Santa Series: Three Stories of Magical Holiday Romance Read online

  But she wasn’t going to let it go now.

  “Why are we so protective of our rum-filled eggnog and Christmas cookies? Are they really that crucial to our brand? Does the Big Guy himself live on eggnog and Christmas cookies? I’ll wager he’s sick of them. He’s about so much more than that.”

  Casper leaned back in his chair and stroked his beard. She couldn’t tell, but she had a hunch she had reached him.

  “Here’s what I don’t understand,” she said, lowering her voice just a little. “Why aren’t we protecting the health of our greatest investment? Why aren’t we happy that children want Santa to live longer? Why are we angry at a professor of public health for pointing out something that we should have noticed years ago? Is it because we should have noticed it?”

  “Those children were just parroting your Professor Palmer,” Ludwig said.

  “First, he’s not ‘my’ Professor Palmer,” Nissa said, even though she wouldn’t mind if he were. His image flashed across her mind, and she felt her heart rate increase. Then she forced herself to focus. “Second, children don’t ‘parrot’ professors of public health. Children are actually pretty sensible. Isn’t that what you told me when I started at Image Headquarters? That children know what they like and don’t like and know more than we give them credit for?”

  Ludwig glared at her. Oskar wasn’t even looking at her. His head was bowed; he was staring at his shoes as if he were embarrassed for her.

  “The children,” she continued, “are seeing a problem. They’re seeing the same health problems in their schools, in their families. They know that weight is an issue—the entire culture talks about it, and sometimes bluntly, sometimes saying that people who are heavy won’t live very long. So why wouldn’t children recognize the same in their favorite holiday icon? Why wouldn’t they worry?”

  “They’re not supposed to worry about Santa,” Casper said.

  “Exactly,” she said. “And they are.”

  Her words echoed in that crowded room. Casper still stroked his beard. Sven puffed on his pipe, sending small smoke rings into the thick air. Ludwig still glared, and Oskar—Oskar still hadn’t looked at her.

  Finally he raised his head. Then he stood up—slowly, like a man in pain. His gaze hit hers with such force that it almost hurt.

  “The children are worrying,” he said, “because you didn’t shut down Palmer like we told you to.”

  Did he just say it was her fault? Was Oskar so egotistical, so blind, that he couldn’t take criticism?

  “Let me get this straight,” she said. “You’re blaming me?”

  “For this entire debacle. For Palmer, for the children, for all of it.”

  They were going to fire her or at least transfer her laterally to some hellhole, like Last Minute Toys. So she might as well speak her mind.

  “Really,” she said, her voice even softer. But she knew they could hear her in this room. They could probably hear her heartbeat in this room. “So you get rid of me or move me laterally and then what will you do when the next professor of public health or some TV doctor or someone with a vast audience starts complaining about Santa as a role model? Because this is the second time I’ve dealt with it. Sure, Professor Palmer blitzed the US media, but the last guy wasn’t American at all. He was Australian, he wrote for a British medical journal, and he got a lot of airplay in the US as well. If those two men, from different parts of the world, come up with this independently of each other, then other people will come to the same conclusion. It won’t change. It’s happening, and you can’t stop it.”

  “Maybe not now,” Oskar said. “You could have stopped it by taking him on one month ago.”

  She let out a small shocked laugh. “No, I couldn’t. You can try to make this my fault, but it has nothing to do with me, and it has everything to do with you.”

  “Me?” Oskar said, his cheeks fire-engine red—and not in a good way.

  “All of you,” she said. “You all moved here at the same time, and for some reason, you thought you could handle Image Analysis in the Greater World while divorcing yourself from the Greater World. You’re failing Imagery 101. You know you have to stay in touch with current trends to understand how the masses think—to manipulate how the masses think. Instead, you can’t even handle a television signal, let alone online chatter. In fact, I’ll wager you don’t even know what online chatter is. Or how important it is. Or how to access it.”

  “Now, see here, Missy,” Ludwig said.

  “Oh, and that?” she said, whirling toward him, pointing a finger in his direction. “That tone, that word ‘missy’? It would get you fired in the Greater World, or reprimanded, or at the very least, removed from anything to do with employees. You can’t talk to junior executives like that anymore, particularly female execs.”

  “See?” Sven said in a stage whisper to the Old Boy next to him. “I told you this was a feminist thing. They want to overthrow the S-Elf system and install a woman, based on gender. That’s what all of this is about. Forget tradition, forget the way things are, forget all our years of imagery tweaking—”

  “And that,” Nissa said, putting her hands on the table and bending toward Sven. “That fear of feminists. That’s so very 1970s.”

  They all leaned away from her as if she had thrown something at them. She wondered what that was about. She wished she knew more about internal Pole politics. Because all those rumors about a female S-Elf taking over Santa’s role just got a bit more credible.

  It also explained some of the animosity coming toward her now.

  She was going to take an even bigger risk. She was going to dive straight into something political that she might or might not understand.

  “What I’m telling you is a problem. It’s not a feminist thing. It’s an out-of-date thing. You’re so far behind in everything cultural because none of you have been to the greater World in decades. Your junior executives flee to the Greater World and we do our best to work within your dictates. But we can’t manipulate. We can only maneuver. And it doesn’t work.”

  “You have no right to speak to us that way, Missy.” It was clear, from the emphasis Ludwig put on the word “Missy” that he was now trying to piss her off.

  “I have every right,” Nissa said. “Because you’re not listening to people on the ground, and you’re right: Santa’s image has become a crisis. But it’s a crisis that you, not that Professor Palmer, made. You’re too out of touch to know anything about branding and imaging in this new century, and you’re too blind to realize it.”

  Oskar slammed a fist on the chair beside him. It leapt in astonishment—and she couldn’t tell if the leap was because the chair just naturally bounced or if its own internal magic system was startled.

  “We were talking about your misbehavior over Palmer,” Oskar said, making it sound like she slept with Palmer on national television. If only she had slept with him (although not on national television). Then she might deserve this treatment. As it stood, Oskar had no right to be this angry with her.

  “Really?” she said. “We’re talking about Palmer? Because I thought we were talking about Santa’s image. Isn’t that what this is about? Isn’t that what we should be focused on here in Image Analysis?”

  Oskar’s face had turned purple. He opened his mouth to say something else when Casper raised his head.

  “It is what we should focus on,” he said in his calm tone. “And frankly, we haven’t been. We’ve let our most important brand slide. And worse, we’ve let other people control it.”

  Nissa felt her breath catch. He was agreeing with her?

  “Brava, Miss Kealoha. You have somehow gotten it through our—or maybe just my—thick skull that we have not paid the right kind of attention.”

  “Casper,” Oskar said. “You don’t understand.”

  “No,” Casper said, and for the first time, Nissa saw the strong man behind the “ghost.” “You don’t understand. Miss Kealoha is right. Palmer is not our problem. We ha
ve a much greater one. Palmer is just a symptom.”

  “Of what?” Ludwig snapped.

  “Of our lack of control,” Casper said. “Eighty years ago, we would have known about his book. We would have seen the threat, maybe before it was published, certainly before his—what is it called? Press tour?—started, and long before he ever showed up on television.”

  Sven set down his pipe. “We tried to get Miss Kealoha to do her job.”

  “She was,” Casper said, “and you don’t appreciate it. She’s right. We’re wrong. And personally, I think she’s the one to fix it.”

  Nissa frowned. She wasn’t quite sure what he meant.

  “Fix what?” she asked tentatively.

  “Everything,” Casper said.

  14

  RYAN STOOD IN front of the gigantic white board in his favorite classroom. For some reason, his laptop wasn’t talking to the projector, and so nothing displayed on the whiteboard at all. All last week, he had compiled a PowerPoint presentation of various public health issues for his 300-level class, Principles of Health Education and Health Promotion.

  He had actually looked at his syllabus last week with Nissa in mind, and realized the entire course sounded dull. It wouldn’t play on TV and the undergraduates, social media and game junkies all, would consider the coursework too slow.

  He thought of developing a health game, like Farmville, but realized he didn’t have the time or the know-how. Later, he might talk with the urban planning department. He’d heard that they had successfully used some social media games to show the importance of designing a city correctly. Maybe he could do something similar with the environmental impact on health.

  But, he realized, he couldn’t do that this semester. All he could do was jazz up the existing material, and that was woefully hard to do. He was well known as one of the best lecturers in the medical school (which the university had folded public health into), but that meant nothing since the level of lecturing expertise in his department was (to be polite) minimal.

  So, he’d developed the presentation, and he was proud of it. It actually moved quickly. The music and the images matched and, he realized as he completed it, with some changes, it could be used in health promotion.

  One of the wags in his department thought he should add some stuff from his talk show blitz, but even if he could get permissions, he didn’t want to. He never wanted to look at himself doing that publicity tour ever again.

  Although he wouldn’t mind looking at Nissa again. He no longer carried her card with him—he’d weaned himself from it—but he still thought of her way too much.

  He hunched over the projector. His first class started in two hours, and if he didn’t get the laptop and the projector to talk to each other, he would have to default to the old method of teaching—passing out badly photocopied pieces of paper, and then lecturing about it all. He didn’t want to do that.

  He had done a lot of soul-searching over the past month. He finally realized that what he wanted to do was what he had thought the book and the book tour would do: teach people how important individual health was to public health. In the last week or so, he’d come to the conclusion that he was better off influencing one student at a time, and giving that student the tools—and the passion!—to proselytize for him. Which meant that he had to step up his game.

  Which he wanted to do, if only the damn PowerPoint presentation worked.

  He checked the connections, wondered if there was some way to do this all with wireless, and then realized he’d have to rely on the university’s wireless network which, in this old concrete bunker, built in the 1970s, barely worked at all.

  “Son of a bitch,” he muttered, and looked at the whiteboard as if it provided answers. He was going to have to call the university’s IT department, and that would tank his entire presentation. IT seemed so proud of the fact that they were busy. He always wondered why a university’s IT department would be understaffed. Weren’t there a million student experts who would work for some kind of credit?

  “Problems?” a sexy female voice said behind him. The voice sent shivers through him. It sounded like Nissa, but he had Nissa on the brain so much that he thought half his female students sounded like her. He often found himself peering around corners, thinking he had just gotten a glimpse of her when, indeed, he hadn’t seen her at all.

  “Computers never work right around me,” he said as he continued to fiddle with the laptop. “It’s really annoying. Of course, I blame the computers, when in reality, I’m the clueless one. I follow the instructions and still miss somehow…”

  He turned around as he said that last, and trailed off when he realized he was looking at Nissa. Or some mental phantom of Nissa. Although he doubted that his imagination was capable of imagining her here, looking like that.

  She didn’t look at all like the Manhattanite he had seen a month before. She wore appropriate winter attire, for one thing. A heavy, white, parka-like coat over jeans tucked into fur-lined boots that had no heels. She held a pink stocking cap in one hand and mittens in the other. A matching scarf still looped around her neck, making it appear as though her face rested on pinkish snow.

  She was even more beautiful than he remembered. Her black hair, mussed a bit on top from the stocking cap, still had a wedge cut, and he couldn’t see those pointed ears (if, indeed, he remembered them correctly and hadn’t made them up in his fevered [and exhausted] imagination). Her dark eyes twinkled at him. The cold had put so much red in her cheeks that it took him a moment to realize she was barely wearing makeup at all.

  “Nissa?” he asked stupidly.

  She bowed just a little, and waved her arm in a butlerian flourish. “I’d say ‘at your service,’ but that implies the wrong things.”

  And made him imagine the wrong things. He felt the whisper of arousal, but willed it away. He didn’t want to think of her that way. (Well, he did, but not right now: not when he had to focus.)

  He walked toward her through the maze of metal desk chairs. “I’m…” honored to see you? Surprised you’re here? Jeez, he didn’t even know the right way to talk to her. “I’m…It’s…” great to see you? Fantastic to realize I hadn’t imagined you? “I’m…”

  He tripped on one of the chairs, and had to catch himself on the back of the next chair. He was actually happy for the distraction. He was coming off even nerdier than usual.

  She grabbed his arm a half second too late, but her grip prevented him from losing his balance. A tingle ran through him. He looked up at her, and when their gazes met, his entire body shivered with pleasure.

  “Hi,” he said, settling on brevity.

  She smiled. “Hi.”

  “I thought Manhattanites never left the nest,” he said, and then wished he hadn’t. Had he insulted her? He hadn’t meant to. He didn’t mean to say anything disparaging about Manhattan, even though the rest of New York hated all the attention it took away from the state.

  “Good thing I’m a transplant,” she said.

  She was? He didn’t know that. Of course she was. That indefinable accent.

  Her face seemed redder than it had a moment earlier. Maybe the cold hadn’t put the roses in her cheeks. Maybe she was embarrassed too. And maybe pigs would fly out of his ass (although he didn’t want that to happen; he’d really be embarrassed then).

  She finally released his arm. “I came to see you because I need a consult.”

  “A consult?” He repeated what she said because the speech centers in his brain didn’t seem to be working properly. Very little of him (except his hormones) seemed to be working properly. The first time he saw her, he had blamed this reaction on his exhaustion. Now, he was beginning to understand that the problem was just his reaction to her.

  “Yeah,” she said, but her gaze had moved away from him and settled on the projector. “But it looks like you have a more pressing problem.”

  “I do?” he asked. Come on, brain. Get a grip.

  “Do you always have
trouble with technology?”

  He blinked, once, twice, three times, willing himself to concentrate. “Yes,” he said. “It seems to hate me.”

  “Hmmm,” she said, giving him a sideways look that he couldn’t really interpret. It was almost as if she were reassessing him. “Any problems on your tour? Cameras giving out? Mics not working?”

  “All the time,” he said, glad to focus on something else for a moment. “I was beginning to think every single studio had crappy equipment. I know it wasn’t me, since I never touched any of it. Usually things go wrong when I touch stuff.”

  Okay, that sounded stupid too. Because he really wanted to touch her, and he didn’t want anything to go wrong.

  She didn’t seem to notice his discomfort. She didn’t even look at him. Instead, she walked toward the projector. She touched it, and he thought he heard something pop.

  He said, “I was just about to call the university’s IT department—”

  “Who is probably sick of you, right?” she asked. And then she put a hand to her mouth like a child who had misspoken. “I didn’t mean that like it sounded.”

  “Yes, you did,” he said with a smile. Maybe he made her nervous too. Or maybe she was one of those people who picked up on other people’s nervousness and then got nervous on her own. “And you’re right. They are sick of me.”

  “I can get this to work for you,” she said. She ran a finger over the laptop, then the projector and then she hit the laptop’s space bar. The first image of his PowerPoint presentation showed up on the screen just like it was supposed to.

  “How did you do that?” he asked.

  She shrugged. “Magic.”

  “Wish I could replicate that,” he said.

  “Oh, you probably could,” she said. “But no need right now. This should work from now on.”