Page 22 of Santa Daddy, I'm Not the One

“How long does that usually take?”

“About half an hour.”

“Half an hour!”

“Shorter if the person you have sex with isn’t someone you connect with at the heart level. Ours may take longer.”

I blushed and ducked my head.

“No, don’t hide. I’m being forward with you here, Landon. I think you came here for me.” He entwined our fingers. “The knot helps us to stay together so we can form a heart connection after sex. The heart knows if we need more time to forge that connection, and the body makes that happen through the knot.”

“So no quickie, then, huh?”

“I can pull out before the knot forms and come all over that gorgeous ass or that beautiful face of yours.”

A shiver ran through me. “Okay. So what do we do now?”

“We talk. Tell me about you…”

I shrugged. “I’m sure you already know.”

“The truth is, I don’t remember every single thing about any one child, Landon. I’ve been at this for seven hundred years.”

“It’s nothing spectacular. I was born as a ploy that didn’t work and quickly became a castaway when I no longer had any use.”

“Explain.”

I closed my eyes. “My father was already married and wealthy. My mother, his secretary at the time, was having an affair with him, but he wouldn’t divorce his wife for her, so she tried to use a pregnancy to get him to commit to her. A long story short, she didn’t get her way. He abandoned her instead, and she was stuck raising a child she didn’t want. When I was four, she left me home alone with a sitter and never returned. I spent the rest of my life in a group home.”

Miserable. Alone. Never quite fitting in and the boy to be bullied by others because I was so small. And then when I got older, being used by the older boys to suck their dicks, then eventually by one of the employees at the home, who thought he would make me a man. When I was sixteen, I’d run away for the first time, but I always ended up back in homes.

“It was tough,” I said. “I waited all my life for my father to come for me, and he did. When I was nineteen.” And living with a man old enough to be my grandfather who gave me room and board for sex, immediately followed by a beating. Because I was the devil who made him want me.

“Is that how you came to own the toy store? Did he find out how wrong he was and you reconciled with him?”

“No. He died and had no one else to leave his fortune to, so that’s how I inherited everything.”

When the lawyer informed me I was a wealthy man, I’d rejected anything to do with my father at first before a roughnight of beating forced me to wake up. I might have hated everything my father stood for, but I needed to survive.

“Landon, baby, I’m sorry for all you’ve been through.”

I sniffled and rubbed the tears from my eyes. “That’s what they all say. Everyone’s sorry, but no one was there to help. If you could see everything, why didn’t you help?”

7

NILS

In the stillness of the records room, a repository of towering shelves, each laden with ancient ledgers and scrolls, Landon’s words reverberated in my mind.

If you could see everything, why didn’t you help?

His question was like a dagger that had found its mark in the soft flesh of my heart. It hit at the guilt I had. Always the rewarder of good and bad but never allowed to make judgments about whether the action was justified. Landon was just one of the many children over the years who had been hurt by a system that didn’t consider their feelings, their hardships.

But everything needed to happen in its natural order without me interfering in their lives. I knew the rules all too well. As much as my heart ached to intervene, to cradle each hurtingchild in a protective embrace, my role was bound by the very magic that allowed me to spread joy to millions. I was not permitted to interfere with mortal lives directly. If I did and it backfired, that could be the end of Christmas. I was the last of my line, and there was no more Santa to come after me. The last time I’d broken the rule, I’d been forced to watch Frostheart wreak havoc in the world while unable to do anything about it.

The door creaked open, and the elf on duty stepped in. He widened his eyes slightly at finding me there, a rare occurrence in the quiet solitude of the records room.

“Santa?”

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