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  Christmas Cara

  An eRed Sage Publication • All Rights Reserved • Copyright © 2007

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  ISBN: 978-1-60310-144-8

  1-60310-144-6

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  Published by arrangement with the authors and copyright holders of the individual works as follows:

  Christmas Cara © 2007 By Bethany Michaels

  Cover © 2007 by Rika Singh, Inc.

  Printed in the U.S.A.

  Book typesetting by: Quill & Mouse Studios, Inc. • quillandmouse.com

  Christmas Cara

  * * *

  by Bethany Michaels

  To My Reader:

  Christmas is a time when we often take stock of where we are and what we’ve done during the year. It’s a time for reconnecting with old friends, celebrating with family and for acknowledging that miracles really can happen. Some of us just need a little more help than others to believe. I hope you enjoy my sensual modern twist on a Christmas classic.

  Christmas Cara: Marley’s Ghost Cara Travers hated casual day at the office. And casual day on Christmas Eve was especially bad. All it did was give people an excuse to trot out their tackiest holiday garb, from cutesy reindeer sweaters with red pom-pom noses to truly nau-seating rhinestone Christmas tree sweatshirts complete with tiny lights that blinked in time with a tinny rendition of Jingle Bells.

  Vera, Cara’s latest secretary, wore one of those sweatshirts. At least the woman had the good sense to remove her reindeer-antler headband before tapping on Cara’s office door.

  “Tina and Jack are getting married tomorrow,” the blinking woman chirped.

  “Did you want me to arrange for a gift to be sent over?”

  Cara turned her attention back to the stock prices crawling across her laptop screen. “If I had wanted to send a gift, I would have said so the first three times you mentioned it.”

  “But Tina has worked for you for five years, Ms. Travers. Surely, you—”

  “Look,” Cara said. She leveled an unblinking stare over the gold rims of her half-glasses. “Weddings are nothing but a hugely expensive, inconvenient waste of time.”

  “But Ms. Travers-”

  “Why should I have to pony up just because a couple of kids barely out of their tweens think they’re in some fairy tale?” Cara gritted her teeth. “If I was going to give Tina and Jack a gift to celebrate their foolishness, it would be the name of a good divorce attorney.”

  Vera clapped a hand over her mouth in horror. “Surely you don’t really think that way!”

  Cara’s eyes narrowed. “Fifty percent of marriages fail. What makes Tina and Jack think they’re so special? That they’ll live happily ever after? Yeah, right.

  They’ll wake up soon enough and find out that love is something the greeting card companies invented.”

  Cara opened a spreadsheet on her laptop, dismissing the shocked woman still standing in front of her desk. Vera wisely didn’t stay to argue, and the door opened and closed a moment later.

  Cara was just entering the first column of numbers into her spreadsheet when a burst of laughter erupted from the other side of her door. Even when they were going to lose a whole workday tomorrow, her colleagues thought they could spend half the day drinking punch and exchanging tacky Secret Santa gifts. Cara would put and end to all that wasted time and money once she made Division President.

  There would be no more parties, Christmas or otherwise.

  Cara tried to concentrate once again on the numbers marching across her laptop.

  She wanted to get the analysis done for the tech stock she’d recommended before everything shut down for the holiday. The only good thing about Christmas was that it helped business. The Dow always skyrocketed during the holiday week. For some reason, holidays always made people feel like spending money, as if bribing people with useless gifts somehow made them feel better about their own miser-able lives. Yeah, right.

  When off-key strains of We Wish You a Merry Christmas spewed out of the intercom speaker mounted on the wall, Cara gave up and slammed her laptop shut.

  The only way she was going to get this report finished was to work on it at home—

  where it was quiet, and no one was singing.

  * * *

  By the time Cara had trudged ten blocks home, she was ready to hop a plane to some god-forsaken country where they had never heard of Christmas. Antarctica, maybe— but only if they had high-speed internet.

  People clogged the sidewalks toting dead evergreens and plastic holly. The jingle-jangle of the street corner Santa’s bell gave her a throbbing headache, intensified by the Christmas carols piped into the street to induce last-minute shoppers to part with their money. All she wanted to do was get home to her nice, quiet apartment and lock herself inside until the holiday was over for another year.

  In the entryway of her building, Cara stomped the slushy brown snow off her boots. She climbed into the rickety elevator and punched the button. The car took forever to limp up to the tenth floor, but the doors finally clanged open, and Cara headed down the drafty corridor to her apartment. Almost every door had a tacky wreath hanging on it. She stifled a groan when she saw her neighbor Nick Freder-ick on a ladder hanging mistletoe, of all things, in the hallway outside his door.

  “Merry Christmas, Cara,” he called brightly when he saw her.

  “Yeah, right,” she muttered. She focused on the cheerless haven of her wreath-free door and quickened her steps.

  Too bad Nick was always so disgustingly bright and cheery. He was rather nice—to look at, anyway, the classically tall, dark and handsome variety, with a chiseled jaw and blue eyes that crinkled at the corners when he smiled, which was entirely too much. But at least today he was dressed in khakis and a plain navy blue pull-over and not some ridiculous reindeer sweater. And he wasn’t singing. Yet.

  He followed her to her door. “I’m glad you’re home. I wanted to give you this.”

  He handed her a small box wrapped in shiny silver paper and tied with a bright red

  bow.

  “I don’t do Christmas.” She handed the gift back. “But thanks anyway.” She dug through her purse for her house keys.

  His smile faltered. “Oh. I didn’t know.” Nick shoved a hand through his dark hair and blew out a puff of air. “Um, I’m going to a Christmas ball tomorrow night at the art museum. It’s a fund raiser for the homeless shelters of Chicago. I wondered, if you don’t have plans, if maybe you would want to go? With me?”

  Cara managed a stiff smile. She thought that she’d been pretty clear the five times she’d turned him down in the past year. First it was
an invitation to dinner and a movie. Then there was the last New Year’s Eve party. Then game-night at his place, and sushi at a fancy new restaurant across town. She couldn’t remember what date number five was, but she’d turned that one down, too, saying she had to work, which was true enough. But Cara would have refused anyway.

  She just didn’t see the point in dating. Dating led to relationships, and relationships always ended in disaster. Besides, she had never found a flesh and blood man who could offer her anything she couldn’t get from her hand-held Butterfly. It brought her to orgasm every time, was happy to live quietly in the nightstand drawer until the next time it was needed, and didn’t need to be trained to put the toilet seat down or pick up its dirty socks. It was the perfect arrangement. So why should Cara waste time fixing what wasn’t broken?

  “I have to work. Sorry.” She fit her key in the lock.

  “On Christmas?”

  Cara got the door open and stepped inside. “Yes.”

  He looked disappointed. “Oh. Maybe another time, then.”

  “Uh-huh.” She closed the door and listened until she heard him shuffle back to his own apartment.

  She almost felt sorry for him, just not sorry enough to waste a whole evening’s worth of work-time. So maybe some pretty wild fantasies about him had intruded on her quality time with her battery-operated friend lately. That didn’t mean anything.

  Cara shrugged off her damp overcoat and hung it on the hook by the door. A quick glance in the entryway mirror revealed that her normally pale cheeks were reddened slightly from wind burn. Her full lips were on the pink side, too. She frowned and tucked a stray tendril of curly sable hair back into its tight bun. She took off her glasses and inspected the skin around her deep brown eyes for the first signs of crow’s feet. So far, so good, she thought and put her glasses back on.

  Cara decided to get back to work on that report. Who needed dinner when she

  had a microwave? She heated a frozen chicken a la king and settled down with her laptop on her dun-colored sofa. That was the only piece of furniture in the large bare-walled room, besides a small television shoved in the corner and a dusty coffee table littered with old Wall Street Journals. As the laptop booted up, she switched on C-Span, scooped up a bite of rubbery chicken, and tried to put the whole Christmas debacle out of her mind.

  * * *

  “Cara.”

  Drowsily Cara shifted and snuggled deeper into the musty couch cushions.

  “Cara.”

  “Go away,” Cara mumbled and drifted back towards dreams of bull market divi-dends.

  “Cara!”

  Cara sat bolt upright. She looked around the empty room, rubbing her eyes. No one was there, of course. Her laptop still hummed quietly on the coffee table. That voice must have been another dream. After such a trying day, maybe it would be best to turn in for the night and get back to work first thing in the morning.

  The laptop screen flickered then went blank. Great, now her battery was dead.

  She frowned and leaned over and punched a key. The screen glowed back to life.

  But a fuzzy image appeared on the screen in place of her spreadsheet. It grew larger and clearer until a terrifyingly familiar visage came into focus.

  Cara’s breath caught. She blinked. Looked again.

  “Cara,” the image moaned.

  “Marley? Marley Jacobs?”

  Cara felt dizzy. Her old boss had passed away at her desk seven years earlier, while reviewing the quarterly reports. The losses the firm had sustained that pe-riod were enough to kill even a young woman, and Marley definitely had not been young. She had been spinning gold from speculation and gut instinct since before Cara even knew what “NASDAQ” meant.

  Marley’s neat blond bob and blood red lips looked exactly the same as they had the last time Cara had laid eyes on the woman. Her skin, though, was a deathly pale, nearly white, and her rheumy eyes were ringed in dark, puffy circles. Skin hung loose around her jowls and deep lines were etched around her mouth. She looked like a ‘before’ picture of her normally professional, well-put together self.

  Cara recoiled, clutching a lumpy throw pillow to her chest.

  “You look hideous, as usual,” Marley’s image croaked. “Did you find that blazer in the dumpster or wrestle it from a homeless man?”

  Cara swallowed. She’d endured the woman’s daily barrage of hypercritical com-ments for years as her employee. She was immune. Almost.

  “You’re not real,” Cara said with as much conviction as she could muster. “You can’t be. You’re dead.”

  The image of her old idol chuckled. The rasp was like the tines of a rusty leaf rake on pavement.

  “Oh, I’m real, all right.” The image turned its head, taking in Cara’s dingy apartment. “What is this dump? Do you actually live here?”

  “Too busy to decorate,” Cara said. Was she actually discussing interior design with a hallucination? “There must have been some kind of freaky mold in that frozen dinner. You’re just a symptom of food poisoning. That’s all. Go away.”

  But the image of her old boss didn’t go away. In fact she grew even larger on the screen until her eyes, mouth and nose, large pores and all, took up the entire screen.

  Marley hadn’t looked this angry even when some junior agent invested his client’s whole portfolio in the Exxon Valdez two days before it bled crude all over Prince William Sound.

  Now Marley’s eyes narrowed, making them appear even more accusatory than usual. “Why did you hold all those shares of Enron? I’d told you to sell.”

  “I didn’t have time. I was attending your funeral,” Cara said defensively.

  “No excuse. No excuse at all.” She rolled her grayish eyes. “You never could take orders.”

  Cara frowned. Enough was enough. “Ok, let’s say, for a moment, you really are haunting my PC. What do you want?”

  “I want to tell you to get your head out of your ass.”

  “What?”

  “Oh, come on. If you don’t wake up, you’re going to end up like me.” The specter sighed. “While I walked the earth, I never once looked beyond my office, beyond the next quarter. Beyond the next promotion. I shut people out. I never took time for friendship, for love, for passion. And now I’m doomed to wander eternity completely alone.”

  That didn’t actually sound so bad to Cara, since most people tended to grate on her nerves, anyway. But she decided it was probably best not to provoke a ghost—

  especially the ghost of her old boss.

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Big surprise.” The ghost glared at Cara. “Look behind me. What do you see?”

  Cara squinted at the screen. Out of the fog behind the ghostly figure stretched a long line of rusty chain. It was covered in barnacles and greenish mold.

  “A chain?”

  “Still as observant as ever. One link for every time I shut my heart to my fellow man. Every time I turned down a date, missed an opportunity for friendship, each time I shut passion out of my life instead of embracing it.” The ghost narrowed her eyes and seemed to stare a hole right through Cara’s soul. “A chain of missed opportunities. Of a closed heart, a wasted life. And no one to help me carry it.” Marley’s image swelled. “Your chain is even longer.”

  Her chain? Cara didn’t have a chain! She almost looked behind her to make sure.

  But this really was going too far. “So what, I’m supposed to hit the nearest singles bar and start picking up guys? Join the country club? Sign–up for online dating?

  Yeah, right.”

  She scooted to the edge of the couch, hand out. She had to shut the laptop’s lid and go to bed before the ghost of her third grade teacher popped out next. Next time, she’d check the expiration date on those dinners.

  Then the machine shrieked, the radiating noise making Cara slam her hands over her ears. Its racket was almost as bad as those blasted carolers who always darkened her doorway on Christmas Day.

  Whe
n the wailing stopped, Cara cautiously uncovered her ears. “Are we done?”

  she asked.

  “Not yet. You will be visited this night by three ghosts,” Marley said. Her image started to waver and grow faint.

  “Uh, yeah. Could I get a raincheck on that?”

  “Always such a smart-ass. Expect the first ghost tonight when the bell strikes one,” the specter said. “Don’t piss them off. And for the love of Greenspan, get a decent haircut!”

  Her image shrank until Cara was staring at her spreadsheet, debits and credits lined up just as she had left it.

  Slowly Cara looked around the room. Nothing seemed out of place. She shook her head. A dream. It must have been a dream. Wouldn’t you know it, she’d dream about Marley. Not a dream. A nightmare.

  She shut down her computer. It was just this stupid holiday and all the frustration surrounding it that had her all out of sorts.

  Ghosts, she chuckled to herself.

  Yeah, right.

  Christmas Cara: The First of the Three Spirits The sharp peal of a digital bell pierced the cool, deep stillness and jolted Cara out of a restless sleep. She groped on her bedside table, scattering papers, reading glasses and an economy-sized jar of ibuprofen until she located her screeching clock and switched off the alarm.

  She peered at the glowing red numerals. That was funny. She’d set the alarm for 6 am, just as always. Why was it going off at… midnight? That couldn’t be right.

  After that crazy hallucination or dream or whatever it was earlier that evening, Cara had tried to shake off the lingering sense of unease and went about her normal routine. She had showered, pulled on a soft, oversized plaid shirt and fresh panties, then shimmied under the covers where she reviewed the next day’s schedule on her Blackberry before settling in for a nice, hallucination-free night of sleep.

  But sleep had been elusive. She kept replaying her dream-—and she had con-vinced herself it had been a dream—the things Marley had said to her about ghosts and passion, everything else. Cara had tossed and turned until well past 2 a.m.

  So how could it just now be midnight? Surely she hadn’t slept an entire day and night away. Cara checked the date on the glowing blue screen of her Blackberry.