Free In Love Before Christmas by Capri Montgomery Page A

pay for her haste later in the week, but there was just no time to waste. She quickly made it downtown to High Fashion magazine’s office just in time to catch the only person she knew could help her.
     
    She rushed past the reception area with a quick hello to Julia, the red hair striking green eyed young beauty, before nearly colliding into Matthew Taylor. “I need your help.” She pushed Matt into his office so fast he had barely had time to respond. Maybe she should have started with “hello,” but there was just no time. This was dire and her sense of panic would not allow her to calm down for even one second. She shut the door behind her and turned to find him now sitting with his butt on the edge of the desk—more leaning than sitting she would say—and he had a smirk on his face. She would have ripped into him about his lack of compassion, but Matt was the nicest guy she knew. He was the only man who could help her. He would have to understand her sense of urgency—he would just have to.
     

     
    “Are you behind deadline again?” Matt said “again” because he had often known Lani to wait until the last possible minute to get her column together, but he had never seen her so distressed over it. They were doing the photo shoot now and she had to write the piece about the fashion along with her typical women’s piece for the magazine. If she were behind he was not going to be able to write either one for her. He gave her the once over. Her still wet hair clung to her face.
     
    “You’re going to catch pneumonia.”
     
    “That would mean I’d be lucky; and I’m not. You have to help me. I have to fall in love in three weeks.”
     
    He laughed. Surely she couldn’t be serious. “You’re joking right? I mean you’re kidding me, yeah?” He stopped laughing as he saw the serious expression on her face. “What, are you going to die if you don’t?” He returned his attention to the spew of papers he had dropped when Lani pushed him inside the office. He really should pick those up and put them back in order. Thankfully, he had remembered to number the pages this time. The last time Lani had been in his office while he was working on a big project he had forgotten to add the page numbers to the file before printing out the papers and of course when he clumsily dropped them while on his way to see the boss all the papers had scattered. Lani had been the one to help him get each page back in order in time for his big meeting.
     
    “No, but I made a promise with Derek Vanderbilt years ago and well…it’s the thirty-second Christmas.” She went on to tell him of how two kids had made a stupid arrangement years ago, how she had just been reminded of it through her “way too real” nightmare. The truth was that she couldn’t stand Derek; nobody could actually. He was rude, obnoxious, self-absorbed, arrogant, and those were his good qualities.
     
    “You do know you don’t have to follow through.”
     
    “We pinky swore.”
     
    “Oh, you pinky swore,” he laughed as he shook his head.
     
    “In St. Mary’s.”
     
    Matt stopped laughing immediately. Everybody knew St. Mary’s was the one place to hold whatever was said sacred. He wasn’t Catholic, and she didn’t go to church anymore either, but that didn’t negate the fact that they all knew a person couldn’t swear anything in that place and not follow through. “You know, Ash Henderson said that he…”
     
    “I know the story,” she quipped. Ash Henderson, right there in church, before all the members of the church, had promised to donate part of his lottery winnings to charity. He didn’t follow through and two weeks later a bus hit him while he was crossing the street; fortunately their version of a bus was a cute little trolley shaped thing and the driver had just been taking off from a bus stop so Ash only ended up with a few broken bones. Of course broken bones weren’t the end of his problems. He lost his winnings in