'Tis the Season Read Online Free

an au pair. Someoneto help you out in the afternoons. I know you’ve got a system of after-school arrangements for your son, but you can’t keep leaving Gracie here after hours and expecting us to take up the slack.”
    â€œI know, but—”
    â€œAnd while I’ve got you, Evan, Gracie’s been very quiet today. Almost withdrawn. She hasn’t been herself.”
    â€œI know.” Even though she didn’t have a fever, she could be coming down with something. If he was any kind of father, her health would be his top priority. And it was. But he was stuck in the middle of this god-awful meeting. “All right. I’ll send someone over to pick her up,” he said, guilt devouring him. “I’ll send my secretary.”
    â€œMake sure she has a note from you and photo ID,” Molly reminded him. “I don’t like turning Gracie over to someone I don’t know.”
    â€œOf course.”
    â€œI mean it, Evan. These jerry-rigged child-care arrangements aren’t good for your kids or for you. If you need help, get it.”
    â€œOkay.” If he were twenty-five years younger, he’d be hanging his head in shame.
    â€œYou’re a wonderful father,” Molly added, tossing him a sop before she said goodbye.
    One self-abasement down, one to go. He hung up the phone and hurried from his office into the one next door. “Heather, I need an extremely big favor from you,” he said, reaching for the pad of Champion Sports memo paper on her desk.
    Heather was young, gorgeous and endowed with an abundance of attitude. She burned through boyfriends the way Pedro Martinez burned through batters—it seemedas if every guy who went up against her wound up striking out. She alarmed Evan with her high-potency beauty and her sheer nerve, but she was so proficient at her job he was grateful to have her.
    â€œWhat favor?” she asked, flashing a smile that would fell a weaker man.
    â€œDrive over to the Children’s Garden and pick up Gracie for me.”
    â€œI hate children,” Heather said laconically.
    â€œI’m not asking you to love her. I’m asking you to pick her up. I’m being held hostage by Jennifer and those guys from Pep Insoles, and can’t go get Gracie myself.”
    Heather hesitated, nibbling her lush lower lip. “Picking your daughter up at preschool isn’t part of my job description.”
    â€œI know it isn’t. But flexibility is part of your job description. And don’t forget, we’re getting close to yearend bonus time.” He scribbled a note to Molly Saunders-Russo on the memo pad, identifying Heather as his official emissary.
    The word bonus clinched the deal. “All right,” Heather muttered, plucking the note out of his hand. “But this is the last time.”
    The last time this year, Evan amended silently. Next year another bonus would be at stake. He watched her pull her purse from a desk drawer and saunter past him to the door, her chin held high, her ash-blond hair falling in a perfectly swinging pageboy.
    He waited until she was out of sight, then felt the air seep from his lungs. How could it be that he’d come so far, accomplished so much more than anyone would have predicted, building a business and raising two magnificent kids—and yet he felt like a total failure?
    All right. He wasn’t a failure. He just happened to have a few people exasperated with him right now: Molly at the preschool, Heather, Jennifer. The three women on whom his entire existence depended, he thought glumly.
    But he hadn’t gotten where he was by surrendering to circumstances. He would tighten the controls on his time at work—as soon as the Christmas retail season was over—and be out the door by ten minutes to five every day, even if it meant taking work home with him in the evenings. He could stick to a rigid schedule from January until June. In the summer the