Chapter Three

Why are you walking away? Wade’s polar bear demanded. She’s our fated mate!

I know she is, Wade said. But she also would have thought I was a jackass if I stood there staring at her while the kids were begging to see Santa.

Walking away from her was the hardest thing he had ever done. Life didn’t hand out medals for shifters who managed to play Santa in the face overwhelming romantic epiphanies, but right now, he felt like it ought to. The second he had met her eyes, he had known she was the one for him. His soulmate. His perfect match.

All he wanted to do was get to know her—but he couldn’t abandon a whole Christmas Village full of hopeful kids.

You could have gotten her name, though, his bear pointed out with a kind of internal harrumph. You had time for that.

I wasn’t thinking that clearly! I’d never met my fated mate before!

His polar bear clearly didn’t consider that a very good excuse, and Wade didn’t blame it. He couldn’t believe he’d forgotten either.

In the meantime, he would just have to call her Galadriel. Petey had mentioned that the Christmas Village was short an elf costume, and now Wade knew what they’d done to replace it. It was a strange choice, but on her, it was beautifully eye-catching.

Even if her striking white gown with its long, lacy sleeves wasn’t traditionally Christmassy, she looked incredible in it. Movie Galadriel had looked otherworldly and untouchable, but this Galadriel seemed ... enticing. The airy confection of the dress was like icing or whipped cream, a delicious embellishment.

Wade forced those thoughts away. Galadriel would be here all week—she’d said so herself—so he would get plenty of time to think about her. Here and now, he needed to think about the job. It might be a sudden, unwanted obligation to him, but it meant something to these kids, and they deserved a Santa who didn’t spend all his time daydreaming.

Luckily, Petey had given him a quick overview of the basics. Ask each kid what they wanted for Christmas, chat with them a little, pose for a picture, hand them one of the cheap giveaway toys, send them on, and pass the word back to the parents. If the kid asked for a toy that Wade knew for a fact was somewhere in the mall, he should direct the parent to the proper store.

“How am I supposed to know that?” Wade had asked.

“There’s a list you memorize at the start of the Christmas season.”

“At the start of the Christmas season, I was just a guy minding my own business, foolishly thinking my brother was going to keep his job .”

Petey had patted him on the shoulder. “Marsh can get you the list. Don’t worry about it until then.”

Hopefully he wouldn’t torpedo anyone’s business by not being able to direct foot traffic their way this morning. It was going to be all he could do this afternoon to keep his head above water as he tried to make sure he didn’t mess anything up. The last thing he wanted was to singlehandedly ruin some poor kid’s Christmas.

Another elf—a teenager dressed in more typical North Pole garb—let him through the candy cane side-gate that led to Santa’s chair.

“Who are you?” the kid said under his breath. “Where’s Petey?”

“On his way to Hawaii. He won the raffle. I’m a last-minute replacement.”

“Oh, you’re Wade ,” the kid said, snapping his fingers. “He’s mentioned you. Sorry you got stuck with the red suit, buddy, but let’s get going before we have a full-on riot on our hands.”

Wade got going, taking a seat in Santa’s painted, filigreed throne. He didn’t appreciate the ominous, worrying creak it gave as he settled into it. The last thing he needed was it collapsing beneath him, especially when he had a kid balanced on his knee. He’d have to hope it always groaned.

He took a deep breath and motioned the first child forward.

“And what’s—”

The teenaged elf leaned forward and urgently whispered in his ear: “You have to do the Santa voice!”

Oh, right. He’d heard Petey do his bellowing ho-ho-ho’s before, so he knew how it was supposed to sound. But there was no way he could do it without feeling ridiculous.

He didn’t have to do an impression of Petey’s Santa, he just had to do an impression of Santa . And while Santa often had a thunderous voice, it wasn’t universal. He would have to be more like Kris Kringle in Miracle on 34 th Street : a kindly, soft-spoken Santa.

He had just enough time to shake his head at the elf before a little girl hopped up onto his knee.

“And what’s your name?” Wade said in his best Kris Kringle.

(Off to his right, the elf sighed at this blatant violation of protocol.)

“Bethany,” the little girl said.

“And what do you—”

Bethany, unsurprisingly, was prepared for that question. She pushed up the sleeve of her sweater and began reading out a list literally as long as her arm.

Actually, it turned out it was as long as both her arms put together, because when she finished with what she’d written on one arm, she yanked up the other sleeve and started all over again. Bethany’s poor mom, standing just within earshot and doing some frantic typing on her phone to try to keep up with all this, looked like she was going to have a heart attack. She shot Wade a look of pure panic.

Petey hadn’t prepared him for this. Partly, Wade knew, because there hadn’t been time, not when Petey wanted to be on a beach as soon as possible. But part of it was also that Honey Brook likely didn’t think this kind of thing was a problem. Mr. Marsh probably didn’t either.

Sure, a mall Santa was supposed to entertain the kids and leave them with happy holiday memories, but he was also supposed to encourage parents to drop as much money at the mall’s stores as they could. A child with a Christmas list a mile long was good for business.

But the mom looked desperate, and it wasn’t like she was bedecked with diamonds. There was no way she could afford to buy everything her daughter was asking for.

“Those are all good choices, Bethany,” Wade said, hoping he wasn’t screwing this up. “But Santa can’t bring you all of them. I wouldn’t have room in my sack for anyone else’s gifts.”

Bethany squinted at him, suddenly suspicious. “But isn’t the inside of your sack infinite ?”

“Not quite infinite,” Wade said.

“You can fit toys for every kid in the world in there, but I’m going to be the tipping point where it gets to be too much? That doesn’t make any sense.”

Now it was Wade’s turn to shoot Bethany’s mom a panicked look, and all she could do was shrug helplessly at him.

Don’t look at me , the shrug seemed to say. Her dad’s the one who raised her to be a critical thinker.

“I can fit toys for every kid in the world in there,” Wade said carefully, “but not dozens of toys for every child.”

Bethany pursed her lips, thinking this over. “Okay, so what’s your average? How many gifts can I get without taking up too much space?”

Had he been this precocious as a child? He didn’t think so.

He glanced at the mom again and she flashed ten fingers at him, nodding exuberantly.

“Let’s go with a top ten,” Wade said.

*

Bethany turned out to be a good way to ease into playing Santa. One or two of the children were shy and soft-spoken, barely able to whisper a deferential wish for a single Christmas gift, and a few more were total sweethearts who could have come straight out of a Hallmark holiday movie. If he’d gotten any of those kids as his first, he probably would have let his guard down.

Fortunately, Bethany had prepared him for a long, long day that would include plenty of candy-sticky hands trying to tug his beard off, demands for video games way too old for any kid who still believed in Santa, and heated cross-examinations about how Santa was here and in front of the grocery store at the same time.

Even the most dizzyingly overwhelming kids were usually good kids, just too curious and skeptical for any mall Santa’s peace of mind. But it all added up to a hectic, stressful day.

... And it was still only lunchtime. It wasn’t like the day was over. But at least he could change out of the red suit for an hour.

And maybe he could see Galadriel again. Not everyone in the Christmas Village had the same lunch break, because some of the elves stayed behind to manage the crowds, sell gingerbread and sugar cookies, man the gift-wrapping booth, host carol-oke, and generally keep the place feeling more like a village than a seasonal pop-up in the plaza of an outdoor mall. Galadriel could easily be on duty during his lunch. If she was ... well, as desperate as he was for a break and the relative quiet of the usually-slammed food court, he would rather hang out here and get the chance to talk to her.

But he got lucky, because she came out of the women’s locker room part of the Outpost right as he was coming out of the men’s.

Now that Wade wasn’t being bowled over by his shifter senses announcing that she was his fated mate, he got to actually look at her. She was tall and curvy, with thick chestnut hair. It had been loose in her Galadriel costume, but when she had changed back into casual clothes, she’d put it into an adorably chunky braid. A light spray of freckles ran across her nose and cheeks, like a sprinkling of cinnamon.

And if he was staring at her, she was also staring at him. A pink flush surfaced beneath the freckles.

“Uh, hi,” Wade said. It wasn’t the best opening line he could hope for, but she’d already seen him as a terrified and overwhelmed newbie Santa, so it couldn’t get worse than that, could it? “I’m Wade. From before. The Santa.”

Have you ever talked to another human being before? his polar bear asked him, covering its face with one paw.

He had, but he could admit that you sure wouldn’t know it from this.

Thankfully, Galadriel didn’t seem to mind. Either that, or she was nice enough to pretend that he was less awkward than he actually was.

“I recognized you,” she said. “I’m Mira, by the way. Mira Allenby. The non-Christmas elf.”

Mira , Wade said to himself dreamily. It was a beautiful name.

“Petey told me that someone didn’t have a typical elf outfit,” Wade said. “I was thinking it would just be a little bit mismatched, though. I didn’t picture a Tolkien elf at the North Pole.”

“Believe me, I didn’t either. This was Marsh’s brilliant move.” She covered her mouth. “Sorry, I shouldn’t have said that.”

“We’re not friends or anything,” Wade reassured her. “I haven’t even met him yet.”

“You will,” Mira said darkly. “And when you do, he’ll want to talk to you about why you aren’t wearing the Santa belly.”

“I have a good answer for that one, though. The costume was tailored for Petey. I can squeeze into it, but I’m bigger through the shoulders than he is, so all the extra room in the suit goes to make room for that. I can’t fit the belly in.”

“The absolutely makes sense, but Marsh still isn’t going to like it.” She sighed. “I shouldn’t bad-mouth him like this. I really need this job. And we both really need lunch.”

This is your moment! his polar bear said, nudging him. Ask her to share a delicious seal with you!

I’m going to revise that a little , Wade said.

He cleared his throat. “Do you want to grab lunch together? I could use some more tips about how the Christmas Village works. Petey didn’t have a lot of time to go into it.”

Mira’s smile made her dark brown eyes sparkle. “I wouldn’t either, if I needed to make sure you took the job. And sure. I’d love that.”