Page 18 of Wrong Number, Right Santa

“I’m Santa.”

I pulled him onto the chair opposite me. “You were an amazing Santa today, but that guy with the sleigh and reindeer is just for kids. He’s not real.”

“Why do adults stop believing in Santa?”

Ummm, there was an easy answer to that. This was more serious than I thought. How did I tell him? It might break him.

“Because we grow up and put away the make-believe.”

“And yet shifters are real, but to humans, they’re fantasy.”

He had me there, but it didn’t solve our dilemma.

“You don’t believe me.” He got up and stood in the middle of the room. “I’ll show you.”

Gods, I didn’t want him to hurt himself, so I ran to the fireplace and blocked it with my body. He might die if he tried climbing up the chimney.

Chris twitched his nose and shifted. Not shifted like a shifter, but he became the jolly gentleman he’d been earlier. The white beard, the red suit, and the big belly.

Holy shit. He’d been telling the truth.

Not only was Santa real, but he was my mate!

Chapter 14

Santa

I panicked when Dario hadn’t believed me about who I was and pulled up my Santa glamour. It hadn’t been my plan and wasn’t at all how I wanted this to go down. I guess I thought, because he was a shifter, he would just believe me. Like he would somehow have already known and that no “evidence” was needed.

Of course, that was ridiculous given who I was. Collectively most of society didn’t believe in my existence. Full. Stop. I didn’t mind, not normally. If all I had to give was amazing childhood memories, that was a gift worth giving. But with Dario… it was different.

In hindsight, no one believed in me after a certain age, and even suspecting he might had been a stretch. That wasn’t true, some adults did believe, but the numbers were significantly lower than I preferred. Sadly, the number of people who believed in me decreased as a whole each year, they got lower and lower thanks to children being pushed to grow up faster and faster. But that was a different issue for an entirely different day.

And now he was staring at me. Not a movement or a word to be had. He stared. That was all. I couldn’t tell if it was because he was scared or shocked or happy—or what.

“Ho-ho-ho?” It came out as a question, which hadn’t been my intention, but it did its job. The next thing I knew, he was hugging me, apologizing for not believing me.

“You’re him. You’re Santa.” He squeezed me tighter, and I felt like I’d finally come home.

I hugged him back, holding on as tightly as I could in my current get-up. “Yeah, I am. And you’re a reindeer. How about that.”

He buried his face in my neck, scenting me deeply. I knew this was a thing shifters did, but in my head it had always been kind of creepy. Now, as he did it to me, I saw how intimate it was.

We stayed like that for a few minutes until Max got jealous and decided to try to get our attention. Silly dog.

“I think someone needs to go out.” I stepped back, hating to break our hug but not wanting Max to have his needs go unmet simply because I wanted to stay in Dario’s embrace for the next week or so.

“Don’t leave.” Dario rubbed his cheek against mine. “Please.”

“Not going anywhere.” I wasn’t sure I could if I wanted to, and I very much did not.

Dario took Max to the back door, and while I waited, I took off my glamour. This one had been extra taxing because it included glamouring my clothing, something I didn’t like to do. I finally felt like myself again when I was back in my real clothes—the ones that weren’t magically morphed.

A couple of minutes later, Max ran into the room ahead of Dario, who immediately took my hand. “That feels better.”

“It really does.” I gave his hand a squeeze. Touching him, feeling that connection—it was grounding in a way.

“Now what?” he asked.

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