All I Want For Christmas Is You - Penelope Ward Page 0,17

estate, they’d both stuck in at school and gotten into Edinburgh University. While Patrick then studied for his medical degree in Manchester, Reid got his MBA at a top business school in London. We’d see them over the holidays as Annie and Reid always spent Christmas with us. I wasn’t aware of Reid back then. I was only a kid, after all, and just excited to have my big brother home.

Reid returned to Edinburgh before Patrick, and we didn’t see much of him at all.

My brother returned home two years later to complete his foundation program as a doctor at a GP practice in the city. It was then we saw more of Reid. Not loads. But more.

And I developed my first real crush.

I remember it clearly.

I was thirteen years old. It was Christmas Day and Patrick was spending the night with us, rather than staying at his flat. Like always, Annie and Reid came over for Christmas day.

I’d noted that Reid didn’t smile much.

But he smiled at me as he strolled into my parent’s sitting room and wished me a happy Christmas. His smile set off a riot of flutters in my belly and I found myself tongue-tied and flustered around him.

The feeling never really went away, although it lost its intensity as I got older and saw him less and went off to Edinburgh university to pursue my own degree in Business Management. An MA that proved to be useless to me when I left school and competed with a ton of other young people with similar degrees and very little experience.

After six months of job searching with no luck, Patrick said Reid was looking for a new personal assistant at his department store and he was willing to give me a shot.

I hadn’t even thought about my old crush.

All I’d thought about was the great pay and the fact that my first job would be working with one of the most successful entrepreneurs in Scotland.

After working for several companies over the years, networking, accruing stock and investments, Reid purchased an aging department store in the heart of Edinburgh. Situated on the main thoroughfare of the city center, on Princes Street, the department store had lost its luster years ago, as many had because of online shopping. Reid bought the store and the three shops that shared the same turn-of-the-century building. Knocking through into those meant he could create a much bigger department store. While he maintained its nineteenth century charm, he created a mini empire with everything from clothing to home furnishing to electronics to beauty to a salon and spa and topped it off with a fine dining restaurant on the level below the office floors. He created an atmosphere where people wanted to shop and he catered to those in the city who had money to do so.

Everyone thought he would fail.

In the last three years the store had gone from strength to strength, proving all the naysayers wrong.

Unfortunately, success meant Reid was a busy man. Too busy to think about women beyond the convenience of having a partner with him at a business dinner and someone to satisfy his sexual appetite. While not necessarily a womanizer, Reid was definitely a serial monogamist. He had a few rules when it came to women.

They had to be understanding of his long working hours.

Everything was on his schedule.

And he didn’t do immaturity. Which meant he never dated a woman younger than twenty-eight. Patrick told me that. It didn’t make sense to me at all. I knew women twice my age way more immature than me. That ridiculous rule stung.

Did I mention my youthful crush returned when I started working for Reid and was now growing into a full-blown infatuation? It wasn’t just because Reid was tall with the athletic physique of a swimmer, or that he had the most beautiful glimmering dark eyes and wickedly boyish grin. I suspected Reid had much passion and feeling buried beneath his cool, overly controlled facade. For instance, he was loyal and generous to a fault. I wasn’t supposed to know it, but my parents were in financial difficulty because of a second mortgage they’d taken on with the house and were in danger of losing it. Reid paid off their debt. No questions asked. I could only imagine how much of a hit that was to Dad’s pride. Reid would have handled it delicately though. I’d seen him handle businessmen with a deft touch and he loved my dad, so