Elkin Brothers Christmas The Complete Series - Leslie North Page 0,126

out with his son, completely solo.

His son.

This wasn’t babysitting.

Talk about weird.

Scott held his fingertips while they walked down the hall together, stopping to check out the thousands of small details that only a two-year-old would notice. He wanted to see the trim on the doorways. Touch the hinges. Pick at something invisible in the carpet. It took them five minutes to make it to the elevator, and once they were inside, Scott didn’t want to get off. He just wanted to push the buttons. Jonas’s one advantage was that he could scoop him up and make him laugh, and then the buttons were forgotten.

What were they going to do?

“Door,” Scott pointed out as they left the elevator. “Nuffer door.” Doors fascinated him.

“Hi,” Scott said, clear as day, catching Jonas’s attention with a devilish grin. Scott giggled, and the sound made Jonas proud. He was obviously happy and smart, not to mention curious and active.

“Hi,” Jonas repeated, earning him a leg hug.

They made their way to the lobby, the hall opening into the central room with vaulted ceilings, Christmas music drifting down from hidden speakers. Yesterday, Scott had wanted to play with the presents by the tree, but they were real gifts to be given to local people in need. The gift shop would be a much better place to take his son. He scooped Scott up just to be on the safe side.

“Mr. Elkin?” His receptionist’s voice held a note of panic, and he turned to see what was wrong. “What can I do for you, Elsie?” She was one of their newer employees. He was excruciatingly aware of Scott on his hip as he made his way to the desk. “Problem with reservations?” he asked.

“Well, I—yeah. There is.” Elsie clicked around on her computer, going through window after window. “It’s one of the VIP reservations. They just called and wanted to change their booking dates to five days later in February. I said they could, but another VIP party has the Presidential Suite on one of those days,” she said, her voice rising. “I don’t know why it let me do that. Something in the system didn’t work right, and now—” Poor woman was close to tears.

“It’s all right.” He watched over her shoulder. Now the calendar was blinking red, telling her that two reservations conflicted. “Tell you what—get them on the phone for me.”

She let out an audible sigh of relief and picked up her handset, dialing the number from the reservation record.

Jonas personally apologized to the guest for the confusion and offered them some extra perks while he explained that they’d have to stay in the Alpine Luxury suite. It was the same as the Presidential but with a corner view rather than a head-on view of the ski hills and was a one and a half-bath instead of two. Smoothed over in less than five minutes. He hung up the phone.

“All done. Change them to Alpine Luxury, and I’ll let Gabe know that the system did something weird.”

“Thank you.” A smile crept back over her face. He couldn’t remember where she’d worked before, but it had obviously been somewhere that made it harder to recover from mistakes like that. Jonas didn’t want to run that kind of business.

He brought Scott out from behind the counter, and as he rounded the corner, Jonas spotted his grandmother. She was standing at the foot of the Christmas tree, the light gently reflected on her face. They’d have to cross in front of her to get to the gift shop.

Jonas took a deep breath and reminded himself not to hunch his shoulders. He wasn’t hiding. As they approached, he noticed her eyes were closed as if deep in thought. She must have sensed his presence, her eyes opening, and going wide when she noticed Scott in his arms.

“Well, hello, you two,” she said, her eyes flicking back and forth between his face and Scott’s. She smiled, but her expression was one of confusion. “Is this where you snuck off to? Who is this sweet boy?”

What? Didn’t she recognize him as the boy from the room upstairs? Clearly not, and in the next moment, he registered the dark circles under her eyes. His grandmother looked tired—more tired than she’d looked in recent weeks.

“His mother is staying at the hotel.” A technical truth, though it felt wrong to say it. “She wanted to take some photos, so I offered to look after him for a while.” He was hedging. The question was,