Good Elf Gone Wrong: A Holiday Romantic Comedy

My eyes opened at 5:45. It was pitch-black and snowing outside.

I raised myself slowly off the mattress. Gracie was sound asleep. Her laptop was sitting on the bookshelf.

I hadn’t meant to fall asleep, but I hadn’t slept the night before as I was dealing with our other contract, and Gracie’s bed was so comfortable, the sheets so soft, the slightly sweet cinnamon smell of her hair so intoxicating, it had knocked me out.

I didn’t need much time though. I just needed a good look at the laptop to see what I was dealing with, what kind of password protection she had on it.

As I’d walked around the room yesterday, I’d memorized where the creaks were in the ancient floorboards, and I sidestepped them as I navigated my way silently through the room to her computer.

Right as I reached for it, robotic elven voices shrieked Christmas carols from the alarm clock by her bed.

Gracie murmured and banged the top of it with her palm.

“Sorry, Hudson,” she mumbled, sitting up. Her pajamas, decorated with saccharine-sweet scenes of bears enjoying Christmas, had come undone while she’d slept, revealing a swell of her breast from the deep V of the opened flannel. Her curly hair was snarled in her face, and she yawned then yelped when she noticed me standing there in front of her.

Foiled again.

“Sorry. Did I wake you up?” Gracie asked.

“I was going for a run,” I said, supplying the ready excuse.

“In the cold?” she asked, confused.

“You want to come?”

“I’m making breakfast.”

I shrugged off the silkies, the ubiquitous shorts worn in the Marines during physical training, knowing it would make her shriek to see me naked in her bedroom.

Gracie pulled the covers over her head with a squawk.

I toyed with using the opportunity to open her laptop—it had been thirty-six hours since I’d made contact with her, and I had nothing to show for it.

Who wakes up at six in the morning to bake? I seethed as I tossed the shorts on her bed and pulled out my running clothes from my bag.

“Are you decent?” Gracie asked as I zipped up the hoodie.

“No, I’m a terrible person,” I replied.

She lowered the covers to just above the tip of her nose.

Something about the gesture was almost adorable. It tugged on something in my chest. It couldn’t be my heart. I kept that thing encased in ice.

If we were a normal couple, I’d give her a kiss, letting her feel the rough stubble on my chin.

I slid the black skullcap on my head.

“Be careful. It’s icy out there,” she called as I headed for the door.

I paused.

No one ever told me to be careful or worried about me when I left.

There didn’t seem to be any ulterior motives in her soft brown eyes.

“Do you have any breakfast requests?” she asked.

What was this? Why was she being nice to me? I’d told her last night I was going to make her suck my cock. Yet she was waiting expectantly for my answer.

“Just protein,” I said finally.

“Coming right up!”

“It was all that sleep,” I told myself as I jogged lightly down the stairs.

Pugnog was snorting awake in his basket in the living room when I passed by to the front door, suddenly craving the numbing cold.

The pug stumbled out of the dog bed, stretching out his stubby legs.

“You’re not a real dog,” I whispered to him. “Real dogs are Belgian Malinois and German shepherds. They root terrorists out of caves. You wouldn’t last a day with them.”

Pugnog’s tongue flopped out of his mouth. He looked like he needed to go out.

I didn’t hear Gracie following me down the stairs.

Pugnog whined uncomfortably.

“Fine,” I snapped at him.

Dog tucked under my arm like a football, I unlocked the front door and slipped out into the cold dark.

“Hurry up,” I ordered Pugnog.

I tried not to think about that time when I was little and had asked my father for a dog for Christmas and he’d actually bought one. My father had already been wasted by the time we were opening presents, and he had this dopey, drunk smile on his face when the puppy had popped out of the box, a huge bow on its neck.

My mother had been so mad. They’d gotten into a screaming fight. She’d thrown a glass at him, and the puppy had cowered behind me as she’d threatened to skin it.

By New Year’s, the dog was gone. I hoped he’d found a good home.

Pugnog couldn’t decide which leafless bush he wanted to do his business on.

“That one,” I pointed to a bush, “is a particularly good vintage, 1998, a great year.”

“Are you being good for Hudson?” Gracie asked Pugnog in a baby voice. She stepped out onto the front porch, closing the heavy door behind her.

It felt oddly domestic, her standing there in a knitted sweater, tying an apron around her waist, the dog meandering in the snow.

“That was sweet of you to take him out.” Grace beamed at me. “You can go on your run though. I’ll watch Pugnog. He might be a while. He’s like you. He can be pretty particular.”

“I’m very low-maintenance,” I countered. “Unlike you, with all your Christmas decorations just so.” I winced. “I’ll make you a new gingerbread house. I’m sorry.”

“Don’t worry about it. I wasn’t in the right headspace for it.” She sighed. “It wasn’t going to be my best gingerbread house anyway. There’s always next year.”

There she was, making herself smaller to serve the people around her. This time I couldn’t blame her family or James—it was my fault.

The pug had finally found a suitable bush and was whining to go back inside for his breakfast.

“You don’t want to get some exercise with Hudson?” she cooed at the pug who barked at her.

“With his nose all smushed up like that, he probably can’t breathe,” I said, not sure why I hadn’t just fucking left already.

Gracie looked guilty.

“I know that pugs are really inbred,” she said defensively, “but I didn’t buy him, if that’s what you’re thinking. My sister wanted a pug for Christmas, and of course my parents bought one for her. He peed in her Birkin bag, and she decided she didn’t want him anymore and refused to take care of him. So I took him in.”

Gracie gave a sad laugh. “Maybe Kelly will have a kid, and I’ll take care of them too. It’ll probably be the only way I get a family.” Her eyes flicked up to mine. “Never mind.”

Gracie rested her hand on the door.

I wanted to leave, run until I couldn’t breathe, and also stay there and bask in the warmth of her forever.

“See you in a bit,” she said cheerfully as she ushered the pug back inside the warm house.

The snow that blanketed the upscale neighborhood muffled the sounds. It was like being in a cocoon.

“Don’t think about Gracie. Think about how you’re going to get access to the laptop,” I told myself.

Yet all I could think about was her soft warmth next to me in bed, her standing there, framed by garland in the doorway, the way she said be careful like she cared about me.

The kitchen was warm and smelled like sugar and spice when I slipped in after the brutal run I’d pushed myself through.

“They played this song twice already, didn’t they?” Gracie was saying to the pug as she fiddled with the radio. “Why can’t they play anything other than the same ten Christmas carols? Hi, Hudson!”

She beamed at me. “Did you have fun on your run?”

Gracie poured me a glass of water from a pitcher and handed it to me.

“Pugnog and I are going to listen to some vintage Christmas carols, aren’t we?”

Fuck, I thought, fist clenched on the glass, as I watched her log into the computer.

Most people just used a simple pin to access their computer, or a password.

Not Gracie.

There was a long password that I memorized as I watched her type it in. That wasn’t the problem.

No, she had a four-factor authentication.

What the hell was she, some government spy? What the fuck?

All my hopes for an easy, quick mission-complete went up in a fiery explosion to the sound of the Nutcracker’s Russian dance as I watched her swipe her finger, use the laptop camera to authenticate her face, and then enter in a code that had been sent to an app on her phone.

“I know it’s a little overkill but I’ve been burned before,” Gracie said quickly when she noticed me staring. “My sister was dating this bad boy—he wasn’t like you, he was a really bad person—and he stole all my stuff. He used my computer to steal my identity, so now I keep it all locked down. Fool me once …” She laughed sadly.

I tried not to scowl. There was no way I was getting access to that computer without her knowing.

You have to. You have to try. Grayson Richmond does not tolerate failure.

Gracie navigated to a music-playing program on the computer.

“You might want to leave the room,” she said as she reauthenticated her identity, because apparently she had her computer set up so that anything more than sending an email required a password and facial recognition. “Don’t want you to melt from too much Christmas.”

Fuck.

I drained the glass of water.

“I’ll take a shower.”

There has to be another way, I decided as I headed upstairs.

The O’Briens had a family office in town, I thought, desperately running through my mental file of the EnerCheck Inc. account.

Maybe there was something there.

My men had accessed the office, but Gracie hadn’t been logged in on any computers there at the time. If I hung around with her, maybe she’d go to the office and log in on a desktop. Then I would have access to her company account.

Or maybe I wouldn’t, and Grayson Richmond would have me drawn and quartered by Rudolph and his friends on Christmas Eve.

“Stick to the plan,” I whispered to myself in the bathroom mirror.

The plan needed to change though. I needed to escalate. It wasn’t enough to just hang around in the hopes that I would get a free moment alone with the laptop. I needed to get Gracie so wrapped up that I would be able to keep her off-balance enough to both leave the laptop logged in and unattended.

It was going to take time, more time than I thought. More time than I had.

Though I had joked to her about us needing to have sex, now it was true. Soon we were going to have to deliver, or her family would think something was up.

Would it be such a bad thing to kiss her, run my hands over the curves of her breasts, to bury myself in the softness of her?

You’re just looking for an excuse to sleep with her.

If I could convince her to log into the company computer, then I would have what I needed.

I was not sleeping with her. I had done a lot of bad shit, but this was a line I shouldn’t cross.

I pulled my military dog tags out of my pocket. I hated wearing them, hated thinking about that time, but it was part of the ensemble.

Combing my fingers through my damp hair, I headed through the chilly house to the warm kitchen, feeling like I was about to enter a war zone I was ill prepared for.