Naughty Elf: Mistletoe (Santa’s Naughty Elf Mates)

Chapter 6

CHAPTER 6

RYAN

The day had both flown by and dragged, thanks to my schedule of awful meeting followed by working session followed by another skull-crushing meeting. The branch manager was calling for layoffs if we didn't meet our next deadline. "Time is money," he said right before he uttered my least favorite phrase in the human language, "I'll give you some time back in your day."

"That's not how time works," I said once I confirmed the meeting had ended. I sighed and resisted the urge to throw my headset at my monitor. I couldn't afford to break it, not with Miz and Ellie playing downstairs after school. They were too quiet for my computer microphone to pick it up, but without the headphones over my ears, my moose hearing would catch every word of Ellie telling Miz another story about princess unicorn. I heard the occasional dragon roar from Miz, too.

I envied their play time. I wanted to join them, but I had one more meeting with the project managers and scrum leaders before I could call it a day.

I had five minutes to spare, though. Time to stretch my legs down the stairs, go to the bathroom off the kitchen, and grab a quick snack.

Dru had sent a few cookies home with Miz, which was nice of her. I shot off a text while I shoved one of the soft sugar cookies in my mouth. Instead of frosting, the cookie crunched with the granular sugar sprinkled on top. It tasted of lemon, my favorite.

"A sugary treat from a sugary sweetheart," she texted back. "Miz is a keeper, don't you think?"

I rolled my eyes. Dru had been trying to convince me to date again for the last year. I liked Miz, I did, but I needed him more as Ellie's daycare provider. I didn't want to fuck that up.

The last meeting of the day went about as well as the rest of my day: terrible. The message about possible layoffs hit our scrum leaders hard. We set the deadlines, but our developers were the ones responsible for meeting them. While we couldn't control how fast they worked, our jobs now depended on it.

As a project manager, I was used to the pressure. I was well aware I would be the first to go if my team couldn't perform. That didn't make it any easier. I had to support Ellie. Now that I didn't need to worry about a job for Miz, I would probably spend some quality time on the career websites tonight for myself.

I shut my office door behind me to hide the mess of scribbles on my white board. Out of sight, completely out of mind. I took a couple deep breaths before walking to the edge of the stairs. My toes dipped over the top step and I lurched forward, catching myself on the railing.

I laughed at my clumsiness. I constantly slid on the carpet. When I finally reached the tile floor, I'd forgotten all about work and was instead grumbling about the carpet.

"Oh, Daddy, did you trip again?" Ellie's melodious laugh made me feel even more like a klutz.

"I think your papa was trying to kill me when he insisted we keep the carpet."

"At least you won't split your head open," Miz said. "It's carpet!"

"Concussions are so much better for me, I know."

Miz grinned. "We can't let anything happen to your pretty head. I'll find one of those plastic stair runners online to protect you."

My moose perked up at that. First, he preened at being called pretty. Then, he bristled his fur at the idea of Miz protecting me. He wanted me to be the protector in this relationship.

He needed to calm down. Miz was my employee, not my boyfriend.

My heart thumped against my chest, a sign my moose was restless. "I'll be out in the woods for a few minutes. Miz, can you start dinner for us after you help Ellie put her toys away? Ellie can set the table."

"Sure." Miz sounded as cheerful as always, but I felt his eyes on my back as I turned toward the cold kitchen. My robe hung in the mud room, awaiting my return. I stripped out of my clothes and hopped out onto the patio, my feet sticking to the frosty concrete until my hooves took shape. I bent forward as the shift took me, lowering my head for the last of my change, when the giant rack of antlers manifested. They were heavy on my neck, especially after a long and trying day, but a gentle shake of my shoulders released most of the tension.

I eased into a run, letting my muscles warm gradually. My warm breath dampened my snout with each exhale. Steam trailed behind me as I picked up speed, letting my muscles grow accustomed to the frigid air until I felt alive and invigorated.

I wanted to keep running for the usual loop around the woods, but my moose hesitated. He wanted me to go back inside. He kept showing me images I didn't understand. Candy canes. Hot chocolate. The Christmas tree. A creepy elf statue that looked nothing like Miz.

My moose and I were usually on the same page, but today I didn't understand him. He loved winter, and he ignored human holidays. Not only that, but Christmas was over. Ellie had talked me into leaving the tree up until the twelve days of Christmas were over, but after that, the tree and ornaments were going back in their boxes until next December.

I turned toward the house, and my moose let out a bray of satisfaction. He wanted to go back inside, which made no sense at all.

I could hold a partial shift, keeping my hind hooves a moment longer than the rest, long enough to turn the door handle and step inside the cool mudroom before shifting my feet. At least the braided rug on the floor was soft and warm against my toes. The shift gave me back the skin I'd left on the concrete, but I'd come close enough to frostbite in the past.

I heard Miz and Ellie laughing in the dining room as I hurried to my bedroom to change into sweats. By the time I returned my robe to the mudroom, dinner was served.

I smirked at the plate before me. I had seven chicken nuggets and a heap of mixed greens on my plate, along with two sauce cups filled with barbecue sauce and ranch and a side dish filled to the brim with applesauce. Not what I'd expected for dinner, but nuggets were Ellie's comfort food. When given the opportunity to pick an entrée, she would always choose the dinosaur-shaped breaded chicken bits.

I dug in, eating them before they could get cold. The salad was my favorite part of the meal, though. I loved the crunch of soybeans and sunflower seeds, the sweetness of dates, and the variety of vegetables tossed with a tangy vinaigrette. The bag mix hadn't been on my list, so Miz must have picked it up. He had good taste.

Ellie filled the silence by telling us about her day at school. Alicia, the girl she'd met at the mall playground, had joined her class. The teacher had switched around the seating arrangement, and Ellie and Alicia March were now desk buddies and locker mates. I didn't understand what all that meant, exactly, but she was happy, which was all that mattered to me.

After dinner, Ellie leaned over to Miz and whispered, "He didn't complain."

I frowned at them and crunched on the last piece of kale.

"Was he supposed to?" Miz asked.

"He thinks this is baby food."

"I never said that!" I placed the fork on my empty plate and fixed them both with an indignant glare. "This was the perfect meal for the first day back to school and work. Thank you, Miz."

"You're welcome."

He blushed from the tips of his ears to his round apple cheeks, and more inappropriate thoughts creeped into my head. I shouldn't want to see if that flush continued down his chest when he was excited, or how quickly I could make his nipples perk with nothing more than my thumb and index finger.

I cleared my throat and dipped my spoon into the bowl of applesauce. I slurped the cool sweetness into my mouth and stared at the fancy gold-on-white tablecloth they'd found somewhere. It did nothing to quench the heat in my face.

After three weeks as Ellie's daycare provider, Miz slipped up, and it was all my fault. When school let out early for an in-service on Wednesday, Miz wasn't waiting outside the school to pick her up.

The school alerted me a half-hour later because Ellie was one of ten kids still waiting for an escort home.

I dashed a text to Miz while still on my office phone with them, only to hear a breathless, "Ellie! Ellie, I'm so sorry!" in the background.

"Miz!"

"Oh, good," the administrator said, "your new daycare provider is here. Sorry to bother you, Mr. Marchand!"

I forgot to share the school event calendar with Miz, and I'd missed a text from Dru while I worked.

"Is there an early out today? The other neighbor kids are home already."

"I'm so sorry!" I texted back. "Sending Miz the calendar link now."

My phone rang a moment later.

"What's wrong with him?"

"Excuse me?" Never any pleasantries with Dru. She always got right to the point with her accusatory tone.

"He's hot, he's kind, and he's absolutely in love with your daughter, so what's the problem? Why haven't you taken him on a date yet?"

I heard the front door open and Ellie's melodious singsong as she told Miz all about her day.

"I'm still working," I reminded her.

"When you log out, you need to talk to Miz about your future."

"Future?"

"Take him on a date. Get to know him without Ellie around. Enjoy his company and maybe talk to your beast about him. I don't want to have this conversation a year from now when you realize it's too late."

What did she mean, too late?

"Pick a day and time and send Ellie over to my house to bake some cookies and watch a movie."

There was no arguing with Dru when she got an idea in her head. I enjoyed spending time with Miz, so it wouldn't be a hardship. I wished I knew why she was so doom and gloom with this ultimatum.

"Friday night, around six?" I could take him out for dinner at one of the nearby restaurants, or we could drive across town for something fancy … except I wasn't ready for fancy. If I were honest, I wasn't ready for any of it, but I would try, for Miz.

"It's a plan, then." She sighed. "I know this is hard for you. You and John had something special, even without a fated mate bond. I'm sorry if this feels like I'm pushing too hard, but you're more moose than human sometimes."

I'd heard it plenty over the years. "Stubborn as a bull moose," my grandma used to say. Well, I was a bull moose, but I didn't want that to impact my daughter's potential happiness, or mine.

I loved Ellie, and Ellie loved Miz. Her attitude at home had changed from night into day the first afternoon he'd walked her home from school. He deserved every penny I paid him.

"I can hear your gears grinding, you know." Dru sighed. "Yes, you pay him a salary. Yes, that makes you his boss, and he's your employee, but need I remind you, you don't have a written contract between you."

Fuck. Maybe we should.

"People have relationships with their mannies, nannies, and babysitters all the time. Some of those are highly inappropriate breaches of conduct, but until you have a contract between you, there's nothing to break."

I liked the contract idea. Ground rules and boundaries were important in any budding relationship, and ours was even more complicated with the employer/employee layer.

" … get your head out of your ass!" Dru hung up on me while I was still thinking through the details.

After work, I walked Miz through the calendar app I shared with him. Then, I set two new meetings for us. The first was on Thursday after dinner, a quick meeting to talk about the contract in my office. The second was for a date on Friday night. I left the entry as "tentative," depending on how the contract negotiations went. I didn't want to force Miz to go to dinner with me if we determined our relationship should remain strictly professional.

I found a live-in manny employment contract on my favorite career website. I was surprised at how basic it was. It didn't contain any clauses about inappropriate behavior between employer and employee; it only detailed the employee's interaction with the children.

I'd never once worried about Miz's actions around Ellie. He had a special touch with my daughter, one even I lacked sometimes. When she was so hyped up, with her voice lifted to the pitch and decibels of an emergency siren, Miz could convince her to use her inside voice with a tiny shake of his head. John hadn't even been that good.

John. Sometimes I could think his name and feel nothing. Other times, I felt the joy of having such a wonderful partner, only to remember he'd been ripped from me far too soon. Most of the time, the name brought grief, the cold and dry sorrow of a barren desert in the middle of winter.

What would John think of Miz?

That wasn't the right question to ask. They would never meet. The question that finally brought tears to my eyes was about me. Would John's opinion of me change if he saw me with Miz?

If he could see us, I wanted to be better for Miz than I was for John. I wasn't the most patient husband and father. After the cancer diagnosis, I'd shut down and dissociated for a few months. There were far too many days I'd wished I could get back after he was gone.

I wouldn't do that to Miz. If the time constraint Dru hinted at was real, I didn't want to lose Miz before I knew what we could have together.