Mr. & Mrs. Claus, Book #3

• Sweet and Wholesome
• Redemption Romance
• Workplace Romance
• Christmas Romance

Nothing says Christmas like a snow cannon that shoots flames, family mayhem, and finding the true meaning of the season, with a lot of love thrown in.

But, there’s still magic to be had!

Emma Walters is a simple woman with simple needs—job stability, a paycheck to share with her struggling mom and brother back home, and enjoying the occasional laugh. It’s that last part that gets her in serious hot water. When she laughs at the antics of her boss’ youngest son, a teenage boy with the social skills of a neanderthal, she’s forced to handle the worst possible assignment she could imagine… Recruit the CEO’s eldest son back to the family business at all costs.

She can’t afford to fail—her job, her apartment, and her family’s financial security depend on her succeeding
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Alistair Dennison, Jr., or Al as his friends like to call him, is the town’s Santa. He’s spent his life helping mankind, not helping line corporate’s pockets. But then his father sends an irresistible blonde spy, dressed in the worst looking elf costume he’s ever seen, to tempt him to the dark side. His solution? Turn her into his personal Mrs. Claus and show her the true meaning of Christmas.

But with the clock ticking down and the heat rising, which side will win in a battle that’s becoming more and more dangerous to their hearts?

Mr. & Mrs. Claus is a contemporary romance written by USA Today bestselling author, Day Leclaire and her daughter-in-law, Dre Leclaire. With laugh out loud adventures and heartwarming kindness, this story of a Hot Santa and his Mrs. Claus will surely melt your heart. If you’re looking for a happily ever after, purchase your copy today!

Of all the places Emma Walters expected to be sent to recruit the wayward eldest son of her CEO, the local mall wasn’t it. But that’s where the GPS in her modest sedan sent her. The parking lot overflowed with holiday shoppers out making last minute Christmas purchases.

As a financial analyst and a planner by nature, she’d already purchased her meager list of gifts for her mom and brother, wrapped, and mailed them back home before the end of September in anticipation of missing the trip to her magical hometown, Tylerville.

Last minute shopping or, to be honest, being anywhere near a retail establishment at Christmas, made her itch. It figured her boss would send her on a fool’s mission into the heart of her worst nightmare, the chaos of a winter wonderland crowded with over-sugared, under-slept, excited children and their equally over-wrought, exhausted parents.

Find Alistair Dennison, Junior, and lure him back to Dennison Family Alliance to take over the family business. Those were the cryptic instructions given to her by the company CEO, and his father, Alistair Dennison, Senior, after she’d exploded in an ill-advised bout of laughter at the company-wide holiday luncheon.

It was both a test of her negotiation skills and a punishment. But if laughing long and loud at the sight of an obnoxious teenage boy falling into a three-tier nacho cheese fountain was wrong, Emma figured she’d earned it, in spades. She might have tried to hold her laughter in a bit more, given that the teenager was the youngest son of the CEO, but it proved impossible.

From where she sat, the kid had it coming, after a very unwelcome attempt at flirting with an older brunette waitress. He tried to get grabby with her assets. She ducked, he dove, and landed with enough force against a buffet table housing the inordinately large fountain to receive a cheese bath, still gloppy and lukewarm. The waitress, rightfully, finished her interaction by topping the handsy teen in a bowl of tortilla chips.

All the other employees in attendance at the holiday luncheon, all four hundred and twelve, give or take a dozen, gasped. The only gasp heard from Emma came between choked bits of laughter and a spray of holiday green punch. Needless to say, the summons to the office of her boss’s, boss’s, boss, wasn’t entirely unexpected.

She’d expected a pink slip and instead received the gift of an impossible challenge. Recruit the CEO’s eldest son back to take over the family company from his retiring father before the short notice Board meeting scheduled on Christmas Eve. Five days. She had just five friggin’ days to convince Junior to fall in line with his father’s wishes.

She kept repeating her internal words of comfort. It’s all going to be fine. She’d talk to him about family duty and show him a benefits package and signing bonus he can’t turn down. It’s all going to be totally fine. She certainly didn’t think her job depended on something as simple as finding a parking space in the middle of the busiest shopping season of the year. Beads of sweat rolled down her back.

Emma drove back and forth down the lanes, slowly circling up and then down the parking deck. After her third pass, she wondered if she should just abandon her car on the side of the road and use the towing fee as a tax write off. Surely the IRS would understand.

Rows and rows of cars, in various states of salted, caked-on mess from wintry streets crowded the parking deck. It was only after the fifth pass that she spotted a family of six headed toward a very old, grey minivan loaded down with bags of goodies. She almost wept with joy when the family climbed in and slowly backed out of their space, leaving room for her.

She wanted nothing more than to go back to her desk at DFA and get back to what she knew— straight forward, honest numbers. Algorithms. Facts. Instead, she found herself squeezing her car into the surprisingly small, abandoned space.

And did she forget to mention? She’d be walking into a potentially hostile encounter with the mysterious Alistair Dennison, Jr., dressed like a half-eaten, moth-infested Christmas Elf that someone had thrown behind a dusty refrigerator. She couldn’t say if this was Senior’s diabolical way of exacting additional punishment on behalf of his entitled youngest son or if it just made him joyful to see her dressed like a creature half elf and half candy cane, but her instructions came along with a wardrobe change he’d referred to as “holiday festive.”

When Elvira, his assistant, handed her the shopping bag filled with red and white striped swirls and tulle, she’d felt her insides crack. It was the tarnished gold bells glued on the tips of her scratchy red felt shoes that really did it for her though. The reflection in her rear-view mirror was a mix of comedy and tragedy.

Her mascara was starting to run, and her blonde hair had more static underneath the green felt elf hat than a cat who’d rubbed its way across a shag carpet, but she looked like an electrocuted doll. After smoothing a finger beneath each eye with the hopes of making herself look a little less Gothic, she sighed, climbed out of the car quickly, and high-tailed it into the front of the mall jingle-jangling the whole way.

The smell of freshly made chocolate fudge and soft pretzels enveloped her as she pushed her way through the front doors of the mall in search of the small administrative wing. The smell of fresh-baked goods should have given her a false sense of warmth and security meant to enhance the shopping experience, but it quickly lost out to the noise and overwhelm that surrounded her.

Between the sound of modernized Christmas carols blaring out over the loudspeaker and the competing voices of shoppers, Emma’s anxiety steadily increased, leaving her vibrating in her elf skin. She preferred to work behind the scenes at DFA, and the mall poked at all of those reasons like a sharp stick in the eye.

She kept her head down and pushed onward, slowly navigating the crowds. Each storefront she passed was dressed for the season, glittering lights highlighting their newest products, smiling attendants waiting by the front of their shops encouraging shoppers to enter. Avoiding eye contact at all costs and the lure of money unnecessarily spent, Emma continued her trek, the reflection of an over-fluffed, under-stuffed Christmas elf chasing behind her in each window reflection.

She should have been paying more attention, and perhaps would have been if the snow blower hadn’t misfired like a cannon, sending down a cascade of smoking, singed cotton snowflakes into the Christmas display.

The initial explosion caught everyone by surprise, causing a moment of panicked quiet that quickly escalated into full-blown screaming terror as the snow blower exploded forth once again with more burnt cotton candy snow. Santa’s workshop, an apparently very flammable gingerbread affair, slowly took on the surreal shades of Halloween.

Orange and red flames licked at the candy painted columns, producing wispy trails of black smoke. Parents and children, uncertain of the source of the explosion and panicked by the smokey haze filling the center of the mall, scrambled to escape what was now being proclaimed a burning building. Emma stood in the middle of it all being pushed and pulled against her will, unable to retreat with the shoppers.

“Hey, get out of here! The building’s burning!”

“One of the elves went rogue. Santa’s house is collapsing!”

“Call the fire department! Call the police!”

For every step she tried to take out of the mall, she ended up slowly pulled further inside. When she slipped on a suspicious looking puddle that she prayed was an Orange Julius, she knew the end had come. She’d be trampled to death in the one place she never should have been, a mall at Christmas time.

She curled into an elven candy cane ball on the floor, attempting to protect her body from the stampeding feet. This was it. This was what she got for landing herself on the naughty list with the boss. Death by stomping.

In that final moment several things happened. First, the overhead fire sprinklers came on, dousing the flames out on Santa’s house and shorting out the flame throwing snow blower. Black smoke continued to roil through the mall as the burning plastic and paper smoldered under the sprinklers.

Through cracked fingers, she could see the motions of employees rushing to stamp out the last bits of fire that lingered. The crowd, still scrambling to escape their own crispy demise, shifted around her for the first time since she’d fallen on the mystery wet spot on the floor. She half expected a column to fall and finish the job of taking her out, but, lo and behold, when she opened her eyes, Santa himself stood guard over her fallen form.

He was only partially dressed for his role, his red velvet pants hitched up by festive suspenders atop a soaked white tank top meant to go under the rest of his gear. A pair of crisp blue eyes and chiseled tan cheekbones behind a theatrical white beard and dark black eyebrows beaded in water met hers.

Hot Santa. The kind of hot that had nothing to do with the fire that had consumed his workshop.

“Hey, are you hurt?” He reached a firm hand down to give her a lift while keeping the other arm spread protectively around her to direct the others away from her. “You slipped in someone’s pee.”

Of course, she had.