizing, even if she was out of his league. Even if she hadn’t defended him—which she had.

  “…thank our guests, Doctor Ryan Palmer and Nissa Kealoha,” Becker was saying. “After the break, we’ll be talking about the latest Congressional sex scandal with Congressman Polk of…”

  The interview was over. Ryan could have dinner. Lunch. Whatever meal he had missed. The schedule Wendy had given him had nothing on tap until five A.M. tomorrow morning, when he’d be back in this building for five minutes with six department store Santas. It was billed as a light moment on the morning show.

  Ryan didn’t know if he could do light, but he could do five minutes. Tomorrow.

  The red light on top of the cameras went off, and assistants seemed to appear from every corner. The audience murmured, as if they were afraid to talk out loud.

  Ryan stood as Wendy appeared from behind one of the cameras. He recognized the determined look on her face, and cringed inwardly.

  “Well, that was a weird segment,” Grippa said as a makeup assistant touched up her cheeks. No one answered her. Naiten had already exited stage right, and Doctor Rayder leaned in to Ryan.

  “What is your degree in, Doctor?” she asked, expecting to hear he had only a Ph.D. like Dr. Phil.

  “I have a medical degree from Columbia,” he said with the same tone. “And yours, Doctor? Where did you get yours?”

  She grunted and walked past him.

  “My,” Nissa said. “She’s touchy.”

  “When people feel the need to compare degrees, they’re usually status conscious,” Ryan said, sounding like a pompous ass and immediately regretting it.

  “Apparently, you won that fight,” Nissa said.

  “Nis,” Becker said, almost shoving Ryan aside. “What was that? I thought you’re Santa’s biggest defender.”

  “Oh, I am, Joseph,” she said. “That’s why I’m paying attention to Doctor Palmer here. He’s a smart man.”

  “Yeah, right,” Becker said, as if Ryan weren’t there at all. “It takes all kinds to make a show. Using Santa like that.”

  “If I’d known it would have brought me here,” Ryan said, not caring anymore, “I would have used a less controversial example.”

  “You don’t like being on TV?” Becker asked as if Ryan had some kind of disease. “Nis thrives on it, don’t you, Nis?”

  “Not like you do,” she said.

  Becker leaned in, shoving Ryan for real this time. “We’ll get you a real segment next time. Maybe just the two of us—”

  “Not necessary,” Nissa said, dodging his hands.

  “Thirty seconds,” one of the PA s said.

  “Ryan, let’s go,” Wendy said from her spot near the camera. He pretended not to hear her.

  If he walked to “his” green room, he’d have to go right past her. So he pivoted and walked off-set in the opposite direction.

  “You have your own personal stalker?” Nissa asked. She was walking beside him. Apparently she didn’t miss anything.

  “No,” he said. “Wendy’s running this tour, and I’m pretty sure she added something to today’s schedule. I’m working off fumes, and if I don’t eat something soon, I’m not sure I’ll make it another hour.”

  “I’d suggest the restaurant on the lower level below the plaza, but it’s a see-and-be-seen place. There’s a nice pub about half a block away. Makes a great burger. A lot of news people used to go there, when there were actual reporters doing the news.”

  Ryan smiled at her. “Thank you. I’m not
as familiar with the neighborhood as I used to be—”

  “I’ll walk you there. I could use a beer,” she said.

  She was going with him? Really? He blinked and almost told her it wasn’t necessary, and it wasn’t. But oh, it was desirable.

  “I’ll just grab my coat, if I can find it,” he said.

  “Let me come with you. I’ll see if I can fend off your stalker.” She smiled at him as they slipped out of the studio.

  Behind him, someone counted down. “Three…Two…One…”

  And then applause.

  Ryan felt like a marionette whose strings had just been cut. He really was exhausted. He walked into this green room. The food here had been well noshed, but he managed two sugar cookies and a bottle of water.

  A makeup artist waited. “Ms. Kealoha, would you like to remove your makeup?”

  “I’m sure Doctor Palmer would as well,” Nissa said, as she walked over.

  He was munching on a cookie. “Ryan,” he said. “Please. ‘Doctor Palmer’ sounds so pretentious.”

  “It’s your name, isn’t it?” Nissa said.

  “I’m a professor,” he said. “I prefer Professor Palmer, but Wendy—that’s the woman you’re calling my stalker—she insists on Doctor.”

  “Because she says it’s more impressive,” Nissa said, rubbing her face with some kind of cloth. “And for a TV audience, it is. I think you surprised Dr. Rayder when you had a real medical degree.”

  “Not as much as I surprised my father,” Ryan said. The cookie tasted like a little bit of heaven. And it vanished in a nanosecond, followed by the other cookie.

  He grabbed a third before the makeup artist gave him one of those magic cloths to wipe off his face. A shower would be good too.

  “I appreciate the directions,” Ryan said to Nissa, “but you don’t have to come with me.”

  “Rethinking dinner?” she asked, and she sounded casual. He couldn’t see her face, but something in her tone was at odds with her body language.

  Dinner. So lunch was the meal he’d missed. Dinner sounded date-like. Dinner sounded important.