Page 2 of A Dark Mafia Christmas

I turn around and catch several pairs of eyes widening before the owners pretend to be deep in conversation.

We hold the Christmas party on the top floor of O’Hara Developers every year. It’s a huge open-plan space. With the bar taking up the length of one wall, tables laden with canapés on the opposite side of the room, and a DJ set up in one corner, lights flashing along in time with the bass beat, there’s ample space to accommodate the staff. No partners invited. We do this as a company, or we don’t do it at all.

I’ll be forced to sit through a bunch of cheesy Christmas movies by my mom, cousins, and aunties when I get home, without having to watch my employees getting all fake-merry because, hey, it’s the most wonderful time of the year, dontcha know?

Don’t get me wrong. I’m no Grinch. I just don’t understand why people can’t be jolly all year round instead of saving it for when the advertising companies say they should be happy spending all their hard-earned money on shit no one wants.

Who am I kidding?

I organize a Christmas party because it’s what’s expected of me, and not because I want to get steaming drunk and sing along badly to Mariah Carey’s ‘All I Want for Christmas Is You’, with someone’s sweaty arm hanging off my shoulders. Besides, Sonia,my PA, would never forgive me if she didn’t get the chance to wear a sparkly dress and reindeer antlers, and dispel the boss’s snooty gatekeeper image at least once a year.

On cue, I catch her eye as she makes her way over to the DJ with a cheesy request, and I raise my soda to toast her. She blows me a kiss from across the room. I don’t even pretend to catch it.

Then I spother. Or rather, I spot the hair. It’s red—not Karen Gillan red with orange tones—but dark, glossy, cherry red. Not from a bottle either. I don’t know how I know this, but no one who isn’t born with it can achieve that kind of red without spending a shit load of money at the salon. And if I’m correct, this woman, I don’t know her name, works in the IT department, she isn’t fucking Rockefeller.

Her hair is scraped back into a ponytail, but stray curls have worked loose, framing her face like she planned it that way. I scrutinize her closely—she’s a beautiful woman, and I’m a red-blooded male—and I might be wrong, but she’s so fresh-faced, she can’t be wearing any makeup. Now that I think of it, she’s wearing plain black pants and a white shirt, the kind of clothes she would wear to the office, and not the Christmas party.

Didn’t she get the memo?

I look around, comparing her to the other women on the dance floor—it’s a tough habit to crack—their makeup starting to sheen with the body heat and the lights and the exertion of jumping around to ‘Jingle Bell Rock’. Everyone else is trying to rock smoky eyes and ruby-red lips. While she hasn’t even borrowed a pot of lip gloss from one of her co-workers.

Another Grinch?

No one forced her to come.

The glass in her hand is empty. I watch her push herself off the wall and wander around the edge of the room. A colleague catches her eye, gestures for her to join the group on the dance floor. But she shakes her head, a half-smile, averts her eyes, and keeps moving.

She’s people-watching. She’s standing back and watching everyone else getting louder and drunker and sillier, like she’s taking notes to report back to the boss in the New Year. The boss. AKA me.

I’m still staring when she looks up. Our eyes meet. I wait for her to turn away, her cheeks growing hot with embarrassment when she realizes that I’ve caught her out, but instead, she continues drifting around the room as if that never even happened.

“Are you having fun?” Sonia has snuck up on me.

Her cheeks are rosy, and I can smell her perfume wafting from her in waves as she keeps dancing on the spot. She snatches my glass and takes a sip, her eyes narrowing when she doesn’t get the taste she expected.

“What are you drinking?”

I’m still following red hair with my eyes. “I’m flying to Ireland in the morning.”

“Emmett.” She hands the glass back, forcing me to look at her. “It’s Christmas.”

“So I hear.”

“So, live a little. Let your hair down.” Her eyes roam to my head and she twists her mouth to one side. “Or whatever the O’Hara version of letting your hair down is.”

Her face grows even rosier. No one in New York knows me better than Sonia, even if she doesn’t approve of my bachelor lifestyle, and even she doesn’t know everything.

“I’ll consider myself told.”

Angela from finance comes over then, grabs Sonia’s hand, and drags her away. “There you are. You’re supposed to be dancing.”

Sonia smiles at me from over her shoulder before being pulled into a circle made up of most of the finance department and a woman from HR and starts singing along to ‘Last Christmas’ at the top of her lungs.

Before I can resume my study of red-haired girl, a raised voice catches my attention. This is the trouble with Christmas parties: people get too inebriated too quickly because they’re like excited kids waiting to open their presents, and they forget that they’re surrounded by work colleagues whom they’ll have to face when the office reopens in the New Year.

“Don’t lie to me!”

I recognize the voice. It belongs to Hazel, my marketing director, a petite, dark-haired woman with sleek bangs and a penchant for practical flat shoes. She’s talking to her fiancé, Max, who works in accounting.

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