Knight in Leather (31 page)

“What do I want? I…” Convinced the whole ordeal was some kind of elaborate scam or a trippy dream triggered by undercooked chicken nuggets, she gave her head a shake and narrowed her eyes at him.
Business. This is business.
“Look, I’ll cut to the quick, and I don’t care if it sounds desperate. I just want to make some extra money for gifts. I’ve got a bunch of kids in my preschool classes and I want to do a little bit better for them than coloring books from the super-center dollar bin.”

Nick perched against the edge of his desk in front of her and folded his arms over his chest. “How interesting.” He didn’t
sound
interested. His voice was flat. His gaze was warm enough, though. He looked at her as if she were a long-awaited meal comprised of decadent things like caviar and foie gras and not just the cold Happy Meal French fries she felt like at the moment.

Gillian dragged her tongue across her dry lips and shrugged. “They’re cute kids.”

“They must like you a lot, Gillian.” His gaze fell to her chest, and he stared brazenly at her Christmas balls.

At least, she
hoped
that was what he was staring at.

“Women aren’t built like you were where I come from.”

He’s so not looking at my Christmas balls
.

She pressed her arms over her chest, and he pulled that silvery gaze back up to her face. That wasn’t much better, because he stared at her lips instead.

It was
definitely
the least professional interview she’d ever had the displeasure of enduring, but something kept her affixed to that seat. Maybe it was curiosity. Or maybe she was just that hard up.

She swallowed. “What are they built like?”

“Sort of like aspen trees, you know the sort? Thin and pale with the inability to thrive outside their native environments. I love dark hair on women.” His long fingers threaded through the curls beside her cheek, his proximity making tingles prickle down her spine and coalesce in her core. “You’re absolutely
stunning
, Miss Wright.”

This is so inappropriate.
“Um, thank you. Do you actually, like, do the hiring or is there someone else I need to talk to?”

He unhanded her hair and retreated to his chair.

She pouted at his back. Inappropriate or not, she wanted him to play with her hair some more. It’d been too long since she’d let anyone get close, and he was top-shelf gorgeous. Maybe she was shallow, but it wasn’t like he could read her mind or anything.

“My assistants do most of the hiring,” he said. “It’s been a long time since I’ve conducted an interview. Sorry to keep you waiting. It took me a while to get here.”

“Well, that explains the delay, but how do I merit special treatment?”

Nick leaned down and opened a drawer. “Because you
are
special. And, of course, it doesn’t hurt you’re lovely to look at. That’ll serve me well.”

“Are you kidding me? I don’t generally like to be mentioned in the same breath as the word
serve
.”

“I don’t kid about much of anything. Who has time for it?” He closed the drawer and dropped a file folder onto the top of his blotter. “What’s the point beating around the bush?”

She gripped her chair arms tightly and gaped at the man, not sure if she should stand and storm out or tell him off.

He was giving her that same sultry stare as before, and her brain was at war with her body.

That come-hither stare of his made her want to straddle him where he sat—proprieties be damned—but she was at a job interview because she needed money. She needed to be professional, even if he wasn’t going to be.

She cleared her throat. “Just out of curiosity, what is the position I’m interviewing for?”

“Can I call you Gill? Isn’t that what your friends call you?”

She furrowed her brow. “How do you know that?” For all she knew, a couple of her peers had interviewed earlier in the day, but she couldn’t imagine any good reasons she’d be brought up in an interview.

“I know it for the same reason you’re in my office and not in the cubicle maze down the hall where everyone else gets interviewed.”

“And that reason is?”

He shrugged and passed his hands over his ears. The points were pronounced again.

“Wait—”

“You were staring earlier. It seems the glamour doesn’t work well on you.”

“Th-the
glamour
?” she stammered.

“The magic that obscures my appearance.”

She nodded and swallowed hard. “Oh. Right. Magic.”

Sure thing, bub.

She clutched her purse to her chest and grabbed her coat from the chair arm. “Well, thank you for your time. I don’t think this is going to be a good fit for me.” She walked quickly to the heavy wooden door beside the curtained windows behind the desk and pulled it open, assuming it led to the strip mall’s back lot.

A gale-force wind knocked her onto her ass. A blizzard raging outside was blowing precipitation around forcefully, and she would have sworn she saw a dwarf in pointy-toed shoes being tossed around.

“There’s someone out there!” she shouted. “And it’s snowing! Why the hell is it snowing?”

It’d been fifty-five degrees outside when she’d trotted up to Agnes’s counter, and there hadn’t been a drop of rain or a flake of snow anywhere in the forecast.

The dwarf grabbed a hold of a column in the walkway nearby and held on until he could try again.

Nick slipped in front of her and pushed the door closed against the howling wind. Then he knelt down and met her at eye level.

She pointed at the door, wide-eyed and wordless.

“Welcome to the North Pole, Miss Wright.”

She tittered, rolled up one sleeve of her sweater, and pinched the flesh of her forearm.

Nothing changed, except for the fact that had freakin’ hurt, and all she had to show for the pinch was a new bruise.

Nick pulled her up by the waist and guided her to a chair.

She dropped onto it the moment the backs of her knees touched the cushion, and whimpered unintelligibly. “Snow…out there…and ears point…”

“Would you like a cup of coffee, Miss Wright? Or something sweet, perhaps?”

She gave her head a shake and forced a swallow down her tight throat. “I—I don’t understand what’s happening.”

He dropped a manila folder onto her lap along with a pen embossed with
Santa Incorporated.
“I haven’t had to use those in twenty years. Better to be safe than sorry.”

She looked down at the file and opened the cover to find about twenty pages of legal garbage. The best she could tell, anyway. Her head was a mess and eyes were crossing, but she was pretty sure it was some sort of contact. “I’m not reading that, whatever it is.”

“Fine, don’t read it. Just sign. It basically says anything you see while under employment of S.I. should remain a secret.”

“Like…pointy elf ears and freak snowstorms?”

He tented his fingers and performed an elegant shrug.

Even
that
was lovely.

She made a guttural noise at the back of her throat, and tried—and failed—to rip her gaze away from him. He was too beautiful, and some broken thing in her mind said that looking away would be like squandering the opportunity to enjoy beautiful art.

“You outsiders tend to see me as a fat man with a white beard and rosy cheeks,” he said. “You’re making me work hard for an illusion that’s barely working on you, Gillian. So, I’m just going to drop the façade.”

“There’s a façade?”

“Barely. You’ve seen the ears, so I’ll show you the rest.” His pupils seemed to spiral inward. His irises became two silvery-blue pools, and his skin seemed paler—almost iridescent.

She clutched her purse tighter, wondering if there was anything in it that could be fashioned into a weapon. “What the hell are you?”

“I thought that was obvious. I’m an elf.”

“There are no…those don’t… No. Not real.”

He smoothed his shirt. “The job pays twenty dollars an hour. Six p.m. to nine p.m. every night until Christmas. Double pay on the twenty-fourth and twenty-fifth.”

“I’m not…
no
. I can’t. I need to leave.”

“You’re not going anywhere, Miss Wright. You may as well give up the pretense.”

“You don’t know me.”

“I know enough.” He opened a wardrobe at the side of the room and pulled out a hanger holding a familiar-seeming red-and-white garment. “This one will have to do for public events.”

Gillian crinkled her nose at the hideous thing. It was the traditional Mrs. Claus outfit: a conservative red frock with white apron complete with a fluffy, ribbon-laced bonnet. “Are you kidding me?”

“No. That’s the job, sweetheart. People expect to see Mrs. Claus when they see Santa. Since my last assistant quit, the job’s up for grabs. That’s why Agnes sent you to me. Well, that and—” He made an
It’s not important
hand flick, but it
so
was.

“Mrs. Claus is your
assistant
?”

“The last gentleman with the job was married, so now people expect it.”

“Oh. I see.” Gillian started to laugh hysterically and couldn’t help herself. She was sitting in front of a man who thought he was Santa, and it was such a Gillian situation: meet a guy hotter than hell only for him to turn out to be a complete whackadoo. Things just weren’t allowed to be normal in her life, apparently. No matter how hard she tried to escape her family’s chaotic legacy, shenanigans found her and made her their queen.

“The delirium you’re feeling should pass in time, I imagine,” Nick said calmly. “It takes some time for mortals to adjust to the magic in this realm.”

“Right. The magic.” When she was done laughing and could catch her breath, she put her hands palms-out in a
wait
gesture. “Okay, say I buy what you’re saying, and this is real and you
are
Santa—at least, the
current
one—what happened to the original guy?”

“That was me.” Nick left the outfit in a pile next to her, returned to his chair, and started an examination of his cuticles.

“So, you had a substitute?”

“Yes. For quite a while. Some political shit went down amongst the elves. I had to help suppress it, so I had someone outside the magic world step in.”

“The
elves
?”

“Yes.
Elves
. Like me, remember?”

“And, Santa just said ‘shit’.”

Nick shrugged. “I swear in several Germanic languages depending on mood. Pick the one you prefer. My Italian sounds much sexier, however, even if my naughty word vocabulary is limited. I really should brush up. Or perhaps instead I’ll work on my Hungarian. You know a bit of that, don’t you?”

She gaped. “How do you know that?” she asked.

There was no way he could have known that. Not even her friends knew her family’s origins. It had never come up in the course of casual conversation, and she preferred it that way. The last time anyone had figured it out, it had been a date who’d called her the g-word and asked if she was going to pick his pockets when he turned his back. That guy had needed five stitches over his eye immediately afterward. He’d sent her the emergency room bill. She’d returned it to him unpaid with a sticky note telling him to brush up on ethnic slurs so he’d know when he was using them. Apparently he’d figured out what he’d said, because every time he saw her now, he was saccharine-sweet.

Nick let out an exasperated-sounding breath. “So, you’ll start tomorrow?”

“Right. Sure.” She nodded, feeling something like a bobble-head doll and unable to stop. She’d do anything just to get out of there. She hoped there was some kind of drug being pumped into the air vents that was messing with her head. Her mind would clear once she walked outside into the balmy—
not
snowy—night. She’d go home to bed and wake in the morning to find it’d all been a crazy dream.

“Wear comfortable shoes, pet. We’ll be quite busy.”

“Sure thing, Santa. We sure will.”

This is just a dream.

And not even a delicious dream of a certain sort. The guy had on way too many freakin’ clothes.

Learn more about UNWRAPPING MR. ROTH
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KNIGHT IN LEATHER

Copyright © 2016 by Holley Trent

Excerpt
UNWRAPPING MR. ROTH
© 2015 by Holley Trent

Cover art © Fiona Jayde Media

Edited by Marci Clark

All rights reserved. Reproduction of any part of this book in any format, except for reviewing purposes, is allowed only with prior consent of the author.

KNIGHT IN LEATHER
is a work of fiction. Names, places, entities, and scenarios in this book are products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously.