A Princess for Christmas Read online

  Dedication

  For my dad, aka Mr. Hallmark Christmas

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  Announcement

  Teaser

  About the Author

  Also by Jenny Holiday

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Chapter One

  Talking to kids was easier in cars. Leo might be making a hash of everything with Gabby, but that was one thing he’d learned in the two years he’d been trying to pinch-hit on the whole parenting thing.

  Talking to kids was easier in cars. Not easy. Easier. Usually only marginally to imperceptibly. Like today when, despite his best efforts, he could not extract any information about how the middle school production of The Wizard of Oz had gone.

  “Did Aidan remember his line today?” At yesterday’s show, number four of the weeklong run, the boy playing the head of the Lollipop Guild had forgotten his line—the line that came before Gabby’s—so the whole production had ground to a halt, Gabby unsure whether she should wait for him. The result, she reported, had been “extreme and utter mortification” when the teacher cued her to go ahead, thus making it look like the flub had been her fault.

  Or so he’d been told yesterday, when Gabby had been infinitely more chatty than today.

  Today, getting her to speak was like trying to arrange an audience with the great and powerful Oz.

  She didn’t answer, just performed a kind of girlish grunt as she looked out the window in the back of his taxi.

  Did Aidan remember his line or not? he wanted to shout. But a person didn’t shout things like that at his eleven-year-old sister. Especially when Did Aidan remember his line or not? was really a proxy for Please tell me you’re okay.

  Also: Where is your winter hat? It might not be snowing yet, but it’s December, and I don’t care about your hair. I care about your ears not getting frostbitten.

  But Leo didn’t know how to say any of those things. One day Gabby was all smiles and stories and “extreme and utter mortification,” and the next she was closed up as tightly as the clams Dani brought back from Long Island.

  He didn’t know if the way she ran so hot and cold was normal. The parenting books he read suggested it was, but he thought it was early for her to be like this—he’d been expecting this moodiness to arrive later, to be more of a teenage thing.

  But on the other hand, she had always been socially advanced. And she was a lot smarter than he was. He had never used phrases like extreme and utter mortification when he was eleven. Or in the fourteen years since, for that matter.

  “What does that mean?” he said in response to her grunt. “Did the Lollipop League boss come through? I’m on pins and needles, here, kiddo.”

  “It’s the Lollipop Guild, Leo.”

  And, oh, the disdain she managed to infuse into that single word. His heart sped up like it always did when he felt like he was on the brink of fucking things up irrevocably.

  Who knew he was capable of getting so worked up over The Wizard of Oz?

  But hang on, now. This was important, yes, because it was important to her, but confusing the Lollipop Guild and the Lollipop League wasn’t fucking things up irrevocably. He needed to keep some perspective here.

  No. What he needed was a vacation. But that wasn’t happening anytime soon.

  So he cleared his throat as he turned onto First Avenue. “Right. Lollipop Guild; Lullaby League. Got it.”

  There was a long silence as he navigated the snarl of traffic on the few blocks between them and their destination. But then Gabby said, “You’re for sure coming tomorrow, right?”

  There. That’s what these rides were about. She never would have asked him that so directly at home. But he could hear in her tone how much she wanted him there. And how much she’d missed the fact that he hadn’t been yet.

  “You can count on it.” He still felt terrible about missing today’s show. He’d told her he would be there, but Mrs. Octavio in 2C had run a bath and forgotten about it, causing it to overflow into the unit below hers.

  He should have been there like he promised. He should have been on hand to witness the “extreme and utter mortification.” That he hadn’t was edging closer to “fucking up irrevocably” territory. Leo worried sometimes that all his small mistakes, his oversights and omissions, while not large enough individually to do any real harm, were invisibly accreting. That they were somewhere inside Gabby, dormant for now, but that one day, when he committed one too many, there would be a kind of tipping point. That all his little fuckups would add up to one giant one that actually harmed her.

  “I’ll let the building flood before I miss it,” he vowed.

  He was watching her in the rearview mirror, so he caught the way her brow knit. “Well, maybe don’t do that. I’m just Lollipop Guilder Number Four. I only have the one line.”

  He hated that an eleven-year-old knew where their household priorities had to lie. Knew that his second job as their building’s on-site super was the only way they could afford the rent. Knew that flooded apartments had to take precedent over school plays.

  Hell, he hated that their priorities had to line up like that to begin with. They had never been rich when Mom and Dad were alive, but things were a lot tighter now.

  “Already done, kiddo. Dani’s gonna work from home tomorrow so she can be on call as backup in case any building nonsense crops up.”

  “Don’t call me kiddo.”

  He glanced in the rearview mirror again, and this time he liked what he saw. She was trying to tamp down a smile as she lodged her objection. He relaxed a little. They were okay. For another day, anyway.

  “Okay, kiddo”—he stressed the endearment—“today you and Max are in for a treat. We are going to . . .” He rolled his tongue and drummed on the steering wheel. He was trying to irritate her now. He was still her brother, after all. Normalcy was important. Routines created stability. And Gabby needed to believe that there was a purpose to their little drive-arounds other than trying to, like, ensure her long-term emotional well-being.

  He turned on the singsong, lecture-y tone she purported to hate. “And here we are! The United Nations Headquarters, designed in 1952 by Oscar Niemeyer, one of the pioneers of modern architecture. So like I said, you are in for an exciting time. And you, too, Max. Get ready, my friends.”

  At hearing his name, Max started barking. Or yapping, because what Max did could not properly be called a bark.

  “See? Max appreciates my genius even if no one else does.”

  Gabby snorted. But she was openly smiling now.

  He had beat back the forces of chaos for a little longer.

  When the applause broke out, Marie almost started crying.

  Which was not rational. There would have been many more logical instances in which to cry today. Perhaps before she gave a speech at the General Assembly of the United Nations? When she’d been standing up there looking at all the dignitaries and translators—a
literal subset of the entire world—she’d felt like she was floating outside her actual body and therefore would have to call in absent to the speech she’d been practicing for so long. Would have to call her father and tell him he had been right. That she had been foolish to try to tack this speech on to the New York visit.

  But, no, somehow, as she’d made her way up to the podium and looked out at that sea of faces and been sure that she was about to float away—sail up past the murals on the side walls and up and over the press gallery—she’d managed to get a hold of herself. Reach up and anchor some small shred of her being, like capturing the string of a runaway helium balloon just before it floated away forever, open her mouth, and talk.

  Once she’d gotten going, it had actually been fine. She knew this material. She cared about this material. She was giving a speech about the ongoing European refugee crisis. She owed those people her best. And she was fairly certain she had delivered.

  But, oh, afterward, the relief. It was all-encompassing. Like when you woke from a nightmare and it was still playing in your head, but then there was that glorious tipping point when enough of reality—your bed, the outline of your armoire—kicked in and triggered that wonderful notion: it was just a dream.

  Or, less dramatically, like the feeling she used to get as a girl after she was done with her weekly dancing lesson. Six days of freedom until she had to do it again! Or like that one time Monsieur Lavoie went away for the summer and they decided to give her three months off instead of replacing him.

  The startling liberation of a heavy responsibility suddenly lifted.

  It made her giddy even as she wanted to weep with relief.

  She had done it, her father’s naysaying be damned.

  But, as she navigated a crowd of well-wishers after the session was over, both the giddiness and the relief faded. Because she wasn’t done yet with this epic day. It was the reason she was leaving so soon after her speech, instead of staying to take questions and talk policy.

  In some ways, her father was right. Her next task was more important than the speech had been, if less public.

  It was certainly as nerve-racking. She didn’t fear that she was going to float away like an escaped balloon this time. More that she might, suddenly and with no warning, be violently popped. Be left with nothing to show for herself but a sad handful of broken latex.

  She had tried to tell her father the party was not the place to do this. That an ambush would not go over well. But, as he had pointed out—reasonably, she had to admit—they really had no choice. Philip Gregory was attending the party, and what they needed to do—their last resort—was to charm Philip Gregory.

  Charm.

  Not something Marie possessed a lot of, despite her ongoing efforts.

  Charm. Grace. Classical beauty. All the things that someone in her position was expected to have, Marie lacked. Her mother had had those things.

  Instead, Marie was cursed with a surfeit of other qualities, things like anxiety and an overabundance of caution.

  Which probably explained why she was in the bathroom at the United Nations changing into her party dress.

  Mr. Benz had tried to insist that they had time to return to the hotel for her to change, and that plan might have worked if it had merely been a regular party. A party on land. But the boat was leaving at seven o’clock sharp, and even though anyone else would probably wait for her if “her people” asked, tonight’s hostess most decidedly would not. She had only invited Marie because it would look odd if she didn’t.

  Marie, ever conscientious, had done her homework. A session with Google Maps had informed her that it was a twenty-minute drive down and around FDR Drive from the UN buildings to the marina. And while Mr. Benz, who so very much did not want to stand by while she changed in a restroom at the United Nations, might be technically correct—they might be able to get up to the Plaza and back down to catch the boat—that was cutting it too close for her liking.

  Marie didn’t have room in her life for might. She hated being late at the best of times—being late only confirmed the worst stereotypes about people like her—and this wasn’t the best of times. This was important. This was work. This was duty.

  “You should have had Verene make the trip with you.” Mr. Benz’s tone, as Marie emerged from the bathroom as polished and pulled together as she was going to get on her own steam, would have sounded neutral to outsiders. Marie, however, heard the nuance. She heard the slightly clipped consonants that signaled his disapproval.

  She might be somewhat sheltered—she would admit to that—but even she knew that traveling with someone whose sole job was to pin her hair and steam the wrinkles out of her clothes was not a good look when one was trying to be casually charming. High-profile American people did not have these sorts of visible assistants. The Kardashians, for example, probably had armies of people spraying and fluffing them behind the scenes, but the key was that they made it look effortless. Americans enjoyed pretending they lived in a classless society, one where social mobility was as easy as a walk to the corner store. But she couldn’t explain that to Mr. Benz, who refused on principle to even attempt to understand the ways of Americans, much less bend to them.

  “There was no need to pay for another person to make the trip,” she said with artificial cheer, falling back on the economic argument she’d made at home. And it was true. She was here to try to shore up the economy at home, not leech off it.

  Mr. Benz sniffed. He preferred to pretend that they still lived in a world where the family did not need to concern itself with things so pedestrian, so crass, as money.

  “Regardless, I’m perfectly capable of dressing myself.”

  Which might not actually be true, judging by how much trouble the back of her dress had given her. It laced up corset-style, and the pink ribbons it was threaded with weren’t long enough for her to reach around and tie herself. This had been a poor choice, but of course she hadn’t thought through the sartorial details the way Verene would have.

  But she was not about to ask Mr. Benz for help or, worse, let him see that she was setting out for the party with the back of her dress undone. She would have to find a sympathetic partygoer to discreetly help her.

  So she adjusted her cape to better hide her back, pasted on a smile, and said, “Shall we go?”

  When they emerged on First and East Forty-Second, the agreed-upon meeting place for maximumly efficient extraction, Torkel was there shaking his head and speaking urgently into his phone.

  Torkel was usually the epitome of cool. A man of few words and no outward emotions, he let his big, beefy muscles and his mirrored sunglasses—oh, she’d had such a crush on him when she was a teenager!—speak for him.

  Usually.

  Today he snapped, “Consider yourself fired,” into the phone, curse-whispered, “So ein Schmarrn!” to himself, and turned to them with a grim expression.

  Seeing any expression on Torkel’s face was such a novelty, it distracted Marie for a moment.

  “The car isn’t coming,” he said.

  “I beg your pardon?” Mr. Benz’s neutral-on-the-surface-of-things tone was now shading into alarm.

  “It broke down.”

  Mr. Benz blinked a few times. “Pardon me?”

  “It broke down.”

  “The car isn’t coming?” Goodness. Mr. Benz rarely emphasized one syllable over another. This must be his version of panic. If Marie hadn’t been sharing in that sentiment, she would have been amused. “It wasn’t supposed to go anywhere,” Mr. Benz went on. “It was supposed to wait for us and meet us here when I texted, which I just did.”

  Oh, he had emphasized four words there!

  Marie felt badly. Torkel would be taking this to heart. He’d chosen the car service because, after extensive research and interviewing, he had determined it could best accommodate their security protocol. He had swept the car and conducted extensive background checks on their driver.

  “Our vehicle is currently
broken down on the Queensboro Bridge.” A vein bulged in Torkel’s neck. “Apparently drivers on UN detail congregate at the home of the Costa Rican ambassador while they’re waiting to pick up.”

  “All right,” Marie said. They didn’t have time to waste. “It’s not the end of the world. No one’s dead.”

  “This was why the speech—” Mr. Benz cut himself off. He’d been going to say, This was why the speech was a bad idea. A frivolous indulgence. But of course he wouldn’t actually say it.

  He might be right, though. Not about it being frivolous, but about Marie’s prioritizing it over the meeting with Gregory.

  “I’ve ordered another car,” Torkel said.

  Marie shook her head. “We don’t have time for that. We’ll summon a taxi.”

  Mr. Benz gasped. Torkel growled.

  She extended her arm out in the direction of the street before the inevitable volley of objections could be launched. She had never attempted to hail a taxi before, but that was how they always did it on Sex and the City. She started waving her arm around for good measure.

  She could feel the disapproval radiating from both men. She didn’t pull rank very often. She usually let them . . . handle her. It was their job, after all.

  But it wouldn’t be their job to tell her father that she had missed the boat—literally, though she was familiar with the American idiom—and with it her only chance to talk to Philip Gregory.

  No, that would be her job.

  She lifted her chin and tried to make the face her mother always used to when Grand-mère came to their apartment for tea. Recalled her mother saying, If you want someone to listen to you, don’t yell. Yelling signals desperation. Speak quietly but firmly. Assume you will be heard.

  All those dancing lessons might have been for naught, but some of her training had stuck.

  Marie also remembered her mother hugging her, grabbing the remote control, and cuddling up next to her to watch some “deliciously dreadful American TV” after Grand-mère left.

  She lifted her chin. “Gentleman. We are getting a taxi. There will be no further discussion.”