A Daddy By Christmas

“Well,” she said. “I guess that settles that. The dog is yours if you still want her.”

Chloe snapped back to the matter at hand. “I do. Definitely.”

Of course she still wanted the puppy. She was just having a hard time switching gears from being proposed to by a total stranger to once again thinking about the logistics of puppy ownership.

“That was weird, though, wasn’t it?” Chloe held the dog closer to her chest. The tiny animal smelled like shampoo and puppy breath, which was a comforting and welcome switch from the gritty aroma of Times Square. “Don’t you think so?”

“Um.” The shelter manager’s smile faded. “I really couldn’t say.”

“That’s right. You missed the crazy part.” The puppy started gnawing on Chloe’s thumb. Somewhere in her purse, she had a chew toy she’d purchased for a moment like this one, but she was too rattled to look for it. “He asked me to marry him.”

The shelter manager gave a little start. “Oh, I didn’t realize you and Mr. Kent knew each other.”

Kent.

So that was his name. It swirled through her thoughts like a snowflake until she found herself combining it with hers.

Chloe Kent.

Mrs. Chloe Kent.

Her face went hot. “We don’t. I’ve never seen him before in my life.”

“Oh.”

Chloe sneaked a glance at his paperwork, still sitting on the counter where he’d left it. “Anders Kent” was printed neatly in the name box.

“He just upped and asked me to marry him, and then he took it back.” Chloe huffed out a sigh.

Of course this would happen to her. The hits just kept on coming. Instead of getting a normal proposal from a normal man—her ex, Steven, for instance—she got one from a total crackpot who promptly changed his mind.

Except he hadn’t seemed like a crackpot. He actually seemed sort of charming, especially when he was holding the puppy. But come on, what handsome man didn’t seem charming with a cute dog in his arms?

“Not that I considered it for even a second. It seems exceedingly rude to withdraw a proposal, though. I’m just saying.” The puppy started to whine in her arms, so she bounced up and down a bit. Jingle, jingle, jingle. “Surely you agree.”

The shelter manager sighed. “Honestly, as long as the puppy goes to a good home, I don’t really care.”

“Right. Of course.” Why was she telling this woman about her almost-engagement to a perfect stranger?

More specifically, why couldn’t she let the stunning incident go? She shouldn’t be dwelling on it. It was a non-incident, as evidenced by the mysterious Anders Kent’s speedy retraction, followed by his hasty exit.

“Do you want the dog or not?” The exasperated woman slid a paper across the counter toward Chloe.

“Absolutely.” She scrawled her name on the designated line.

After all, she was here to adopt a puppy, not to get engaged.

Not now.

Not ever.

“Mr. Kent.” Edith Summers, Anders’s personal assistant, stood as he strode into the paneled entryway to his office. “We weren’t expecting you to come in today.”

Anders paused and nodded graciously at the older woman. He wasn’t typically one for small talk in the workplace, but he hadn’t seen Mrs. Summers since the funeral and her presence at that ghastly affair had been more comforting than he’d expected. Burying his brother and sister-in-law was by no means easy, but seeing his assistant sitting in the second pew, wearing her customary pearls and stoic, maternal expression, had made him feel a little less alone. A little less untethered.

“I changed my mind.” Anders smiled stiffly.

He should say something. He should thank her, or at the very minimum, acknowledge her presence on that darkest of days. But just over Mrs. Summers’s shoulder, Anders spotted his brother’s name on the smooth oak door to the office next to his own, and the words died on his tongue.

Mrs. Summers followed his gaze, then squared her shoulders and cleared her throat. She’d been Anders’s assistant long enough to know that what he needed now was normalcy. And normalcy meant work. It meant numbers and spreadsheets and meetings with investors. It meant being at his desk from sunup to sundown...

But that would have to change now, wouldn’t it?

“Very well. I’ll get you a cup of coffee and then we can go over your schedule,” Mrs. Summers said.

“Thank you.” He held her gaze long enough to impart all the things he couldn’t say—thank you for being there, thank you for not trying to make him talk about his feelings or force him to go home. The list was long.

“Of course.” Her eyes flashed with sympathy, and Anders’s chest wound itself into a hard, suffocating tangle as she bustled past him toward the executive break room.

How long would it be this way?

How long would it be before he could stand in this place where he once felt so capable, so impenetrable, and not feel like his heart had just been put through a paper shredder?

Months. Years, maybe.

Lolly’s sweet, innocent face rose to the forefront of his consciousness, and he knew with excruciating clarity that no amount of time would be sufficient. He’d feel this way for a lifetime. He’d carry the loss to his grave.

But he couldn’t think about that now. Lolly was depending on him. His niece was only five years old, too young to grasp the permanence of what had just happened to her...what had happened to them both. Anders, on the other hand, was all too aware.

He was even more aware of feeling that he wasn’t quite up to the task of raising a child. Anders didn’t know the first thing about being a father. Not that he would ever come close to replacing Grant and Olivia in Lolly’s life. But having lost his own parents at an early age, he knew that children as young as his niece didn’t understand words like guardian and custody. Even if Lolly continued calling him Uncle Anders, he’d become so much more than that. He’d be the one to teach her how to ride a bicycle and help her with her homework. He’d be the one cheering at her high school graduation and pulling his hair out when she learned how to drive. He’d be the one to walk her down the aisle at her wedding.

For all practical purposes, he’d be her father. He’d spend the rest of his life walking in his younger brother’s shoes.

If he was lucky.

“Shall I set up a meeting between you and the estate lawyer?” Mrs. Summers placed a double cappuccino with perfect foam on the desk in front of Anders and took a seat in one of the leather wingback guest chairs facing him. As usual, she held the tablet she used to keep track of his calendar in one hand and a pair of reading glasses in the other.

“Already done. I saw him this morning.” Anders stared into his coffee. It was going to take a lot more than caffeine to get him through the next few weeks.

“Oh.” His secretary blinked. “Everything all right, then?”

Anders took a deep breath and considered how much, exactly, he should share with his secretary. On one hand, she was his employee. On the other, she might be the closest thing he had to a friend now that his brother—who also happened to be his business partner—was gone. Such was the life of a workaholic.

“Not really,” he said quietly.

The phone on Mrs. Summers’s desk began to ring, but when she popped out of her chair to go answer it, Anders motioned for her to stay put.

“Leave it. Just let it roll to voice mail.” He took a sip of his cappuccino. She’d gone easy on the foam this time, and it slid down his throat, hot and bitter. Just like his mood.

Mrs. Summers frowned. “You’re beginning to worry me, Mr. Kent. Is something wrong?”

Nothing that a wife wouldn’t fix.

He closed his eyes and saw the puzzled face of the woman from the animal shelter—her wide brown eyes and lush pink lips, arranged in a perfect O of surprise.

Marry me.

God, he’d actually said that, hadn’t he? The past week had been rough, no doubt about it. It was astounding how much a single phone call could change things, could eviscerate your life so cleanly as if it were a blade of some sort. A knife to the gut.

But until this morning, Anders had been hanging on. He’d had to, for Lolly’s sake and for the sake of the business. Grief was a luxury he couldn’t afford. Not now, not yet. Besides, if he let himself bend beneath the crushing weight of loss, he wouldn’t be able to get back up—not after the things he’d said to Grant the night before the accident.

Anders and his brother rarely argued, and when they did, it was typically about the business. As two of the name partners in one of the most influential investment banking firms on Wall Street, they always had one another’s back, but that didn’t mean blind support. They challenged each other. They made each other better.

Their last argument had been different, though. Anders had gone too far—he’d made it personal. There’d been raised voices and slammed doors, and then nothing but an uncomfortable silence after Grant stormed out of the building. It had been their most heated exchange to date, but that was okay. They were brothers, for crying out loud. Grant would get over it.

But he couldn’t get over it, because now he was gone. And Anders couldn’t even bring himself to set foot in his dead brother’s empty office.

It was easier to stay on this side of that closed door. Safer.

Anders had managed to push their final confrontation into the darkest corner of his consciousness that he could find, and at first, it had been remarkably easy. He’d had a funeral to plan and Grant’s in-laws to deal with and a new, tiny person sleeping in his penthouse.

He was beginning to crack now. That much was obvious. Tiny fissures were forming in the carefully constructed wall he’d managed to build around the memory of his last conversation with Grant. Any minute now, it would all come flooding back. The effort to keep it at bay was crippling, as evidenced by his spontaneous marriage proposal to a woman dressed in a reindeer costume.

“There are some issues with Lolly’s guardianship.” Anders swallowed. The knot that had formed in his throat during the funeral service was still sitting like a stone.

Mrs. Summers shook her head. “I don’t understand. You’re her godfather.”

“Yes, I am.” He’d dutifully attended the church service at St. Patrick’s Cathedral and poured water over Lolly’s fragile newborn head. It had been a done deal.

Or so he’d thought.

He took another scalding gulp of his cappuccino. Then he set the china cup back down on the desk with enough force that liquid sloshed over the rim. “As it turns out, the legalities of the matter are a bit more complicated.”

“How so?”

“When Grant and Olivia drafted their wills, they made my guardianship of Lolly conditional. The only way I can be awarded full custody is if I’m married.”

The tablet slid out of Mrs. Summers’s hand and fell to the floor with a clunk. She didn’t bother picking it up. “Married?”

“Married.” He nodded. Maybe if they both kept repeating the word, the reality of his situation would sink in.

“But...” The older woman’s voice drifted off, which was probably for the best. Anders could only imagine the trajectory of her thoughts.

But you haven’t been on more than three dates with the same woman in years.

But you’re a workaholic.

And to quote his brother...

But you’re dead inside.

“Exactly,” Anders said, because it didn’t really matter which objection caused her hesitation. They all fit.

“So that’s it, then? What happens to Lolly?”

“Lolly’s staying put.” They’d take her away over his dead body. He’d made a promise to his brother that rainy day in St. Patrick’s Cathedral, and he intended to keep it. He owed Grant that much. It was the least he could do. “I just have to find a wife.”

The shocked expression on Mrs. Summers’s face gave way to one of perplexed amusement. “Find a wife? It’s as simple as that, is it?”

“Yes.” He gave her a curt nod.

Simple was a necessity.

Frankly, the more Anders thought about it, the more he liked the idea of an arranged marriage. A temporary wife was exactly what he needed. He’d handle it like a basic merger. After all, those were his specialty. No messy emotions, no expectations—just a simple business transaction between two consenting adults.

Two consenting adults who wouldn’t sleep together or have any other sort of romantic entanglement.

Maybe I really am dead inside.

Fine. So be it.

Maybe Grant had hit the nail on the head when he’d made that astute accusation right before he turned on his heel and stormed out of the office five days ago. Anders hoped he had. He’d love nothing more than to remain in his current state of numbness for the rest of his godforsaken life.

“My husband and I only knew each other for six months before we got married, and he was the love of my life.” Mrs. Summers gave Anders a watery smile. “You’re absolutely right. It doesn’t have to be complicated.”

Anders swallowed around the rock in his throat. “I don’t have six months. I have until Christmas.”

She gaped at him, and he took advantage of her silence to abruptly fill her in on the rest of it. Having this conversation was more humbling than he’d anticipated. “If I’m not married by the end of the calendar year, Lolly goes to the alternate guardians—Olivia’s sister and her husband. Lolly can’t go to them. They live in Kansas, and her entire life would be upended. Plus, they’ve already got five kids of their own, and while I’m sure they’re competent parents, they weren’t my brother’s first choice.”

Nor was Anders, technically. Grant and Olivia wanted Lolly raised by Anders plus one, as if the matter of guardianship could be worded like a wedding invitation.

Was it even legal? Possibly, according to his lawyer. But they didn’t have time to battle it out in court.

Even if they had, Anders would have had to speculate in front of a judge and jury why his own brother would place such a condition on his role in Lolly’s life in the event she became orphaned. He would be forced to admit that the provision in the will had taken him by surprise, but he knew precisely why it was there.

If Grant and Olivia couldn’t be there for Lolly, they wanted her to grow up in a nuclear family—a home with a mom and dad. But that wasn’t the only reason. They knew that Anders loved their daughter, but they also knew he couldn’t be trusted to get up and walk away from Wall Street at a reasonable hour every day. Work was his first love, his only love. And that wasn’t good enough for Lolly.

Hell, even Anders knew it wasn’t.

He would change. Had they really thought he wouldn’t? He’d turn his life inside out and upside down for that little girl.

Yet here you sit.

The paneled walls of his office felt as if they were closing in around him. Anders fixated on the smooth surface of his desk and breathing in and out until the feeling passed.

When at last he looked up, the tablet was back in Mrs. Summers’s hands again and her glasses were perched on the end of her nose.

“Tell me how I can help,” she said.

A fleeting sense of relief passed through him. Help was precisely what he needed, and Mrs. Summers was efficient beyond measure. He could do this. He had to. “Get me the names and contact information for every woman I’ve dated in the past twelve months.”

“Yes, sir.” She jotted something down with her stylus.

“Better make that the past eighteen months, just to be safe.” He took a deep inhalation. It felt good to have a plan, even if said plan was a long shot. Reaching out to old girlfriends made more sense than proposing to strangers.

“If I might make a suggestion, sir. Perhaps you should consider...” Mrs. Summers tipped her head in the direction of the office across the hall from Anders’s, which belonged to another partner in the firm—Penelope Reed.

Anders grew still. He hadn’t realized anyone in the office knew about the arrangement he had with Penelope. So much for subtlety.

“No.” He shook his head.

It wasn’t completely out of the question, but Penelope was his last resort. True, they occasionally shared a bed. And true, their relationship was strings-free, as businesslike as a coupling could possibly be.

But marrying someone within the firm was a terrible idea. They could hide the occasional one-night stand, but a marriage was another matter entirely.

“Very well.” Mrs. Summers nodded. “It was just an idea.”

“I’ll keep it in mind.” He shifted uncomfortably in his chair and wondered what it meant that he’d felt more comfortable proposing to a stranger than to a woman he bedded from time to time. Nothing good, that was for sure. “In the meantime, I also need to find another puppy.”

Mrs. Summers peered at him over the top of her glasses. “Did you miss your appointment at the animal shelter this afternoon? I thought I’d programmed it into your BlackBerry.”

“No, I was there. But the shelter made some kind of mistake. They promised the dog to someone else.” For a brief, blissful moment, Anders’s attention strayed from his messy life, and he thought about the graceful woman in the reindeer costume—her soulful eyes, holly berry lips and perfect, impertinent mouth. Somewhere in the back of his head, he could have sworn he heard jingle bells.

“What a shame. Lolly would have loved that little dog.” His assistant pressed a hand to her heart.

Anders had screwed up a lot of things lately. His list of mistakes was longer than the line to take pictures with Santa at Macy’s, but he had a feeling he’d done the right thing when he’d walked away from the animal shelter empty-handed. Maybe he wasn’t as big of a Scrooge as everyone thought he was.

Dead inside.

A headache bloomed at the back of Anders’s skull. “There are other puppies. I suspect it worked out for the best.”

Mrs. Summers narrowed her gaze, studied him for a beat and then nodded. “Things usually do.”

Did they?

God, he hoped so.

“I think I’m going to take the rest of the afternoon off, after all.” He stood, buttoned his suit jacket and shifted his weight from one foot to the other.

This office was his sanctuary. He’d always felt more at home at his desk, glued to the market’s highs and lows, than he did at his luxury penthouse with its sweeping views of Central Park and the Natural History Museum. But today it felt different, strange... He wondered if it would ever feel like home again, and if it didn’t, where he was supposed to find peace.

“Call the nanny and tell her I’m on the way to fetch Lolly.” Maybe he’d take her to see the tree at Rockefeller Center or for a carriage ride through the park. Something Christmassy.

Like the Rockettes show at Radio City Music Hall?

His jaw clenched tight.

“Yes, Mr. Kent. And I’ll look into the puppy situation and send you a list of available dogs that might be a good fit.” Mrs. Summers looked up from her tablet. “Would you like me to try and find another Yorkie mix?”

He heard the woman’s voice again—so confident, so cynical in her assessment of his character.

You really don’t seem like the Yorkie type.

What did that even mean?

Did she picture him with something less fluffy and adorable, like a bulldog? Or a snake? More to the point, why had that assumption stuck with him and rubbed him so entirely the wrong way?

“Anything. I’m open to suggestions,” he muttered. Then on second thought, he said, “Scratch that. I want a lapdog—something cute and affectionate, on the smaller side. A real cupcake of a dog.”

Mrs. Summers stifled a smile. “Of course, sir.”

“The sweeter, the better.”

Chapter Three

The afternoon following Chloe’s odd encounter at the animal shelter, she tucked her new puppy into a playpen containing the candy cane–striped dog bed and a dozen or so new toys and then trudged her way through the snow-covered West Village to the Wilde School of Dance.

It was time to face the music.

She couldn’t keep lying to her family about her job. Just this morning, she’d thought she spotted her cousin Ryan walking through Times Square while she’d been on flyer duty. She’d ducked behind one of the area’s ubiquitous costumed characters—a minion in a Santa hat—but there was no hiding her blinking antlers.

Luckily, the man in the slim tailored suit hadn’t been her cousin. Nor had it been her brother, Zander. To her immense relief, she also ruled out the possibility that he was the man who’d proposed to her yesterday—Anders Kent. This guy’s shoulders weren’t quite as broad, and the cut of his jaw was all wrong. His posture was far too laid-back and casual. He seemed like a regular person out for a stroll on his lunch break, whereas Anders had been brimming with intensity, much like the city itself—gritty and glamorous. So beautifully electric.

Not that she’d been thinking about him for the duration of her two-hour shift. She quite purposefully hadn’t. But being on flyer duty was such a mindless job, and while she flashed her Rockette smile for the tourists and ground her teeth against the wind as it swept between the skyscrapers, he kept sneaking back into her consciousness. The harder she tried not to think about him, the clearer the memory of their interaction became, until it spun through her mind on constant repeat, like a favorite holiday movie. Love Actually or It’s a Wonderful Life.

Chloe huffed out a sigh. If life was even remotely wonderful, she wouldn’t be so hung up on a meaningless encounter with a stranger. Which was precisely why she had to stop pretending everything was fine and come to terms with reality. She was no longer a professional dancer. She might never perform that loathsome toy soldier routine again, and if she didn’t humble herself and come clean with the rest of the Wildes, they were sure to find out some other way and her embarrassment would be multiplied tenfold. Emily Wilde was practically omniscient. It was a miracle Chloe’s mother hadn’t busted her already.

Sure enough, the minute Chloe pushed through the door of the Wilde School of Dance, she could feel Emily’s eyes on her from clear across the room. Her mother was deep in conversation with a slim girl in a black leotard—one of her ballet students, no doubt—but her penetrating gaze was trained on Chloe.

Here we go.

Chloe smiled and attempted a flippy little wave, as if this was any ordinary day and she stopped by the studio all the time. She didn’t, of course, making this whole situation more awkward and humbling than she could bear.

When was the last time she’d set foot inside this place? A while—even longer than she’d realized. She didn’t recognize half the faces in the recital photographs hanging on the lobby walls, and the smooth maple floors had taken quite a beating since she’d twirled across them in pointe shoes as a teenager. The sofa in the parents’ waiting area had a definite sag in its center that hadn’t been there when Chloe spent hours sprawled across it doing her homework after school.

Was her mother still using the same blue record player and worn practice albums instead of a digital sound system? Yes, apparently. The turntable sat perched on a shelf in the corner of the main classroom, right where it had been since before Chloe was born.

At least Emily was no longer teaching back-to-back classes all day, every day. Chloe’s sister-in-law, Allegra, had taken over the majority of the curriculum. From the looks of things, Allegra’s intermediate ballet class had just ended. She waved at Chloe from behind the classroom’s big picture window as happy ten-and eleven-year-olds in pink tights and soft ballet slippers spilled out of the studio, weaving around Chloe with girlish, balletic grace.