CHAPTER ONE

      DAMIAN MCALLISTER hissed out an oath as he glared at the toy store situated directly across the street from his office. That damned sign in the window! Its neon message had been winking at him since November and was driving him crazy:

      Merry Xmas To U And Yours

      I can’t stand it. He fisted a hand hard against the top of his mahogany desk. I can’t stand it one more minute.

      He lurched to his feet.

      ‘Mrs. Sutton!’ he bellowed.

      Marjorie Sutton, the McAllister Architectural Group’s senior secretary, put down the chocolate doughnut she’d been on the point of dunking into her morning coffee. Casting it a regretful sigh, she heaved her snugly corseted body out of her chair and walked through to the adjoining office.

      Her boss’s blue eyes, she noted, had a wild expression, and his black hair looked as if he’d been trying to tear it out, strand by glossy strand. Yet she wished—as she did on a disturbingly regular basis considering she was quite happily married—that either she were thirty years younger or that the president of the M.A.G. wasn’t such a dreamboat.

      ‘Yes, sir?’ Her tone was light.

      His answering scowl was dark. ‘Cancel all my appointments till the New Year. I’ve decided to take off for my place in Vermont earlier than planned.’ As he spoke, he kept his back rigidly to the window, though he could have sworn he saw the reflection of the toy store’s Christmas lights and gratingly upbeat message flickering on the wall facing him.

      ‘Are you feeling all right, Mr. McAllister? You look white. As if you’d...seen a ghost.’

      The ghost of Christmases past. ‘I seem to be coming down with something...probably that flu that’s going the rounds.’ Dismissively he slackened the knot of his silk tie, and flicked open the top button of his gray shirt. ‘Now—’

      ‘What about the big party Friday night?’

      ‘Party?’

      ‘The Anthony Gould cocktail party. Your invitation came in the mail last month. You accepted, remember?’

      Last month. When he’d convinced himself that this year would be different. This year he wouldn’t be a coward. This year he wouldn’t run from Christmas. ‘I remember. Gould’s going to be showing off his new fiancée.’ He cleared his throat...and winced. His tonsils felt as if he’d raked a cheese grater over them. He opened his desk drawer, rummaged till he found a cough drop and thrust it into his mouth. ‘Cancel,’ he mumbled around the cherry-flavored lozenge. The last thing I feel like doing at this moment is watching Boston’s finest parade his latest trophy—’

      ‘Mr. McAllister!’

      He heard the chiding in her tone, but there was no evidence of remorse in his eyes...eyes that had begun to water as he felt a sneeze gather. ‘Phone.’ He accepted the man-size tissue his secretary obligingly whipped from the box sitting by his fax machine. ‘Get me off the hook?’

      ‘Right. So—’ she paused while his sneeze reverberated through the office and fluttered a blueprint that lay on his drawing board ‘—will that be all, sir?’

      Grabbing his suit jacket from the back of his chair, he shrugged it on, and crossed to hold the door open. ‘I’ll leave everything in your capable hands.’

      Mrs. Sutton walked past him but instead of taking her seat at her desk, stood by it...as if waiting for something.

      He gritted his teeth. Season’s greetings, perhaps?

      He opened his mouth, tried to say the words—Merry Christmas—but they stuck. He muttered something unintelligible. She could decipher his mumblings however she wished, he decided with a feeling of desperation.

      And fled.

      When he drove out of the underground parking lot a few minutes later, he kept his eyes averted from the Warmest Fuzzies Toy Store...and what a pie-in-thesky name that was! But even with his attention focused glazedly on the traffic ahead, he couldn’t block out the neon pattern of reds and greens winking from the store window...or the sound of the music blasting from a purple Corvette in the next lane...

      Garth Brooks, informing him—and possibly everyone else in Boston—that ‘Love Came Down at Christmas.’

      Stephanie Redford bit her lip uneasily as she searched the black-tie, black-dress crowd. Where was Tony? She had to talk with him right away. What the Whitneys had said—it was surely all a silly mistake—

      Her