How My Brother's Best Friend Stole Christmas (Kane Christmas Book 3) Read online

  And now they were married.

  “Your brother,” Mom said, shaking her head with sympathy and concern and every scrap of maternal instinct in her bony body. “He’s working so hard. And now married to this… unimpressive girl? I don’t like it. I told your father, not that he listened. But I don’t like this for your brother. He deserves so much better.”

  This was the thing with my mom. Every girl was unimpressive. She only saw my brother and father. Like, this was old-generation stuff, right? Only men mattered. Sons and husbands and fathers—my job as a sister and a daughter was to just keep reflecting the best versions of the men in my life out into the world.

  Mom had done that her whole life and look where it got her—a husband who’d lied and cheated and whom she was divorcing. And a son who barely tolerated her.

  And meanwhile, my hands had calluses from doing my part to turn this company around. I went to all the meetings my brother called for, I followed the cost-saving protocols introduced by the new CFO, and I treated my crew like the family they were to me. And when I overheard a couple of employees bitching about all the changes, I told them to collect their checks and move on. And my favorite show of support—on Thursday nights after work I went up to my brother’s office and we kicked our feet up on Dad’s old desk and drank a bottle of the good stuff my Dad had hoarded for the end of the world.

  But maybe it was because I worked in the back, in the shipping department, and Mom hated that. Because I couldn’t even be a girl right. Or maybe it was because I was a girl and so somehow…less in her eyes. I didn’t know, and frankly, I was long past caring. I’d tried so hard to get this woman to love me and it didn’t matter.

  “It wouldn’t kill you to support your brother,” Mom said, interpreting my silence as not supporting my brother.

  “Let’s not do this tonight, Mom. We’re supposed to be having fun.”

  “Is that why you’re dressed that way?” she asked. Her silver hair reflected the green and red lights and her eyes…well, they reflected what they always reflected when she looked at me.

  “Yep,” I said.

  “It doesn’t have anything to do with that boy being back.”

  Only Mom would call a decorated Marine that boy.

  “Okay Mom, it’s been lots of fun talking to you, but I’m going to go—” I twirled a finger around “—mingle.”

  “All right, Sophie. Try…”

  To act like a Kane. To make her proud. To be less myself. More like my mother. Dignified and quiet and whatever.

  “I always do, Mom. Believe it or not, I always do.”

  I turned and sucked back my champagne, setting my glass down on an empty table. The champagne was fizzy and sweet, and went to my knees and my head at the same time. A fast drink on an empty stomach was one of my favorite things.

  Now I needed to find my brother.

  And Sam. Really, I just wanted to find Sam.

  The band was good. They were doing swingy-dancey versions of Christmas songs and there were a few people out on the floor. Rhonda who worked the front desk and Romeo from the warehouse clearly had moves.

  Sam was nowhere to be found. Maybe he wasn’t here? He’d said he was coming and he was the kind of guy who showed up when he said he would. Oh man, he’d have something to say when he found out about Wes and Penny.

  I saw Penny standing alone looking like a zillion bucks in a red dress.

  My sister-in-law. Well, no time like the present to welcome her into the family. I whisked her away from the bar and behind the huge Christmas tree. Which was as close to privacy as we were going to get.

  “So you did it,” I said, trying not to sound accusatory. “You married my brother.”

  “You look really nice,” she said to me, and I was totally thrown for a loop. She was all kinds of still waters running deep. She was hard to get a read on. But when she pushed her glasses up higher on her nose, she revealed some of her nerves, and when she did that…she was impossible not to like.

  “Do you really mean that?” I asked.

  “Yes, I do.”

  I shook my head. Damn it. I liked her and there was more to this engagement and marriage than anyone was being told. “You really are nice,” I said. “My brother doesn’t deserve you.”

  “Are you here with a date?” she asked me, carefully hedging the compliment.

  “No. I don’t have a date.” What I had was a plan. And a thong.

  “Those two,” Penny said, nudging my arm discreetly and tilting her head to the wall behind her. “No, don’t look, he’ll see.”

  “W.B.?” I asked, not bothering at all to be discreet. The third prong in my brother’s plan was the new CFO, W.B. Darling. W.B. found out my father was embezzling from the company, which had helped save the company but nearly torn our family apart. W.B. was a good guy for a man who had a spreadsheet shoved up his butt. Joy walked past him without a word and W.B. broke away from the wall to follow. Very interesting.

  “Yes. Him and Joy. There’s something going on there, don’t you think?” Penny asked.

  Yes! Yes, I did think, as a matter of fact. But Joy was not saying a word about W.B.

  “I think Joy is into him, but she says she isn’t,” I said.

  “She seems mad at him.”

  “Why would she be mad at him?”

  “It’s just a hunch,” Penny said.

  Over her shoulder I saw half my warehouse crew walking over with napkins wrapped around fresh bottles of beer. That’s how fancy this party was. The bartenders put napkins around the beer so your hand didn’t get wet and cold. And they were going to come grill Penny and give her a hard time that she didn’t deserve on the night of her wedding.

  “All right,” I said. “Welcome to the family and all that. Don’t get cornered by my mom.” With that plum bit of advice I took one for the team and went to intercept my crew.

  “Holy shit, Sophie, is that you?” Joe Arben asked.

  “Yeah, it’s me,” I said, like it was every day I stood there looking the way I did. “What about it?”

  Joe whistled, a long, low wolf whistle and maybe at another time, in another boss/employee situation, I’d have had to bust some heads over that, but at that moment I took it as a compliment. And let me tell you, I tried real hard not to look at Joe, but I was very aware that he was looking at me.

  He was a kid, nineteen years old, a fairly new hire, and he had made his interest in me obvious. But Joe was also the kind of guy who was interested in anything with boobs. So it wasn’t personal. Even though no one ever looked at me that way. Anyway, I was not letting it go to my head. He was charming and sweet and my employee, and his attention embarrassed me.

  So I ignored him.

  Sort of.

  “Damn girl,” he said. “You are the hottest thing here.”

  I could feel myself blushing. “How many girls has he said that to?” I asked Joe’s friend Zavier.

  “None,” Zavier said, sipping from his beer, his eyebrow cocked.

  I rolled my eyes.

  “You having a good time?” I asked the guys.

  “This is a real good party, Soph.” Paul Sorvinski, who’d been working in the warehouse for as long as I could remember, carried two plates of shrimp and satay and mini quiches. His wife, the always smiling Marie, set down two beers so she could hug me tight around my neck.

  “You look so nice,” she said.

  “Thank you.”

  “When you’re ready to dance,” Joe said, lifting his beer, putting a little innuendo on dance, “you know where I am.”

  I did a super-awkward smile-laugh-shrug combo that was kind of my trademark and quickly got out of there. More champagne was needed, but where was one of those snappily dressed waiters with trays of it when you needed one?

  When we renovated the top floor to make it a fancy-shmancy party room, we’d put in an old bar that the designer unearthed out of a condemned Denver hotel. It was one of those fancy Wild West mahogany bars that had a
ctual bullet holes in it. I found my way to the side of it to get another glass of champagne.

  And that’s when I saw him.

  Across the bar, sitting with a beer and talking to two of Joy’s glassblowers and Annie in sales, was Fucking Sam Porter.

  3

  He wasn’t in a suit. Not even a tie. Just a dress shirt that was too big, because he’d lost weight on his last deployment. His jet-black hair was still jarhead short, which revealed the long, jagged scar over his ear (that he got as a kid climbing a tree), and another one on the back of his skull that was still pink and raised (that he got in mysterious circumstances on his last top-secret deployment, and was part of why he was home and part of why he’d lost so much weight). A third scar (something he’d gotten in a bar fight defending—as he claimed—Wes’s honor) sliced through his eyebrow. As I watched, he ran his hands over his head, front to back and back again, the way he always did when he was agitated.

  It was the party. He didn’t like crowds.

  One of the glassblowers tipped her head back and laughed a real tinkly laugh at something Sam said, which was dubious because Sam was not at all funny, and then she put her hand on Sam’s arm.

  Looking away, I drained half my glass of champagne. I heard him laugh. Laugh at something the glassblower said. The rare, low rumble of it cut through the music and the distance and my heart.

  I’d been ten when Wes found Sam and brought him home. Or maybe it was Sam who’d found Wes, just when they needed each other. Hardly mattered. They met and became inseparable. Brothers more than friends. And Sam treated me like he was another older brother. Part fierce protector, part ambivalent friend, part annoyed family member. And I was pretty stupid, but I wasn’t so stupid as to say I fell in love with him when I was ten and he was fifteen. (No, I managed to save that for a few years). The first time I saw him he’d had a black eye and a ripped shirt, and he’d eaten fistfuls of the microwave popcorn I’d popped. And then Mom had come home and while Wes and I argued about where to hide Sam, Sam sneaked out the back door taking a silver candlestick with him.

  A move that had been so scandalous to me when I was ten. Now I loved it. Loved that he took that candlestick, got some food and his mom some antibiotics for a sinus infection that wasn’t going away and a pair of slick new tennis shoes. I loved that he took that candlestick and came back the next day. For Wes. And more popcorn.

  “You can stay,” Wes had told Sam. “But you can’t steal. My mom finds out and she’ll have you arrested or something. So you ask me for anything and it’s yours, but you can’t steal.”

  They smacked hands and ran off to do very thrilling and mysterious fifteen-year-old boy stuff, and I’d run after them as fast as my legs could carry me.

  And then, suddenly, Sam was just there. More often than not. He asked for money one other time, and Wes and I pooled what we had in our birthday stashes and gave it to him. A thousand bucks.

  Wes had said it was for bail for his dad.

  Sam never said anything, but six months later he paid us back. I have no idea what he did to make that money.

  Yeah, I didn’t fall in love with him then. Or when he enlisted three years later, and Wes and I saw him off. Sam hugged me so hard my feet were lifted up off the ground, and he whispered, all rough and gruff in my ear, “Stay safe, kid.”

  Two years later, I didn’t make the cheerleading team in high school and Wes must have told him. And out of the blue Sam wrote me a letter telling me that cheerleaders were lame and the fun at football games was always under the bleachers. Not on the field.

  He took the time and the care to try and make me feel better about stupid high school shit by writing a letter from some place in Iraq. I mean…maybe I fell a little in love with him because of that letter. We started playing video games on-line after that.

  Wes didn’t know. I never told him and neither did Sam. Our friendship was a tiny little secret we kept. Or, I did. Maybe Sam was embarrassed and that’s why he kept his mouth shut.

  But the real moment, the final kill shot, had been the year he came home and could no longer tell us where he was stationed. Or what he did there.

  I found him in the middle of the night in the kitchen—our kitchen. The Kane family kitchen. Wes had his own place at that point but he was away on business.

  So, he’d come to me.

  And his eyes were dark and his mouth was different.

  “Is this okay?” he asked. “Me being here.”

  “Always,” I said, surprised by how much I meant it. By how much I wanted it.

  And I could tell something had happened. Something big. Something awful. Something he couldn’t tell me about and somehow he couldn’t handle on his own.

  I popped popcorn he didn’t eat. Made tea he didn’t drink. Told stories until he smiled. Jokes until he laughed. I stayed at the kitchen island, and by the time the sun came up I was twenty years old and I was deeply in love with my brother’s best friend.

  I’d thought it would go away. He got deployed again and I wrote him and he wrote me back. We played video games. He showed up, he vanished again.

  I got my own apartment, and when he was home he’d come over and played Skyrim all day with me. We ordered pizzas and drank beer like nothing was different, but the entire time my body thrummed with the nearness of him. Tracking him around my apartment. Around my life.

  Years I’d spent loving this guy and he didn’t know? Didn’t see? Was I so invisible? Or was he pretending? And why did that feel so much worse?

  Now he was back with that fresh pink scar.

  And I was dressed up in the shoes and the thong because I just couldn’t take it anymore.

  I might end up in flames, but I was taking a shot.

  The last of the champagne went down in one big gulp and I turned, ready to confront the love of my life.

  Only to find Sam standing next to me.

  “Jesus,” I shouted and dropped the glass. Which he caught—because of course he did—and set with a quiet click on the bar. “Sam, you can’t sneak up on a person.”

  “A second ago you were staring at me.”

  “Well, I was just wondering who the guy was who didn’t get the memo about the dress code.”

  “This was all I had,” he said. Which wasn’t true. I’d seen him in his dress blues with the sword and everything. But he was making a point that I should shut up about his clothes.

  “I’m surprised you came,” I said, shifting my body just slightly away from his because I could feel the heat from him. I could feel the iron strength of his arm beneath the too-big sleeve of his shirt. And it was distracting. And I didn’t want to be distracted from telling him how much I wanted to see him without that shirt.

  Yeah. It didn’t make much sense to me, either, but that was the effect he had on me. He turned me upside down just being in the room.

  “I love a party,” he said with a tilt of his lip—the illusion of a smile. I gave him my whole smile in return. Which was how the scales balanced between us. He gave me nearly nothing and I gave him everything I had.

  “Me too,” I lied, the same way he’d just lied to me, and when our eyes met, a certain kind of understanding blazed in the space between us. I know you. And you know me. And I’ve never felt this way, ever. And I don’t know how to live if you don’t feel the same way.

  “We could leave,” Sam said. “Go back to your place. Kill some dragons. Steal some scrolls.”

  “My brother would kill us.”

  “You missed the announcement.”

  “He really did it, huh?”

  “He really did.”

  “Were you…there? Like…at the ceremony?”

  “No, Soph. He didn’t have anyone there.” It was in his tone of voice, he knew what I was asking and why.

  “Do you think it’s real?” I asked.

  Sam grunted. And in the Sam Porter translation app that I had built and refined over years of knowing him, I knew that what he meant was, We’ll see and I
doubt it and sometimes you’re right about people but I’m not going to admit that at this moment and I’m just worried about my best friend who has been acting like a mad man since taking over the company.

  I poked him in his rock-hard side and he jerked back, smiling.

  “Jesus, kid. I don’t know what to think.”

  The kid stung. Not gonna lie.

  “What a liar you are,” I said, laughing at him. “He’s always told you more than he’s told me. Not that I’m bothered.”

  “You are so bothered.”

  “I am! Why does he do that?”

  “He’s asked us to trust him. Let’s just…do that.”

  “I like Penelope,” I said. With a sudden pang, thinking about that conversation we’d had, I wished I’d cut her a break earlier. Wished I could take back some of the things I’d said. Thought, even.

  “Food’s good. Have you had any?” he asked, and I smiled at his predictable change of topic.

  “Not yet.”

  “There’s a crab thing you’ll love. But they go fast.”

  “I’m not hungry,” I said, and he looked at me sideways. Because I was always hungry. Around him I put food in my mouth so I had something to do with my hands. Something to keep me from saying the words I was so scared of saying to him.

  “There’s a chocolate fountain.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah. In the corner. You can dip all kinds of stuff in it. There’s pretzels.”

  Sweet and salty, another one of my favorites. How well he knew me was a bruise he kept poking.

  And it had not escaped my notice that we’d been standing here, chatting and looking at each other and breathing the same air, and he hadn’t said a single word about how I looked. I glanced down just to make sure I was still wearing a tight, sparkly blue dress.

  Yep.

  So, should I say something? Like my dress? Notice anything different about me? It felt silly. Needy.