Secret Santa Read Online Free Page A

the EMTs, you’d better come right away.”
    * * *
    N EIL WAS BUSILY rigging up a plastic bread bag over his bad arm in order to take a shower when first his front doorbell rang, long and loud, followed by someone doing a good impression of the Gestapo on the heavy oak.
    He dropped the bread bag on the kitchen counter and made his way through the living room to the foyer. When he threw open the door, Charli Prescott nearly beaned him on the head, apparently ready to pound on the door again.
    He caught her fist in his good hand. “Whoa! I’m here.” He released the pink-tipped fingers. For a long moment, all she could do was gulp in air. Maybe she was still ticked about his Christmas lights? He tried a smile to defuse the situation. “Can’t sleep?”
    “My keys... I gave you my keys!” she got out.
    “Yeah. I put them under the flower pot by your back door.”
    “Oh! Sorry! I didn’t look there!” She whirled around, purse flying, no coat on despite temps hovering around a chilly forty degrees, and her hair even worse for wear than it had been earlier.
    “Wait! What’s wrong?” Neil followed her as she stumbled down his steps and down the walkway.
    “My dad! He’s had an MI—I’ve got to get to the hospital.” She wobbled unsteadily as she shouted this over her shoulder and backed past his Christmas lights.
    “A what?”
    “An MI... A heart attack.” As she turned to head for her own driveway, her purse got caught in Neil’s trio of wired angels by the front walk. She snatched at the strap, making the whole chorus of angels rock back and forth.
    “Let me drive you. I have my keys, right here in my pocket.” Neil held them up and was gratified to see her extricate the strap from the offending angel’s halo without doing any damage and without falling herself. “My car’s here.”
    Charli stopped again. Her expression revealed indecision. Neil could literally see her body jerking first one way and then the other.
    So he didn’t wait for her reply. Instead, he dipped back into the little foyer, grabbed two jackets and shut the door behind him. He loped over the short distance between him and Charli and took her arm gently in his.
    “Come on. Let’s get you to the hospital.” He steered her to his car and assisted her in with a fumbling one-handed approach, though she didn’t seem to notice. He wrapped the spare coat around her slim frame. She didn’t protest, just folded her long legs into his little Corolla and seemed to withdraw into herself.
    Once he’d negotiated closing the door with his right hand, he started the car and backed carefully out of his drive. It seemed to trigger something in her. “I’m never like this,” she said. “I’m always cool in a crisis.”
    “Hey. It’s your dad. You’re thinking like a daughter, not a doctor.” Gravel that had collected in the dip between the street and the drive crunched under his tires as he backed out onto the street and started for the hospital. “What happened? Do you know?”
    She jerked her head in the negative. “Lainey—a nurse—”
    “I know Lainey. She called?”
    “After they got a call in from the EMTs. It’s bad.”
    She would know. She’d probably handled lots of these in her work, Neil figured. At the stop sign, he hung a left and made the subsequent turns to the main road in town.
    “Do you want to call your mother?” Neil asked her as they stopped for the last red light between their neighborhood and the hospital. “I didn’t think to ask if your mom needed a lift.”
    In the crimson glow of the light, he could see Charli’s swallow. “Should I go back?” he asked.
    “No. Lainey—Lainey said Mom was riding with the ambulance.”
    The light turned green and he took his foot off the brake, trying not to gun it, but still going a little faster than the speed limit.
    Charli seemed calmer now, but he could tell from her drawn face in the glow of the streetlights she was anxious.
    “You said it was bad. How