Magical Christmas

I told Santa

Erin POV

"There is another option," he said. "The request was not so precise that one can't allow for some wiggle room. Someone to warm your bed. I take it you have more than one bed as your house is quite big?"

"Yes, I have 2 guest rooms."

"The person also has to bring some magic into your dating life, so ideally a magical creature. And they had to be attractive and willing to do naughty things in bed. Well, naughty could be anything from not brushing one's teeth to making prank phone calls."

"Would you ever not brush your teeth before bed? I thought wolves had supersmelling abilities. How gross would it be to be that one werewolf everyone was talking about?"

"Fine, I would brush my teeth. But you get the point. It would actually make my surveillance a lot easier. So, you want to be roommates until Christmas?"

On the one hand, hell yeah, but this was not in the way I was hoping for. On the other hand, it did neatly solve the daterape thing. As long as I was able to resist SW for twentyfive minus 11 days. Em, 14 days. If I could live 2 weeks with a superhot roommate in a sexless house, everything would be great. And I would not have to spend Christmas alone. But even without the s****l tension (admittedly mostly coming from me) spending all day at work and all time together at home did seem to put us in danger of bickering.

"I'd be willing to give it a try. But don't get your hopes up for it to work. Also, I will accept zero restrictions on my actions in the house except for not entering your room. Cooking and cleaning chores will be shared. Oh, and please warn me if your pack decides to come and kill me. Do we have a deal?"

"We do." He stretched his hand forwards and I shook it. My hand looked teeny tiny inside his. "Just as well," he continued. "I could not afford rent this month anyway." He stuck his tongue out to me and I playfully pushed him to the side. Who knows, maybe this could work. Speaking of work.

"What would you like to go over for the office? Burt wanted us to analyze the productivity of each of the staff. We should get a handle on everything Eliza normally does. We especially need the dates of all the deadlines. We should book meetings with sales, accounting, IT and HR. We should look up how the Christmas party is going and I want to know her plan for my Christmas present. Speaking of Christmas presents. You had better get me one as my fake dating partner."

"Ok, lets go through that list a little slower. Is Burt the merger guy?"

"Yeah, I thought you would know that if the board sent you."

"There was a last minute change and they sent me here before being able to fill me in on the details. But please continue with your planned steps. This time also say who we should contact to book meetings."

"Ok, first accounting, that is Teddy Anderson. He hated being called Teddy, but everyone says it anyway. It is an unfortunate sideeffect of being the boss's son. He is the son of Bjorn Anderson who is the founder, primary stockholder of the Magic Hat and leader of the board. Next is sales- Tilda is your girl there. Christopher is head of IT and Robert is in charge of HR. The others who also work here are Betty, who does customer service, Linda, also IT, Carla, our receptionist, John, who is manager of purchasing and production, and finally Jason, for storage and shipping."

"And what do you do?"

"I was head of marketing and office supplies. We are a small company, so almost all of us hold manager titles, but really everyone helps out with everything."

"I'm a little unsure as to the board's reasoning, and please don't be offended by this, but why did they put the marketing and office supply manger in charge? Would one not normally choose accounting or HR to fill in for the CEO? Also, it sounds like many of the meetings you have scheduled today should have been done by other staff. Why did you speak to people about complaints instead of Betty? Why isn't John speaking to the people presenting new products? And why wasn't Teddy here showing Burt the accounting information?"

"Yeah, I agree, it is weird. I just assumed the magic wanted me to talk to everybody. But since our deal is on, I should start delegating." I used the intercom to call John and inform him people were here in masse to show him new ideas. Then I called Carla to inform her that they would not be sent to me. Next, we booked meetings with everyone. The only one who would not see us that day was Teddy. But there were no surprises there, as he tended to think he was a little too high and mighty for this office. He made no pretense of thinking the rest of us had value. This was an unfortunate sidejob he had to take on his way to becoming a big shot.

We spent all day actually working. I thought it would be superhard to focus with Devin in the room but we worked surprisingly well together. Don't get me wrong, in boring moments I would sit watching him instead of the presentations on the screen, But the work was interesting and I liked talking to him about it.

At the end of the day, Devin asked the big question all of us staff had wondered about:

"Why is this merger happening? As far as I can tell, this is a tightly knit group made up of people who compliment each other. Based on what I see from sales and purchasing, the economy should be very good. And you said Bjorn started this company himself. Surely he should not want to see it get overrun."

"Honestly, we are all confused about it too. Our managers' meetings used to be fun meetings with cookies and happy news. We rarely take hits and if we were to, everyone would already know it as we would already be brainstorming solutions. But then, in the last 6 months, nothing really made sense. According to everyone, things were looking up, but when Teddy presented the numbers everything was bad. He blamed corona, the war, inflation and government policies. But we started underperforming. And after 6 months, he convinced his father not to fall on a sinking ship."

"I'm really looking forwards to the accounting meeting tomorrow. But I have a friend who is really good at accounting. Could I send us the latest report from Eliza's email to get a second opinion?"

"Sure, as long as you make her sign a secrecy clause beforehand. And present the results to me before the meeting."

We drove our separate cars home. He had a car which looked like a simple WV Golf from the outside but was clearly some kind of superversion of it because that thing could accelerate quickly. We had left the office late, so we picked up some Thai take away. Normally, a luxury I reserved for Fridays, but everyone deserves a little extra treat once in a while.