Checking her gift again, she reached down to straighten its bow, then turned in search of another drink, and perhaps some nibbles.
*
“You know she’s a Christmas elf, don’t you?”
Cole turned at the sound of his brother, Rhod’s, voice and followed his gaze to the petite woman stood at the buffet table. Instantly, every cell in his body perked up to pay attention.
Mia.
“She is?” He asked in confusion, without taking his eyes off the tiny woman.
She’d joined the agency in the summer, and he hadn’t been able to get her out of his mind. Tiny and curvy, with masses of dark hair that reminded him of roast chestnuts and caramel eyes that sparkled with mystery, she was temptation personified. A temptation he’d have been quick to snap up, except for the fact that she went bright red and ran off every time he tried to talk to her.
Shy was not the word.
“Well,” he said with a shrug. “That explains some things.”
Like the little tug just under his breastbone every time he saw her, and the need to make her smile…to see those sad eyes sparkle with laughter. A Christmas elf without Christmas, without the Pole, was a sad creature. Unlike the Claus elves, who carried Christmas within them, Christmas elves didn’t. They needed regular infusions of the Christmas spirit to make them the happy-go-lucky creatures that nature had intended them to be. The Christmas in him felt her sadness, sensed the void within her, and needed to fill it.
But it didn’t explain other things. Like the need to wrap his arms around her, or the need to find out if those plump, bee-stung lips tasted as good as they looked. It certainly didn’t explain the red mist that wanted to descend every time she smiled at another man. Those were down to good old primal instinct, and the fact he thought she was as sexy as hell.
He tracked her with his eyes as she moved around the room. Small groups of people parted to welcome her, and Cole had to grit his teeth as Darrick, one of the pixie operatives, casually looped an arm around her shoulders. He could tell from the set of her body she wasn’t comfortable with the casual touching.
“If you want her,” Rhod bumped Cole’s shoulder with his own. “You better make a move before Darrick does.”
Cole growled at him, but Rhod just laughed and walked off in search of his wife, Candy. It was still a running joke at the Pole, that only a Claus elf, that only Rhod, could find and marry a woman called Candy Kane. Now she was Candy Claus, which didn’t have quite the same ring, but made no difference, over half his brothers still fancied themselves madly in love with her.
Cole grinned into his drink, tipping his head back and finishing it in one gulp. There was one thing that those brothers forgot though. Rhod and Cole might be Santa’s for one night, and damn good Santa’s at that, but for the rest of the year they were protection operatives. Fucking good ones too boot, with all the skills and abilities required to guard VIPs, celebrities and sometimes, even royalty. Not just that, some jobs the agency took on were location and retrieval. It wasn’t unknown for them to drop into a war zone to retrieve a fairy Princess, or track a wyvern across the Antarctic.
He glimpsed Mia through the crowd, slipping out of the door opposite onto the terrace and smiled to himself. And those skills would come in useful to track and capture a delightful armful of a Christmas elf. Because he was determined that tonight, she stopped running from him.
Chapter Two
Although Mia liked Christmas and parties, and all the revelry that came with it, she wasn’t a people person. Elves had a reputation of being cutesy and sweet. There was also that children’s book thing about them sitting on toadstools. So much so, that for the first three weeks working at the PPA, she’d had to endure the toadstool jokes. But elves were just like anybody else, they had their likes and dislikes. Some, like her cousin Roger, were assholes, and some wanted to party.
Mia though was a little bit more of a homebody. She liked the parties, liked getting dressed up and looking pretty (not cute, pretty. There was a difference), but she didn’t like crowds of people. She didn’t like being closed in. So after a while, she grabbed a drink and slipped out to the sanctuary of the terrace.
It was a lovely terrace, on the boardroom level and wrapped around the front of the building. Access to the back was restricted, but she knew that was just because the Dragons used it as a landing pad; people wandering around when creatures the size and weight of inner city buses hit the deck was a safety risk.
The Christmas decorations extended outside. Wreaths of holly and ivy wrapped around the balustrade, and yet more fairy lights twinkled among the leaves and berries. Picking a spot along the railing, she rested her elbows on the wood, and looked out. She loved the city at night, all the twinkling lights and the sense of peace that came when most of the population settled down to sleep. It was even better this time of year, at Christmas, when magic hung in the air.