The Christmas Keeper Read online

  “Is that so?” he asked. “Does that mean that all those times you gave me the brush-off when I asked you out, you didn’t mean it?”

  “Uh . . .” Savy stared at him. She wasn’t sure how to answer. The man had verbally outmaneuvered her. She could either admit that she had been telling the truth when talking about feeling abandoned or that she hadn’t meant it when she rejected all of his offers to dinner, movies, and so on. Dilemma!

  She tipped her head to the side and then cupped her ear. “Do you hear that? Is that Maisy calling me? Why, yes, I believe she is. Excuse me.”

  She tossed her dish towel onto the counter and scooted toward the door. She heard him chuckle behind her, but she didn’t allow herself to look back even when she heard him call after her, “Coward.”

  Savy knew this was an argument she couldn’t win. When it came to Joaquin Solis, she was a big, yellow-bellied, lily-livered, fainthearted fraidycat. The man was too attractive for his own good, and just like an endless bag of potato chips, if she tried even one, she was doomed.

  She knew that man would get under her skin and then she’d be making all sorts of life decisions based on his hotness and not on the revenge that drove her to regain her reputation in the publishing world. There was nothing in life she wanted more than getting her cred back, and no cutie pie cowboy was going to distract her from her purpose. Period.

  Several months before, Savannah had been unceremoniously kicked to the curb by her boss, Linda Briggs. At the time, no explanation of her firing had been given. Savannah didn’t have an employee contract and was considered an at-will employee, meaning she could be fired at any time with no reason given.

  It had taken some time, but Savannah had her friend and colleague Archer Vossen from human resources find out why Linda had fired her. Apparently, Linda had proof that Savannah had taken credit for Linda’s publicity campaign for Billie Latham, an up-and-coming author the publisher was promoting heavily. Linda had computer files that she said were stolen from her own computer, and an e-mail exchange between Savannah and Billie where Savannah proposed several innovative publicity strategies.

  The kick in the teeth was that the strategies and the e-mail exchange were real. Savannah had been busting her butt to get Billie’s book to shine. What had been false was the lie that Savannah had taken Linda’s work. Somehow Linda had managed to steal Savy’s work and put it on her own computer with a time stamp that made it look like Linda had drafted the strategy before Savannah. It was utter bullshit and Savy had no idea how to fight it.

  At the time, she hadn’t been given a chance to defend herself as she didn’t even know why she was being fired when security had arrived at her desk and watched her pack her stuff and then escorted her from the building. Linda had been conveniently away from the office. It had been the most confusing, humiliating moment of Savannah’s life to date.

  Savy had told Maisy that she’d been let go from her former position, but she hadn’t shared the shaming that had been involved. She didn’t like to talk about it. Word had gotten out in the industry and her reputation was in tatters. She had no defense, as Linda had spent months working behind her back to build a case against Savannah that she hadn’t even suspected. Savy and Archer logged hours on the phone trying to figure out why Linda had done what she did. Archer theorized that Linda felt threatened by Savannah and had decided to get rid of her before management caught on and let Linda go and replaced her with Savannah. He promised to keep his ear to the ground and look for an opportunity to help Savannah. Archer felt that Linda would slip up. It was just a matter of time. This was cold comfort for Savannah.

  When Maisy called Savy in a panic about the Victorian house she’d inherited from her great-aunt Eloise, Savy had come down from New York to help Maisy organize Auntie El’s hoarder’s trove of romance novels into one of the few romance bookstores in the country. Savy loved doing the publicity for a shop that celebrated books by women, for women, about women. Sure, there were some male authors who wrote romance, and the market stats said that 16 percent of the readership was male, but mostly, it was a chick thing, which was one of the things Savannah loved most about it.

  Together she and Maisy had decided that the Happily Ever After Bookstore would celebrate all the things that brought women joy. Such as the color pink, working out to achieve a rocking bod, crafting, pursuing higher education, accumulating wealth, being the smartest person in the room, cupcakes, a love of science and math, glitter, hairdos, and video games. Okay, so maybe not all of those things were commonly known as girly, but Savannah believed that the two greatest gifts a woman could give herself were knowledge and strength, and she loved that Maisy felt the exact same way.

  They were committed to making the bookstore a space that celebrated all women from all walks of life, living their best lives. Truly, the past few months had been some of the most fulfilling of Savy’s publicist career, although she didn’t tell Maisy this because she knew her friend would leverage it into a talk about why she should stay in Fairdale. This was not a conversation Savy was willing to have.

  She had left New York under a cloud of disgrace in the publishing industry and until she gained her reputation back, she felt stuck and couldn’t move forward until there was a resolution to what had happened with her old job. Everything she did felt like a lateral shift where she was just biding her time. She was determined that she would rise from the ashes and prove her detractors wrong, especially Linda Briggs, the cause of all her pain.

  Even the thought of the woman made Savy want to punch something, really hard. Instead, she pictured the day that she would strut back into New York in her favorite power suit, wearing her spikiest heels, and launch a campaign to bring a heretofore unknown author out of the shadows to catapult onto the bestseller lists followed by guest spots on Ellen, The View, a fifty-city book tour, and a movie deal with Reese Witherspoon’s production company. She simply would not, could not, rest until she achieved her comeback.

  * * *

  * * *

  DECK the halls with boughs of holly, Fa la la la la la la la la.”

  Savannah opened one eye and noted that her bedroom was still dark, which meant the sun wasn’t up and it was still the darker side of dawn, so unless she had dreamed that someone was singing then the noise that had awoken her was actually someone singing.

  “’Tis the season to be jolly, Fa la la la—”

  That did it. Savannah shoved her covers aside, grabbed her robe, and jammed her feet into her slippers. She stormed out of her bedroom door and into her apartment. Up until a few months ago, she’d been sharing the small two-bedroom apartment atop the Happily Ever After Bookstore with Maisy, but Maisy had fallen in love with Ryder. In a gesture of his devotion, Ryder had bought the house literally right next door, giving Maisy the shortest commute to work ever but also leaving Savannah alone in the apartment. Most of the time, she didn’t mind. In fact, she liked getting away from everyone after the end of a busy workday, but sometimes it was too quiet. This was not one of those times.

  Savannah marched across the living room and yanked open her front door. She glanced over the staircase railing to the second-floor landing. The singing was definitely coming from there. She knew Maisy was hoping for a good holiday season and, yes, today was Black Friday, but did that mean they had to be up before the sun, singing Christmas tunes, no less?

  It was a man’s voice she heard so she assumed it must be Ryder. Poor bastard, he was so in love with Maisy, she probably had him convinced he wanted to decorate the store today. Savannah staggered toward the steps. She would relieve him of his duty and send him home. It was the least she could do.

  Savannah was not a fan of Christmas. She didn’t need a psychiatrist to tell her that it all stemmed from her childhood and her family’s complete inability to do Christmas. Once launched, her sisters refused to come home. And who could blame them? Her father ignored the holiday, expecting
his wife to do it all, and her mother tried to decorate the house, throw the expected parties, and be the hostess with the mostest, before succumbing to the lure of one too many martinis, which more times than not quickly went from taking the edge off her stress to leaving her in an embarrassing stupor.

  The day usually peaked with stilted dinner conversation with extended family they never saw except at Christmas, where at some point her mother would pass out face-first in her yams, sending her father into one of his quiet rages where he disappeared into his study and didn’t come out for days. Good times. Unfortunately, after so many years with holidays like that, Savannah had discovered that she had an aversion to the entire thing, and try as she might, she just couldn’t enjoy the holiday festivities. When the calendar flipped to January first, she was always thrilled to know that she wouldn’t have to deal with the holiday again for another 358 days.

  She often wondered if she hadn’t been brought up dreading the holiday, if she would have found it as annoying as she did. She didn’t know for sure, but given that she considered it all off-putting—the music, the lights, the movies, the shopping, the cookies (no, wait, actually, the cookies were about the only thing she liked about the holidays)—she thought it was definitely her upbringing.

  The forced family cheeriness, the dread of a dramatic episode, the hurt feelings—Savannah would spend weeks with a ball of anxiety in her stomach. This usually made her overindulge in everything, making it all worse because then she felt bloated, which her mother would feel compelled to comment on in a pretend bout of concern, which was really a passive-aggressive way of pointing out how big Savannah was compared to her own petite self. Even thinking about it made Savannah’s stomach cramp.

  “Fa la la la—”

  Savannah hit the stairs at a run.

  “Stop!” she cried. “Stop. Stop. Stop.”

  She stepped out onto the second-floor landing to find all the lights were on in the shop, and Joaquin was cheerfully winding a silver tinsel garland around the railing of the staircase toward the landing.

  He glanced at her in surprise. Savy could only imagine what she looked like. She was no doubt sporting a spectacular case of bedhead. She likely had dried-up drool on her chin and eye crusties on a pale freckled face that was makeup-less. Oh, God.

  Naturally, being caught totally off guard by him, she snapped, “What are you doing here?”

  Joaquin looked from her to the garland and back. “Seems kind of self-explanatory.” Then he grinned and his eyes moved over the mess that was Savy. “Did you just wake up?”

  “Not by choice,” she said. “Someone’s singing roused me. What time is it, anyway?”

  “Five,” he said.

  “In the morning?!” She was outraged. “Why are you here this early?”

  “Maisy asked us to start decorating extra early so the place is ready before opening.”

  “Who is ‘us’?”

  Joaquin glanced over his shoulder and Savy followed his gaze beyond the second-floor railing at the first floor below. Jeri, the store bookkeeper, and Ryder, Perry, Sawyer, and Maisy were bustling around, stringing lights and garlands and other holiday-related decorations.

  “Morning, Savy,” Maisy called up to her. “Hope we didn’t wake you.”

  “Ugh.” Savannah was not at full capacity yet.

  “We have coffee,” Ryder called. “Lots of coffee.”

  Savy would have told him where to stick it but . . . coffee. She turned on her slipper and trudged away from Joaquin. He immediately started singing again, which forced her back around. She pointed at him and snapped, “No singing before everyone has had their coffee. It’s a rule.”

  “Okay, okay,” he said. He held up his hands in surrender but the garland dangled from his big square hands, looking ridiculous. Her gaze narrowed. He looked happy. Then she got an eyeful of his sweater.

  “What is that?” she asked.

  He was wearing a green-and-red plaid sweater with a snowman embroidered on the front.

  “It’s my Christmas sweater,” he said. “Like it? I have a closetful of them.”

  “Oh, man, you’re one of those people, aren’t you?” she asked. His sweater was giving her the dry heaves.

  “One of what people?” he asked. He bent over to continue wrapping the tinsel around the wooden banister.

  “Those people who love Christmas and everything that comes with it,” she said. Her voice was full of disdain and she could feel her lip curl into the slightest sneer.

  “Well, yeah,” he said. He looked at her as if he couldn’t imagine being any other way. “What’s not to love?”

  “Let me consult my list,” she said.

  He looked shocked. “You don’t like the holidays?”

  “Not even a little,” she said.

  “Ah!” He let out a high-pitched yelp and clutched the snowman on his chest as if he couldn’t believe what he was hearing. Savy resisted the urge to laugh, mostly because she suspected that he was trying to make her laugh but also because she was pre-coffee and nothing was funny before caffeine.

  She turned away from him, not wanting to pursue this conversation anymore. She didn’t want to be judged for her lack of holiday spirit. As far as she was concerned the whole thing was a sham. It was a commercially driven gimme holiday and people were held hostage by a warm, fuzzy expectation of the holidays that rarely proved out. While the publicist in her understood the commercial demands of the day, the regular person in her loathed the whole manufactured extravaganza of shop, shop, shop, and shop some more. It just led to debt and disappointment and who needed that?

  “There has to be something about the holidays that you like,” he said. He abandoned his garland and fell into step beside her as she went down the stairs.

  “Nope,” she said.

  “What about all the great holiday movies?” he persisted.

  “Nope.”

  “The music?”

  “Nuh-uh.”

  “The ballet,” he said with a snap of his fingers. “There is not a woman alive who doesn’t love The Nutcracker.”

  “As much as I love the title of that ballet right now”—Savy paused and gave him a pointed look in the crotch area before she continued—“no, I don’t like that ballet. The king of the rats is terrifying. Who thought it was a great idea to scare little girls into thinking their toys would be killed off by giant rats? Blerg.” She feigned a shiver and kept walking.

  “He’s the Mouse King, not a rat,” Joaquin corrected her.

  “Who cares?”

  On the first floor, they passed Maisy, who had taken a waterfall display rack and was stuffing it with Christmas romances from holiday heavy hitters Susan Mallery, Jill Shalvis, and Lisa Kleypas. Jeri was decorating the front counter with blinking lights, the sort that gave Savannah a headache.

  She trudged into the kitchen with Joaquin right behind her. Clearly, he was not appreciating the boundary issues of a woman who hadn’t had her java yet. Well, if she bit him, it was his own fault.

  She beelined to the coffeepot, giddy to find it full, and grabbed a sunshine-yellow mug out of the cupboard. She filled it to the brim, leaving just enough room for a splash of milk. Quino watched her quietly.

  “Presents,” he said. “You have to like getting presents. Who doesn’t like getting presents?”

  She stared at him over the rim of her mug. “What am I? Five?”

  “Oh, you’re a hard one,” he said. “How about the spirit of the holiday? You must appreciate that the holidays make everyone a little better, kinder, more thoughtful?”

  “That hasn’t been my experience,” she said. “Rather, it seems to make them meaner, greedier, and more selfish.”

  Quino slid onto a stool at the counter and propped his chin in his hand as he studied her. “Who did you so wrong, Red?”

  “Sto
p calling me Red,” she said. She sipped her coffee. The aroma soothed her as the bitter heat moved from her tongue to her belly, uncoiling the knot of tension inside of her. “And for your information, no one did me wrong. I just think the holidays have gotten way out of hand. I mean, people lose their ever-loving minds trying to twist themselves in knots to have the best holiday ever. It’s ridiculous. Like we haven’t all been members of our own families for years and should know better.”

  Quino pushed a big pink bakery box at her. “Have a donut. It’ll sweeten your disposition.”

  “I don’t want—”

  He flipped the lid and Savannah sighed. Donuts went so well with coffee. It would be a shame to deny such a perfect pairing. She scanned the selection from Big Bottom Donuts, searching for—aha! There it was. A coconut-encrusted donut. She snagged it and took a big bite. Then she washed it down with some coffee. Perfection.

  She glanced at Joaquin as he perused the donuts. He looked good in the morning light—yes, even in that hideous sweater. His dark hair flopped over his forehead, deep dimples bracketed his mouth, and his black eyes sparked with amusement. She got the feeling he was one of those people who found joy in every day, not just the holiday. She envied him that.

  She wasn’t sure when she’d turned into such a cranky pants about the holidays but she had a feeling it was about the same time her dad informed her, at the age of four, that Santa was a lie and, no, she would not be getting any presents from him. At the time, Savannah had been convinced that her father told her that because she was naughty and Santa wasn’t coming to her house because she was on the bad list. She’d thought he’d been trying to spare her. Every year, she’d been filled with shame to discover no presents from Santa. It was a few more years before she figured it out and, yet, the shame stayed. She shook the memory off.

  “You were saying,” he said.

  “Nothing, it’s just, who can stand to watch all of those Christmas movies? I mean, there’s like a new one on every day from Thanksgiving until Christmas,” she said. She took another bite of her donut. He said nothing. In fact, he looked away, staring at the wall as if avoiding her gaze.