by Keeland, Vi
OTHER TITLES BY VI KEELAND AND PENELOPE WARD
Dirty Letters
Hate Notes
Rebel Heir
Rebel Heart
Cocky Bastard
Stuck-Up Suit
Playboy Pilot
Mister Moneybags
British Bedmate
Park Avenue Player
Other books from Vi Keeland
Inappropriate
All Grown Up
We Shouldn’t
The Naked Truth
Sex, Not Love
Beautiful Mistake
Egomaniac
Bossman
The Baller
Left Behind
Beat
Throb
Worth the Fight
Worth the Chance
Worth Forgiving
Belong to You
Made for You
Other books from Penelope Ward
Just One Year
The Day He Came Back
When August Ends
Love Online
Gentleman Nine
Drunk Dial
Mack Daddy
Stepbrother Dearest
Neighbor Dearest
RoomHate
Sins of Sevin
Jake Undone (Jake #1)
Jake Understood (Jake #2)
My Skylar
Gemini
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Text copyright © 2020 by Vi Keeland & Penelope Ward
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
Published by Montlake, Seattle
www.apub.com
Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Montlake are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.
ISBN-13: 9781542025133
ISBN-10: 1542025133
Cover design by Caroline Teagle Johnson
Cover photography © 2019 S. Tong Photography
To Luna—this book is almost as special to us as you.
Contents
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
CHAPTER 19
CHAPTER 20
CHAPTER 21
CHAPTER 22
CHAPTER 23
CHAPTER 24
CHAPTER 25
CHAPTER 26
CHAPTER 27
CHAPTER 28
CHAPTER 29
CHAPTER 30
CHAPTER 31
EPILOGUE
Free for our Readers!
Acknowledgments
About the Authors
CHAPTER 1
SADIE
Do: Tell your date how nice she looks.
Don’t: Tell your date how much she resembles your ex-fiancée . . . but with a little more meat on her bones.
This week’s article was an easy one. All I had to do was summarize the time I’d spent with Austin Cobbledick last night. No, I’m not kidding. That was actually his name—smart move going by Austin Cobb on Match.com. Anyway, the name wasn’t the worst of it. The guy was just awful. I could have written this week’s Do’s and Don’ts of Dating column on at least a half dozen things the guy did wrong. Let’s see . . .
I stared unfocused at the computer monitor on my desk and tapped my finger to my bottom lip, pondering the other choices.
Do: Close your mouth when you sneeze.
Don’t: Get food particles from the meal you just chewed with your mouth open all over your date’s Burberry coat. (Which, by the way, I dropped at the cleaners this morning. I should send Cobbledick the damn bill. No wonder there’s an “ex” in front of the word “fiancée” when he says it.)
Though an article about getting sneezed on probably wouldn’t fly. The twenty-one to twenty-eight-year-old demographic that reads Modern Miss magazine tends to be a bit squeamish. Perhaps they’d be more interested in another article about Cobbledick:
Do: Order a beer, soda, water, or glass of wine during your date.
Don’t: Order a Shirley Temple and use it as a prop to show off your ability to tie a knot in a cherry stem when you’ve known a woman all of five minutes.
Total sleaze bucket.
My ruminations were interrupted by my coworker Devin coming to deliver mail. She dropped a stack of envelopes in the in-box on the corner of my desk and said, “Want Starbucks? I’m going on a run.”
Mind you, she still had an unfinished venti cup in her hand.
Devin was one of the fashion editors for the magazine. Yet sometimes, when I looked at her, that made me scratch my head. Today she had on a white baby-doll dress, silver sparkly sequin jacket, yellow rubber boots, and a colorful scarf that wrapped around her neck and hung to almost the floor . . . and it wasn’t even raining out. I bit my tongue. She had, after all, just picked up my mail from the mail room and was now offering to go fetch me coffee. I knew enough not to bite the hand that fed me. Plus, Devin was one of my best friends.
I opened my desk drawer, dug my wallet out of my messy purse, and pulled out a ten-dollar bill. “I’ll take a grande iced sugar-free vanilla latte with soy milk. And yours is on me.”
She wrinkled up her pert little nose. “Is there even coffee in that?”
“Espresso.”
“Oh. Okay. Be back in a few.” She turned around and started to walk, then stopped in the doorway to my office. “By the way, how was your date last night?”
“He turned into an article five minutes in.”
She laughed. “Maybe you should go back to eHarmony?”
Over the last two years, I’d tried Match, Plenty of Fish, eHarmony, Zoosk, and Bumble. I’d even tried Jdate, the site where Jewish people looked for other like-kind religious people to date, even though I wasn’t actually Jewish. My bad luck at dating sucked for me but worked well for the weekly columns I had to write in my position as a magazine staff writer.
“I’m thinking of trying Grindr, actually.”
“I thought that site was for gay, bi, and transgender people?”
“I might reconsider my options after my date last night.”
Devin laughed, thinking I was kidding. But any more dates like the last few, and I might have to seriously reconsider how much I liked penis.
I decided to wait until she returned with my coffee before going back to work on the article I needed to finish. To pass the time, I grabbed the new pile of mail and started to sort through it.
Advertisement.
Advertisement.
Résumé from someone who wanted to do an internship at the magazine.
Layout proofs from the copy department.
Advertisement.
Letter from a woman who disliked my use of the word “panties” in last week’s article. It was a full page back and front, typed. Obviously she had too much time on her hands.
I stopped at the next-to-last envelope. This one wasn’t addressed to either Sadie Bisset or to the editor. It was addressed to Santa Claus. Seeing as it was June, I looked at the postmark, thinking maybe the letter had gotten lost in the mail. Bu
t . . . nope. The postmark was just three days ago. Each of the staff writers here at Modern Miss had set weekly columns to write, but we also had to run one seasonal or holiday-related feature. I was in charge of the Holiday Wishes article that ran during November and December. So it wasn’t actually all that unusual for me to receive a letter addressed to Santa. Though the timing was obviously odd. We hadn’t even put the mailing address in the magazine since last December. Nonetheless, I sliced open the envelope and settled back into my seat, curious about this person who was too impatient to wait a few more months.
Dear Santa,
My name is Birdie Maxwell, and I’m ten and a half years old.
The first line made me smile. At what age did I stop saying and a half? Technically, I was twenty-nine and a half. But I certainly didn’t want to lean any closer to thirty than I had to. These days, I preferred to say late twenties rather than my actual age. Birdie, on the other hand, likely wanted to sound more mature. I did at that age, too. I went back to reading, curious about what the little girl’s wish might be.
Even though I’m writing this letter, I’m not sure I believe in you anymore. I know that sounds dumb, since here I am writing and all. But I have my reasons. You let me down. If there really is a you. Maybe this letter will never even be opened because you don’t exist. I don’t know.
Anyway, four years ago, I wrote you a letter and asked you to make my mom better. She was sick with cancer. But she died on December 23rd. When I cried and said you didn’t exist, Dad told me that Santa was only for kids, and it didn’t work to ask for things for adults. So the next year, I asked for a blue Schwinn with a white basket with pink flowers, a bell that made a quacking sound, and a license plate that had my name. Nothing ever comes with the name Birdie. Not magnets, or coffee mugs, and definitely not bicycle license plates. But you came through. My bike is super awesome, even if Dad says my knuckles are starting to drag on the ground when I ride it.
Then last year I asked for a puppy. I really, really wanted a Great Dane named Marmaduke, one with one blue eye and one brown eye. But you didn’t bring a puppy. Dad tried to tell me that Santa doesn’t bring live gifts. He didn’t know that Suzie Redmond, the most annoying girl in my class, asked for a guinea pig and got one from so-called Santa. Anyway, like I said, I’m not sure if you’re real. Or if any of the rules Dad told me Santa has to follow are even true. But I thought this might be a good way to send my list for this year. Well, it’s not really a list but one big thing that I want . . .
If you’re really Santa, can you please bring my dad and me a special friend? Sort of like a mom, but not a mom because I only have one mom, and she’s gone. But maybe someone who can make Dad laugh more. And if she can do braids, that would be super cool. Dad is really, really bad at them.
Thank you!
Birdie Maxwell
P.S. I know it’s summer. But I thought it might take a while to find the right special friend.
P.P.S. If you’re real, Dad can use some black socks. The ones he wore today had a hole in the big toe.
P.P.P.S. And if you’re really real, can you send me olives? The big black ones that come in a can. We ran out and Dad finally lets me use the can opener. I like to put one on each finger and eat them in front of the TV.
I blinked a few times, taking it all in. It was the sweetest, most selfless letter to ever cross my desk. The fact that the little girl lost her mom at only seven made my heart hurt. I’d been six and a half when my mom died of cancer. And oh my God . . . I’d just thought back to the last time I’d seen my mom and realized how I recalled my age—six . . . and a half.
Oh, Birdie. I totally get you. The years after my mom died, my dad rarely smiled, too. My parents had been high school sweethearts. On Valentine’s Day in ninth grade, he’d given her a diamond Ring Pop while standing in front of the pizza place down the block from their school. Five years later, he brought her back to that exact spot and proposed with a real ring. Their love had been the things little girls dream about. Though inspiring, their romance had a downside. My parents had set such a high bar for what a relationship should be, I refused to settle.
Sighing, I reread the letter. The second time around, I had tears in my eyes when I was done. I wasn’t sure what I could do for Birdie, but I had the sudden urge to call my dad. So I did.
Like a typical New Yorker, I didn’t go food shopping so much as visit the tiny grocery store around the corner from my house on my way home every day. Cairo, the guy who worked behind the counter, had moved here from Bahrain with dreams of becoming a stand-up comedian. He treated his customers like we were his test audience.
I started to unload the items from my basket onto the counter.
“Last night, I told my wife that she was drawing her eyebrows too high. She looked surprised.”
I chuckled and shook my head. “Cute, Cairo. But you know me, I like the dirty ones.”
Cairo looked around and then motioned for me to lean in close. “A girl noticed she started to grow hair between her legs. Not knowing what it was, she got nervous and asked her mom if it was normal. Her mom responded, ‘It’s normal, sweetheart. That’s called your monkey. It means you’re becoming a woman.’ The girl got excited. That night at dinner, she boasted about it to her sister. ‘My monkey has hair now!’ Her sister smiled. ‘Big deal. Mine’s already eaten a dozen bananas.’”
I laughed. “Keep that one in the act.”
Cairo pointed down the aisle behind me. “Did you see? I got more of those chocolate wafer cookies you like so much.”
I groaned. Hazelnut-filled Pirouline wafer cookies were my weakness. I was lucky that most of my weight went to my ass, and junk in the trunk was en vogue right now. “I told you to stop ordering them.”
He smiled and waved his hand. “Go. My treat.”
I sighed. But yet I made my way back down the aisle. Because . . . well . . . cookies. Cairo’s little local store had no rhyme or reason to the product placement. Sponges were stacked next to spaghetti and on the other side of that were the Piroulines. I grabbed the front canister, and as I went to turn away, I noticed a stack of cans next to where I’d just grabbed the wafer cookies from. Black olives. I smiled, thinking about Birdie, and started to walk back to the register. I made it only three steps before I turned around and grabbed two cans of olives off the shelf.
Cairo proceeded to tell me three terrible olive jokes while I finished paying for my purchases. I left with two bags of groceries, and I had no idea what the hell I was going to do with the olives, but for some reason, I hummed “Jingle Bells” all the way home.
CHAPTER 2
SADIE
“What the heck are you doing?”
The next afternoon, Devin came into my office and found me with a roll of Christmas wrapping paper laid out on my desk and a can in the middle. I shrugged and started to cut the paper. “Wrapping olives.”
“Uh. Why?”
I reached into the plastic bag sitting on my chair and held up the item I’d bought on my lunch hour. “How do you think I should wrap these? I don’t have a box.”
Devin’s bushy brows drew together. “You want to wrap men’s black socks?”
I set down the scissors and folded the red-and-white candy-cane-striped wrapping paper around the can. “Well, I can’t send the olives looking festive and not the socks.”
She plucked the socks from my hand and rolled them into a ball. “I have two brothers. My dad used to give me twenty bucks to buy each of them a gift at the holidays. Every year they got socks from the sale rack for a buck, and I used the rest of the money to buy makeup. They wrap best folded like this, into a ball.”
“Oh. Smart.”
Devin leaned against my desk and moved the tape dispenser closer to me. “So who are the olives and socks for? New guy I don’t know about?”
I shook my head. “No, they’re for Birdie.”
“Ohhhhh. Birdie.” She nodded as if it all made sense. “Who the hell is Birdie?”
>
“She’s a little girl who wrote to the Holiday Wishes mailbox. I want to make some of her wishes come true.”
“And she wished for men’s black socks and olives?”
“Yep. And a special friend for her dad. Her mom died of cancer a few years ago. So sweet.”
Devin frowned. “That sucks. But what’s her dad look like?”
“How should I know?”
She shrugged. “He’s single. And is about to have clean socks. That’s better than half the men you’ve gone out with lately already.”
I chuckled. “True. But I don’t think so.”
“Suit yourself. His kid sounds like an odd duck anyway. Who asks Santa for olives?”
I stopped wrapping and looked at her. “When I was seven, I asked for a rooster because I wanted fresh brown eggs.”
“But . . . roosters don’t lay eggs.”
“I didn’t say I was the smartest seven-year-old.”
Devin laughed as she walked out of my office. “I think you just made a case for why you should google Birdie’s dad. Sounds like maybe you’re a match made in heaven.”
I never ended up googling anyone. In fact, after I sent Birdie the olives and socks, I wished her well in my mind and never gave it a second thought. That is, until another envelope showed up at the magazine about a week later. When I noticed her name on the return address, I immediately dumped the other mail and ripped that envelope open.
A photo fell out of the letter onto the floor. When I picked it up, what met my eyes was a beautiful little girl with golden hair and a bright smile that melted my heart. It was a wallet-size school photo. Wow. This is her. It felt surreal to be looking at the actual Birdie. She was so pretty, with kind eyes and, from everything I knew, a beautiful soul to match. I put the photo aside and read the letter.
Dear Santa,
Oh my God. Oh my God. Oh my God! You are real. You’re really real. I got the olives and socks today. The holes fit on my fingers! Not the holes in the socks. The holes in the olives. The socks didn’t have holes. My daddy’s socks don’t have holes anymore. They were so nice and soft. You should’ve seen him when he found the socks in his drawer! He still doesn’t know how they got there. He said today must have been his lucky day because he found them. And I laughed. It was so funny! And then he took me to the ice-cream place next to his restaurant to celebrate our lucky day. I couldn’t tell him that I was too full because I just ate a can of olives.