Christmas Shopping for a Billionaire by Julia Kent

Chapter One
    The call today from my old boss, Greg, two days before Christmas at 2:12 p.m. should have tipped me off. I should have let it go to voicemail. I should have ignored it and not stopped decorating the Christmas tree in my boyfriend’s apartment. The tree that Declan had ordered from some place in Nova Scotia where all trees look like something out a movie set and the super-nice Canadians hire Tibetan refugee monks to rub the trunks down with virgin coconut oil and chant “Om Mani Padme Hun” for universal nirvana.
    That is, before they chop the tree down to ship it by helicopter to a waterfront high rise on the Long Wharf in Boston, where it will look pretty for two weeks and then get the chipper treatment at a recycling center. That’s a form of reincarnation, right?  
    But I don’t ignore Greg’s call even though I might be a little intoxicated by the sight of my man wearing a Santa hat, tight jeans, and a snug green cashmere sweater that makes me want him to hurry up my chimney tonight.
    (C’mon. You knew the pun was coming).
    “Hey, Greg. What’s up?” I answer. 
    Declan is hanging one of the new ornaments I bought him, a candy cane made from glued cloves. Mom’s friend holds a Sustainable Free Trade Christmas Fair every year, and I’d been told a young African girl made the clove ornament to raise money to buy a three legged-goat for milk to feed her family, or something like that.
    The details are fuzzy because I couldn’t listen through my sobs as I handed fistfuls of money to Mom, who just picked out a few items and patted me on the back, mumbling something about how I is just like my father. He had been banned from the fair two years ago when he bought all five hundred handmade Christmas cards from the Ivory Coast refugee who was promoting slave-free chocolate, sobbing with guilt and apologizing profusely for his KitKat addiction.
    “Did Carol call you?” My old boss sounds frantic. Greg isn’t the type to descend into hysteria. A chill runs up my spine, and it isn’t from the nine inches of snow that blanketed Boston yesterday. I know that tone of voice. 
    That is the tone that got my hand shoved down a toilet in the men’s room of a fast food restaurant when I worked for him as a mystery shopper, evaluating customer service at stores and companies.  
    The tone that gave me a brand-new car that looked like a Goliath took a steaming dump on top of it when we were doing branded advertising for a website.
    The tone that made me listen to podiatrists wax rhapsodic about toe fungus as they eyed my feet like I was starring in a fetish story from one of my dad’s old Hustler magazines that he kept stored in his backyard Man Cave.
    That is the tone of desperation.
    “No. Carol did not.”
    Declan looks at me, tilting his head to the left and making a low voice in the back of his throat that indicates displeasure. While I work for Declan’s company now, I fill in for the occasional mystery shop at my old job. My oldest sister, Carol, has my old job now and sometimes does the really professional maneuver where she calls and begs and whines and pleads and threatens to tell my boyfriend all about that time I bought a chest enhancer and got my budding nipple caught in the springs, in order to get me to take on a shop. 
    Yeah. Professional like that. Carol would make a great women’s prison kitchen chef.  
    So Greg is a step above. “Carol had a mystery shopper no-show on her, and she can’t come in because of your nephews. Something about needing a babysitter—”
    “We can go over and watch Jeffrey and Tyler!” I say in an overeager voice as Declan continues his vocal imitation of Jamie Fraser from the Outlander series, making more guttural sounds than a female sea lion with strep throat.
    Of course, I offer to babysit. Because the alternative is…
    “That doesn’t work. Something about one of the kids having the bubonic plague,” he adds. Carol can get a wee dramatic, but I