Free High Heels and Holidays by Kasey Michaels Page A

all?”
    â€œNot at all,” Maggie repeated, fitting the cylinder into the holder. “But he knows about them.”
    â€œYes. Precisely. Not me, of course. I came later. The finishing touch, as it were, that made the rest of it possible. Well, I should go feed Henry.”
    â€œOh, stay a while, please,” Maggie told him quietly, and Sterling, who had been eyeing the door, slouched against the back of the couch. “I want to hear all of it. Now.”
    â€œBut there’s really nothing to say, Maggie. You know Saint Just lived inside your head until he decided to come out.”
    â€œNo, I don’t know that, Sterling. It’s what I’ve been told, but I don’t know it. As a matter of fact, I try very hard not to think about it.”
    â€œYou really shouldn’t, if it makes your head hurt, or any of that. I hadn’t lived there quite so long—in your head, that is—and Saint Just was already firmly in residence when I got there. I once asked him how long he’d been with you, and he said he’d been there since the beginning.”
    Now here was something she hadn’t heard before. “From the first day I began writing? Is that what you mean? What he means? That he’s been the glimmer of an idea in my head for as long as I’ve been writing?”
    â€œNo, from the beginning, Maggie. I think, now that I consider the thing, he mentioned the word . . . um . . . puberty.”
    â€œOh, God,” Maggie said, staggering over to her desk chair and collapsing into it. He’d been with her that long? She’d been measuring men against him ever since she’d first looked at Jimmy Gilchrist and decided maybe boys weren’t all dopes? Except they’d all turned out to be dopes, hadn’t they? Dopes, or duds. All these years, she’d never found one, not a single one, who could measure up to, live up to . . . to the imaginary man living in her head? Maggie blinked, trying not to faint. “He’s been with me that long?”
    Sterling was on firmer ground here, it seemed. “Oh, yes. Evolving, you understand. And then, at last, you named him, which he appreciated very much by the way, for it’s just the name he would have chosen for himself.”
    â€œ Just the name, huh? The Viscount Saint Just,” Maggie heard herself say over the ringing in her ears. “All along? All these years? I’d been . . . building him?”
    â€œYour perfect hero, yes. I am just delighted that you chose to make me believable as well, or else I shouldn’t be here, should I, and where would Henry be without me?”
    â€œHungry,” Maggie muttered, waving Sterling toward the door. She needed to be alone. She needed to think about this. “Wait! There was something else, wasn’t there? Oh, right, I remember. Alex was here this morning, you showed up the moment he left, and now you’re concerned as to when he’ll be back, because you want to be gone. I’m being babysat, Sterling, aren’t I?”
    â€œI’m afraid I don’t understand the term,” Sterling said, now backpedaling toward the door. “Truly, I don’t.”
    â€œOh, yes, truly you do,” Maggie said, already calling up her search engine on the computer. “But never mind. I’ll figure out the why of it on my own.”
    Sterling escaped, and Maggie typed a few words into the search engine, and then clicked on one of the articles that appeared. Christmas trees were introduced to England from Germany around 1841. Maggie’s books, those written as Alicia Tate Evans and those written as Cleo Dooley, all dealt with the Regency, 1811–1820. She’d written about a Christmas tree in one of her Alicia Tate Evans books, and nobody had caught it. Not her, not the copy editor. None of her half dozen fans of those older books. Nobody.
    â€œWell, now, that’s embarrassing,” Maggie said, cupping her