Jaimie swallowed and tried not to look as terrified as she felt. “Before you say anything, would you rather I be stupid or incompetent?” Please, please laugh.
“I’d rather you not be here at all,” he said with horrible calmness.
Oh, shit. “Are you firing me?” she choked out. She kept waiting for the ax to fall, an ax wielded grimly by a stone-faced man in a perfectly tailored suit.
“I’m putting you on probation.” He sat down, looking remarkably less angry than when he’d stood up, his movements slow and measured.
Somehow, probation was worse, far more humiliating, than being fired. If she’d been fired, she could have gotten all indignant, vowed to find a better job at a better paper for more money. Seasoned journalists got fired; greenhorns got probation. It would have been difficult to decide which burned brighter, the red on her cheeks or the anger in her eyes. Jaimie took a breath to calm down. “I understand you are angry, but . . .”
“I’m not angry and there are no ‘buts,’ no excuse for what happened. And you know it. For the sake of clearing the air, let me tell you what happened. It was late, near deadline, and you and your pal Nate came up with this very funny headline. It wasn’t meant to run, am I right?”
“Yes,” she ground out.
“And yet it ran anyway.” He looked at her expectantly.
“Obviously, yes.” You arrogant son of a . . .
“I can tell you one thing. I bet it was the most well read story in the paper today.” His eyes flickered down to the paper and Jaimie thought she detected the slightest bit of humor in their cold depths. He gave her an assessing look, a completely asexual look, and Jaimie curled her fingers around the cuffs of her too-long sweater as she fought a shiver.
“You’re a damned good editor, Jaimie, and I’m certain something like this won’t happen again.”
She could almost hear the unspoken or else in his tone. While she knew she deserved more than he’d given, Jaimie couldn’t stop the deep resentment churning in her gut. Maybe it would be better if she did leave. That thought left her colder than Harry’s office. “I’ve been editor here for five years, and there’s never been this kind of screwup. It won’t happen again.”
He nodded, an agreement and a dismissal, and Jaimie left the office feeling relief and slightly less loathing. She was at her desk for two seconds before Kath Kopf came over, a wide grin on her face.
“So, are you fired?”
“Don’t sound so hopeful,” Jaimie grumbled. “No, I’m not fired.”
“Did he ask you out?”
“No, we just had sex on his desk. He’s got a small dick.”
“Really?” Kath asked in mock dismay. “When I had sex with him on my desk, I thought it was rather large.”
“We all have different standards,” she said dryly. “He put me on probation. All in all, I got off easy.”
Kath’s smile disappeared. “Probation? I didn’t think we had anything like that here.” She gave Harry’s office a worried look. “Do you think he’s done firing people?”
Jaimie was startled by the real concern in Kath’s voice. Kath, short for Katherine, had been at the Nortown Journal nearly as long as Jaimie. She was a hard-working, fast-writing, tough-as-nails reporter who should have moved on to another, better paper years ago. “Kath, you have nothing to worry about. You’re safer than I am.”
“But I heard he’s hiring a couple of Columbia University hotshots.”
Jaimie hadn’t even heard that—something that made her feel even more impotent. “You’re not seriously worried, are you?”
“We all are,” Nate said, unabashedly eavesdropping on their conversation. “He fired three reporters already.”
“I’m pretty certain he’s all done firing.” Her two friends looked uncertain, which made her unsure about Harry’s plans as well. “Do you want me to talk to him?” she asked, praying hard and fast they’d say no.
“We want you to sleep with him, then use your body to gain favors for us,” Nate said, as Kath nodded.
Jaimie gave them a withering look. “Thanks for the vote of confidence, guys, but I really don’t plan to use this body as an instrument of extortion. Anyway, sexual harassment is illegal.”
“When did you get all politically correct?” Nate said, smiling evilly.
Jaimie let out a beleaguered sigh so her friends would know exactly how much she hated to confront Harry with their concerns. “I’ll talk to him, but I really doubt I’ll find anything out. And I’m not going to talk to him today. I’m already on his shit list.”
Kath gave Nate a look. “We think you should, um, make friends,” she said.
“I am not sleeping with that man,” Jaimie said, blown away by her friends’ suggestion and the fact they’d met and discussed this at length, coming to the astounding conclusion she’d have any influence over Harry.
“Who said you should sleep with him?” Kath said. “We just want him to get to know us, like us. It’s easy to fire people when you don’t know them. He won’t be able to fire people he likes.”
Jaimie shook her head in confusion. “What are you suggesting, then?”
“For starters, you could invite him to the softball game. Have him join the dead pool. Tell him about Duffy’s Bar. Use your imagination.”
Jaimie gave her friends a sick look. “Why me? Ted’s way more friendly with him than I am.”
Nate rolled his eyes. “Ted’s sports editor. He doesn’t have anything to do with the newsroom,” he said as if talking to a simpleton. “It’s got to come from you, our hallowed leader. Otherwise, he’s going to slowly and methodically replace us with new college grads. They get paid less, they’re eager, and they’ll kiss his ass.”
“So you are making me the official ass kisser? Is that it?”
Kath grinned and gave Nate a nudge with her elbow. “Finally she gets it.”
Jaimie made a sick face. “You do realize what you’re asking me to do. Play nice with a guy I can’t stand.”
“He’s not that bad,” Kath said. “Plus, I wouldn’t kick him out of bed. Wink wink.”
“You still think Ted Bundy’s innocent,” Jaimie said, dismissing Kath’s assessment of Attila the Hun. “Just because he’s okay-looking . . .”
“Okay-looking?”
Jaimie narrowed her eyes. “Just because Harry’s . . .”
“Gorgeous.”
“Is he?” Nate asked, looking over at Harry’s office with pure puzzlement.
“Yes. He is. But he’s a jackass,” Jaimie said with force.
“And you’re going to invite that jackass to the softball game, right?”
Jaimie looked Nate in the eye. “To save the newsroom, I’d do just about anything.”
THE 24 DAYS OF CHRISTMAS
LINDA LAEL MILLER
CHAPTER ONE
The snow, as much a Thanksgiving leftover as the cold turkey in the sandwich Frank Raynor had packed for lunch, lay in tattered, dirty patches on the frozen ground. Surveying the leaden sky through the window of the apartment over his garage, Frank sighed and wondered if he’d done the right thing, renting the place to Addie Hutton. She’d grown up in the big house, on the other side of the lawn. How would she feel about taking up residence in what, in her mind, probably amounted to the servants’ quarters?
“Daddy?”
He turned to see his seven-year-old daughter, Lissie, framed in the doorway. She was wearing a golden halo of her own design, constructed from a coat hanger and an old tinsel garland filched from the boxes of Christmas decorations downstairs.
“Does this make me look like an angel?”
Frank felt a squeeze in his chest as he made a show of assessing the rest of the outfit—jeans, snow boots, and a pink T-shirt that said “Brat Princess” on the front. “Yeah, Lisser,” he said. “You’ve got it going on.”
Lissie was the picture of her late mother, with her short, dark and impossibly thick hair, bright hazel eyes, and all those pesky freckles. Frank
loved those freckles, just as he’d loved Maggie’s, though she’d hated them, and so did Lissie. “So you think I have a shot at the part, right?”
The kid had her heart set on playing an angel in the annual Christmas pageant at St. Mary’s Episcopal School. Privately, Frank didn’t hold out much hope, since he’d just given the school’s drama teacher, Miss Pidgett, a speeding ticket two weeks before, and she was still steamed about it. She’d gone so far as to complain to the city council, claiming police harassment, but Frank had stood up and said she’d been doing fifty-five in a thirty, and the citation had stuck. The old biddy had barely spoken to him before that; now she was crossing the street to avoid saying hello.
He would have liked to think Almira Pidgett wasn’t the type to take a grown-up grudge out on a seven-year-old, but, unfortunately, he knew from experience that she was. She’d been his teacher, when he first arrived in Pine Crossing, and she’d disliked him from day one.
“What’s so bad about playing a shepherd?” he hedged, and took a sip from his favorite coffee mug. Maggie had made it for him, in the ceramics class she’d taken to keep her mind off the chemo, and he carried it most everywhere he went. Folks probably thought he had one hell of an addiction to caffeine; in truth, he kept the cup within reach because it was the last gift Maggie ever gave him. It was a talisman; he felt closer to her when he could touch it.
Lissie folded her arms and set her jaw, Maggie-style. “It’s dumb for a girl to be a shepherd. Girls are supposed to be angels.”
He hid a grin behind the rim of the mug. “Your mother would have said girls could herd sheep as well as boys,” he replied. “And I’ve known more than one female who wouldn’t qualify as an angel, no matter what kind of getup she was wearing.”
A wistful expression crossed Lissie’s face. “I miss Mommy so much,” she said, very softly. Maggie had been gone two years, come June, and Frank kept expecting to get used to it, but it hadn’t happened, for him or for Lissie.
I want you to mourn me for a while, Maggie had told him, toward the end, but when it’s time to let go, I’ll find a way to tell you.
“I know,” he said gruffly. “Me, too.”
“Mommy’s an angel now, isn’t she?”
Frank couldn’t speak. He managed a nod.
“Miss Pidgett says people don’t turn into angels when they die. She says they’re still just people.”
“Miss Pidgett,” Frank said, “is a—stickler for detail.”
“A what?”
Frank looked pointedly at his watch. “You’re going to be late for school if we don’t get a move on,” he said.
“Angels,” Lissie said importantly, straightening her halo, “are always on time.”
Frank grinned. “Did you feed Floyd?”
Floyd was the overweight beagle he and Lissie had rescued from the pound a month after Maggie died. In retrospect, it seemed to Frank that Floyd had been the one doing the rescuing—he’d made a man and a little girl laugh, when they’d both thought nothing would ever be funny again.
“Of course I did,” Lissie said. “Angels always feed their dogs.”
Frank chuckled, but that hollow place was still there, huddled in a corner of his ticker. “Get your coat,” he said.
“It’s in the car,” Lissie replied, and her gaze strayed to the Advent calendar taped across the bottom of the cupboards. Fashioned of matchboxes, artfully painted and glued to a length of red velvet ribbon, now as scruffy as the snow outside, the thing was an institution in the Raynor family. Had been since Frank was seven himself. “How come you put that up here?” she asked, with good reason. Every Christmas of her short life, her great-aunt Eliza’s calendar had hung in the living room of the main house, fixed to the mantelpiece. It was a family tradition to open one box each day and admire the small treasure glued inside.
Frank crossed the worn linoleum floor, intending to steer his quizzical daughter in the direction of the front door, but she didn’t budge. She was like Maggie that way, too—stubborn as a mule up to its belly in molasses.
“I thought it might make Miss Hutton feel welcome,” he said.
“The lady who lived in our house when she was a kid?”
Frank nodded. Addie, the daughter of a widowed judge, had been a lonely little girl. She’d made a point of being around every single morning, from the first of December to the twenty-fourth, for the opening of that day’s matchbox. This old kitchen had been a warm, joyous place in those days—Aunt Eliza, the Huttons’ housekeeper, had made sure of that. Putting up the Advent calendar was Frank’s way of offering Addie a pleasant memory. “You don’t mind, do you?”
Lissie considered the question. “I guess not,” she said. “You think she’ll let me stop by before school, so I can look inside, too?”
That Frank couldn’t promise. He hadn’t seen Addie in more than ten years, and he had no idea what kind of woman she’d turned into. She’d come back for Aunt Eliza’s funeral, and sent a card when Maggie died, but she’d left Pine Crossing, Colorado, behind when she went off to college, and, as far as he knew, she’d never looked back.
He ruffled Lissie’s curls, careful not to displace the halo. “Don’t know, Beans,” he said. The leather of his service belt creaked as he crouched to look into the child’s small, earnest face, balancing the coffee mug deftly as he did so. “It’s almost Christmas. The lady’s had a rough time over the last little while. Maybe this will bring back some happy memories.”
Lissie beamed. “Okay,” she chimed. She was missing one of her front teeth, and her smile touched a bruised place in Frank, though it was a sweet ache. Not much scared him, but the depth and breadth of the love he bore this little girl cut a chasm in his very soul.
Frank straightened. “School,” he said with mock sternness.
Lissie fairly skipped out of the apartment and down the stairs to the side of the garage. “I know what’s in the first box anyway,” she sang. “A teeny, tiny teddy bear.”
“Yup,” Frank agreed, following at a more sedate pace, lifting his collar against the cold. Thirty years ago, on his first night in town, he and his aunt Eliza had selected that bear from a shoebox full of dime-store geegaws she’d collected, and he’d personally glued it in place. That was when he’d begun to think his life might turn out all right after all.
Addie Hutton slowed her secondhand Buick as she turned onto Fifth Street. Her most important possessions, a computer and printer, four boxes of books, a few photo albums, and a couple of suitcases full of clothes, were in the backseat—and her heart was in her throat.
Her father’s house loomed just ahead, a two-story saltbox, white with green shutters. The ornate mailbox, once labeled “Hutton,” now read “Raynor,” but the big maple tree was still in the front yard, and the tire swing, now old and weatherworn, dangled from the sturdiest branch.
She smiled, albeit a little sadly. Her father hadn’t wanted that swing—said it would be an eyesore, more suited to the other side of the tracks than to their neighborhood—but Eliza, the housekeeper and the only mother Addie had ever really known, since her own had died when she was three, had stood firm on the matter. Finally defeated, the judge had sent his secretary’s husband, Charlie, over to hang the tire.
She pulled into the driveway and looked up at the apartment over the garage. A month before, when the last pillar of her life had finally collapsed, she’d called Frank Raynor and asked if the place was rented. She’d known it was available, having maintained her subscription to the hometown newspaper and seen the ad in the classifieds, but the truth was, she hadn’t been sure Frank would want her living in such close proximity. He’d seemed surprised by the inquiry, and, after some throat clearing, he’d said the last tenant had just given notice, and if she wanted it, she could move in any time.
She’d asked about the rent, since that little detail wasn’t listed—for the first time in her life, money was an issue—and he’d said they could talk about that later.
Now she pu
t the car into park and turned off the engine with a resolute motion of her right hand. She pushed open the door, jumped out, and marched toward the outside stairs. During their telephone conversation, Frank had offered to leave the key under the doormat, and Addie had asked if it was still safe to leave doors unlocked in Pine Crossing. He’d chuckled and said it was. All right, then, she’d said. It was decided. No need for a key.
A little breathless from dashing up the steps, Addie stopped on the familiar welcome mat and drew a deep breath, bracing herself for the flood of memories that were bound to wash over her the moment she stepped over that worn threshold.
A brisk winter wind bit through her lightweight winter coat, bought for southern California, and she turned the knob.
Eliza’s furniture was still there, at least in the living room. Every stick of it.
Tears burned Addie’s eyes as she took it all in—the old blue sofa, the secondhand coffee table, the ancient piano, always out of tune. She almost expected to hear Eliza call out the old familiar greeting. “Adelaide Hutton, is that you? You get yourself into this kitchen and have a glass of milk and a cookie or two.”
Frank’s high school graduation picture still occupied the place of honor on top of the piano, and next to it was Addie’s own.
Addie crossed the room, touched Frank’s square-jawed face, and smiled. He wasn’t handsome, in the classic sense of the word—his features were too rough cut for that, his brown eyes too earnest, and too wary. She wondered if, at thirty-seven, he still had all that dark, unruly hair.
She turned her head, by force of will, to face her younger self. Brown hair, not as thick as she would have liked, blue eyes, good skin. Lord, she looked so innocent in that photograph, so painfully hopeful. By the time she graduated, two years after Frank, he was already working his way through college in Boulder, with a major in criminal justice. They were engaged, and he’d intended to come back to Pine Crossing, as soon as he’d completed his studies, and join the three-man police force. With Chief Potter about to retire, and Ben Mead ready to step into the top job, there would be a place waiting for Frank the day he got his degree.
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