It Must Be Christmas

by Jennifer Crusie, Mandy Baxter, Donna Alward

Genres: Holiday books; Romance Anthologies & Collections; Holiday Romance

Synopsis

Previously published stories from New York Times bestselling author Jennifer Crusie, Mandy Baxter, and Donna Alward, these hot romantic stories share the spirit of love this season.

It’s the most wonderful time of the year, when love is in the cold and frosty air—and desire reaches the boiling point…

Hot Toy
From New York Times bestselling author Jennifer Crusie comes a hilarious, sexy story about a determined shopper who grabs the last action figure off the shelf, only to find herself plunged into the arms of a sexy secret agent. Mayhem under the mistletoe ensues. Business as usual this Christmas season…right?

Christmas with the Billionaire Rancher
Nate wants to stay away from all the women who want his money in Mandy Baxter’s story set deep in the heart of Texas. But when gorgeous do-gooder Chloe Benson comes knocking at his door—in search of funds for her charity—Nate can’t ignore the passion he feels for her. Maybe love is priceless after all?

Christmas at Seashell Cottage
’Tis the season in Jewell Cove when local doctor Charlie Yang finds her quiet, steady life disrupted by both an abandoned baby in the nativity manger and ex-SEAL Dave Ricker. Are these turn of events too good to be true? Or is Christmas working its magic—for real?

Release date: October 4, 2016

Publisher: St. Martin's Publishing Group

Print pages: 384

Sample

Chapter 1
 
Trudy Maxwell pushed her way through the crowded old toy store, fed up with Christmas shopping, Christmas carols, Christmas in general, and toy stores in particular. Especially this toy store. For the worst one in town, it had an awful lot of people in it. Probably only on Christmas Eve, she thought, and stopped a harried-looking teenager wearing an apron and a name tag, accidentally smacking him with her lone shopping bag as she caught his arm. “Oh. Sorry. Listen, I need a Major MacGuffin.”
The kid pulled his arm away. “You and everybody else, lady.”
“Just tell me where they are,” Trudy said, not caring she was being dissed by somebody who probably couldn’t drive yet. Anything to get a homicidal doll that spit toxic waste.
“When we had them, they were in the back, row four, to the right. But those things have been gone since before Thanksgiving.” The kid shrugged. “You shoulda tried eBay.”
“And I would have, if I hadn’t just found out I needed it today,” Trudy said with savage cheerfulness. “So, row four, to the right? Thank you.”
She threaded her way through the crowd, heading for the back of the store. Above her, Madonna cooed “Santa Baby,” the ancient store speakers making the carol to sex and greed sound a little tinny. Whatever had happened to “The Little Drummer Boy”? That had been annoying, too, but in a traditional way, like fruitcake. She’d be happy to hear a “rum-pa-pum-pum” again, anything that didn’t make Christmas sound like it was about getting stuff.
Especially since she was desperate to get some stuff.
The crowd thinned out as she got to the back of the store. Halfway down the last section of the fourth row, she found the dusty, splintered wood shelf marked with a card that said: Major MacGuffin, the Tough One Two. It was, of course, empty.
“Damn,” she said, and turned to look at the shelf next to it, hoping a careless stock boy might have—
Six feet two of broad-shouldered, dark-haired grave disappointment stood there, looking as startled as she was, and her treacherous heart lurched sideways at the sight.
“Uh, merry Christmas, Trudy,” Nolan Mitchell said, clearly wishing he were somewhere else.
Yes, this makes my evening, she thought, and turned away.
“Trudy?”
“I don’t talk to strangers,” Trudy said over her shoulder, and tried to ignore her pounding heart to concentrate on the lack of MacGuffins in front of her. She’d been polite and well behaved with Nolan Mitchell for three dates, and he’d still dumped her, so the hell with him.
“Look, I’m sorry I didn’t call—”
“I really don’t care,” Trudy said, keeping her back to him. “In October, I cared. In November, I decided you were a thoughtless, inconsiderate loser. And in December, I forgot all about you.”
Madonna sang, “Been an awful good girl,” and Trudy thought, Like I had a choice. The least he could have done was seduce her before he abandoned her.
“It’s not like I seduced and abandoned you,” he said, and when she turned and glared at him, he added, “Okay, wrong thing to say. I really am sorry I didn’t call. Work got crazy—”
“You’re a literature professor,” Trudy said. “Chinese literature. How can that get craz—” She shook her head. “Never mind. You didn’t like me, you didn’t call, I don’t care.” She turned back to the shelf, concentrating on not concentrating on Nolan. So it was empty. That didn’t necessarily mean there were no MacGuffins. Maybe—
“Okay, I’m the rat here,” Nolan said, with the gravelly good humor in his voice that had made her weaken and agree to go out the fourth time he’d asked her even though he was a lit professor, even though she’d known better.
The silence stretched out and he added, “It was rude and inconsiderate of me.”
She thought, So he has a nice voice, so he’s sorry, big deal, and tried hard to ignore him, and then he said, “Come on. It’s Christmas. Peace on earth. Goodwill to men. I’m a man.”
You certainly are, her id said.
We’ve been through this, she told her baser self. He’s no good. We don’t like him. He’s bad for us.
“Okay, so you’ve forgotten I exist. That means we can start over.” He came around her and stuck his hand out. “Hi. I’m Nolan Mitchell and I—”
“No,” Trudy said, annoyed with herself for wanting to take his hand. “We can’t start over. You were a grave disappointment. Grave disappointments do not get do-overs.”
She turned away again and put her mind back on the MacGuffin. Okay, this was the worst toy store in the city, so the inventory control had to be lousy. If somebody had shoved a box to one side …
She dropped her shopping bag and began to methodically take down the faded boxes of toys to the right of the empty MacGuffin shelf. They were ancient but evidently not valuable Star Wars figures, a blast from her past. There was a little Han Solo in Nolan, she thought. Maybe that was why she’d fallen for him. It wasn’t him at all, it was George Lucas and that damn light saber. She put Nolan out of her mind and kept taking down boxes until she reached the last layer. None of them were MacGuffins.
“Trudy, look, I—”
“Go away; I have problems.”
“You have Star Wars problems?”
“No. I have Major MacGuffin problems. If you know where to get one, I will talk to you. Otherwise, leave.”
“I can’t.” Nolan smiled at her sheepishly. “I’m looking for a MacGuffin, too.”
“I figured you more for the Barbie type.” Trudy started to stack the boxes back on the shelf again.
“No, no, I’m a collector.” Nolan picked up a box and put it back for her, and she thought about telling him to go away again, but she really didn’t want to put all the boxes back by herself. “It’s important to get the toys mint in the box.” He held up a box with a crumpled corner. “See, this is no good.”
“Thank you for sharing.” Trudy put another box back. When he continued to help, she decided he could put them back by himself and moved to the dusty boxes to the left of the empty MacGuffin shelf. Action figures from The Fantastic Four. The store really did have an inventory problem; those were completely out-of-date. Well, if there wasn’t a Mac to the right, there would be one to the left. Life could not be so cruel as to send her a Nolan but not a MacGuffin.
She began to methodically remove every Fantastic Four box on the shelf, while Nolan restocked the Star Wars figures and tried to make small talk about the MacGuffin, asking her if she’d bought one there before, if she shopped in the store often, if she knew anybody who’d bought one there. She ignored him until she’d pulled out the last box and there was still no MacGuffin, and then she took a deep breath. Okay, Plan B. Maybe on the other side of the shelf …
“Trudy, I—”
“Unless you have a MacGuffin, I’m not interested.”
“Okay,” he said. “I understand.” He put the last of the Star Wars boxes back and smiled at her. “Have a great Christmas and a happy new year, Trudy.”
He turned to go and she turned back to the shelf, irrationally depressed that he was going. She wanted him to go, that was the point—
She heard him say, “Hello, Reese,” and then somebody else said, “Hey, I heard you guys talking about the MacGuffins. You found any?” and Trudy looked up to see the kind of guy who looked like he’d say “dude” a lot: early twenty-something, clueless face, muscled shoulders, tousled hair. The only non-surfer thing about him was his shopping bag with a pink confetti-printed box sticking out of the top. Both the box and the guy looked vaguely familiar, but Trudy couldn’t place either one.
He grinned at her. “Hey, Miss Maxwell, you’re lookin’ good.”
Trudy looked closer but still didn’t recognize him.
“You don’t remember me.” His grin widened with forgiveness, and he added, “I sure remember you,” and Trudy thought, What a shame he’s too young for me. I could seduce him in front of Nolan.
He stepped closer. “I’m Reese Daniels, your father’s research assistant last year. You helped me find that book on the Ming Dynasty your father wanted. You know, in the library.”
“Good place to find books,” Nolan said, his voice considerably cooler than it had been when he’d talked to her.
“Right. Reese. Got it,” Trudy said, placing him now as the guy her father had called the most inept RA of his career.
Reese smiled at her. “I sure have missed your dad since he went to London.”
“Oh, we all have,” Trudy lied, and stuck out her hand. “Call me Trudy.” She looked at Nolan. “You can call me Miss Maxwell,” she said to him. “No, wait, you’re not going to call me at all. Weren’t you leaving?” Reese still held on to her hand, so she took it back.
He nodded to Nolan. “So you and Professor Mitchell found a MacGuffin?”
“Professor Mitchell and I are not together.” Trudy picked up her shopping bag and moved around both of them. “And I haven’t found a MacGuffin yet. But I will.”
Reese followed her around to the next row and the other side of the empty MacGuffin shelf. “Well, I’m not sorry you’re not with Professor Mitchell, Trudy,” he said when they’d rounded the corner. “I never got the chance to get to know you better. Your dad worked me pretty hard. But the best part about being his RA was always seeing you.”
“Thank you.” Okay, for some reason this infant was trying to pick her up. Whatever. She had problems, so later for him.
Trudy zeroed in on the boxes that backed up against the MacGuffin shelf. Dolls this time, with big heads and miniskirts and too much eye makeup. Too bad Leroy wasn’t a girl; she could have loaded him up with pop-tarts. But no, he had to have a violent, antisocial ’Guffin.
“Men.” She put her shopping bag down again and began to take the dolls off the shelf. Over the tops she could see Nolan restocking Fantastic Fours. He shook his head at her, probably disgusted she was flirting with an infant like Reese, and she turned away to see the infant looking at her, confused.
“Men?” he said. “Did I say something wrong?”
“What?” Trudy said, stacking doll boxes on the floor. “Oh, not you. My nephew, Leroy. He’s five and he wants a Major MacGuffin doll, and of course, I can’t find one.”
“Yeah, you had to shop early for those,” Reese said, sounding sympathetic. “So I guess you haven’t seen one here?”
“I would have shopped early if I’d known his father wasn’t going to get him one,” Trudy said, exasperated. “But since his father told me he was going to, I didn’t.”
“So what are you doing over here?” Reese frowned, looking at the dolls she was taking down.
“I’m looking for a misplaced MacGuffin. This place is pretty sloppy, and I’m hoping there’s one stuck at the back of a shelf someplace because if there isn’t, I’m screwed.” She took the last box down and faced another empty shelf.
On the other side, Nolan looked serious as he put back the last of the Fantastic Four boxes. He couldn’t possibly care that she was talking to Reese. Unless he was one of those guys who didn’t want something until somebody else wanted it. He hadn’t seemed like that kind of guy.
He’d seemed pretty much perfect: smart, funny, kind, thoughtful …
Ignore him, she told herself, and started to put the boxes back. Okay, suppose I was hiding a toy so I could come back and get it later, maybe when I had more money. I found the last MacGuffin, but I didn’t have enough to pay for it, so I needed to hide it. The first thing I’d do is go to another row of shelves so nobody who wanted one would trip over it accidentally.
Nolan came around the end of the shelf and started to say something and then saw all the doll boxes on the floor. “Great.”
Trudy ignored him to smile at Reese and then picked up her bag to go look in a different aisle.
“So no MacGuffin,” Reese said. “Really sorry about that.”
“Yep,” Trudy said, and then stopped when she caught another glimpse of the pink confetti-patterned box sticking out of Reese’s shopping bag. “What is that?”
He looked down. “This? It’s some nail polish doll my niece wanted.”
Nail polish doll? Trudy reached down and pulled the box out of the bag. “Oh, my God,” she said, looking closer at the Pepto-Bismol pink box that said: Twinkletoes! in silver sparkly paint. “This doll is twenty-five years old!”
“I think it’s a reissue,” Reese said, sounding confused as he tried to take it back.
“Is the box mint?” Nolan said, and Reese frowned at him and tugged on the box again.
“A reissue.” Trudy held on to the box. Her sister would have a heart attack if she knew they were making these again. She brought the box closer to see through the clear plastic. Yep, it was the same pouting blonde bimbo, Princess Twinkletoes, and there at the bottom next to Twinkletoes’ fat little feet was the same pink plastic manicure set with three heart-shaped bottles of polish—pink, silver, and purple—that had made Courtney’s six-year-old heart beat faster, the Hot Toy of 1981. “Where did you get this?”
Reese yanked the box from her hands and nodded to the next row. “Over there,” he said, sliding the box back into his bag. “There are a lot of them.”
Trudy rounded the corner to see the Twinkletoes shelf, crammed full of hot pink boxes. Evidently lightning did not strike twice; Twink was clearly not the Hot Toy of 2006. You get a little age on you and nobody wants you, Trudy thought. Well, unless you were Barbie. That bitch lasted forever. Trudy picked up a Twinkletoes box.
Reese came to stand beside her. “Your nephew wants a doll?”
“This is the doll my little sister never got,” Trudy said. And she could use some payback this Christmas.
“How old’s your little sister?”
“Thirty-one.”
“Oh.”
Trudy looked up at the confusion in his voice. “Courtney was supposed to get this the Christmas she was six, but my dad forgot. He told her it fell off Santa’s sleigh.”
“Uh huh,” Reese said, probably trying to picture her academic father talking about Santa.
“That was his line for whenever he forgot the Christmas presents,” Trudy said, thinking of Leroy, waiting at home for his MacGuffin. If she didn’t find a MacGuffin, would she be reduced to the “fell off the sleigh” line?
Never.
“Did he forget a lot?” Reese said, sympathy in his voice.
“Pretty much every year. You know professors. Absentminded.” Trudy shook her head. “Never mind. I’m rambling. My mind’s on my sister and my nephew.”
“Well, hey, it’s Christmas. That’s where your mind is supposed to be. Family.” Reese smiled at her, gripping his own Twinkletoes box. “Listen, I have to get going, but maybe we can have coffee sometime?”
“Sure.” Trudy smiled back at him automatically, her mind on the Twinkletoes. Would a gift that was a couple of decades late distract Courtney from her divorce?
Hell, it couldn’t hurt.
Reese walked away, and she looked closer at the Twinkletoes box in her hands. It had a crumpled corner and she remembered what Nolan had said. The box should be mint. She put her shopping bag down and began to take the Twinkletoes boxes off the shelf. Courtney was going to get a perfect Twinkletoes, pink box and all.
Nolan came around the end of the row and sighed when he saw the boxes on the floor.
“Go away.” Trudy took down the next pink box.
“Listen, is there anything I can do to make you not so mad?”
“Mad? I’m not mad.” Trudy studied the Twinkletoes box. Smudge on the top. She dropped it on Nolan’s foot. “Why would I be mad?”
He picked it up. “That’s what I asked.”
She pulled another Twinkletoes box off the shelf and shoved it at him. “Okay, here’s why I’m mad. I didn’t want to go out with you because you were a professor, and I grew up with a professor, and it was no fun because you get forgotten a lot because your dad is thinking about something that happened four millennia ago, so I said no, four times I said no, but you kept at me and I weakened and went out and I really liked you, you bastard, and you were smart and you were funny”—she shoved another box at him—“and I thought, gee, maybe this will work out, maybe this is a professor who won’t forget, but evidently it was just the thrill of the chase or something because you dropped me”—she threw the next box at him and he caught it, balancing it with the first two—“and I never knew why since you never bothered to tell me; you just fell right off the sleigh—”
“Sleigh?” Nolan said.
“… so I’m a little upset with you.”
Nolan sighed. “Look, you changed.”
“Of course I changed,” Trudy snapped. “It’s been three months. I’ve grown. I’ve matured. I’m in a new and better place now. A place without you. Go away.” She went back to the Twinkletoes shelf, pulling boxes off at random and dropping them on the floor, appalled to realize that she was close to tears. He did not matter to her; the fact that she’d thought he was darling was immaterial; the fact that she’d told her sister he might be The One was immaterial; the fact that her father had said, Nolan Mitchell, that’s a little out of your league, isn’t it? was … Well, her father was a jerk, so that didn’t count.
“No, you changed from the library,” Nolan was saying. “You were funny in the library. You talked fast and made weird jokes and surprised me. I liked that. And then I took you out and you, well, you kind of went dull on me.”
Trudy stopped dropping boxes on the floor. “You took me to a faculty party. If I hadn’t gone dull on you, you’d have lost points. You’d have been Nolan who brought that weird-ass librarian to the October gin fling. I was helping you.”
“Did I ask for help?” Nolan said, exasperated.
“And you took me to dinner at the department head’s house. You wanted me weird there?”
“I couldn’t get out of that,” Nolan said.
“And then the Chinese film festival.” Trudy dropped another box to the floor. “I thought I was going to see Crouching Tiger Two, but it was some horrible depressing thing about people weeping in dark rooms.”
“It was?” Nolan said, confused.
“Not that you’d know, since you left right after it started,” Trudy snarled, flinging a box at him. “You got a call and walked out of the theater, and I was left with people weeping in Chinese—”
She stopped to stare at the shelf, the next box in her hand, her heart thudding harder than it had when she’d first seen Nolan.
There was a camouflage-colored box at the back.
She dropped the Twinkletoes box and pulled out the camo box and read the label: Major MacGuffin, the Tough One! “Oh, my God.” Trudy held on to it with both hands, almost shaking.
The box was not mint—the cellophane was torn over the opening, a corner was squashed in with a black X marked on it, and there were white scuff marks on the bottom—but the MacGuffin scowled out at her through the plastic, looking like a homicidal Cabbage Patch doll dressed in camouflage, a grenade in one hand and a gun in the other, violent and disgusting and the only thing Leroy wanted for Christmas.
“I do believe in Santa,” Trudy said as Nolan came closer.
“That’s a Major MacGuffin.” He sounded stunned.
“Can you believe it?” Trudy was so amazed she forgot to be mad.
“No,” Nolan said. “I can’t. I knew you were an amazing woman, but this puts you in a whole new league.”
“What?” Trudy said.
“I’ll give you two hundred bucks for it,” Nolan said.
“No.” Trudy stepped away from him, holding on to the MacGuffin box.
Nolan smiled at her, radiating sincerity. “I know, your nephew wants a Major MacGuffin, but he doesn’t want that one. He wants the Mac Two. The one that spits toxic waste and packs a tac nuke, right?”
Trudy thought of Leroy, waxing rhapsodic about how the ’Guffin spit green stuff when you squeezed him. “Yes.”
“What you have there is a MacGuffin One,” Nolan said, sounding sympathetic and entirely too reasonable. “Last year’s model. No toxic waste.”
Trudy looked back at the box. It did look different from the picture Leroy had shown her. “What does this one do?”
“It has a gun. Basically, it shoots the other dolls.”
“And the hand grenade?”
“Just a plastic ball. Doesn’t do anything.” He shrugged, unimpressed.
“Damn.” Trudy looked down at the doll’s ugly face.
“Two fifty,” Nolan said.
Trudy glared at him. “No. This is for my nephew. And I have to go now. Thanks for putting the boxes back.”
“Trudy, wait,” Nolan said, but she picked up a perfect Twinkletoes box, stepped over the rest of the pink boxes, and headed for the checkout counter, her belief in Santa restored if not her belief in the rest of male humanity.
*   *   *
Trudy got in the long line to the register, clutching both the Mac and the Twinkletoes boxes, stepping back as a woman in a red and green bobble hat slid in front of her at the last minute. Then Nolan got in line behind her and said, “Three hundred. It only costs forty-nine fifty new. That’s six times—”
Trudy jerked her head up. “No. I’ll never find another one of these tonight.”
Nolan nodded, not arguing. “Okay. Five hundred.”
“Are you nuts?” Trudy said.
“No, I told you, I’m a collector.” He stepped closer, and she remembered how nice it had been having him step closer on the three lousy dates they’d had.
She stepped away.
Nolan nodded to the Mac. “You are holding a doll that is actually rarer than the Mac Two. They didn’t make many Ones.”
“It’s not rarer from where I’m standing,” Trudy said. “I actually have this one, and there are no Mac Twos in sight.”
“That looks like an original box,” Nolan said. “May I?”
“No,” Trudy said, holding on to it and the Twinkletoes box, trying to put her shopping bag between them to block him, but he’d already opened the top and was reaching in. “Hey.” She elbowed his hand away as he pulled out the instruction sheet. “Give me that,” she said, and he opened it so that she could see the drawing of the MacGuffin showing how to detach the silencer from the gun.
“No toxic waste,” Nolan said. “It’s a Mac One.”
He slid the instructions back in the box. “Two thousand,” he said, and then Trudy heard somebody say, “I’ll be damned,” and turned to see Reese staring at her from the front of the checkout line.
“You found it,” he said.
“Yes.” She turned back to Nolan as he closed the box again. “No. I’m not selling it. This one is Leroy’s.” She checked to make sure the MacGuffin was still in the box, complete with hand grenade and gun, and then her cell phone rang.
She fumbled the boxes until she could hold both of them with one arm, looked at the caller ID, clicked the phone on, and said, “Hello, Courtney.”
“Did you get it?” Courtney said, and Trudy pictured her, sitting on the edge of her Pottery Barn couch, her thin fingers gripping her Restoration Hardware forties black dial phone, every auburn Pre-Raphaelite ringlet on her head wired with tension.
“Sort of.” Trudy looked through the plastic window on the front of the Mac box at the fat little homicidal doll. “Damn, he’s ugly.”
“What do you mean, sort of? Did you get him?”
The line moved and Trudy stepped forward, bumping her shopping bag into the woman in the bobble hat.
“I’m so sorry,” she said as the woman turned. “Really sorry.”
The woman smiled at her, motherly in a knitted cap with red and green bobbles, her arms full of teddy bears. “Isn’t it just awful, this Christmas rush?…”
Her eyes narrowed as she saw the MacGuffin. Animals in the bush probably looked like that when they sighted their prey. Trudy clutched the MacGuffin box tighter.
The woman jerked her face up to Trudy’s. “Where did you get that?”
“In the back, shoved behind some other boxes.” Trudy tried to sound cheerful and open. “Boy, did I get lucky.”
The woman’s chin went up. “That’s not this year’s.”
“No toxic waste.” Trudy nodded. “Well, you can’t have everything.”
“I’ll give you a hundred dollars for it,” the woman said, her eyes avid.
Piker. “No, thank you.”
“Who are you talking to?” Courtney said, her voice crackling with phone static.
“A lovely woman who just tried to buy the MacGuffin from me.”
“No!”
“Of course not, but listen, I’ve got last year’s model. The Mac One. I don’t think—”
“Evil Nemesis Brandon is getting this year’s model. The Mac Two. With extra toxic waste.”
Trudy shifted her weight to her other foot. “Okay, this ‘Evil Nemesis Brandon’ stuff? You have to stop that. Do you want Leroy thrown out of kindergarten for calling names?”
“Evil Nemesis Brandon’s mother knows we don’t have a Mac,” Courtney said. “I saw her today at Stanford Trudeau’s Christmas party. She said if we hadn’t found one, Brandon would let Leroy borrow his last year’s doll.”
“Okay, she’s a terrible person, but you have to stop calling her kid names.”
Trudy shifted the boxes, trying not to drop either one, and the eyes of the woman in front of her followed the Mac box. A man with a cap with earflaps, standing in front of the woman in front of Trudy, looked back idly and then froze and said, “Is that a Major MacGuffin?”
“Last year’s model,” Trudy said to him, and shifted the boxes again. It’s like being on the veldt. Gazelle vs. lions.
The woman in front of her stepped closer, and Trudy backed up and bumped into Nolan.
Lots of lions.
“Do you have any idea how humiliating that was?” Courtney was saying. “Do you have any idea—”
“Well, that’s what you get for going to a cocktail party while I’m busting my butt searching for a nonexistent war toy.” The line moved up and Trudy followed, praying she wouldn’t drop the Mac box. There’d be a bloodbath if she did. “I’m all for you getting out and playing well with others, but it’s Christmas Eve and you should be home with your family, baking something, not looking for your second husband. I’m sure Stanford Trudeau is a lovely man with an excellent retirement portfolio, but—”
“I’m baking gingerbread men and a gingerbread house right now, and Stanford Trudeau is five. It was Leroy’s playgroup’s Christmas party. And that woman mocked me.”
Trudy took a deep breath and reminded herself that Courtney had troubles. “Okay, so now you can tell her he has his