His Christmas Fantasy. Jennifer Labrecque

didn’t miss the flicker of wistfulness in her eyes. Her smile lit up her face, and he caught himself just in time from reaching out to wipe away the dusting of flour on her nose. “No one wanted to keep me out late the way they did Helene. You won’t be surprised to know your wife always had the boys lined up.”

      “Not surprised at all. She’s beautiful.” Helene was beautiful. Sam realized he had a need, as a bastard kid who’d grown up in public housing, to prove himself by having the best. He might wear jeans, but his shirt was always pressed and his jacket was Armani. His condo downtown offered a great view of Atlanta’s skyline. At thirty, he was ready to settle down. Beautiful Helene was a head-turner. He’d married her and committed to a lifetime together, and Sam neither made nor took the commitment lightly. Which was why he found it so confounding to be standing on the stairs with his heart slamming against his ribs and lost in the depths of Giselle Randolph’s hazel eyes.

      “She is,” Giselle said on a breathless note. Something real and hot and dangerous pulsed between them. Something organic neither one had manufactured but which they were both caught up in. She inhaled sharply, and for one brief moment, like the slow descent of a single drop of water captured on time-lapse film, she leaned toward him. Her breath tumbled out in a sigh, gusting warm and fragrant against his mouth.

      Instinctively, he shifted toward her. The stair creaked like a rifle shot, blasting away the intimacy and bringing them both back to their senses.

      She turned abruptly and led him up the stairs, chatting as if that would erase whatever the hell had just passed between them. “That’s Mom and Dad’s room at the top of the stairs, so you can see how they were right there to bust her. And then Daddy’s study is off to the right on the other side of their bedroom. My room is in the attic. I talked the parental unit into letting me move up there when I was twelve. It let my imagination run free.” That made sense. Helene had told him her sister was a writer. “And here’s Helene’s room…well, your room, too, now. Since you’re married and all.”

      He deposited the suitcases at the foot of the bed as Giselle determinedly continued her tour guide monologue. “That’s a picture of Helene when she won homecoming queen her junior year,” she said, pointing to a particular picture in a wall full of framed glossies of his wife. “And that’s when she was senior homecoming queen.”

      God, he wanted to kiss her to shut her up and, well, he just wanted to kiss her.

      A sick feeling blossomed in his gut. Even further out of left field than the urge to kiss her came the traitorous thought that he’d up and married the wrong sister. And that was a helluva fix two days past his honeymoon.

       The week before Christmas, two years later…

      “HEY, GISELLE, got a minute?” Monica, Life Trendz magazine’s editorial department secretary, stepped into Giselle’s cubicle. “Change of plans on the Sedona trip.”

      Often the harbinger of less-than-stellar news, Monica had a the-shit’s-about-to-hit-the-fan-but-don’t-shoot-the-messenger smile she put on for such occasions. She wore that smile now.

      “Sure.” Trepidation crawled along Giselle’s spine as she closed the file folder with her Sedona notes. She was flexible. Writing for a monthly magazine that covered recent innovations, new ideas, and current…well, trends demanded flexibility, but a change of plans on Friday when she was flying to Arizona on Sunday to start this project didn’t sound promising. “What’s up?”

      “Do you want the good news or the bad news first?” Monica stepped into her cubicle but remained standing instead of making herself at home, the way she usually did in the folding chair shoved in one corner.

      “Start with the bad so we can end on a positive note with the good.”

      “Darren’s bagging the Sedona assignment.”

      “What? He can’t do that.” More than just the photographer she’d teamed up with for three years now, Giselle considered Darren a good friend. “Unless he has a really good reason, he’s about to be a dead friend.” She was only partially joking.

      She stared at Monica and drummed her fingers on her desk, awaiting an explanation. “And by the way, he’s a chicken to leave it up to you to tell me.”

      Monica offered a weak smile. “Something about him and Gerald and a progressive dinner and not having enough prep time if he goes.”

      “A progressive dinner?” Giselle shot to her feet. “That’s it. He’s dead. I’m going to kill him. I’ll wait until after Christmas, but before the new year…”

      “I know you’ve got a personal stake in this trip and you could’ve used Darren’s moral support.”

      True enough, she had a personal stake in the Sedona assignment, but Monica was blissfully ignorant, as was everyone else other than Darren, as to the real reason behind her eagerness to cover the story. Writing for Life Trendz meant sifting through scads of material for story ideas. She’d run across an online thread and knew, knew the moment she saw it, it was meant for her.

      A New Age guru in Sedona claimed on the third day after the winter solstice, the shortest day of the year when the Earth rotated at its furthermost point from the sun in the northern hemisphere, there was an incredible spike at the energy vortexes in Sedona. Supposedly this surge at one particular vortex, which impacted both the male and female balance energies, had a profound effect on attractions and relationships. The guru claimed that couples who showed up there together tended to fall in love. There were even couples coming out for recommitment ceremonies, they were so convinced. Kind of a right-place-at-the-right-time love potion.

      So, maybe it was a little out there, but that was the nature of most trends and the kind of stuff their readers loved. Giselle was willing to show up to see who else might be there, because anything was better than pining after a man you couldn’t have and shouldn’t want in the first place.

      Monica, along with everyone else, thought her Sedona pilgrimage was to get over her ex-husband. They were wrong. Sam McKendrick was at the heart of her problem.

      She’d never told anyone that running from her attraction to Sam was the real reason she’d married Barry Treadway. Except for her pathetic confession to Darren, over a shared pitcher of margaritas and chips and salsa in celebration of her divorce a couple of months ago. Darren, happy in his ten-year relationship with his partner Gerald and a romantic at heart, had proved an avid listener and sympathizer.

      Once her Jose Cuervo buzz was gone, Giselle had sworn him to secrecy and forbidden him to bring it up again. She’d blabbed in a moment of weakness, but it wasn’t something she wanted to run around discussing. It was bad enough suffering from infatuation-induced insanity without talking about it. She’d coined that catchy phrase herself by way of explaining why she, the responsible big sister who, despite the sibling rivalry that marked their relationship, generally adored her baby sister and always had her back, could fall into lust with Helene’s husband.

      From the moment she’d looked up in her mother’s kitchen and seen Sam standing there…something had happened inside her. She’d fought it, run from it, tried to ignore it, but from the moment she’d laid eyes on Sam McKendrick, she’d wanted him. It wasn’t as if she’d made the decision to want him. It was far worse. Something in her had responded to him, connected, and she’d been in a constant state of flux ever since.

      Sam and Helene’s whirlwind marriage had lasted a whopping eight months. Eight months before Sam had cheated on Helene. How could Giselle possibly still find herself hung up on a man who’d betrayed her sister? And the really pathetic part of her, the part she despised for even thinking such a thing, was furious that if he was going to cheat, she, Giselle, hadn’t been an option. Not that she would have slept with her sister’s husband, but…And despite the knowing, despite the guilty sense of betrayal every time she thought of him, Sam McKendrick remained her forbidden fantasy.

      She was resolute that this trip to Sedona would get her over Sam. It was meant to be, as if her stars were aligned just so. Darren bailing like