Good Elf Gone Wrong: A Holiday Romantic Comedy

A lesser man might have felt some kind of way sending a photo like that, but it was all part of my plan.

I’d had those photos saved up, ready to fire off if I felt like my hold on Gracie was slipping and I needed to reel her in.

That was when I’d thought that I was going to have to woo her, make her think she was falling in love with me, that I was the bad boy she was going to mold into the perfect boyfriend.

Thank god for dysfunctional families. It made my job a lot easier if I could keep her off-balance, keep her focused on her sister, and not her feelings for me.

Still, the pictures had come in handy.

“Let’s try to close this contract up by the end of this week,” I told my brothers. The security company was flush with cash from the last payout. Plus Svensson PharmaTech had recommended us to several other companies, and now I had contracts lined up for the first half of the year. Though Christmas was my least favorite holiday, I couldn’t deny that it was going to be a good one.

So long as I delivered on Gracie.

My phone chimed.

“Does she want another nudie pic?” Jake snickered.

I hit him lightly on the back of the head then swiped open Gracie’s message and scowled.

Gracie: We need to talk.

I dialed her number.

“Are you alone?” I asked in a voice that promised mind-blowing sex, just in case her family was listening.

“Yes,” she said.

I let my voice grow cold.

“Then don’t text me. We went over the rules,” I reprimanded, stalking away from my brothers.

“Sorry,” she said. I could practically see her tugging self-consciously at her skirt like she was doing last night.

“We need to talk. Verbally.”

“I am not your boyfriend, Sugarplum. I don’t do those little mind games women like to play where they go, ‘We need to talk’ then let their boyfriend stew for hours wondering what it’s about,” I said in a mocking tone. “So you can tell me what you want to talk about, or you can get lost.”

“Fine,” she hissed through her teeth. “We need to talk about the fact that I’m firing you.”

Fuck.

You pushed her too far.

“You are not firing me,” I spat.

My brothers looked over in alarm.

Anderson mouthed, What the fuck, Hudson?

“I can pay you for your time spent thus far,” she said like she was some corporate HR rep giving me my walking papers.

Double fuck.

“Where should I meet you?”

“Are you free now?” she asked.

“Where, Gracie?”

“The Nutmeg Café.”

“Meet me there in ten minutes,” I barked.

“Ooh, Hudson’s getting fired.” Lawrence drawled. “I’m shocked. You should have had me do this job.”

“Fuck you.”

“With a charming attitude like that, is it surprising his fake relationship lasted all of twenty-four hours?” Talbot deadpanned.

I could kill my brothers.

“Maybe you could be ever so slightly nicer,” Anderson called after me as I stormed out to my motorcycle.

It had taken me months to get to this point. I finally had a lucky break, and now Gracie had cold feet. I wouldn’t stand for it. She wasn’t firing me; she wasn’t backing out. We would proceed according to plan.

Gracie was sitting at a small table in a back corner of the café, Pugnog on her lap, nursing an oversized mug of coffee festooned with snowmen marshmallows, when I stalked in. She looked up at me, wide-eyed, as I slammed the motorcycle helmet on the table.

Maybe Anderson was right, and I had been a little bit too harsh with her.

But I was so close to my goal.

Stay calm.

“Cold feet?” I asked, pulling the chair out across from her.

I expected her to launch into a tirade against me, like many of my more emotional clients liked to do when they felt like things were out of their control and they didn’t understand what was going on.

Instead Gracie laid her palms flat on the table.

“I think firing might have been too harsh of a word,” she said carefully. “It’s not you. It’s me.”

I raised an eyebrow.

“Sometimes clichés are useful,” she said, making a face.

“Sometimes they’re annoying.”

She looked down at her coffee. “You were right,” she admitted, “about a lot of things.”

“Oh?” I leaned back in my chair and crossed my arms.

“Apparently all of the women in my family would happily spit on Susan B. Anthony’s grave if it meant getting it on doggy style with you in the back of your truck,” she grumbled.

“Imagine that.” I let a sly grin form.

“Especially after that photo.” She scowled. “Don’t look so smug. Who took that photo anyway? Did you do a photo shoot?”

“My brother.”

“And I thought my sister and I had a fucked-up relationship,” she said, shaking her head.

I bit back a grin.

“Anyways, I think it’s too much. I can’t keep the lies straight,” she said quickly, lowering her voice. “My sister thinks I hired you, James is on to me, my grandmother is going to disown me—”

“No way. Your grandmother loved me.”

“That’s Granny Murray, not Grandma Astelle. She is the daughter of my great-grandma Cecelia, whose dress my sister destroyed. Astelle is the youngest daughter. The middle sister got their mom’s engagement ring and pawned it while Grandma Astelle got the dress and let Kelly destroy it and then throw away any scraps in the dumpster so that no one with sewing skills could save them. Her eldest sister got all the recipes, and those are still in the family, letting you know that if you want to save family heirlooms, give them to the eldest daughter. Not that I’m bitter or anything.” She took a deep breath.

“Spoken like someone who needs a little revenge in her life,” I said after a moment.

“I can’t. I’m not a soldier, and I’m going to crack under the pressure,” she pleaded.

I took her hands.

Be nice.

Well niceish.

“Sugarplum, James isn’t on to you. James is trying to get in your head and destroy your self-esteem so that you’ll take him back.”

“No, he’s not,” she scoffed. “He doesn’t even think I’m attractive.”

“I’m going to tell you a secret about men. Now, I’m betraying the bro code to do this,” I said smoothly, “so I hope you appreciate my sacrifice.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Women think that men are after a pretty face and nice tits. That’s not true.”

“Then why do they all want supermodels?” Gracie argued.

“You’re looking at it backward. Men want the supermodels because they think all the other guys do. It’s all one big territorial dispute. Every monkey wants the high-status banana. James now perceives you as a higher-value item because he thinks a higher-status male stole what he thinks of as his woman.”

“He slept with my sister,” she countered.

“He did it because he thought he could get away with it. But you’re not going to let that happen, are you? Shock and awe.”

“I’m not like you,” she said desperately. “I fall apart.”

“You’re not falling apart,” I assured her. “You just forgot your motivation. Tell me about discovering the affair.”

Gracie made a disgusted noise and looked away.

“It was so humiliating to find my fiancé and my little sister doing that in front of the Christmas tree. What’s was worse it that my parents insisted we still have Christmas morning.”

“So you burned down the Christmas tree and salted the nativity scene with your rage?” I asked.

“No, I baked cinnamon rolls and opened up my usual gifts of socks and regifted knickknacks.”

“Now you finally grew a backbone and want to burn the place down.”

“No. I’m just trying to … I don’t know.” She looked down at her coffee.

“I can break up their marriage,” I promised her. “That humiliation you felt? I can make them both feel it tenfold. I can make your parents despise them, make your family hate them, make it so they never show their faces at a holiday party again. And I can make you the most beloved member of your family.”

Take the bait.

“That seems …” She played with the mug in her hands.

“Like justice?”

“More like nuclear revenge.” She wrinkled her nose.

“What’s the point of revenge if you’re not going to leave a smoking crater when you’re done?”

Gracie chewed on her lip.

“I think maybe I just wanted my family off my back. It gets old, you know—the snide comments about how I’m almost thirty and don’t have a boyfriend, how I’m going to be so old when I ever do get married that I’ll only have one kid.”

“If you wanted to impress your family,” I said, “then you could have hired a man in a suit and had him pretend to be a billionaire. But you wanted a bad boy.”

“I just want …” She shrugged helplessly.

“You want revenge,” I said quietly.

“Yeah. I do.”

“I want that for you,” I crooned.

“You don’t even know me. We’re not friends.” She poked at a marshmallow with her tongue. It was endearing.

And almost made me want to kiss her.

Almost.

“Let’s just say I get turned on by wielding justice.”

And by girls who lick their lips like that.

“You’re like a superhero.”

“More like a supervillain for hire.”

She took a gulp of her coffee.

“So am I still fired?” I asked.

She shook her head.

“But you still may want to quit.”

“Never.” I pressed a hand on my chest.

“There’s one small wrinkle.” She made a face. “You don’t happen to have a custom dark-forest-green special edition 2018 Ford F-150, do you?”

The confusion was clear on my face before I could stop it.

“I kind of told my family that was the car where you—where we … uh …”

“Where I fucked you so hard you squirted on the roof of the car?” I pinched the bridge of my nose. “How in the hell am I going to get a car like that?”

Gracie winced.

“My god. You really are bad at this.”