Jingle All the Way

by Fern Michaels

  Christmas Eve

  Laura hadn’t felt so happy in a lifetime. Corny as it was, she actually looked up at the incredible winter sky and made a wish on the brightest star. “I wish,” she said, tears burning her eyes and squeezing at her throat, “that Brian and the kids will always remember this Christmas as the happiest in their lives.” Because it’s my happiest. By far.

  She closed her eyes and breathed in the sharp, crisp air, feeling ridiculously content for someone who was on the verge of tears. Inside, Brian and the kids were gathering around the Christmas tree to open the Christmas Eve presents—special presents given to the kids from Mom and Dad instead of from Santa. Christmas music was playing on the TV’s cable—Perry Como singing about chestnuts roasting on an open fire.

  “Hey, are you going to join the rest of us?” Brian called softly from the door. He was wearing a thick gray sweater that made his changeable eyes look gray-green. He’d been a little put out by her insistence he not wear the Santa suit this year, but he let her have her way. It was silly, but Laura thought she’d have a better chance of changing the future if she changed as many little details as she could.

  “You okay?”

  “I’ve never been better. Brian, I love you.”

  He came up behind her and wrapped his arms across her, pulling her close. “It’s freezing out here.”

  “I know. But it’s beautiful.”

  He looked up, and she could feel the rumble of his agreement. An mmmm that went right through her and warmed her better than a fur coat.

  “Mommy, the presents,” Zack called out.

  “What presents?”

  “Very funny,” he said, but Laura thought she heard just the slightest bit of worry in his tone.

  They opened their presents, a book light that attached to their beds and books.

  “Awesome,” Zack said. “All the Goosebumps I haven’t read.” So Laura had gone a little nuts, buying fifteen of the things; she didn’t know if she’d be around to buy the whole set one at a time. The awful foreboding she’d been feeling was almost gone, and Laura chalked it up to so desperately wanting to stay. Tomorrow she’d wake up to the sounds of the kids’ squealing because Santa had come. She’d go downstairs and oooh and aahh and act as surprised as the kids that Santa had somehow been able to give them exactly what they wanted. She’d make coffee and breakfast while Brian put everything together. Then they’d all get in their Christmas outfits and go to church, and she’d thank God for letting her see Christmas morning and apologize for thinking He didn’t exist for so long.

  After the kids went to bed, Laura and Brian stuck the presents beneath the tree, then sat on the couch and stared at the fire. “You went a little nuts this year. I don’t think I want to see the Visa bill, do I?”

  “Nope.” She snuggled closer to him and kissed his cheek. “You smell good,” she said, nuzzling his neck.

  To her surprise, he moved away from her. “I have something I want to show you,” he said, and her stomach dropped so fast she thought she might vomit. Things had been going so well, she’d almost forgotten what had happened all those years ago. It didn’t feel real; it was as if she was watching a home movie in slow motion. He bent to his briefcase, just as he had all those years ago, and shuffled through some papers before bringing out a thick manila envelop.

  She knew what he’d do next; she could see it in her mind, her terrifyingly clear mind. He straightened, tapped the envelop in his hand twice, then turned, his handsome face grim.

  “Brian,” she choked out.

  And then he threw it in the fire.

  “You know what that was?”

  She nodded, her eyes brimming with tears.

  “I never want to think about doing something like that again. Promise me I’ll never have to,” he said, his voice rough.

  “I promise.” Her tears spilled over as she stood and rushed into his arms. “I promise,” she said, over and over.

  He pushed her back and held her head between his hands. “And I promise you that I’ll never do anything to make you want to leave me.”

  Laura let out a watery laugh. “Do you know what this means?”

  “It means we’re going to grow old and gray together.”

  She pulled him tight, resting her head against his chest. I did it, Brian. I saved us. I did it.

  They went up to bed together, holding hands. Laura couldn’t remember ever holding hands with Brian as they went to bed, not even when they were dating. As she walked, feeling the strength of his grasp, she had a brief and wonderful image of them, both slightly bent and gray, their movements slightly slower, their steps a bit more tentative as they went up the stairs together, holding hands.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Christmas Day

  Laura woke to the sound of a steady beeping noise. At first, she thought it was the alarm, and she wondered why Brian had set the alarm on Christmas morning. Except Brian wasn’t shutting the damn thing off and . . . it smelled funny.

  Her entire body froze except for the painful beating of her heart. “No,” she whispered, clutching at her blanket that didn’t feel anything like her ugly old quilt. Her eyes still closed, she willed everything to stop, to go away. She willed Brian to be sleeping next to her in their bed, for her kids to be waking up excited because it was Christmas morning and Santa had come.

  Please, God, please. This wasn’t a dream. Tell me it wasn’t.

  “Are you all right, Laura?”

  Grace. It was the old lady’s voice. She remembered it because she sounded so calm, so goddamn nice when everything in her life had just gone to shit.

  “Should I ring the nurse for you?”

  Laura managed to shake her head. She couldn’t speak; she was still too paralyzed for that. Still too scared.

  I’m going to open my eyes and see my room. I’m going to turn my head and see Brian. She breathed in and out, short of breath, terrified, wrapped in an anguish so immobilizing she wondered if she could will herself to die.

  “Grace?” Don’t answer. Be Brian, all confused about why the hell I’m calling him Grace.

  “Yes?”

  She opened her eyes and saw acoustic tile and a bag of fluids. She looked down at the white hospital blanket, at her hands, her old hands. “No.” She whispered it, then screamed that same denial. “It’s not fair,” she said, bringing those old hands up and burying her face against them. “It wasn’t a dream. It wasn’t.”

  “Of course it wasn’t,” Grace said in the same soothing tones Laura had used with Mary when her little girl had a bad dream. She’d say anything to calm her down. Anything.

  “But it was,” Laura said, sobbing, her heart ripping slowly in half.

  “What’s wrong? Honey, what’s wrong?”

  She heard Brian’s voice and thought she must be going crazy. “What happened?” he demanded.

  “I don’t know. I think she had a bad dream,” came Grace’s calm reply.

  Laura jerked her hands down and looked up at the beloved face of her husband. “Brian?”

  “The one and only,” he said with that grin she fell in love with all those years ago. It was Brian, an older, slightly heavier version perhaps, but it was him. It was. Alive and well and looking at her as if she’d just gone a little crazy.

  “It can’t be,” she said finally, then looked over to Grace. “Tell me what’s happening.”

  Grace smiled and tilted her head. “Sometimes,” she said, “we get an unexpected gift. If I were you, I’d just say thank you.”

  Laura smiled through her tears. “Thank you,” she said.

  Grace nodded. “You’re very welcome. Now, if you don’t mind, I’m going to take a little walk down the hall. The doctor said it’s good for the circulation.” She gave Laura a little wink before heading out of the room.

  “She seems nice.”

  “You don’t know the half of it,” Laura said, laughing. “Come here, let me take a look at you.”

  Brian sat on the edge
of the bed, indulging his wife. She held his face between her hands and smiled. He had a few more lines than he’d had the last time she’d seen him, and the few wrinkles he had were deeper. His hair was slightly thinner and much more gray, but he was still the most handsome man she knew. “You’ve aged well.”

  He laughed. “You, too. Though I could do without this heart thing of yours. Thank God it wasn’t anything more serious.”

  “You’re telling me,” a young man said from the door. “We just about had a heart attack last night when you passed out.”

  “Zachary,” Laura breathed. He was clean-cut, clean-shaven, and she was pretty certain he hadn’t just been let out of prison for visitation rights.

  “Justin and Mary are right behind me. Mary caught sight of someone she knows, and Justin’s in the can.”

  Laura watched, amazed, as her daughter and son walked through the door. She knew what they looked like as adults, that wasn’t the shocker, but they looked so normal. So happy and healthy, so different than the adults she’d seen last.

  And they were all grown. All those years, missed again. She supposed she should be grateful, but Laura mourned those years she’d never know, those Christmases she had no memories of. She hardly knew these young people smiling down at her. It was as frightening as it was gratifying.

  “Mom, I brought your memory box. I thought since you couldn’t be home for Christmas I could bring some of home to you.”

  Laura smiled up at her daughter, this beautiful girl with the shining long, light brown hair and sharp brown eyes. She was amazing. She was a stranger. Laura took the box and put it aside, almost afraid to open it up to see what was inside. She would see things in that box that would have no meaning to her, items from a life she hadn’t lived.

  After her family had gone, Laura took the box, heavier than she remembered, and put it on her lap. She traced a finger along the edge, prolonging the moment when she would open a stranger’s life.

  She shook her head at her fear and opened the lid, pulling out the top paper. It was a graduation program for Mary, and she smiled because Mary had been so nervous that day about making her salutatorian speech. Laura blinked.

  How had she known that? She hadn’t been there, and yet she could remember the bright pink strand of hair on her artistic daughter’s head, the way Mary had cried when they’d hugged, how worried she’d been thinking about all those graduation parties she planned to attend.

  She held the paper in a shaking hand as memory after memory came forward, until she lived that day. With a growing sense of excitement, she picked up a bit of green felt cut out like a clover with gold glitter still clinging to it. It was Justin’s St. Patrick’s Day kindergarten project. She’d kept it because he’d cried so hard when he noticed the gold glitter was falling off and she’d promised she’d keep it forever because she liked it so much. Next was what looked like a wedding invitation. She let out a laugh as memories flooded her. Tammy and Ron had renewed their vows five years before. Ron had been in a serious car accident and was in a coma for two days. Tammy had been frantic, terrified that he’d die and even more terrified by just how much she really did love her lunkhead husband. She quit drinking and devoted her life to making her husband well again. Laura shook her head. Tammy had become insufferably in love with her husband.

  Item after item fit together like puzzle pieces, putting together a life she’d thought was gone. When she was finished going through each item in the memory box, it was as if she’d lived the years she’d lost. Everything was there, stored away, safe. A life she’d made all those years ago when she’d been given an unexpected gift.

  STOP THE PRESS . . .

  Here’s the front page story: Pulitzer Prize-winning,

  buttoned-up journalist, Harry Crandall, becomes publisher

  of small-town newspaper. Firing reporters left and right, he

  makes no friends in the newsroom, especially not with the

  cute, rough-around-the-edges editor, Jamie McLane. She’s

  got a pool going—first reporter who can find out why the

  cold-hearted-but-extremely gorgeous taskmaster had to

  leave New York takes the jackpot. And she plans to be the

  winner . . . if she can keep from falling for the jerk.

  ARE YOU GETTING THIS ALL DOWN?

  Here’s the curve ball: Turns out Crandall thinks McLane’s

  one of the best natural reporters he’s ever met. Sure, she

  needs practice—some late nights; a little field work; a lot of

  arguing behind closed doors that leaves him ready for a

  cold shower. His reporter’s instincts tell him she’s working

  hard to get the story on him, but if she wants him to reveal

  his sources, she’ll have to be willing to give him something

  of hers in return . . .

  Please turn the page for an exciting sneak peek of

  Jane Blackwood’s

  A HARD MAN IS GOOD TO FIND

  coming in December 2004!

  CHAPTER ONE

  Jaimie McLane stared at the headline—“Man Loses Cock”—for the tenth time wishing somehow it would disappear and wishing just as hard no one would notice it.

  “Did you see this?” Nate Baxter asked, handing her that day’s edition of the Nortown Journal and trying not to grin. The assistant editor had thought the headline was a real hoot the night before when Jaimie had gleefully typed it over the story about a local farmer who had lost his prize Rhode Island Red rooster. It had been a joke; it was not, obviously, meant to run over the story.

  “I’m screwed. I can’t believe we let this through. Harry’s going be shitting bricks over this.” Jaimie buried her head in her hands. “I’m so dead. Dead, dead, dead,” she moaned, beating her head against her fists.

  “He won’t fire you,” Nate said.

  He being Harry, her new boss and the man she was quickly growing to dislike intensely. She knew herself well enough to know she could never fully hate something as beautiful as Harry Crandall. Perhaps she could loathe him instead. When he’d walked in two months ago her heart had actually done the oddest thumpety-thump, something that hadn’t happened in . . . well, it had never happened quite that way. Her cheeks had flamed, her ears turned red, and the neon sign on her forehead that flashed “hottie alert” whenever she saw a man who made her lungs compress buzzed on. He was a juicy combination of Matthew McConaughey and Paul Newman in his prime with a bit of a young Cary Grant thrown into the mix to give him that standoffish better-than-you air she found so unpleasant in Harry and so pleasing in Cary. Except he didn’t have any of their boyish charm or lazy smiles. Jaimie grimaced at her thoughts. That’s what came from watching too many movies late at night—most of them black-and-white relics in which every star was either now dead or suffering from Alzheimer’s.

  He might be eye-candy, but Harry had managed to throw a big ol’ bucket of cold water over her head after he fired three reporters the first week. Fine, they were dead wood, but they were her dead wood. Everyone in the newsroom was walking around as if the slightest mistake would end with him or her out on the street. And now she had the awful feeling he was about to turn his ax on her.

  “He should fire me. I would.” Jaimie peered up through her fingers. “I’m not sure I should tell him I don’t get the sexual connotation or admit to fooling around on deadline and being too stupid to remember to change it. I can’t believe it got through.”

  Nate skittered away suddenly, moving so fast his skimpy combover blew in the breeze, and slinked around to his desk that sat opposite Jaimie’s.

  He had arrived. Mr. Pulitzer-prize-winning Harry Crandall. Mr. GQ New York Times. As he had done since he took over the paper precisely sixty days ago—Jaimie had the date marked with a black X on her calendar at home—Harry walked in without looking at a single person in the newsroom, went straight to his office, and shut the door. Mr. Personality. If the guy smiled, his face would probably c
rack, Jaimie thought grumpily.

  “How long before he sees it?” Nate whispered.

  “Five minutes.” Jaimie glanced nervously at the clock before booting up her computer and pretending to work. “I’m so dead.” Far sooner than five minutes, she saw his office door open but didn’t look up as she stared intensely and blindly at the screen in front of her.

  “McLane. Get in here.”

  “Shit,” she whispered, feeling the noose tighten around her neck.

  She walks toward the door, her heels clicking on the hardwood floor. Right before she enters, she smoothes her skirt and checks her lipstick on the doorknob. “Don’t tell me to apologize, chief, ’cause I won’t. You and I both know that was the best story this paper has ever seen.” He stands and glares; smoke from his cigar swirls around his head. “I oughta fire you, but I got a thing about firing dames.” He throws down his cigar in disgust. “Especially dames that look like you,” he says so she can’t hear.

  “Jaimie, you going in or what?” Nate asked.

  Jaimie closed her eyes briefly, wishing her life were really a black-and-white movie instead of this very sucky reality. “Oh, God. I’m dead,” she croaked. And Nate, supportive friend as always, began to whistle “Taps.” Jaimie gave him the bird behind her back right before walking into Harry’s sparsely furnished office. It held only a large antique oak desk and a water bottle that chose that moment to burp up a bubble. And it was so cold Jaimie wondered if she’d be able to see her breath, so she hugged her brown sweater more tightly around her. Other than his irascible nature, the only thing she’d noticed about her new boss was that he kept the air-conditioning in his office so high, his windows fogged up. The Ice Man Cometh.

  Harry’s desk was clean but for that day’s edition of the Nortown Journal, folded in half, front page showing. He looked at her with an unyielding gaze, his dark gray eyes boring into her, making Jaimie want to squirm. He didn’t look exactly angry, more . . . impatient. He had been pushed back in his chair, but he moved slowly forward until he was standing and leaning over his desk, his large hands lying on either side of the paper, the tips of his fingers pressing into the wood. And now, to Jaimie’s growing fear, he did look angry. She watched, in curious fascination, as a bead of sweat moved down his lean face, over his hard jaw, and dropped silently onto his well-starched white dress shirt. How on earth could the man be sweating in air this frigid? Unless he was so angry he’d broken out into a cold sweat.