Jenny Lopez Saves Christmas by Lindsey Kelk Read Free Book Online Page A

donkey in sight.’
    â€˜It’s a house,’ Sadie replied. ‘The lake is grey and frozen and cold. Remember two summers ago when I was at Lake Como? We met George Clooney and we had cocktails and—’
    â€˜Here are the keys,’ I said brightly. I couldn’t take the George Clooney story again, I really couldn’t. And I loved the George Clooney story. ‘Let’s get out of the snow.’
    All I wanted to do was get inside, check my emails and fire off the presentation to Stephen, then I could throw myself into Christmas mode full throttle. I’d brought up boxes and boxes of lights and every damn bauble I could find in the house, and by the time Angie arrived I wanted it to look like Santa had blown his load over every available surface. Assuming Santa’s load was made of glitter. Huh. Gross.
    After wrestling with several false starts, I finally found the key that fitted the lock. ‘And we’re in!’ I declared, pushing the door wide open and letting Sadie push past me as though the devil himself were chasing her. ‘Wow, nice place.’
    â€˜Yeah, it’s okay,’ Sadie agreed. It didn’t sound like much but it was a pretty big compliment coming from her. ‘Which one is my room?’
    â€˜Whichever one you want,’ I relented, knowing she would pick the biggest and the best. ‘Don’t forget there are five other people coming!’ I shouted as she tore off up the stairs at an impressive pace for someone wearing studded stiletto-heeled Versace boots. ‘And two children!’
    Like I said, I love children, but sometimes I forget that they count as people.
    The living room was every bit as gorgeous as the outside of the house promised it would be. Huge, sprawling and super comfortable. Erin, or one of Erin’s interior designers, had done some fine work.
    Work. Oh yeah.
    I pulled my phone from my pocket, sadly remembering that I had a job and not a super-rich investment banker husband. I scanned through my emails but nothing much was going on − almost everyone was already on break for the holidays. Nothing more than a couple of corporate e-cards, sale reminders from Net-a-Porter and Bergdorf Goodman and the Kardashian family Christmas card forwarded by my friend Vanessa. She got me. No sign of the last couple of presentation points from our host.
    Dumping myself on the couch, I unzipped my coat and swiped over to my messages, scrolling up and down, refreshing, reading and generally starting to worry about why I hadn’t heard from Joe. What if something had happened to him? He was supposed to fly down to Florida on Tuesday evening and now it was Wednesday afternoon. He could have been mugged, he could have been carjacked. His plane could have crashed, for all I knew − we’d been listening to Christmas music all the way up here. Oh my God, what if his plane
had
crashed? And his poor family were all sitting around waiting for him and I was the last person to see him and all his gifts for his nieces and nephews were just scattered somewhere over Georgia.
    â€˜I could text him,’ I told the sofa. ‘I mean, he’s probably not dead, he’s probably just tied up with his family. I bet he’d love me to text him.’
    I stared into the open fireplace and blinked. Who wouldn’t love me to text them?
    Opening a new message, I considered my options for a moment. Nothing too heavy − something seasonal and light. The holidays were a perfect excuse to send the first message, something I would normally never do, but hey, I’d already broken all my rules with this guy. Grabbing Erin’s keys from the coffee table, I ran back out to the car and brought in one of the boxes of decorations. The one in which I had stashed my sexy Mrs Santa outfit. A master of the quick change, I was out of my jeans and into the little red dress inside thirty seconds. Now it was just a matter of lipstick and