In this lighthearted holiday novella, Sophie Gift is spending her first Christmas alone after a broken marriage left her with nothing. And working in a department store this time of year, as one of Santa's elves, no less, isn't exactly putting any cheer into the holiday. Mitchell Lauderdale has never been big on Christmas to begin with. He comes from a long line of retailers and doesn't see much to celebrate, other than the piles of cash that find their way into the registers of Lauderdale's Department Store. It's going to take a special kind of spirit to bring together these two souls who have lost (or never known) the meaning of Christmas. But then, everyone in Chicago knows that Lauderdale's is haunted by the ghost of one of its long ago Santas. And that ghost has a thing for matchmaking... "Only 15 Shopping Days Left...," along with four other short reads by Elizabeth Bevarly, can also be purchased in the omnibus collection, SHORT WORK, for a reduced price! ***Originally Appeared in the Anthology: Christmas Spirits in 1997
Author
Elizabeth Bevarly was born and raised in Louisville, Kentucky and earned her BA with honors in English from the University of Louisville in 1983. Although she can’t recall ever wanting to be anything but a novelist-oh, all right, she toyed briefly with becoming an archaeologist, until she realized how awful she looked in khaki and flannel, and there was a brief fling with the interior decorator thing, until she realized she had trouble distinguishing chintz from moiré, and… (Where was I? Oh, yeah. My brilliant career.) Anyway, her career side trips before making the leap to writing included stints working as a bartender, a waitress, a movie theater cashier, a soap-hawker for Crabtree & Evelyn, an apparel-hawker for The Limited, and a bridal registry consultant for a major department store. She also did time as an editorial assistant for a medical journal, where she learned the correct spellings and meanings of a variety of words (like microscopy and histological) which, with any luck at all, she will never use again in this life. She wrote her first novel when she was twelve years old. It was 32 pages long-and that was with college rule notebook paper-and featured three girls named Liz, Marianne and Cheryl, who explored the mysteries of a haunted house. Her friends Marianne and Cheryl proclaimed it “Brilliant! Spellbinding! Kept me up past dinnertime reading!” Those rave reviews only kindled the fire inside her to write more. Since sixth grade, Elizabeth has gone on to complete more than 60 works of contemporary romance. Her novels regularly appear on the USA Today and Waldenbooks bestseller lists, and The Thing About Men was a New York Times Extended List bestseller. She’s been nominated for the prestigious RITA Award, has won the coveted National Readers’ Choice Award, and Romantic Times magazine has seen fit to honor her with two-count ‘em TWO-Career Achievement Awards. Her books have been translated into two dozen languages and published in three dozen countries, and there are more than ten million copies in print worldwide. She has claimed as residences Washington, DC, northern Virginia, southern New Jersey and Puerto Rico, but she now resides back in her native Kentucky with her husband and son and two very troubled cats where she fully intends to remain.
