Ghostwriter of Christmas Past

  Table of Contents

  Blurb

  Dedication

  Text

  About the Author

  By TA Moore

  Visit Dreamspinner Press

  Copyright

  Ghostwriter of Christmas Past

  By TA Moore

  Ever since ghostwriter Jason Burke ended up in loco parentis for his orphaned niece, Mallory, he’s been trying. He goes to parent/teacher events, and he makes packed lunches, so he definitely didn’t mean to forget about Christmas. He just hasn’t celebrated it since he left home under a cloud years ago.

  Put on the spot, Jason makes the snap decision to take Mallory to see where he and her father spent their Christmases as kids. The last thing he expects is to run into Tommy, his ex—ex-best friend, ex-boyfriend—who is still living in town… and working as a sheriff’s deputy.

  It’s hard to avoid someone in a small town—and maybe Jason doesn’t want to. He got Mallory a Christmas, and maybe now it’s time to get himself a Christmas boyfriend. But first, he owes Tommy some explanations.

  To the Five, always. To my Mum, who’s getting this for Christmas!

  “WHAT ABOUT you, Jason?” Harriet swiveled on the barstool to face him and raised her perfectly groomed eyebrows curiously. “What are you doing for Christmas?”

  Jason’s brain—which a client once called a perpetual motion machine for bullshit—stalled.

  They were at their agent’s Christmas party. Harriet was wearing mistletoe in her cleavage, and the head of the agency was dressed up as Santa and encouraging pretty girls to sit on her knee. There was a tree in the corner of the bar with shot glass ornaments and drunken reindeer lights. It was hardly a weird question.

  But this year his rote answer of “hot driver/waiter/cute paralegal” might not cut it.

  “Shit.” He took a drink of whiskey.

  “Ah,” Harriet said. She smirked around the lip of her glass, her bright-red lips glossy with smugness. “You forgot about the kid, didn’t you?”

  His jaw tightened. He never forgot about Mallory. Boxes of her stuff filled his apartment. They were shoved in corners and packed into the back of closets. He’d cleared her out a dresser, and it turned out that wasn’t enough to fit a whole life in. His calendar was full of desperate, hopeful reminders to find a dentist and pick up the cereal she said she liked, as though he could fake it if his online calendar looked like it knew what he was doing.

  He tried. That was the thing. Ever since the social worker knocked on his door with bad news and a sullen kid waiting in the car, he’d tried his best. It was just never good enough. He got her enrolled in school and then forgot to pick her up after she stayed late for music, forgot to get her a new soccer kit, and forgot shoving fifty bucks into the kid’s wallet as she headed out on a school trip wasn’t a substitute for a packed lunch.

  And every time he did, there was someone there to sigh and shake their head and pick up the slack. They weren’t even surprised anymore. What else could you expect from Jason?

  Now Harriet, who hadn’t bothered to arrange summer camp and instead paid her son’s sitter to take the kid camping for three weeks, got to roll her eyes at him as though he’d forgotten Christmas?

  Well, fuck it.

  “Actually I’m planning to take her away for Christmas,” he said.

  Harriet arched a skeptical brow and snorted, “Sure,” into her liquor.

  That committed him to the lie. Maybe he couldn’t pull off the parent crap in real life, but he was damned if he was going to be shit in his lies as well. “She grew up in Florida. Now she lives in San Diego. Mallory thinks a white Christmas is going to Disney and riding the Matterhorn on Christmas Eve.”

  He sounded convincing enough for Harriet to put down her glass and give him a dubious look. “Have you ever seen a white Christmas?” she asked.

  “I grew up in Malachite, New York,” he said. She looked blank, and he grinned bleakly. “Exactly. It’s like Ithaca, if Ithaca were shit. I basically grew up in the fucking Laura Ingalls books, Harriet. We had sheep, sports, and snow. In fact, that was all we had. So yeah, I’ve seen a white Christmas.”

  Harriet looked pained as she tried to fit that piece of information into her image of Jason. He didn’t blame her. When he left Malachite behind, he did his best to leave behind the person who lived there—for a lot of reasons. These days when he wore jeans, they were designer. His hair was cut in a salon, not at the table in the kitchen. And he dated surfer boys instead of….

  Yeah. He didn’t go there. Not even with half a bottle of whiskey warming his stomach.

  “So what?” Harriet asked. She leaned her elbow on the bar and cupped her chin in her hand so she could frown at him. “You’re going to take the kid back to your hometown for Christmas?”

  Fuck no. As far as he’d fleshed out his lie, he imagined a ski lodge or a luxury hotel, hot chocolate, and watching the snow through glass, maybe some sort of cute hat with ears for Mallory. Except….

  He remembered Christmas in Malachite. The reindeer Mr. Jessop brought down and penned in town to convince the little kids they were going to audition to join Santa’s team. Mint-chocolate milkshakes in the local café and carts selling peppermint sticks and bags of hot chestnuts on the corner. Nothing you couldn’t find in your local Cracker Barrel, but all the better for the cold and the pennies and the cheap paper bag that burned your hand.

  That was just the sort of Thomas Kinkade sentimental crap that might convince Mallory it was something he’d planned all along. It wasn’t going to be a good Christmas, not when being an orphan was still a raw hollow for Mallory, but he’d like to avoid making it even crappier, if he could.

  “That’s right.” He drained the dregs of his whiskey and grimaced around the bite of it. “We’re going home for the holidays.”

  “THIS WAS where you grew up?” Mallory asked. She had her nose pressed against the window as they drove, her breath a spray of mist against the glass as she looked out at frost-hard fields and run-down barns that rattled in the wind—what she could see of them through the fog and the dim winter twilight. “You and Dad?”

  “Yeah.” Jason took one hand off the wheel and smacked it against the dashboard. The impact made the vents rattle and burp out a damp, mildewy smell but didn’t generate any more heat. “There’s a street in town named after us.”

  Mallory twisted around to frown at him. The first time he saw her, he thought she looked like her mother. She had Nora’s white-blonde hair and big blue eyes. But it was Ben he saw in her skepticism and in her prim disapproval of his flippancy.

  “Really?”

  He glanced at her and back at the road. “Maybe. It’s called Burke Street, but I’ve never heard a good story as to why.”

  Mallory thought about it for a second and decided. “That’s cool.” She went back to staring out the window. After a second Jason took his eyes off the road—it was empty anyhow. He hadn’t seen another car in five miles—and glanced at the ghost of her reflection in the window.

  It had been eight months since her parents died. Was she sad enough? Too sad? Most days she seemed… fine. Not happy. Not devastated. Fine. Jason didn’t know if that was normal or not. He didn’t know what was normal for any ten-year-old, let alone one who’d just lost both her parents.

  “Mallory—”

  Something shot across his field of vision—a blur of motion and color his brain, too late, identified as a deer. In the moment he just registered the flicker of motion and spun the wheel. The car veered to the side, bumped down the shoulder, and thumped into the drift of snow plowed up at the sides of the road. It stopped. The car engine stalled, ticked, and steamed.

  “Fuck,” Jason
said.

  “You shouldn’t swear,” Mallory told him.

  Jason cursed again—silently, to himself—and slumped back in the driver’s seat. Lumpy stuffing pressed against his shoulder blades and sweat was drying under his arms. After a second the drift of snow cracked and collapsed on the hood of the car with a hollow-sounding schluff.

  They both stared at the mound of snow that sat on their car. It was Mallory who snorted out a laugh. She covered her mouth with her hand quickly, as though she could stuff the noise back in. Too late. Jason cracked up along with her and laughed until his ribs hurt.

  “Okay. Stay in the car,” Jason said finally. He reached into the back seat, grabbed his parka, and tossed it to her. “Here. Keep warm.”

  “What about you?” she asked dubiously.

  “I grew up here,” Jason told her. “I’m hardy.”

  He shoved the door open, and the corner of it dug into ruts of frozen slush as he got out. The cold air hit him like a slap. It stung his eyes and scratched at the back of his throat when he breathed.

  It turned out fifteen years in the sun sucked the hardy right out of you.

  “Are you okay?” Mallory asked.

  “Fine,” he assured her, though he had to clench his teeth to stop them from chattering. “Stay there.”

  The front of the car was covered in a ton of half-frozen snow. The back was sunk axle-deep in slush and mud. Jason scrubbed a hand through his hair. He might be a city boy these days, but he remembered enough about growing up here to know the car wasn’t going anywhere.

  Jason threw his weight against the back of the car, more for the sake of doing something than from any expectation it would move. It didn’t. He pushed himself off the cold metal and stepped back. If he remembered right, the old Walker farm was only about twenty minutes away. Fifteen if he cut through the fields rather than followed the road.

  He pressed a finger to the bridge of his nose and pressed.

  It wasn’t like he could take Mallory with him. But he couldn’t leave her in the car either.

  “Jason.”

  He glanced up. Mallory had rolled down the window and stuck her head out. She looked cold, even with his jacket on top of her own.

  “Get back inside,” he said.

  She wrinkled her nose at him, stuck her arm out the window, and pointed to back down the way they’d just driven. “No. Look. There’s someone coming.”

  Jason turned and saw the dim glow of headlights cruising through the fog toward them. Thank God. He jabbed a finger at Mallory—“Stay there.”—and scrambled up onto the road. The lights were closer, and Jason could see the distinctive tan and white of the Sheriff’s Department. He straddled the line in the middle of the road and waved his arms.

  For a second it looked as though the car hadn’t seen him. Jason flinched and folded his hands over his head. He wondered how screwed-up Mallory would be to lose her last living relative in another car accident.

  A lot. Probably. He should have just ruined Christmas.

  The car stopped. It was close enough to Jason that he could feel the warmth from the running engine against his legs. Caught in the headlights, he dropped his arms and squinted at the car.

  “Hey.” He waved one hand uncertainly. “We got stuck.”

  The driver got out of the car and leaned his arms on top of the open car door. All Jason could see in silhouette was a pinch-crowned campaign hat and the bulk of a gun on his hip. Despite his best efforts not to, Jason couldn’t help but remember every horror story that started with the family murdered by an apparently helpful stranger. Those were sort of horror stories he wrote, so it would be ironic if he died that way.

  “Jason? Jason Burke?”

  The driver stepped forward into the puddle of light cast by his car—not that Jason needed him to. He recognized the low, rough voice, the rusty scrape on the rs. The driver reached up to push back his hat and revealed a scruff of latte-brown curls and angular cheekbones. It was still too dim to see his eyes, but Jason knew with hopeless certainty they were an odd, colorless shade that hovered between gray and blue.

  The beard was new. It was darker than his hair and curly, cropped close to his jaw and around the grim lines of his mouth. Jason didn’t know if he liked it or not. He didn’t know what it felt like against his mouth. It didn’t seem right that he didn’t know something like that.

  “Hey, Tommy,” he said. His voice sounded hollow and dried out. He smiled wryly. “Long time no see.”

  THE GRAPE-PURPLE sedan was the fifth car to skid off that patch of road since the weather turned bad. After the two teenagers in the second car spent a long, cold night out there, Tom had started to roll past around sunset, just to check.

  Last thing he expected was to find Jason fucking Burke in the middle of the road with his jeans soaked to his knees and that old shit-eating grin on his face.

  Long time no see? No kidding, asshole. It has been over a decade.

  For a second he was that pissed-off eighteen-year-old again—anger hot and stupid in his throat. He wasn’t sure if he wanted to punch Jason or just abandon him there in the snow—not that it would be the first time for either.

  “Are you the sheriff?” a clear young voice asked. “He drove us off the road. We crashed.”

  He turned and looked at the girl who leaned out the car window. She had blonde hair and big blue eyes, and an oversized, overpriced parka hung over her shoulders. She was probably around eleven and hadn’t even been alive when there was a point to his anger.

  “Officer,” he corrected her. “You must be Mallory.”

  She blinked and looked worried as she withdrew into the car. “No.”

  Tom laughed. Good instincts. Burke instincts.

  “Jesus,” Jason said. “Yeah, that’s Mallory. Mallory, this is Tommy Ryan. Officer Tom Ryan, apparently. He’s an old friend.”

  She rolled her eyes. “Sounds fake, but okay.” Jibe delivered, she disappeared back into the car. The window juddered up laboriously to seal her in. Then her face lit up with the dimmed, night-mellowed light from her phone as she turned it on.

  Jason huffed a sigh and shoved a hand through his hair. It was longer than he used to wear it. Tom corrected himself with that sentimentality-piercing fairness he could never quite shake—longer than his dad would have let him wear it.

  “Sorry,” Jason said. “She’s… Mallory.”

  “I don’t know,” Tom said dryly. “I’d have to side with the kid on this one. Sounds fake.”

  He walked over to the back of the car, ignoring Jason’s muttered “Ouch,” and crouched down. The plastic of the flashlight was warm against his palm as he steadied himself. A glance under the car and the hot whiff of burned oil made him grimace.

  “It’s stuck.” Jason said.

  “It’s wrecked,” Tom corrected him. “You hit a stump.”

  “Son of a—” Jason spat out half of the curse, then glanced at Mallory’s window and choked back the rest. He scrubbed both hands over his face and groaned into his palms.

  The old grudge was as resilient as a rubber band. Tom ground it between his teeth until it finally gave up the ghost. He pushed himself back to his feet and brushed snow off his knees.

  “I’ll give you a lift into town. Get you both out of the cold and into your hotel,” he said. “You can call a tow truck in the morning.”

  Jason dropped his hands. His face, still roughly pretty despite the scuffs the years had put on it, wore an expression that hovered between relief and discomfort.

  “You don’t have to do that,” he said.

  Tom jerked his thumb over his shoulder at the cruiser idling in the road. “Kind of my job.” He rapped his knuckles against the trunk of the car. “C’mon, Jason. Radio says there’s another storm due tonight. There won’t be anyone else on this road until morning.”

  Jason shivered and scrubbed his arms against the cold. The fine soft wool sweater he was wearing was no barrier against the frost on the wind, but he still
hesitated. Stubborn bastard. Tom snorted to himself. At least that was one thing that hadn’t changed, apparently.

  “It’s cold,” Mallory yelled from inside the car, her voice muffled through the glass as she mashed her face against the window. “Can we go yet?”

  It should have been more fun to watch Jason fold. Tom always enjoyed it in the past. But the glimpse of bleak despair that flashed over Jason’s face as he looked at his niece sucked the fun out of it.

  “Thanks,” Jason said. “I appreciate it.”

  He shivered his way around the car to grab the keys and pop the trunk. It clicked open, and Tom lifted it up the rest of the way. He hauled out the two cases—he assumed the Hello Kitty one belonged to Mallory—and carried them up to shove them into his trunk. The cold had seeped through his heavy boots and thermals to steal the heat he’d built up in the car. He hadn’t missed that Mallory was wearing Jason’s parka.

  The prickle of concern was unwelcome, so he grabbed a spare jacket from the back of the car to bribe it to go away.

  “Here.” He tossed the coat to Jason. “Before you freeze and I have to drive to Ithaca to get you defrosted.”

  Jason started to pull it on and then stopped with one arm in and one arm out. His head was tilted down, his expression hidden.

  “What?” Tom asked.

  “You still smell the same, Tommy.”

  This time it wasn’t anger that was hot in Tom’s throat, but it was just as stupid. There wasn’t much point in being angry anymore. If there were, Jason might still have gone, but he wouldn’t have left his drunken old brute of a dad to break the news to Tom.

  “It’s not my jacket,” Tom lied. Not that it mattered, but it established some cold, uncomplicated distance between them. “And no one calls me Tommy. It’s Tom.”

  He left Jason to finish pulling on the coat and walked back to the car. Despite the salt that crunched under his boots, the road was slick under his feet. He could feel the slip under his heel, just waiting for a second’s distraction.