Midwinter Magic

Midwinter Magic

After an eye-opening congressional hearing, former corporate shark Jack Morgan redirects his ill-gotten gains toward charity work. However, his attempts to bring holiday cheer to a Bolivian village meet with one disaster after another: canceled flights, crumbling luggage, implacable customs officials. His plans disintegrate further when he runs into a sexy tourist with... wings?

As Jack's guardian angel, Sarah Phimm has her work cut out for her. When his latest volunteer mission risks his life, she's forced to reveal herself to him—but only in part. She can't risk him knowing the truth. He's everything her immortal heart desires, but can never have. She soon discovers that keeping him safe amidst death bridges and tumbling telephone poles is far easier than guarding her heart.

Copyright © 2013 Erica Ridley
All rights reserved.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

Cover design
©
Erica Ridley.
Photograph of wings
©
Grafissimo / iStockPhoto.

All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the author.

For Margarita

The original angel in a cupcake

J
ACK MORGAN
swung his heavy burlap sacks off the back of the strangers’ pickup truck. He leapt over the tailgate and grunted when his worn hiking boots landed hard on the cracked asphalt. He tried to offer cash to the sun-worn Hispanic family stuffed into the truck’s cab, but they waved off the money, waved him off, too, and continued toward the mountains, a stream of exhaust smoke trailing in their wake. Jack hiked his sacks back onto his aching shoulders and hauled himself up the two-kilometer stretch into town.

Santita, Bolivia. Population: Six hundred. Amenities: Scarce. Not most people’s idea of a luxury Christmas vacation, but then again, Jack had given up on both “luxury” and “vacation” when he’d walked out of the congressional hearing a free man. The government would pen new statutes to better guide industry practices in the future, but nothing could be done about the past. After all, no laws had been broken. Any exploited resources had been depleted legally. He and his Fortune 500 counterparts were free to retire with billions of dollars and a clean conscience.

Jack’s conscience disagreed.

Sure, no businessman made the cover of
Time
magazine without ruthless ambition and relentless momentum. But his face on the cover had impacted him far less than the gut-punch of images shown during the hearing. While the others congratulated themselves on becoming filthy rich before the government could stop them, Jack had simply felt filthy. His eyes had been opened, and he would never again value a conglomerate over an individual. For the rest of his life.

And so here he was, at the crossroads of the Andes Mountains and the Bolivian lowlands, making his own penance for the damage his industry had wrought.

Or trying to, anyway. Getting out of California had taken nearly three weeks.

Heading
toward
his Malibu beach house was never a big deal. Limos and private jets were as easy to score as taxis and economy airfare. But leaving the States for a remote dot in the rainforest—or going anywhere without malls and craft beer and 4G networks—was all but impossible. Even for him. It was as if a forcefield of Murphy’s Law tried to trap him inside the 90625 zip code.

As quickly as he made airline reservations, his flights got canceled without notification. Taxis suffered flat tires just pulling out of his driveway. LAX customs officials grilled him about his crates full of toys and medicine and children’s clothing until he missed every possible flight and had to start all over the next morning.

Once he managed to get on a plane, mechanical failure kept it grounded. When the plane finally took off and reached cruising altitude, inclement weather diverted him to first to Vegas and then to Aspen. When he landed at his actual destination, immigration officials warned him of typhoid and avian flu and diphtheria and offered to send him right back home, free of charge.

The moment he refused this largesse, his sturdy, custom-made crates spontaneously disintegrated, strewing crayons and penicillin along the baggage belts. When he refused the reiterated offer of a free return to Malibu in favor of stuffing whatever he could salvage into discarded burlap sacks that still carried the faint scent of coffee beans, the car rental company he’d hired as well as the backup car rental company he’d also hired and every other car rental company in Bolivia were inexplicably fresh out of operable vehicles.

Which is how Jack Morgan, ex-Fortune 500 leading man, found himself sharing a truck bed with four skinny goats for the 185 mostly-paved kilometers between the Sucre airport and the rural chili town of Padilla, his luggage reduced to dirt-stained burlap sacks… and almost less than that. Who knew goats ate burlap? And crayons?

It would’ve been much easier to give up and go home. But Jack hadn’t taken his company from regional conglomerate to international powerhouse in ten short years by being the sort who gave up and went home.

Plus, it was already December. Only a week and a half until Christmas. And he’d promised the children of Santita that, this year, they would have one.

He was stumbling downhill, a couple hundred yards from the spare room he’d coaxed from the town dentist—all traditional lodging had naturally been unable to accommodate his request—when he smacked into an invisible wall. Everything went flying, including him. Giant snow-white wings and a blinding light filled his vision and vanished just as quickly.

Jack landed on his ass and blinked in befuddlement at the empty space in front of him. Maybe not a brick wall after all. . . but equally as mystifying.

He could’ve sworn he’d run into another person—someone swathed in a gangster-huge fur coat. Something soft and wide and hairy and completely unnecessary in sixty-degree weather. The breeze had a nip to it, sure, but head-to-toe fur was a bit much. Only a crazy person tromped around Bolivia dressed like a Sasquatch.

But there was no one there. Just an empty gravel road, littered with coloring books and chewable vitamins and a dazed and confused ex-CEO.

Maybe
he
was the crazy person.

He set about stuffing his donation supplies back into the burlap sacks for what felt like the millionth time that day. Every single muscle ached. He was hungry and exhausted and no doubt hallucinating from stress and sleep deprivation. There’d been no enormous white wings, no ’20s gangster wrapped in snow-bleached fur, no—

A clipboard.

He jerked his head up and scanned all sides of the empty road. A few goats, several chickens, plenty of gravel, but no sign of anyone who might’ve dropped a clipboard in his path.

Except whomever he’d run into.

The clipboard had been half-hidden beneath one of the comic books that had fallen from his sack, but it hadn’t been there long. For one thing, the clipboard wasn’t dirty—and anything lying on a dirt road for more than three seconds got very, very dirty. Jack could well imagine the state of his backside. Also present beneath the fallen clipboard were a handful of mismatched Barbie shoes and a Hot Wheels car.

The clipboard had definitely fallen at the same time he did. But from where? From whom?

He looked around slowly, carefully, every sense on high alert. But this was rural Latin America on a Sunday evening. The only thing open was the church. Every townsperson was either inside their homes cooking dinner or crossing themselves at Sunday mass. There wasn’t even anywhere to
hide,
not as quickly as the accident had happened.

Except here he was, dusting off jump ropes and children’s tennis shoes, right next to a clipboard that Should Not Be.

Once he got his precious donations resecured in the burlap sacks, he picked up the clipboard for a closer look.

Malibu

Los Angeles

Houston

La Paz

Sucre

Santita

His itinerary. Jack’s stomach dropped. He was dehydrated and bone-weary and wound so tight he could snap, but he clearly wasn’t hallucinating. He looked around again, slowly, carefully, his farcical bad luck taking on a sinister edge. He sat on his haunches in the middle of the empty road, ready to spring up at a moment’s notice.

Someone had a copy of his travel itinerary, stop for stop. Someone was
following
him. Or had arrived first in anticipation.

But who? And how? And why?

When he’d dissolved his corporation, he’d given every single employee an extraordinarily handsome severance package, from the legal team through the janitorial crew, so there was no cause for concern on that front. The documentary on the far-reaching impacts of corporate greed still ran on late-night TV, but it vilified international conglomerates in general, not him in specific.

And yet. . . Jack’s fingers gripped the clipboard, smudging the pristine page with his dusty fingerprints. And
yet
.

He leapt to his feet.

“I know you’re out there!” he shouted into the evening wind, raising the clipboard over his head like Lloyd Dobler’s boombox in
Say Anything
.

Jack’s well-practiced Spanish was as fluent as possible for a gringo, but for now he stuck with English. Whoever wrote this list had started in Malibu. He was likely as gringo—and as ruthless—as Jack himself.

“Come out, come out, whoever you are,” he called, his voice singsong and infused with anger. He didn’t like mysteries, he didn’t like being stalked, and he especially despised any situation that made him look foolish. Such as yelling his gringo head off in front of a goat and a few chickens. “Show yourself right this second, or so help me—”

A woman stepped out of the shadows.

Presumably the shadows, anyway. Purple sky shot with pink from the setting sun did tend to lower visibility, but he could swear the shade between the trees hadn’t been nearly thick enough to hide a person.

And yet here she was. His mystery stalker. Looking less defiant than he’d imagined, and more. . . terrified. Good. She ought to be terrified.

He, for one, was speechless.

She had bright blue eyes, a pert little nose, and Shirley Temple hair. . . which might not have seemed out of place on, say, an eight-year-old girl instead of what appeared to be a twenty-eight-year-old woman. She stood about average height—maybe a head shorter than Jack himself—but there was nothing else average about her. She wore a gold-and-purple Lakers jersey over the telltale gold lamé straps of a string bikini top, tight black yoga pants, mind-blowingly impractical stiletto-heeled sandals, and a plastic headband with a hot pink cupcake sticking out of it.

His niece had a headband just like it.

His niece was seven.

This woman. . . Jack shook his head to clear it. It didn’t help. He tried to think logically, which would’ve been much easier had there been anything logical at all about the woman before him. She looked like she’d gotten her getup from some Halloween costume labeled “California Girl.” The kind sold on Mars. For the extraterrestrial tourist who wants to blend with the earthlings.

If this was a stalker, he’d eat the clipboard.

“Who
are
you?” he managed to get out, once his throat started working.

“Sarah,” she answered automatically, her voice low and strangely melodious. “Sarah Phimm.”

He choked in disbelief. “Sarah Phimm? Seriously? Well, I’m Jack. Jack Uzi.”

She stared at him in cherubic innocence, as if she hadn’t gotten the joke.

Forget it. He held up the clipboard. “What are you doing with my itinerary, Sarah Phimm?”

“It’s
my
itinerary.”

He didn’t bother to hide his skepticism. The woman was wearing a cupcake. On her head.
“You’re
from Malibu?”

“I came from there this morning,” she said, which didn’t precisely answer the question. “Anybody arriving from Malibu has that itinerary. It’s either that, or layover in Miami. And Miami is, you know. . .
Miami
.”

Well, that stopped him.

He shared her disdain for the Miami airport—too difficult to traverse terminals in search of a preflight meal—and it was certainly true that the only other option was to touch down in Houston. And yet. . . He narrowed his eyes, trying to picture a world in which it was okay to take someone in a cupcake headband seriously. He wasn’t even sure he could take
himself
seriously at this point. He rubbed his temples. Okay. So she flew in from LAX. That still didn’t explain her My First Earthling getup—or why in the hell anybody with time and money to burn over Christmas would choose this, of all destinations.

“Why here?” he demanded. “Why would anyone from Malibu vacation in Santita?”

“Why not?” she countered with a little shrug. “You’re here, aren’t you?”

He frowned. Not at her logic, which was incredibly flawed and yet unarguable, but because when she’d lifted her shoulder, a soft rustling accompanied the movement, like spring leaves fluttering in an afternoon breeze.

There were plenty of leafy trees and brisk winds here in Santita, but neither should be coming from the direction of Sarah Phimm’s shoulders.

He had to be more sleep-deprived than he’d thought.

She held out her hand. “Can I help with the bags?”

“No.” He handed back her clipboard, then hiked the burlap sacks back up over his bruised shoulders. Every muscle screamed in protest. He ignored the pain. He might be dead tired, but the contents of those bags were his greatest responsibility. After the frustrating three-week adventure getting back to Bolivia from California, there was no way he’d risk jaunting home again before Christmas for another shopping spree.

He resumed his laborious trek toward the dentist’s house.

She fell in beside him. “Where are you going?”

He glanced over at her, his lips shut tight. He suspected she knew precisely where he was headed. He decided to turn the tables. “Where are
you
going?”

“Oh, you know. . .” She waved her hand in the general direction of nowhere. “Around.”

He’d bet. Did she not want to name a hotel because she worried he might spy on
her?
That was rich. In a town this small, people recognized each other’s chickens on sight. Everyone from the local seamstress to the guy who ran the vegetable stand probably knew where she was staying.