Sheila Roberts - The Lodge on Holly Road

Still, he’d planned on trying. He’d bought a bunch of Christmas movies for them to watch and stocked up on cocoa, put up the tree and stuck their gift cards in among the branches. “I figured we’d have Christmas at home,” he said. Now he sounded like an ingrate and he didn’t want to do that. Anyway, it was too late now. They were halfway to Icicle Falls. The Polar Express had left the station.

“I think this will be good,” Brooke said. “It’s our gift to you.”

“Your gift?” Staying in some lodge would be expensive. “Oh, no. I’ll take care of it.”

“Daddy,” she said firmly. “You’ve always taken care of us. And you’ve always been Santa,” she added, smiling at him. “Now it’s our turn. So don’t ruin the game.”

He sighed and looked out the window at the stands of evergreens they were rushing past. He guessed he could play along.

As long as nobody asked him to be Santa this year. Because Santa had lost his Christmas spirit and he didn’t care if he ever found it again.

Chapter Two

All I Want for Christmas Is...

“What are you doing?” screeched Mrs. Steele, startling Missy Monroe.

This was not good because Missy was in midcut. The scissors took a slide and an extra half inch of hair disappeared.

“Ack!” Mrs. Steele cried.

“Sorry,” Missy muttered.

“Stop!” Mrs. Steele commanded. “That’s too short!”

It sure was now. “I’m sorry,” Missy said earnestly. “I thought you said you wanted to go shorter so the cut would last.”

“Shorter, not bald,” snapped her unhappy customer, scowling at their reflections in the mirror.

Short of gluing the woman’s hair back on, there was nothing Missy could do now. “I think, once we’ve styled it, you’ll like it.”

“Style? You have no style. How did I get stuck with you, anyway?”

Missy had just been thinking the same thing about Mrs. Steele. But she’d been the next available stylist, and there’d been no way she could wiggle out of taking the woman. She strongly suspected all the other stylists had been dawdling over their haircuts in an effort to avoid getting the old witch. Dummy her. She should’ve dawdled, too.

Nobody liked Mrs. Steele. She was sixty-something and skinny and wore a frown right along with her expensive clothes. Maybe if she ate more chocolate she’d be happier. Or if she went to some couture hair salon. But Mrs. Steele was notoriously cheap, which was why she was at Style Savings Salon. She never tipped and she was never happy, no matter what you did.

“Well, it’s too late now,” Mrs. Steele said with an irritable flick of the hand. “You’ve already gotten the color wrong. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that you can’t cut hair, either.”

Mrs. Steele had picked that color, but now it was Missy’s fault. Sooo unfair. She loved doing hair and helping women look their best, but sometimes she hated this job.

“Don’t worry,” she said. “It’ll look nice.” Well, the cut would, anyway. If Mrs. Steele had listened to her advice, the color would have been perfect, too. After a certain age, raven’s-wing black didn’t do a woman any favors.

Fortunately for Mrs. Steele, Missy knew what she was doing. She’d find a way to blend in this little slip of the scissors. She snipped some more and then put in some of the salon’s hair root lifter. This really was going to look nice...if only Mrs. Steele would stop frowning.

But all the product in the world, all the careful styling, couldn’t redeem the fact that Missy had failed to be psychic and know what Mrs. Steele had really wanted, which was probably to look like Jennifer Lawrence or some other movie star. (Good luck with that.)

Mrs. Steele glared at herself in the mirror, her thin lips pressed together in an angry line. Then she glared at Missy. “My God, but you’re incompetent.”

She was not! She did hair, not plastic surgery. If Mrs. Steele wanted a miracle, she should have gone to church. Missy bit her lip to keep in the angry words.

Now everyone in the salon was staring, all the other last-minute holiday customers no doubt thanking God that they hadn’t gotten stuck with the incompetent stylist, all the other stylists thankful that they hadn’t gotten stuck with Mrs. Steele. Missy could feel the heat of embarrassment over this undeserved criticism from her collarbone to the roots of her powder-blue dye job.

“I’m sorry you’re not happy,” she said.

“I’m certainly not. The color’s wrong and the cut is awful. I’m not paying for this.”

Oh, great. Mrs. Steele was going to walk, and that meant it would come out of Missy’s paycheck.

“And I’m not coming back here,” she added as Missy removed the plastic cape.

“Good riddance,” muttered the stylist next to Missy as Mrs. Steele stormed out the door.

“I thought her haircut was pretty,” said the woman sitting in the chair.

It was, darn it all. Well, never mind. In another hour she’d be done and out of here and on her way to having the best Christmas ever. She got her broom and swept up the raven’s-wing black locks left behind by the old crow, all the while hoping that a big tipper would come in before they closed.

The door opened and in came—oh, no, not this guy. Again, all the other stylists started cutting in slow motion. Nobody wanted Larry the lech.

“Welcome to Style Savings,” sang out Shiloh, their manager. She went to where their cash register and appointment schedule sat to get old Larry checked in.

Larry was somewhere in his forties and, more than anything, he resembled the Pillsbury Doughboy. He was the king of the boob grazes, and there wasn’t a stylist in the salon he hadn’t hit on, including Missy. And she’d bet that today he was going to be all hers. Goody.

Sure enough, Shiloh was giving her The Look. She set aside her broom and came over to conduct Larry to her chair. She could practically feel his pervy stare burning her butt as they crossed the salon. Ugh.

She settled Larry in his chair and fastened a cape around his neck. “What would you like today, Larry?”

“You,” he said with a wink.

Gag. If she was married she could flash him her ring.

But marriage had never happened for her. Men had happened, two to be exact, one for each kid. Man Number One had been what some might have considered a youthful mistake, but she’d loved him like crazy. And when she got pregnant, they’d planned on getting married...until he tried to break up a bar fight and got killed for his trouble. Right before he’d been about to enlist in the army, too. Even though she’d had a child with him, his parents hadn’t bothered to make a connection with their grandchild. Hardly surprising considering that they’d pretty much written off their son.

That was sick and wrong if you asked Missy. People could change. She would never write off her kids. They were the best part of her life, even if things hadn’t worked out with their dads.

And boy, things really hadn’t worked out with Man Number Two, who was also out of the picture but for a completely different reason. She’d jumped into that relationship, driven by loneliness, anxious to find a father for Carlos. Man Number Two had been separated from his wife. They’d been ready to get a divorce...until wifey informed him she was pregnant. He told Missy just as she was about to break the news of her own pregnancy to him. (She’d read somewhere that condoms were 98 percent effective. Leave it to her to land in the 2-percent category!) His family was happy that he’d finally “come to his senses” and was reuniting with his wife. They’d never said anything to her face but she knew they’d never approved of her. She wasn’t about to stay around and be accused of screwing up the man’s life. So, figuring a pregnant wife trumped a pregnant ex-girlfriend, Missy had decided to let him go and stick with single parenthood. She was already raising a child on her own. What was one more? By Man Number Three, she was using more reliable birth control, but she wasn’t making smart choices. He hadn’t been good father material. He hadn’t even been good boyfriend material, the cheating rat.