How My Brother's Best Friend Stole Christmas

Now I needed to find my brother.

And Sam. Really, I just wanted to find Sam.

The band was good. They were doing swingy-dancey versions of Christmas songs and there were a few people out on the floor. Rhonda who worked the front desk and Romeo from the warehouse clearly had moves.

Sam was nowhere to be found. Maybe he wasn’t here? He’d said he was coming and he was the kind of guy who showed up when he said he would. Oh man, he’d have something to say when he found out about Wes and Penny.

I saw Penny standing alone looking like a zillion bucks in a red dress.

My sister-in-law. Well, no time like the present to welcome her into the family. I whisked her away from the bar and behind the huge Christmas tree. Which was as close to privacy as we were going to get.

“So you did it,” I said, trying not to sound accusatory. “You married my brother.”

“You look really nice,” she said to me, and I was totally thrown for a loop. She was all kinds of still waters running deep. She was hard to get a read on. But when she pushed her glasses up higher on her nose, she revealed some of her nerves, and when she did that…she was impossible not to like.

“Do you really mean that?” I asked.

“Yes, I do.”

I shook my head. Damn it. I liked her and there was more to this engagement and marriage than anyone was being told. “You really are nice,” I said. “My brother doesn’t deserve you.”

“Are you here with a date?” she asked me, carefully hedging the compliment.

“No. I don’t have a date.” What I had was a plan. And a thong.

“Those two,” Penny said, nudging my arm discreetly and tilting her head to the wall behind her. “No, don’t look, he’ll see.”

“W.B.?” I asked, not bothering at all to be discreet. The third prong in my brother’s plan was the new CFO, W.B. Darling. W.B. found out my father was embezzling from the company, which had helped save the company but nearly torn our family apart. W.B. was a good guy for a man who had a spreadsheet shoved up his butt. Joy walked past him without a word and W.B. broke away from the wall to follow. Very interesting.

“Yes. Him and Joy. There’s something going on there, don’t you think?” Penny asked.

Yes! Yes, I did think, as a matter of fact. But Joy was not saying a word about W.B.

“I think Joy is into him, but she says she isn’t,” I said.

“She seems mad at him.”

“Why would she be mad at him?”

“It’s just a hunch,” Penny said.

Over her shoulder I saw half my warehouse crew walking over with napkins wrapped around fresh bottles of beer. That’s how fancy this party was. The bartenders put napkins around the beer so your hand didn’t get wet and cold. And they were going to come grill Penny and give her a hard time that she didn’t deserve on the night of her wedding.

“All right,” I said. “Welcome to the family and all that. Don’t get cornered by my mom.” With that plum bit of advice I took one for the team and went to intercept my crew.

“Holy shit, Sophie, is that you?” Joe Arben asked.

“Yeah, it’s me,” I said, like it was every day I stood there looking the way I did. “What about it?”

Joe whistled, a long, low wolf whistle and maybe at another time, in another boss/employee situation, I’d have had to bust some heads over that, but at that moment I took it as a compliment. And let me tell you, I tried real hard not to look at Joe, but I was very aware that he was looking at me.

He was a kid, nineteen years old, a fairly new hire, and he had made his interest in me obvious. But Joe was also the kind of guy who was interested in anything with boobs. So it wasn’t personal. Even though no one ever looked at me that way. Anyway, I was not letting it go to my head. He was charming and sweet and my employee, and his attention embarrassed me.

So I ignored him.

Sort of.

“Damn girl,” he said. “You are the hottest thing here.”

I could feel myself blushing. “How many girls has he said that to?” I asked Joe’s friend Zavier.

“None,” Zavier said, sipping from his beer, his eyebrow cocked.

I rolled my eyes.

“You having a good time?” I asked the guys.

“This is a real good party, Soph.” Paul Sorvinski, who’d been working in the warehouse for as long as I could remember, carried two plates of shrimp and satay and mini quiches. His wife, the always smiling Marie, set down two beers so she could hug me tight around my neck.

“You look so nice,” she said.