Midwinter Magic (7 page)

“Guardian angels.”

“None of them?”

She shook her head.

“Zero angels,” Jack repeated. “Zero guardian angels in the whole godforsaken village.”

“In. . . Bolivia,” she corrected quietly. “There’s a few in Brazil and at least one in Argentina, but—”

“Are you shitting me?” he spluttered.

She was not. The misery on her face spoke for itself.

He couldn’t believe it. “No bridge, no roofs, nobody looking out. But a corporate shark with nothing but time and money on his bloodstained hands,
he’s
the one who gets a guardian angel?”

“I know it doesn’t seem fair. I’m not part of the planning committee, so I never saw the decision tree. But my supervisors found you worthy, and so do I.” She bit her lip again. “And I’ve been watching over you since birth. Long before you became a shark. Or a billionaire.”

“No decision tree in the world should—” He sucked in a horrified breath. “Wait.
Birth?
Like, every minute of every day? Or just, like, sometimes?”

“Every minute of every day. Except during end-of-month reviews. Then I’m gone for a few hours.”

Jack’s neck heated. She’d seen him vomit up a pint of Jim Beam on his eighteenth birthday. She’d seen him spend three days in the bathroom after accidentally drinking the water in Morocco. She’d seen more than his deleted Internet history—she’d seen exactly how he reacted to that totally wrong, totally sexy, alien spaceship porn his college roommate had sent him.

There could not be a hole big enough to drown in right about now.

“But—the villagers,” he said desperately. “Why don’t they have angels watching over them?”

“There’s a shortage,” Sarah admitted.

“A shortage. Of angels. Are you guys in danger of extinction or something? Is it our fault? Do we need to stage a ‘clap your hands if you believe in angels’ sort of thing?”

“No, we’re basically immortal. It’s just that there’s a lot more of you than there are of us. And since it’s basically confining yourself to an invisible solitary confinement for the rest of eternity, most people choose a different career path. Like management. Or coaching an interdimensional soccer team.”

“Look,” he said with as much patience as he could muster. “There’s a shortage, and a need. You have the power to help these people. So, help them. What’s the worst that could happen?”

“I’d be sacked,” she answered immediately. “And then the world would have one less guardian angel.”

He thought about that. “What if I gave you permission? Dissolved whatever contract there is between you and me, so that you could help someone else
before
you get sacked?”

“Even if you could fire me as your guardian angel—which you can’t—what about all the people who come after you? You may not be immortal, but I am. And the eternity of people who should’ve had a guardian angel but ended up dying young because some billionaire with a hero complex decided he’d rather get his angel fired than let her continue watching over people. . . what about them? Are you willing to dissolve their contracts, too?”

His hands clenched into fists. “That’s not a fair question.”

Her smile was bleak. “You of all people should know the world isn’t fair.”

“So, what then? I just go about trying to save as much of the world as I can for the rest of my mortal life, knowing there’s an invisible presence who
could
help out, but won’t?”

“Not if I can help it,” she said with feeling.

The first ray of hope pierced the gloom spreading inside him. “Really?”

“Of course. All this gallivanting around third-world countries is far too dangerous. What you
should
do is stay home.”

The oxygen evaporated from his lungs, as months of improbable bad luck replayed through his brain. The inexplicable flat tires. The permanently delayed flights. The nightmares with Customs. The inability to rent cars or hotels or anything else he needed. The equally improbable reversal of fortune the moment he decided to head home. Direct flights with first-class upgrades. Limos flooding the streets. Zero traffic.

“
You
were responsible for the burlap sacks?” he asked inanely.

“No, I was responsible for the exploding crates. I wanted you to go
home
. I still do. I’ve saved your life a dozen times since you landed, and it’s barely been a week. If I’d seen the burlap sacks before you did, I’d have gotten rid of them, too.”

Jack turned on his dirt-caked heel and stalked away before he came unglued.

She’d rather guard him from Starbucks spills back in Malibu than help him save undernourished children in Bolivia?

Well, too fucking bad.

Now that he knew she was contractually obligated to keep his ass alive, he planned to risk it as much and as often as necessary in order to keep improving lives. If she had to save him from falling logs and insurgent gunfire forty-six times a day just so he could keep making a difference, then so be it. Why
not
risk his life to save someone else’s?

After all, he had a guardian angel.

S
ARAH STARED
at the new community center without moving a muscle. Jack was on the roof, a power drill tucked into his waistband, as he teetered on the apex.

They hadn’t spoken in days. Not that there’d been time for speaking. Jack had been far too busy throwing himself in harm’s way at every possible opportunity. The projects were moving faster than ever, but if she so much as blinked, her stubbornly altruistic human was going to gore himself on his own drill. Or snap his spine falling off the roof. Or tumble headfirst into a pile of machetes. Or all of the above.

He’d been hard enough to protect when he hadn’t had the slightest notion of her existence. Now that he knew the truth, he was all but impossible. She felt like
she
was the one balanced at the edge of a precipice. She needed to do everything in her power to salvage as much of the situation as possible before meeting her superiors. And now that her cover was blown, she really ought to go back to being invisible.

But she couldn’t bring herself to do it. Not now. Not anymore. Why should she?

She was
so
fired at her end-of-month debriefing, it wasn’t even funny. This would not only be her last assignment, it was also the last time she’d be allowed on Earth. The clock was ticking. Every day closer to Christmas was another day closer to being stripped of all privileges, if not outright shackled to a cloud. There was no way she was spending her last days with Jack as nothing more than an invisible specter. Not when an eternity of being shunned was the only thing awaiting her back home.

Plus. . . she didn’t want to leave him like this. Hating her. Angry. Resentful.

If she could somehow save the whole world
and
him, she’d be all over it. But she couldn’t. So, here she was. Watching over him.

While she still could.

At the moment, he and most of the men from the village and the neighboring pueblos were hard at work patching up the death bridge with strips of wood and leftover roof bits and plenty of sun-bleached rope. He was currently hanging upside down, sinking counter-nails into the underside of the bridge.

Jack called it “pulling a MacGyver.” Sarah called it “madness.”

And
God
was she going to miss this man.

He was so hardheaded and softhearted that she could barely look at him without her throat closing up and her lips curving with pride. He was magnificent. What he wanted, he got. What he wanted to do, he did. And steamrolled anything that dared get in his way.

And he was right, Sarah realized with sudden clarity. He didn’t live according to the rules. He lived according to his heart.
He
was the angel.

In the centuries she’d spent on Earth, she’d watched over fourteen humans. Fourteen living, breathing miracles. She’d been glued to their sides from the moment of their births, and yet she couldn’t claim to have saved a single one of their lives. She’d only kept them safe until the moment of their scheduled demise.

She cried when death inevitably came. Every single time.

But that was the job. Without her, their lives would’ve been even shorter. She was a professional. A good one. And after going on a thousand years of service, she was watching over assignment number fifteen.

Jack? A baby. A blink in the eye of the cosmos. A momentary spark confined to a fragile human shell.

And he’d probably saved fifteen lives since breakfast.

He was atoning for sins he hadn’t even knowingly committed, but Sarah knew him well enough to have realized long ago that his heart had always been wide open to others. Sure, one of the side effects of his company’s rapid growth had been collateral damage to infrastructures or people or the environment. He wasn’t wrong about that.

But he’d presided over his multibillion-dollar empire with a strong will and an even stronger moral compass. Despite subsidiaries and foreign branches sprouting up like gremlins, he hadn’t permitted any of them to skirt any laws, to slip through any loopholes, or to take advantage of corrupt governments or delicate economies or a naive workforce. The same company in anyone else’s hands would’ve destroyed far more than it created. After the hearing, the other businessmen had opened champagne bottles, not charities.

But Jack had become a one-man tornado. He’d reinvented himself as Captain Planet instead of Captain Corporation, and started funds and launched volunteer organizations and risked malaria just to lend a hand.

This
was why he had a guardian angel. Not to enable the corporate dynamo he had once been, but to encourage the global champion he now was. He was worth a thousand guardian angels. She never wanted him out of her sight. She couldn’t imagine entrusting a man this special into the care of her replacement. But she didn’t have a choice.

At the end of the month, she’d be gone.

A
FTER HAMMERING
in the last of the nails, Jack swung his gaze from the underside of the bridge to the crowd watching from the other side of the steep drop-off.

 Even from this distance, even dangling upside down beneath slats of ancient wood, every fiber of his being was still painfully attuned to Sarah’s. She was frustrated with him. He was frustrated with her. It was a standoff.

And probably futile.

The most annoying aspect of the whole mess—outside of her blind adherence to whatever ill-thought-out rule forbade her from helping anyone other than him—was that, despite it all, he still. . .
liked
her. She might be stingy with the miracles, but she was still omnipresent, ready to lend both hands at the first sign of need. She picked fruit, she shoveled dirt, she fed babies, she drilled holes, and she never flagged. She was amazing. Her refusal to perform miracles just made everything else she did all the more incredible.

She was much more than just an angel. She was
Sarah.
A person in her own right.

And he was a dick.

With a grunt, he hauled himself back onto the correct side of the bridge and faced the truth. He shouldn’t judge her when he didn’t know the first thing about her.

Being pissed about her not breaking her personal code of ethics just to please him was something Old Jack would’ve felt. New Jack was supposed to be all about walking a few miles in other people’s shoes. He shot a surreptitious glance toward her feet and shuddered. Hopefully he wouldn’t have to walk anywhere in astronautic orange-and-lime moon boots. Once was enough.

He doled out high fives and clapped sweat-drenched backs and herded his motley construction team off the MacGyvered bridge. It wasn’t near strong enough for a cement mixer or heavy machinery, but it was sturdy enough to start busing kids to school.

The second he stepped off the last wooden slat onto firm land, Sarah’s entire posture changed. He’d known she wasn’t thrilled about his construction acrobatics, but he hadn’t realized just how tightly wound she was until right this moment.

Her forehead cleared. Her fingers loosened. Her shoulders relaxed. He could practically
hear
her exhale the same breath she’d been holding since he first stepped onto the bridge. She didn’t just worry about him. She was terrified she’d step away or blink her eyes for a millisecond too long, and in that time he’d fall to his doom. What had she said?
I can’t undo death
.

She clearly meant it.

He’d been pushing her buttons on purpose, his already high risk-tolerance buoyed further by the safety net of a guardian angel. But she wasn’t a safety net, was she? Life was the roller coaster and she was the guardrail. If he was stupid enough to vault over the railing, his messy corpse would be on his conscience, not hers.

Except that wasn’t true, either. If anything happened to him—even if it were unquestionably
his
fault, not hers—Sarah clearly wasn’t going to take it well. And here he was, making life harder. On purpose. Being a self-centered prick. He trudged up the bank to where she stood watch and wished he had a white flag of surrender to toss at her feet.

Or maybe roses. He’d bet it had been awhile since someone had given her roses.

The apology he’d been about to make got caught in his throat, and what came out instead was, “Have you ever gotten roses?”

She stared at him as if a rosebush had sprouted right out of his head. He sort of felt like maybe it had.

“Roses?” she echoed blankly.

“Flowers of any kind. You know, like from a guy. To show he was interested.”

Slowly, she shook her head. “I’ve never even been
visible
to a guy. Until you.”

“I don’t necessarily mean a human guy.” He broke off, unsure now what he
had
meant. Or if he’d even thought it through. “Um. . . Do angels give each other flowers? Or is there some other heavenly courting ritual I can’t even imagine? Cruising on cloud nine? Hiring a group of golden harp mariachis?”

She stared at him for a long, uncomfortable moment without so much as blinking.

“Good question,” she admitted, softly. “If we do, I missed all that. In school, I was kind of a book nerd. And as soon as I graduated from university, the Governing Council of Heavenly Beings recruited me. My first assignment was as a guardian angel, and that’s what I’ve been doing ever since. Invisibility is a condition of employment. Not much opportunity for dating.”

Jack could’ve slapped himself. Had he thought teasing her would erase the tension? He felt like an even bigger asshole than before. They’d already established she was the only guardian angel in the entire country. Who did he think would be bringing her flowers? Or courting her at all? When was she supposed to find time to go on dates? Or even have a moment to herself, to de-stress? Especially with an asshole like him, hanging upside down on a rickety bridge all day?

“I’m sorry,” he said, finally finding the apology he’d meant to lead with all along. Although now it meant something different. Something worse.

He was no longer just apologizing for being embarrassingly pissy about her answering to a higher power than the word of Jack Morgan. He was apologizing for the whole world, hers and his. He was apologizing for life itself, and how it wasn’t fair for anybody. He was apologizing because she, of all women, deserved an infinity of roses. And so much more.

She glanced over his shoulder as if she hadn’t heard a word. “Bridge looks nice.”

He snorted. That was a flat-out lie. The bridge looked like something Dr. Frankenstein’s dog barfed up and Jack well knew it, but if she didn’t want his apology, he wouldn’t force it down her throat. But now that he’d thought of it, he couldn’t get the idea of bringing her flowers out of his head. Or the sensation of paralyzing loneliness inherent in a job that required you to be literally invisible every second of your life.

His neck warmed. He still hadn’t gotten used to the idea of being an unwitting client. The only other time he’d ever been an unwitting anything, he’d ended up a guest of honor at a congressional hearing. This was private, just between Sarah and him, but for some reason, it felt no less momentous.

The villagers trickled away from the bridge. They headed back to work, to lunch, to their wives, to the next project. He and Sarah were alone along the bank of the river. Inches from the edge of a cliff.

He held out his hand. “Care to accompany me back to town?”

She stared at him without taking his hand.

His muscles froze. He kept his hand outstretched because he was too embarrassed to drop it. He was a moron. Obviously she would accompany him back into town. She was his guardian angel. She was—how had she put it?—contractually obligated to accompany him. On any fool mission he might dream up. Like it or not.

When was the last time she’d been able to decide anything for herself? To do something
she
wanted? Or to even be consulted?

He dropped his hand, heat crawling from the back of his neck all the way to his cheeks for probably the first time since sixth grade, when he’d sprung accidental wood at a girls’ volleyball game. He felt no less self-conscious now.

“Sorry,” he muttered again. “I realize you have to follow me, no matter what. But you don’t have to hold my hand.”

She slid her small hand into his, her voice almost too soft to hear. “I like to.”

The rush of pleasure at those three little words was more than he deserved.

To distract himself from the sweetness of her fingers and the subtle scent of her hair, he hammed his way up the hillside, dramatizing every step and every groan as if they were weary hikers on the final stretch up Mount Everest.

“I’m getting old,” he huffed, pulling a face. “I’m not sure these old bones can make it. What do you say, little lady?” He cast her an exaggerated leer. “Should we camp here for the night?”

That got a muffled laugh out of her. “Spare me. You’re thirty-five.”

“Exactly! And at our age—” He broke off as her true meaning sank in. Thirty-five would mean nothing to her. A hundred and thirty-five would be equally unimpressive. He was the billionaire playboy who’d never dated anyone out of her twenties, and she. . . “You’re older than me.”

It was a statement, not a question. By the look on her face, it was an observation she found much funnier than any of his attempts at charades.

“I’m older than
everybody,
” she pointed out. “I’m an angel.”

“How much older?” he found himself asking, although it patently didn’t matter. “Like, on your next birthday.”

The shadow that flickered across her pretty face immediately showed his mistake.

Either angels didn’t celebrate birthdays, or they
did,
except she didn’t get to, because she was down here with him.

“When’s the last time you were home?” he asked instead, more softly this time.

Her chin lifted, but her smile didn’t reach her eyes. “Oh, all the time. Mandatory end-of-month debriefings, remember? Like clockwork. Every four weeks for almost a thousand years.”

“That’s not home. That’s a board meeting with your boss.” He tightened his hold on her hand. “When’s the last time you were
home
?”

A glossy sheen coated her eyes and she quickly glanced away. “I don’t have one. After a thousand years, you learn to think of ‘home’ as wherever you are, not where you’d like to be. I’m not sorry I chose this path. I’m only sorry I won’t get to keep it.”

“You’ll lose your job because of me?” he asked quietly.

“Not because of you. Because of me. I knew the rules, and I broke them. I thought it was the right thing to do, but that doesn’t make it legal. All I can do now is finish my last month with as much honor as I can, and although I’ll lose my position, I won’t do so in utter disgrace. Truly. I’ll be fine.”

“But if you won’t have a job and you don’t have a home,” his runaway mouth blurted out, despite his better judgment, “then where will you go?”

She didn’t answer. The tiniest, involuntary hitch to her breath indicated she wasn’t ignoring him. She didn’t answer because there
was
no answer.

After a thousand years, there’d be no place to go.

“Let’s not think about that,” he announced, horrified he’d been insensitive enough to even bring it up. “Think about this: It’s almost Christmas! A roof over our heads, Bolivian chilies in our bellies. . . we’ve got everything we could want. Except maybe a Christmas tree.”

“I can’t conjure one for you. That’s way outside my purview.”

“I know,” he said quickly. “I didn’t mean—”

He stopped in his tracks, pulled her to face him. Her eyes were dull with resignation. His mind blanked in surprise, and his silver tongue failed to utter a single word.

It honestly hadn’t occurred to him to beg her to miracle up some garish plastic tree, nor was he likely to criticize her if she refused to produce one. But how would she have known that? Here he was, trying to bring Christmas to the people who needed it most, and yet every time he interacted with Sarah, the only words that came out of his mouth were
me, me, me.
It was no surprise she expected him to ask for favors. He hadn’t given her any reason to believe he saw her as anything more than a source of potential miracles.

His whole world tilted. If she’d never celebrated her birthday, it stood to reason she’d never had an opportunity to celebrate Christmas. Or Valentine’s Day, or New Year’s, or a prom, or losing her first tooth, or bandaging a skinned knee the first time she tried to go without training wheels. The only thing she’d ever had was a backseat view of other people’s memories, while she remained confined to the shadows.

He couldn’t give her back a life she’d never had, but the one thing he
could
give her was a Christmas to remember. He took a deep breath. Here, now, gazing into the clouded depths of her incredibly sad eyes, that one simple task seemed like the most important thing he could possibly accomplish. Christmas wasn’t about getting, it was about giving. It was about family. It was about love. It was about
home
.

His guardian angel was the one person most in need of a miracle. And he would do anything in his power to make sure she got one.