Baby, It's Cold Outside by Heidi Rice, Kate Hardy, Aimee Carson, Amy Andrews Page B

sopping tights, drenched boots, and decidedly damp woolen shift dress and stood shivering in her matching bra and knickers. As she searched frantically for the gym wear she could have sworn she left there a week ago, Kate realized her colossally crappy Christmas had just gotten worse.

Chapter Two
    What the hell difference is there between the Festive Fairy Princess and Santa’s Seasonal Sprite anyway?
    Ryder Sinclair frowned at the virtually identical dolls in their glittery green-and-gold packaging and tried to make an informed decision. After five agonizing minutes of study, the only appreciable difference he could see was that the Seasonal Sprite seemed to have a good millimeter of extra cleavage. And he was pretty sure Gully wouldn’t notice that, because she was eight for chrissake—and a girl.
    He flipped one of the boxes over to read the lurid scarlet lettering on the back, but instead of describing the doll’s virtues, it listed her whole damn life story—including the fact that she was head elf in Santa’s workshop.
    Turning the box again, he stared at the doll’s mind-boggling cleavage barely covered by her miniature green elf dress.
    Santa, you dirty old man.
    He sighed and replaced the two boxes beside the others on the display, then rubbed his temple where the tension headache brought on by jet lag and extreme frustration was starting to bite.
    Dammit, he’d been in the toy department for an hour at least and he still didn’t have a clue which doll to buy. He hadn’t seen Gully in over two months, so he’d phoned Christine from the airport in Afghanistan last night to get a ballpark idea of what his daughter might want—but Christine’s only suggestion had been a Christmas-themed doll. And there were like twenty of the damn things.
    He glared at the array of boxes neatly stacked in a tower of concentric circles as frustration turned to aggravation. Maybe he should get Gully a selection of them? But he dismissed the idea almost as soon as it had occurred to him.
    Turning up at Christine and Bill’s place in Ithaca tomorrow with more than one Christmas gift would mean suffering through another lecture from Christine about being present in his daughter’s life instead of trying to buy her affection—while getting the standard smirk of smug superiority from her husband, Bill.
    After holding it together for two solid months in the sweltering hell of Helmand Province and dispassionately photographing everything from two-year-olds who’d had their limbs blown off by IEDs to soldiers who risked their lives on a daily basis but were barely old enough to shave, he was pretty sure his bullshit-o-meter wouldn’t be able to survive even a single glimpse of that damn smirk. Since punching Bill’s lights out for smiling the wrong way wasn’t an option with Gully there, he was going to have to make a decision about the doll, one way or the other, before he could head back to his apartment in SoHo and crash until he had to grab a cab to take him to Penn Station tomorrow.
    He surveyed the tower for what he hoped was the last time and spotted a sparkle of silver among all the green and gold. But as he bent forward to read the script on the side, his boot connected with the boxes at the foundation of the tower.
    “Crap.”
    He went to grab something, anything, but all he got was thin air as the boxes at the top tumbled backward in slow motion. He sucked in a breath, watching in horrified amazement as the rest of the display tilted precariously to one side like the Leaning Tower of Pisa and then collapsed—taking out the elaborate Lego landscape of Santa’s Grotto set up behind it—in a thundering avalanche of plastic, cardboard, and sparkles.
    …
    “What on earth do you think you’re doing?”
    The astonished shout rang out, and he whipped around to see a shadowy figure standing right beside him. Panic shot up his spine and battle-ready reflexes, honed by two months in a war zone, engaged. He launched