How My Brother's Best Friend Stole Christmas - Molly O'Keefe Page 0,5

the night of her wedding.

“All right,” I said. “Welcome to the family and all that. Don’t get cornered by my mom.” With that plum bit of advice I took one for the team and went to intercept my crew.

“Holy shit, Sophie, is that you?” Joe Arben asked.

“Yeah, it’s me,” I said, like it was every day I stood there looking the way I did. “What about it?”

Joe whistled, a long, low wolf whistle and maybe at another time, in another boss/employee situation, I’d have had to bust some heads over that, but at that moment I took it as a compliment. And let me tell you, I tried real hard not to look at Joe, but I was very aware that he was looking at me.

He was a kid, nineteen years old, a fairly new hire, and he had made his interest in me obvious. But Joe was also the kind of guy who was interested in anything with boobs. So it wasn’t personal. Even though no one ever looked at me that way. Anyway, I was not letting it go to my head. He was charming and sweet and my employee, and his attention embarrassed me.

So I ignored him.

Sort of.

“Damn girl,” he said. “You are the hottest thing here.”

I could feel myself blushing. “How many girls has he said that to?” I asked Joe’s friend Zavier.

“None,” Zavier said, sipping from his beer, his eyebrow cocked.

I rolled my eyes.

“You having a good time?” I asked the guys.

“This is a real good party, Soph.” Paul Sorvinski, who’d been working in the warehouse for as long as I could remember, carried two plates of shrimp and satay and mini quiches. His wife, the always smiling Marie, set down two beers so she could hug me tight around my neck.

“You look so nice,” she said.

“Thank you.”

“When you’re ready to dance,” Joe said, lifting his beer, putting a little innuendo on dance, “you know where I am.”

I did a super-awkward smile-laugh-shrug combo that was kind of my trademark and quickly got out of there. More champagne was needed, but where was one of those snappily dressed waiters with trays of it when you needed one?

When we renovated the top floor to make it a fancy-shmancy party room, we’d put in an old bar that the designer unearthed out of a condemned Denver hotel. It was one of those fancy Wild West mahogany bars that had actual bullet holes in it. I found my way to the side of it to get another glass of champagne.

And that’s when I saw him.

Across the bar, sitting with a beer and talking to two of Joy’s glassblowers and Annie in sales, was Fucking Sam Porter.

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He wasn’t in a suit. Not even a tie. Just a dress shirt that was too big, because he’d lost weight on his last deployment. His jet-black hair was still jarhead short, which revealed the long, jagged scar over his ear (that he got as a kid climbing a tree), and another one on the back of his skull that was still pink and raised (that he got in mysterious circumstances on his last top-secret deployment, and was part of why he was home and part of why he’d lost so much weight). A third scar (something he’d gotten in a bar fight defending—as he claimed—Wes’s honor) sliced through his eyebrow. As I watched, he ran his hands over his head, front to back and back again, the way he always did when he was agitated.

It was the party. He didn’t like crowds.

One of the glassblowers tipped her head back and laughed a real tinkly laugh at something Sam said, which was dubious because Sam was not at all funny, and then she put her hand on Sam’s arm.

Looking away, I drained half my glass of champagne. I heard him laugh. Laugh at something the glassblower said. The rare, low rumble of it cut through the music and the distance and my heart.

I’d been ten when Wes found Sam and brought him home. Or maybe it was Sam who’d found Wes, just when they needed each other. Hardly mattered. They met and became inseparable. Brothers more than friends. And Sam treated me like he was another older brother. Part fierce protector, part ambivalent friend, part annoyed family member. And I was pretty stupid, but I wasn’t so stupid as to say I fell in love with him when I was ten and he was fifteen. (No, I managed to save that for a few