The Kid Who Stole Christmas by Linda Stevens

Bayers,” Shannon continued. “We hardly run in the same social circles. But I’ve seen pictures of Angela in the newspaper. She’s a very stunning woman.”
    “In her case, beauty really is only skin-deep,” Rick said with obvious disgust. He was glad to allow anger to replace his self-pity. “It probably sounds like sour grapes, or something, but really, you can’t imagine how awful Angela is, Shannon. I haven’t the words to describe her.”
    If she was involved in this dirty little scheme to take over the Arnie shipment, Shannon was fully prepared to believe anything he said about the woman. But it didn’t seem like a very productive thing to talk about. Venting anger only did so much good; beyond that, it was better to take a look at the source of that anger.
    “There must have been something you liked about her once, though,” Shannon said. “After all, you got married and had a child, and then raised that child together for eight years.”
    Rick sighed and slumped in his chair. “It’s true. I lose sight of that fact sometimes,” he admitted. “Probably because what happened afterward was so traumatic. But it wasn’t a blissful eight years up until then, either.”
    “How did you meet?”
    “It was a real classic, that’s for sure. I wasn’t long out of college and between jobs, so I started this fly-by-night pool-cleaning service in Phoenix for some quick cash.”
    “Hold on a second,” Shannon interrupted, doing some quick math in her head. “Not long out of college? Wouldn’t you have been almost thirty at the time?”
    “Twenty-eight,” he corrected. “It was my second degree.”
    Shannon’s eyes widened. “Oh, really?”
    Rick seemed suddenly uncomfortable. He looked away, scanning the crowd for a server. When he spotted one, he motioned for another round.
    “Science was my first interest,” he told her when at last he met her gaze again. “But I found I didn’t like the sort of jobs available. So I went back to school and got a business-related degree.”
    “Uh-huh.”
    Science? Business-related? It was all a bit vague. But she could tell by the way he was again avoiding her eyes that it was unlikely she would be able to pin him down any further. It was probably difficult for him to admit how far he had fallen after the divorce. Shannon decided to let it be.
    “Let’s get back to the interesting part,” she said. “I think I can see this one coming. One day you were cleaning a pool, and there was this ravishing woman baking in the hot Arizona sun, her body glistening with oil. You looked at her, she looked at you, one thing led to another and about nine months later Chelsea was born. Am I close?”
    Rick laughed, breaking the tension. “Very. I told you it was a classic. The details are that it was her rich daddy’s house and that he did not much like a twenty-eight-year-old professional student turned pool cleaner consorting with his eighteen-year-old debutante daughter. When she turned up pregnant, he tried to arrange an abortion. Angela and I ran off that same day and got married as soon as the law allowed.”
    “And Daddy?”
    “Ranted, raved and threatened. When Chelsea was born, and he finally realized Angela had done it all mainly to spite him, as well as to get out from under his roof and his thumb, he disinherited her,” Rick replied. “Since I had come to those same conclusions about her myself by then, in many ways that was the beginning of the end for Angela and me, too.”
    It was indeed a classic tale, with the usual sort of ending such tales often had, a messy divorce. In the middle, however, there apparently was a twist.
    “Yet you stayed together until Chelsea was eight?”
    “It’s not that I didn’t see the writing on the wall,” Rick told her. “But I loved her, or thought I did, and I already told you I doted on Chelsea. Ironically, though, it was Angela who held us together in the beginning.”
    “Angela?” Shannon asked,