Unwrapping Mr. Roth Read online

  “I know it for the same reason you’re in my office and not in the cubicle maze down the hall where everyone else gets interviewed.”

  “And that reason is?”

  He shrugged and passed his hands over his ears. The points were pronounced again.

  “Wait—”

  “You were staring earlier. It seems the glamour doesn’t work well on you.”

  “Th-the glamour?” she stammered.

  “The magic that obscures my appearance.”

  She nodded and swallowed hard. “Oh. Right. Magic.”

  Sure thing, bub.

  She clutched her purse to her chest and grabbed her coat from the chair arm. “Well, thank you for your time. I don’t think this is going to be a good fit for me.” She walked quickly to the heavy wooden door beside the curtained windows behind the desk and pulled it open, assuming it led to the strip mall’s back lot.

  A gale-force wind knocked her onto her ass. A blizzard raging outside was blowing precipitation around forcefully, and she would have sworn she saw a dwarf in pointy-toed shoes being tossed around.

  “There’s someone out there!” she shouted. “And it’s snowing! Why the hell is it snowing?”

  It’d been fifty-five degrees outside when she’d trotted up to Agnes’s counter, and there hadn’t been a drop of rain or a flake of snow anywhere in the forecast.

  The dwarf grabbed a hold of a column in the walkway nearby and held on until he could try again.

  Nick slipped in front of her and pushed the door closed against the howling wind. Then he knelt down and met her at eye level.

  She pointed at the door, wide-eyed and wordless.

  “Welcome to the North Pole, Miss Wright.”

  She tittered, rolled up one sleeve of her sweater, and pinched the flesh of her forearm.

  Nothing changed, except for the fact that had freakin’ hurt, and all she had to show for the pinch was a new bruise.

  Nick pulled her up by the waist and guided her to a chair.

  She dropped onto it the moment the backs of her knees touched the cushion, and whimpered unintelligibly. “Snow…out there…and ears point…”

  “Would you like a cup of coffee, Miss Wright? Or something sweet, perhaps?”

  She gave her head a shake and forced a swallow down her tight throat. “I—I don’t understand what’s happening.”

  He dropped a manila folder onto her lap along with a pen embossed with Santa Incorporated. “I haven’t had to use those in twenty years. Better to be safe than sorry.”

  She looked down at the file and opened the cover to find about twenty pages of legal garbage. The best she could tell, anyway. Her head was a mess and eyes were crossing, but she was pretty sure it was some sort of contact. “I’m not reading that, whatever it is.”

  “Fine, don’t read it. Just sign. It basically says anything you see while under employment of S.I. should remain a secret.”

  “Like…pointy elf ears and freak snowstorms?”

  He tented his fingers and performed an elegant shrug.

  Even that was lovely.

  She made a guttural noise at the back of her throat, and tried—and failed—to rip her gaze away from him. He was too beautiful, and some broken thing in her mind said that looking away would be like squandering the opportunity to enjoy beautiful art.

  “You outsiders tend to see me as a fat man with a white beard and rosy cheeks,” he said. “You’re making me work hard for an illusion that’s barely working on you, Gillian. So, I’m just going to drop the façade.”

  “There’s a façade?”

  “Barely. You’ve seen the ears, so I’ll show you the rest.” His pupils seemed to spiral inward. His irises became two silvery-blue pools, and his skin seemed paler—almost iridescent.

  She clutched her purse tighter, wondering if there was anything in it that could be fashioned into a weapon. “What the hell are you?”

  “I thought that was obvious. I’m an elf.”

  “There are no…those don’t… No. Not real.”

  He smoothed his shirt. “The job pays twenty dollars an hour. Six p.m. to nine p.m. every night until Christmas. Double pay on the twenty-fourth and twenty-fifth.”

  “I’m not…no. I can’t. I need to leave.”

  “You’re not going anywhere, Miss Wright. You may as well give up the pretense.”

  “You don’t know me.”

  “I know enough.” He opened a wardrobe at the side of the room and pulled out a hanger holding a familiar-seeming red-and-white garment. “This one will have to do for public events.”

  Gillian crinkled her nose at the hideous thing. It was the traditional Mrs. Claus outfit: a conservative red frock with white apron complete with a fluffy, ribbon-laced bonnet. “Are you kidding me?”

  “No. That’s the job, sweetheart. People expect to see Mrs. Claus when they see Santa. Since my last assistant quit, the job’s up for grabs. That’s why Agnes sent you to me. Well, that and—” He made an It’s not important hand flick, but it so was.

  “Mrs. Claus is your assistant?”

  “The last gentleman with the job was married, so now people expect it.”

  “Oh. I see.” Gillian started to laugh hysterically and couldn’t help herself. She was sitting in front of a man who thought he was Santa, and it was such a Gillian situation: meet a guy hotter than hell only for him to turn out to be a complete whackadoo. Things just weren’t allowed to be normal in her life, apparently. No matter how hard she tried to escape her family’s chaotic legacy, shenanigans found her and made her their queen.

  “The delirium you’re feeling should pass in time, I imagine,” Nick said calmly. “It takes some time for mortals to adjust to the magic in this realm.”

  “Right. The magic.” When she was done laughing and could catch her breath, she put her hands palms-out in a wait gesture. “Okay, say I buy what you’re saying, and this is real and you are Santa—at least, the current one—what happened to the original guy?”

  “That was me.” Nick left the outfit in a pile next to her, returned to his chair, and started an examination of his cuticles.

  “So, you had a substitute?”

  “Yes. For quite a while. Some political shit went down amongst the elves. I had to help suppress it, so I had someone outside the magic world step in.”

  “The elves?”

  “Yes. Elves. Like me, remember?”

  “And, Santa just said ‘shit’.”

  Nick shrugged. “I swear in several Germanic languages depending on mood. Pick the one you prefer. My Italian sounds much sexier, however, even if my naughty word vocabulary is limited. I really should brush up. Or perhaps instead I’ll work on my Hungarian. You know a bit of that, don’t you?”

  She gaped. “How do you know that?” she asked.

  There was no way he could have known that. Not even her friends knew her family’s origins. It had never come up in the course of casual conversation, and she preferred it that way. The last time anyone had figured it out, it had been a date who’d called her the g-word and asked if she was going to pick his pockets when he turned his back. That guy had needed five stitches over his eye immediately afterward. He’d sent her the emergency room bill. She’d returned it to him unpaid with a sticky note telling him to brush up on ethnic slurs so he’d know when he was using them. Apparently he’d figured out what he’d said, because every time he saw her now, he was saccharine-sweet.

  Nick let out an exasperated-sounding breath. “So, you’ll start tomorrow?”

  “Right. Sure.” She nodded, feeling something like a bobble-head doll and unable to stop. She’d do anything just to get out of there. She hoped there was some kind of drug being pumped into the air vents that was messing with her head. Her mind would clear once she walked outside into the balmy—not snowy—night. She’d go home to bed and wake in the morning to find it’d all been a crazy dream.

  “Wear comfortable shoes, pet. We’ll be quite busy.”

 
; “Sure thing, Santa. We sure will.”

  This is just a dream.

  And not even a delicious dream of a certain sort. The guy had on way too many freakin’ clothes.

  CHAPTER TWO

  The following evening, Nick checked the address Agnes had programmed into his phone and teleported into 38 Water Street, Apartment 2B. He landed quietly in a darkened living room and tucked his phone into his velvet jacket’s inner pocket. The light from the television revealed the occupant curled on the sofa. She was cuddled beneath a fuzzy purple afghan with only her dark, curly hair peeking out from the top.

  He gave his begging lungs the breath they sought and fought the impulse to move to her. They were running behind for the evening’s work, but there were some perks to being Santa. Time held still for him when he wanted it to, but they’d already lost three hours. He should have known she wasn’t going to show up, but he’d wanted to give her a chance.

  With his hands tucked into his jacket pockets, he strolled through the cozy apartment, taking in the hints of personality. The tchotchkes. The few pictures on the cream-colored walls. He hadn’t expected her to be living in the lap of luxury—after all, he’d spent half his morning reviewing an incredibly detailed dossier about her and there wasn’t much about her he didn’t know—but he couldn’t help but to expect a bit more glitz from a woman meant to be his mate. Perhaps he’d been in the company of too many high court elves, but even the ones who were up to their eyeballs in debt like Gillian carried on the pretenses of excess.

  “Perhaps I should adjust my expectations,” he murmured as a little dog sat at his feet.

  It stared up at him, its fluffy head laid curiously to the side and tail wagging violently.

  Nick stepped over the pup and made his way to Gillian’s kitchen counter. He tucked the unopened bills into his pocket to hand off to Agnes later, and returned to the living room.

  He sat on the edge of the coffee table and gently pulled the afghan away from Gillian’s face.

  She bolted upright, thrashing her arms wildly until her gaze settled on him. Panting, she clutched her chest. “How the hell did you get in here?”

  Even with eyes as dark as hers, he could see her pupils shrinking as her cheeks flooded even more.

  She yanked the afghan up over the thin tank top that hadn’t done much to conceal her bountiful breasts or the distended nipples at the tips of them.

  Shame.

  Elf women didn’t have breasts like that. If all went according to plan, though, he’d have plenty of time to show his adoration for them later. He didn’t know what he’d done right in his long life, but obviously some god had taken pity on him and delivered to him a mate who could not only break his curse, but get him hard just by him being in her proximity.

  He adjusted his cock.

  Her gaze fell between his legs to his hand, then to the shadowed place where his fingers had been.

  “I…” She let her breath sputter through her lips and forced that dark gaze up to him.

  She was confused, but that was understandable. He hadn’t exactly done anything to lessen her bafflement, and that was because he wasn’t quite sure of what he could do. He might not have known much about the hearts and minds of human women, but he was fairly sure she wasn’t going to buy the fated mate excuse.

  Her pup moved across the room and sat to the left of Nick’s feet, staring up at him expectantly.

  Gillian scoffed. “Normally, the little bastard would have barked at a stranger. You must smell like Christmas magic or something.”

  “You sound like you’re joking.”

  Cringing, she rubbed her eyes. “It was meant to be funny, yeah, but maybe I misjudged my audience. And I guess Christmas smells like Drakkar Noir. Jesus.”

  “I enjoy the scent.”

  “So do I, dude. It’s a panty-dropping scent.”

  He sat waiting for exactly that, but he was beginning to wonder if the woman’s first language was sarcasm. Elves tended to be far more plainspoken, but he was good at adapting. “If you feel compelled to drop yours, I won’t counsel you otherwise,” he said.

  “I bet you won’t.” She dropped her hand and sighed, fixing her tired gaze on him. “Really, how did you get in here?”

  “I teleported.”

  “Right. Sure. I guess shimmying down chimneys is too old-fashioned a concept for you.”

  He turned his hands over in concession. He’d never done the chimney act. His substitute’s wife had thought it was a cute idea. Nick hadn’t learned about it until after Claus took his leave.

  “And why are you here?” Gillian asked.

  “I would have thought that would be obvious. I hired you yesterday and you didn’t show up for work tonight. You need to scramble if you want to make up those hours. I’d hate to dock your pay, but I’m willing to negotiate.”

  “You mean, you’ll let me make up the missed time?”

  “After hours.” He trailed his fingertips up her arm and she held very still as he continued past the bend of her elbow to the inside of her bicep. He swirled his fingertips there, so close to her breast, and as if on instinct, she let the afghan fall.

  Her nipple was perked up, and her breath hitched.

  He rolled her gaze up to her parted lips, to her flushed cheeks. Her wide eyes.

  “Does my touch hold you in thrall? I’m told it’s supposed to be that way. You shouldn’t feel guilty for being aroused. It means we’re compatible and that you’re fertile.”

  She slapped his hand away. “No way, bub.” She grabbed a pillow and threw it at him, and he handily caught it.

  “Get the hell out of my apartment.”

  “I will not. You’re stuck with me. You signed a twenty-year contract last night.” For the job, not the elf-mate situation. His mother had suggested he tread carefully with that latter thing. Apparently, most humans didn’t believe elves were real. That certainly seemed to be the case with his human.

  “Twenty years is about twenty years longer than I plan to tolerate you,” Gillian said. “Twenty minutes is probably all I need of you.”

  Her gaze tracked down his torso to the fingers he entwined between his legs, and then farther to that shadow between his thighs again.

  “Cocky as you are, you’d better be hung down to your knees,” she muttered.

  “Perhaps I am. Would that suit you, pet?”

  “I didn’t say that out loud, did I?”

  “You did, and before you dare think it, I’m not just a figment of your imagination. I’m here in the flesh.”

  “And telling me Santa has a big cock.”

  “I can’t speak for the Santa you know, but I’d be more than willing to let you examine me. Perhaps touching something hard will bring you to your senses.”

  She dragged her tongue across her lips and pulled the afghan up again. “I don’t want to see your dick. I want you to get out of my apartment, and I’m going to pretend we never met.”

  He ground his teeth and tamped down his simmering frustration. Obviously, she was drawn to him. Why was she fighting the attraction so hard? Elf women were so easy in comparison. A simple, “Let’s fuck,” and there’d be no more discussion. Obviously, that wasn’t going to work on Gillian. “You owe me. As I told you yesterday: three hours a night until Christmas. You’ll do what needs to be done. I’m compensating you well for it.”

  “Being compensated well sounds great and all, and even given how unprofessional this ordeal has shaped up to be until now, I’m considering it. I guess I’m desperate, but the arrangement sounds very open-ended to me. I don’t know if I like the way that sounds. And I don’t like this weird blurring of business and personal.”

  “Yes you do.” He cupped her chin gently and tipped it up so she’d meet his gaze.

  She gulped. “I do?”

  “Mm-hmm.” He leaned in so close that his nose grazed the side of her face. “I think if I kiss you, you won’t complain.”

  “Funny, that doesn’t sound like me
.”

  “You’re right. I’ll amend that. You won’t complain about being kissed. You’ll complain about what I’m kissing. Why start with lips when I could devour you down below? Would you like me to? I’d consider lapping between your thighs an absolute pleasure, and I know you’ll enjoy my mouth on you as you come.”

  She sucked in some air and squirmed away from him. “There are rules…you can’t just…well, do this.”

  “The rules don’t apply to me.”

  “You obviously seem to think they don’t.” She tucked a wild swath of hair behind her ear and cleared her throat. “And I think your mouth is dirty enough already without putting it on me. So…no thank you.”

  “It’s kind of you to care about me.” He found the fleshy lobe of her ear and clamped it between his teeth. He stretched it and then let his incisors abrade the skin.

  She arched into him, whispering, “No, no, no,” but her body was telling him yes.

  “I don’t care about you,” she said.

  In one quick, smooth motion, he positioned his left knee behind her back and drew her between his legs and against his front into a bear hug. He covered her mouth with one hand and let the other slide toward her breasts.

  Nestling his nose into her curls, he put his lips against her ear and whispered, “Lying will get you nowhere, pet. Be still.” He tucked his finger between her lips and swirled it against her tongue. He went straight for her breast when he pulled his hand free. He nudged the plackets of her robe apart, yanked up her shirt, and glided his wet finger around one distended nipple.

  “If I didn’t have to work tonight, I’d have you bound to my bed and leave you waiting until you begged for me,” he said.

  “Don’t hold your breath.” She drew in a sharp inhalation through her clenched teeth at his pluck of her nipple.

  He knew exactly what he needed. Just from touching her, he knew which buttons to push, and how hard to push them. Elf mate’s advantage.

  “I’m sure you feel like you need to play hard-to-get, Gillian, but you’ll save yourself a lot of frustration if you just submit to me.”