Good Elf Gone Wrong: A Holiday Romantic Comedy
Good Elf Gone Wrong: Chapter 42

A car was waiting for me when the airplane landed on the pitch-dark runway of the small executive airport near the nondescript New Jersey industrial park.

I took the stairs down two at a time, the hard drive tucked safely in a hard case in my jacket. There was so much data, and we were under the gun, so I was having our New Jersey location process it.

Should I have waited until the morning, waited until Gracie had woken up, cooked me a leisurely breakfast, let me make love to her, so that she wouldn’t think anything was wrong?

In an ideal world, yes.

Unfortunately, the clock was ticking. The deadline was two days away. We had to find enough incriminating evidence against EnerCheck so that Grayson Richmond would be satisfied. With almost four terabytes of data to sift through, we were cutting it dangerously close.

“Bro!”

“Elsa!” I wrapped my little sister in a hug when she greeted me in the lobby of the warehouse. “What are you doing here?”

“I missed you all, and I heard you were in the Hail Mary stage of your super-duper secret mission.”

“I couldn’t call Skylar and Layla back to help,” Lawrence stated. “Layla would kill me. Literally dead.”

“What about the lodge?” I asked my sister.

“Dear cousin Noelle is driving me batty,” Elsa said as we walked into the bowels of the facility. “Harrogate is completely insane right now. Someone was caught cheating at The Great Christmas Bake Off and then took a rolling pin and smashed up everyone’s plum pies. There was a riot.”

“There was about to be a riot here if Hudson hadn’t gotten that data,” Anderson said.

“He always closes the deal.” Lawrence slapped me on the back when I handed him the hard drive. “Let’s see what this baby has to offer.”

My brother carefully plugged in the hard drive, and the light blinked.

“Woof,” Talbot said. “Four terabytes of data?”

“There has to be something on it,” Jake said, taking a bite of one of the cookies Gracie had insisted I take home with me the other night.

“Score! She has her photos set to sync with the laptop,” Lawrence crowed. “Everything we need should be on here.”

“Ooh. Has someone been fighting?” Elsa asked, poking at the cut on my jaw while my brothers set up the protocol for the file review.

“His fake girlfriend’s ex-fiancé hit him in the face with a hockey stick,” Jake said with a laugh.

“Did you win?”

“The hockey game? Of course,” I answered smugly.

“No, the fight.”

I pushed her lightly. “Do you even have to ask?”

“I interrupt this family reunion to bring you four terabytes of data,” Talbot announced, looking up from his computer.

“Clock starts now.”

Talbot had created a program that could sort out folders and parcel them to my various employees. Simultaneously, he also ran another text search program to scan any note files or PDFs on the drive for certain keywords.

I poured myself some coffee, black, and settled at a desk to start sifting through files.

“Oh my god!” Elsa exclaimed.

I jumped up.

“Surely it can’t be this easy,” Anderson said, rushing over to her desk.

Elsa giggled.

“Look at this beautifully decorated apartment. Are you turning over a new Christmas-loving leaf, Hudson?”

I scowled at the photos of my apartment on Elsa’s screen.

“His fake girlfriend decorated for him,” Lawrence said with a shit-eating grin.

“Look at Hudson underneath the Christmas tree.”

“Wait, what?”

“Oh, this girl has it bad for you, bro.” Elsa cackled. “Oh my god, look at Hudson with the pug!”

“Pugnog’s inbred, and supposedly his eye randomly pops out,” I said flatly.

“His name is Pugnog? Adorable! And he’s wearing a Christmas sweater!” my sister shrieked, which caused all the rest of my employees to rush over to see what she’d found.

Elsa pointed to the screen. There was a photo of me at Gracie’s parents’ table, Pugnog in my lap, his eyes going different directions, the dog drooling as I helped Gracie make her gingerbread house.

“She’s cute.” Elsa punched me hard in the chest.

“Ow!”

My sister knew how to hit. She grew up with five brothers and played hockey, sure, but she also spent time with our cousins in Harrogate and one cousin, Noelle, and had, on multiple occasions, been involved in and out of brawls in the middle of Main Street.

“Aw, there’s Hudson after winning his big game,” Jake said with a smirk.

“We should make Gracie a little scrapbook of the two of you.”

“This isn’t real,” I snapped too harshly.

Elsa didn’t seem fazed. She just flipped to another photo.

It was from earlier that evening—a selfie of me and Gracie in front of the glowing Christmas tree, her kissing my cheek.

“Go back to your desks,” I growled. “This is not what any of you are being paid to do.”

“I’m not being paid to be here at all,” Elsa declared.

Six hours in and no one had had a hit on anything good, though Gracie sure took a lot of high-definition videos of her pug.

Elsa joined me at the coffee table when I went for a refill.

“You’re seriously going to walk away from her after this?” Elsa asked. It was 3 a.m., and she was hyped up on caffeine.

“I—”

“Don’t you see how much she adores you?” She waved her phone with the photos on it.

“You cannot have those.” I tried to grab her phone.

“Too bad.”

“It’s better that I break Gracie’s heart now,” I told her viciously. “I’m not stupid. I can see it in her eyes, see how she’s falling for me. Especially last night.”

“So you just ran away in the middle of the night? Bawk bawk bawk!” Elsa flapped her arms. “Chicken! Bawk!”

“St. Nick help me.”

Elsa doubled over in laughter as I swore.

“I spend too much time with Gracie.”

“Hudson likes Gracie!”

“Elsa,” I said grabbing her shoulders. “I can’t. Even if I cared about her, which I don’t, I can’t be with her. That would be wrong. The whole relationship is based on a lie. I used her to get to her company. You don’t understand. You don’t know Gracie. She’s like this pure, good person. She loves Christmas and sings along to the radio and still has all her stuffed animals, and she likes to decorate cookies and make specialty hot chocolate and wear flannel pajamas. I—I can’t be with her. She deserves better than me.”

“Oh, man.” Elsa patted my head like she used to do when we were kids. “You really do have it bad for her.”

“No. I’ll get over it,” I said gruffly. “We’re going to make a lot of money on this job. I’ll have enough to pay off that loft building I just renovated, and I can send some to our uncle for the lodge.”

Maybe that would be enough to assuage my guilty conscience.

“You should at least give Gracie a Christmas present.”

“Yeah,” I said, suddenly feeling exhausted. “Yeah. I’ll do that.”

“Make something from the heart,” my sister recommended.

“I’m not five. I’m not making her a macaroni necklace.” I took a swallow of coffee. “I have to get back to work.”

I stood at a desk next to my siblings as we sifted through Gracie’s digital life—medical records, internet search history, text message strings.

I still felt sick about what I was doing to Gracie.

Should I give her a present? It seemed like a trite gesture after what I’d done. Not to mention, I didn’t give Christmas presents. Maybe I could give her something, a token parting gift, something meaningful. It would be a gift to let her know, if she ever found out the truth—which she wouldn’t—that it wasn’t all a lie, that a part of me did really care about her.

But what?

The dress.

I went into my office and called the head of my waste disposal company that I used to gain access to people’s trash.

“Boss! Merry Christmas!” Trevor yelled into the phone.

“Do you know anyone at the dump in Washington County, Rhode Island?” I asked him.

“My cousin works down there. We got another job?”

“Please bill this to me personally,” I said, cupping my hand over the phone. “I need the trash from Gracie’s address. I’m looking for antique lace scraps.”

“You want all this at the warehouse?”

“We’re a bit packed here. Did you already clear out the Quantum Cyber job up in Connecticut? Can you take it there?”

“You got it.”

“Tell me your secrets,” Elsa hissed at me. “Are you planning a Christmas surprise?”

“It’s a long shot.” I waited a beat. “Hey, you used to make shadow boxes, right. What would I hypothetically need?”

My sister grinned maniacally. She had had way too much caffeine.

“I’ll do it for an unnamed favor to be specified at a later date, no questions asked. Or,” she amended, “you can actually come up to the lodge and spend some time hanging out with your family.”

“Fine.”

“Leave it to me.” She slurped her coffee. Her eye twitched.

“I need to go back to Maplewood Falls,” I said, grabbing my keys. “Let me know the minute you find anything.”

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