Christmas Pie Read online

  Why, what a pompous, callous fool he was! He, James Drayton, a man who prided himself on his humane instincts, had just made an idiotic blunder his own father would have had sense enough to avoid. How on earth could he expect this proud, hard-working girl to accept charity from him as though she were of no more value than a beggar on the streets? He was ashamed of himself.

  “Miss MacNamara?”

  It seemed to take her a second or two, but she finally lifted her face to look at him. Her lips were pinched together as though to prevent her mouth from leaking any more indiscreet words. Such a pretty girl, James thought, with her big, luminous eyes and her flawless porcelain skin, stained now with the flush of her anger and embarrassment.

  “I’m sorry, Miss MacNamara. You’re absolutely right. I wasn’t thinking clearly, and had no business giving you a pair of gloves. Or anything else. Particularly not in front of the other type-writers. It must have been very embarrassing for you, and I’m sorry I didn’t realize it sooner.”

  His rueful grin was so sincere and so beautiful that Polly could only gulp helplessly and nod. She sank into the plush chair she’d deserted moments before, and her anger evaporated.

  “Thank you, Mr. Drayton.”

  James shook his head. “And from what you say, I suppose the other ladies in the type-writing room have already teased you mercilessly about my inappropriate and misplaced gesture.”

  “I’m sure it was meant kindly, Mr. Drayton. I have no doubt of that. In spite of your reputation, I’m positive that you had no ulterior motives.”

  She gasped as soon as she heard herself, and her hand flew to her mouth as if to stuff the words back in. James tried to stifle his amusement. He’d had no idea how utterly engaging Miss Polly MacNamara could be.

  “Be that as it may, it was clumsy. Monumentally clumsy.” Returning to his desk, James picked up the box and looked at it as though for the first time. “I don’t recall its being quite so—so used-looking before.”

  Although his grin contained nothing but lingering humor, Polly felt perfectly awful. “I didn’t see it on my chair, Mr. Drayton. I’m afraid I sat on it.” Once her confession was out, she wanted to crawl under the grand carpet and hide.

  His soft laughter gave her chills and shivers. They were much at odds with her blood, which seemed to heat up and scorch through her veins.

  Suddenly an awful thought struck her. “Is the box too badly damaged for you to return, Mr. Drayton? If so, perhaps you can take the cost of the gloves out of my wages. I don’t think I could pay for them all at once, but—”

  She quit babbling, feeling like an absolute idiot, when he turned around. When he walked toward her with his hand outstretched, it was all she could do to keep from grabbing a cushion from the chair and holding it in front of her face.

  “Please, Miss MacNamara. Truce? I’m terribly sorry for having caused you such embarrassment, and hope I’ll be able to rectify my ridiculous blunder with your co-workers.”

  Polly stared at his hand mistrustfully for several seconds, wondering what he wanted her to do with it.

  When he said, penitently, “Shake hands?” she felt about two inches tall. She shook his hand.

  “Now. Let me see you back to your room,” he said, as though his suggestion was the most natural in the world.

  “Oh, good grief, no! Please. It’s bad enough already!” Then Polly wished she’d bitten her tongue.

  “I’m sorry, Miss MacNamara. I obviously wasn’t thinking. Again.” He peered at her oddly when her hand flew to her mouth. “What’s the matter?”

  “I’m sorry. I—I bit my tongue.”

  “May I see you home again this evening, Miss MacNamara?” James asked with what Polly was sure was studied politeness. He certainly could be a charming man when he put his mind to it.

  “Oh, no. But thank you. I don’t go directly home on Wednesday evenings, Mr. Drayton.”

  “No? And what is there about Wednesdays that’s so special? Is there a young man in your life, perchance?”

  “Good Lord, no!” Then Polly gulped and stammered, “I mean, no. I just do—something—on Wednesdays after work.”

  “Well, whatever your secret is, it’s safe with me, Miss MacNamara. I only hope you have a safe way of getting home from wherever you perform this secret deed.”

  He was teasing her. Polly knew it, and appreciated the lightness of his manner. She gave him a smile and said, “Oh, yes. Thank you. After I perform my secret deed, I’m whisked right to my mother’s front door.”

  Another chuckle accompanied James to the door. “Thank you for coming to see me, Miss MacNamara. I appreciate your braving the gauntlet. I know all those clerks, not to mention Mr. Gregory, can be intimidating.”

  He opened the door and held it for her courteously. Polly glanced up at him as she passed through it into the exquisite reception area. “Thank you.”

  “Thank you,” returned James.

  He watched Polly walk with straight-shouldered defiance past Mr. Gregory’s desk. He noticed she did not glance at the secretary and suspected he knew the reason. He’d been meaning to speak to Gregory for some months now. The man took his position entirely too much to heart, lording it over everybody else in the firm. He treated Raymond Sing like dirt. James could just imagine the grief he’d given poor, respectable little Polly MacNamara.

  When the door closed behind her, James breathed a soft sigh. Why was he so pleased to learn she had no gentleman friend? She was certainly not at all the sort of woman who typically caught his interest. He glanced again at his secretary and found Gregory scowling at the closed office door.

  “Mr. Gregory, will you please step into my office?”

  Gregory leapt from his chair. “Yes, sir, Mr. Drayton.” With a nasal twitter, he said, “I trust you aren’t upset with me for not having got rid of that usurping type-writer, sir. She wouldn’t leave the office. Said she would talk to you, and that was that.”

  The man’s sniveling made James wince. Compared to Polly MacNamara, who had obviously been concerned about the possibility of losing her job but had been willing to face him anyway, Walter Gregory acted like a groveling toad.

  With a sweep of his arm, James ushered Gregory into his office. “Actually, Gregory, it is about that which I need to speak to you.”

  James saw Gregory’s Adam’s apple bob up and down when he swallowed. Wouldn’t his snobby secretary be delighted with his next assignment?

  # # #

  Although the day had begun dismally, after Polly’s nerve-wracking chat with James Drayton it picked up. When Mr. Gregory, clearly smarting with humiliation, distributed a brand-new pair of gloves to each of Drayton and Associates’ team of type-writers, muttering something about Mr. Drayton’s having been somehow prevented from doing so himself, she felt nearly light-hearted.

  Mr. Drayton, according to Mr. Gregory, was giving the gloves to his type-writing staff as an early Christmas present. The gloves were, Mr. Gregory expounded, a suitable gift since a type-writer’s hands were her most important asset. The packets of lavender sachet, he explained, were to keep the gloves fresh in each lady’s bureau drawer.

  “Well, how very kind of him,” Constance Pry murmured.

  Juliana Kenny shot Polly a suspicious frown, but she thanked Mr. Gregory as graciously as she was able.

  Rose’s face went as pink with pleasure as her name when she accepted her gloves.

  Fingering her medallions, Polly watched the condescending Gregory’s stiff-legged passage through the grim type-writing room and wondered if she was evil to feel such satisfaction. It did her heart good to see the nasty, rat-faced little weasel trying to be courteous. Obviously, such a manner did not come naturally.

  After work, she hurried the two blocks to the Sisters of Benevolence, feeling better about life than she had for some time. Although the weather was bitter, her hands were toasty warm, encased as they were in her nice new ten-dollar kidskin gloves from I. Magnin. She was also quite pleased to have mo
re lavender sachet.

  Thanks to her enlightened employer’s good heart—a heart Polly was beginning to appreciate in a new light—the type-writers employed by James Drayton and Associates worked only until five o’clock on Wednesday afternoons. Unlike the dreary sweatshops employing other women who were forced to earn their keep, Drayton paid his type-writing staff a healthy wage, too. Each girl earned fully half what a similarly employed man might make, and they were expected to toil only forty-five hours per week, as well. Polly felt herself very fortunate in her employment.

  She loved her Wednesday evenings because it was then she read to the orphaned children nurtured behind the gates of the Sisters of Benevolence. Polly often wondered if she would ever be blessed with children. Such a likelihood seemed to grow dimmer and dimmer with each passing year, but she couldn’t help wishing.

  Pushing through the orphanage’s merciless wrought-iron gate, Polly’s heart gave its customary lurch at the thought of the children who lived here. Originally established as a sanctuary for children of Chinese singsong girls, the orphanage had expanded over the years. Now, although most of the children it housed were still Chinese or part-Chinese, scores of other parentless waifs swelled their ranks.

  Polly had been reading stories to them every Wednesday evening after work for two years now, ever since she’d been hired by Drayton and Associates. The children loved the stories, and always awaited Polly’s arrival eagerly. And she loved them—every one of them.

  “Good evening, Miss MacNamara. It’s always such a pleasure to see you of a Wednesday evening, my dear.”

  As ever, Mother Francis Mary’s sharp eyes gave Polly the feeling the Mother Superior was staring straight through her and into her heart. With a start, Polly realized the nun and yesterday’s astute little Chinese shopkeeper had the same way about them. The realization amused her and she gave the Mother Superior a big grin.

  “Good evening, Mother Francis Mary. How are my children tonight?”

  “Looking forward to a good story, if my guess is correct. What delights do you have in store for them today, my dear?”

  Withdrawing the two volumes tucked under her arm, Polly showed them to the nun. “For the little ones, I’ll be reading Johnny Crow’s Garden, and then I’ll read chapter ten of Huckleberry Finn to the older ones.”

  “Putting mischievous ideas into their little heads are you?”

  “Oh, good gracious, no! Certainly not that. Why, Huckleberry Finn is a wonderful story. It’s—” Polly flushed when she realized the Mother Superior had been teasing her.

  The nun gave her a wry smile. “Such a serious child you can be sometimes, my dear. But you do have a lovely new pair of gloves, I see. I’m glad. I worried about your poor work-worn fingers, you know.”

  “Oh, yes. My employer gave each of us type-writers a pair of gloves today. Sort of a—an early Christmas present.”

  Taking Polly’s arm and walking with her toward the room where the children awaited their stories, Mother Francis Mary said, “That sounds like a very generous thing for an employer to do. And just who is this paragon?”

  “His name is James Drayton.”

  The name felt strange on Polly tongue. She was unused to saying the “James” part. Pressing her charms in a gesture which was rapidly becoming habit, she experienced a strange lifting to her heart. She wanted to say James again, but didn’t.

  “James Drayton, you say?” Mother Francis Mary smiled in a way that made the creases in her face fold up on one another.

  “Yes.”

  Polly wished her cheeks would cool off. She’d taken to blushing at the very thought of James Drayton, and she didn’t like it. She and the Mother Superior walked through an open corridor and a blast of frigid air struck her, making her shiver.

  “My, my,” murmured the nun, looking about, “I wonder where that came from.”

  # # #

  John Philip Drayton stood outside his son’s place of business for some time, irresolute, before he walked up to the liveried doorman. Such equivocation was foreign to him and he didn’t like it.

  “I should have sent Biddle,” he muttered. Biddle had been his man of business for twenty-five years.

  To Marcus O’Leary, who saluted sharply, J. P. Drayton gave the scowling grimace which, for him, passed as a smile. A brusque question of Marcus produced the information he needed, and J. P. made his way down the plushly carpeted corridor leading to his son’s suite of offices. He eyed the trappings along the corridor with grudging approval.

  Even if the dratted boy hadn’t chosen to go into the family business, J. P. was pleased to see that James had done so well for himself. Not that James’s success surprised him any. He’d pegged the boy for a bright, hard-working lad from the beginning. Too damned soft-hearted, a characteristic he’d inherited from his mother, but shrewd for all that.

  Walter Gregory was working late this evening in an attempt to weasel his way back into his employer’s good graces. He jumped when the door of his precious office was pushed sharply from the outside and the formidable John Philip Drayton strode in.

  J. P. Drayton’s person was an imposing one. Nearly as tall as his son, he stood slightly under six feet. J. P.’s six feet were more vigorously padded than those of his son, however, and his face was hawkish and sharp. James’s mother, from whom James inherited his soft heart, had also softened his features.

  J. P.’s glittering, icy, sea-green eyes had been transformed and become muted and mossy under his son’s chestnut brows. James’s chiseled nose held none of the beakish qualities of his father’s, and his chin, although firm, was not sharply squared. James’s chin also sported a small dimple, a feature much admired by the ladies. His father’s face bore no such mawkishly romantic indentation.

  Gregory had no trouble at all in identifying the personage who’d just invaded his room. J. P. Drayton’s face appeared almost daily in the newspapers, as he was one of the most powerful men in San Francisco. It was said he owned more than a couple local politicians. Rumor had it also that at least one U. S. senator didn’t dare wipe his shoes without consulting J. P. Drayton first.

  Peering down his beaked nose at Gregory, J. P. skewered his son’s secretary with a glare as sharp as a lance. With a sneer he no longer needed to practice, J. P. took the measure of Walter Gregory. “I wish to speak to my son,” he said as though he were addressing a wart.

  Bolting from his chair, Gregory ran to James Drayton’s door. Rubbing his hands together in an obsequious gesture that would have justice to Uriah Heep, he bowed to J. P.

  “Right here, sir. I’m sure Mr. Drayton will be more than happy to see you, sir.”

  With another unflattering glare, J. P. snapped, “I sincerely doubt that,” yanked open the door, and stalked into his son’s office.

  Chapter Four

  “Mother! What are you doing?”

  Polly’s exclamation startled her mother so much that she wobbled on her shaky legs. She only just managed to grab the arms of the chair in time to prevent herself from collapsing in a heap on the threadbare carpet.

  “Oh, Mother!” Racing to her mother’s side, Polly carefully supported her arm and eased her into the overstuffed chair. “What in heaven’s name were you thinking of?”

  Polly’s heart galloped so fast she thought for a moment she might faint. As soon as she was sure her mother was safely ensconced on the cushioned seat, her knees gave out and she sank to the arm of the chair. Her hand reached for her bosom and she pressed her charms as if they had some power to quell her thundering panic. Along with the panic there raced a consuming terror. And there was anger mixed in, as well. The potent combination of sensations made emotion lump up in Polly’s throat.