The tree, and the lights, and the stocking over the fireplace made the cottage feel more like home than it had since he’d moved in, almost six months ago.

  But working from home wasn’t his favourite thing to do. Joel much preferred being in the city, with people to talk to and colleagues to bounce ideas around with. He’d lived in the Canongate area of Edinburgh in a shared flat for a few years, until he’d inherited the cottage, and he missed being so close to everything. He could drive into the city in no time at all, but it wasn’t the same as being just walking distance from the hustle and bustle.

  All this was why he had dragged his sorry, hungover self off of Nick’s sofa early in the morning before Nick got up, went home to shower and change, then headed into the office in Edinburgh’s New Town.

  Milly was the only one in the office when he arrived, nursing an enormous mug of coffee.

  “There’s more in the pot,” she said in way of a greeting.

  “Thank the baby Jesus and all the wise men.”

  Milly’s laughter followed him back to the kitchen.

  Joel retrieved his mug from the back of the dishwasher, filled it with coffee and a generous helping of milk, and made a bowl of cereal to go with the coffee.

  The perks of working in a small office often outweighed the negatives. Joel actually liked the people he worked with, which was a revelation after working in a string of low-paid, part-time jobs when he was a student. Even the couple who owned the business were cool—involved enough to show they cared, while distant enough to not step on the toes of the experts they’d hired.

  Joel though that if he had his own business one day, he’d like to strike a similar balance.

  “Next year, we’re not doing the Christmas party on a Thursday night,” Joel said as he booted up his laptop, idly brushing off excess glitter. They’d gone all out with the office decorations and he had a feeling he’d still be finding glitter in his stuff come Easter.

  “Next year I’m not going to drink.”

  Joel snorted into his cornflakes. “Yeah, right.”

  “I’m serious. I went through, like, four bottles of prosecco last night. Then I cycled, over cobblestones, to get in this morning. Thank fuck it’s so cold out there, it stopped me from hurling into a gutter.”

  “Stay classy, Milly.”

  “Yeah, yeah. You got home okay?”

  He debated telling her exactly what had happened: Single Bells to scraped palms, Bastet the cat and chocolate brown eyes behind tortoiseshell glasses, but something stopped him. Milly wouldn’t make fun of him—their whole job was romance, after all.

  But today was their last day in the office before the Christmas holidays, and even though they weren’t really expected to get much work done, he didn’t feel like spending the whole day gossiping. He just had to answer some emails and send a report across to the boss, which would take him all of twenty minutes.

  “Yeah,” he said lightly. “I got home fine.”

  As he expected, it was a quiet day with his colleagues filing in in drips and drabs with varying degrees of hangover. Joel took a tiny amount of vindictive pleasure that some people looked very much worse than he did—he was pretty sure Celeste was still wearing last night’s eye makeup, and he knew she’d gone home with Tom from accounts, even if he did turn up ten minutes after she did.

  For a group of people who worked in the matchmaking business, they apparently thought their colleagues were blind as well as stupid.

  Joel stored that little bit of gossip away for later.

  The office manager kicked them out just after lunch, and Joel headed down to Princes Street to get the last of his Christmas shopping done. He’d already bought earrings and a book for his mum, a jumper for his dad, and ordered a luxury food hamper for his nan and granddad because that was easier than trying to figure out what they wanted. His brother was still at university, so Joel was planning to buy him booze, and a lot of it, since that was what he’d appreciate the most.

  That just left a couple of his oldest friends that he bought presents for. The Christmas market was busy, despite the cold, with steam rising from carts selling chestnuts and hot chocolate and mulled wine. Joel took a deep breath of all the scents mixing together, and didn’t even care that his nose was so cold it had turned pink.

  The market stalls were crammed in close together, little wooden sheds with their fronts decorated with a glittering array of trinkets. Joel liked shopping in places like this far more than sterile, clinical shopping malls. He picked up a wool scarf for Hannah in a rather fetching grey and pink tartan and a pair of drop pearl earrings for Millie, since earrings were her thing. He very much appreciated that the stall holders at this market would wrap things up in shiny paper, meaning one less job for him.

  With that chore done, Joel looped back around the market, and found himself pausing in front of a stall selling pet toys. Which was ridiculous, because he didn’t have a pet.

  Nick has a pet, a little voice whispered in his ear.

  There were all sorts of practical things: food bowls, collars, chew toys for dogs and feathery toys for cats, but Joel was drawn to a small stuffed reindeer with a red bell around its neck. He picked it up and turned over a handwritten tag looped around the reindeer’s middle that noted catnip.

  “Three fifty, love,” the stall owner said, and Joel fumbled in his pocket for the right change, tucking the reindeer toy into one of his other shopping bags.

  When all of that was done, and his presents were wrapped and tucked under the tree, Joel spent the first two days of his Christmas break wearing nothing but pyjamas and refusing to leave the cottage—not for his mother, who wanted to do some last minute shopping, or any of the invitations he’d received to go out for a quick drink. All of that could wait until next week.

  It had been a long year. He just wanted to sit on the sofa and watch The Muppet Christmas Carol in peace.

  Mid-afternoon on his third day of being—in his mother’s words—a lazy toad, there was a knock on the door. Joel was working his way through a large bag of turkey and stuffing flavoured crisps and was very tempted not to answer… if his living room wasn’t lit up with hundreds of twinkling lights, making it very clear he was at home, he might have gotten away with ignoring it.

  The knock came again.

  “I’m coming, I’m coming,” he grouched, hauling himself to his feet.

  He opened the door to Nick.

  “Oh,” he said.

  “Sorry to interrupt.” Nick rubbed at his red nose with a gloved hand. “But we need as many people as possible.”

  “What happened?” Joel asked, stretching to look over Nick’s shoulder, only vaguely aware that he was wearing pyjama bottoms and a T-shirt showing the main characters from Star Wars carol-singing.

  “The reindeer escaped. Or someone stole them, we’re not sure yet.”

  “The reindeer?”

  He thought of the toy he’d bought on a whim, and his stomach swooshed.

  “I have a herd,” Nick said. “Of reindeer. They’ve been living in a field down the road.” He jerked his thumb at a now empty field.

  “I remember. I thought they were being used for the events in town.”

  “They are. I don’t know what happened yet, but as of lunchtime, someone noticed that they’re all gone.”

  “And you’re putting together a search party?”

  Nick nodded. “Can you help?”

  Joel glanced down at his outfit. “Give me five minutes?”

  “Of course.”

  He shut the door in Nick’s face, really not wanting Nick to see into the disaster zone of his living room, and jogged upstairs to get changed.

  If there was an opportunity for Nick to see him in his pyjamas, Joel had hoped that it would have been in slightly better circumstances. Not when he still had crisp crumbs all down his front.

  He yanked a jumper on over the top of his T-shirt, swapped his pyjama bottoms for loose, warm joggers and his slippers for thick socks and his boots. That only took a moment, then he stumbled into the bathroom to pee, wash his face, and lament that he hadn’t bothered to shave and his stubble had come in all patchy.

  Oh well.

  When he got outside, a small group of people had gathered at the end of the road near the war memorial. They were locals; Joel recognised the a handful of teenagers and small children holding their parents’ hands scattered amongst the older residents bundled up against the cold.

  “We’re splitting into groups,” an older man who Joel didn’t know called into the crowd. “Everyone needs to have a working phone with them.”

  Nick appeared at Joel’s side and touched his elbow lightly. “Do you want to come with me?”

  “Yeah,” Joel said, a little too quickly. But Nick didn’t seem to notice.

  “Okay, great.”

  He touched Joel’s arm again and tilted his head, signalling the direction they should start moving in. Joel followed him, and Nick offered a quick thumbs-up to the man who was still giving instructions.

  They moved quickly and quietly at first, a little further down the hill and then over a gate into the large field where the reindeer had been kept. Joel hardly ever had a reason to come in this direction, so though he’d seen the reindeer from his kitchen window, he hadn’t had chance to get a closer look.

  “That’s the barn back there,” Nick said, pointing a low wooden building. “But the fence is down at the back, over here.”

  The field had a cluster of trees that would have provided more cover, if the reindeer didn’t want to go into their barn during the day, and it didn’t take long for them to come across the broken fence.

  “Was that deliberate?” Joel asked, looking at the trampled ground and broken wood.

  “The police are have already been out to have a look,” Nick said tightly. He picked his way through the semi-frozen mud.

  “What do you think?” Joel carefully followed in his footsteps. He didn’t want to end up face-down in the mud, if he could help it.

  “I think… I don’t know, actually. I really hope they haven’t been stolen.”

  “Would someone really do that? It’s a pretty small community around here. I know we’re only fifteen minutes from the city, but still.”

  “It’s not necessarily someone local. I don’t want to go throwing accusations around when I really don’t know anything. I just hope we find them.”

  Joel followed out of the field and into a much denser area of trees. This area he did know, sort of; he’d spent a lot of time exploring these woods during the summer holidays when he was a kid.

  “So what’s the plan?” Joel asked when he was a little steadier on his feet. “How long have they been missing?”

  “At least a day,” Nick said. “I came to do a check yesterday morning on the four that were still here, before I headed in to the office. We noticed they were missing about an hour ago. Fergus was good enough to start knocking on doors, looking for helpers.

  “As for the plan,” he continued with a sigh. “The police have already come out to take pictures of the fence, but apparently they can’t say if it was pulled down, or if there was a weakness in that area and the reindeer just took advantage.”

  Joel stole a few looks in Nick’s direction as they made their way through the woods. He knew he hadn’t been too drunk and mis-remembering how handsome Nick was.

  But he really was very handsome.

  Like Joel, Nick had tucked his hair under a thick wool hat and was wearing a fleece-lined jacket over his jeans. Winter clothes were never sexy, but Nick’s sharp jaw, dark stubble, and adorable little dent in his chin certainly were.

  He was at least six inches taller than Joel, and Joel had never considered himself particularly short. Nick was broad across the shoulders too. He probably kept himself fit, to be able to work with large animals.

  “How do you even buy a herd of reindeer?”

  “It’s a long story.”

  Joel shrugged. “We’ve got at least a couple of hours before it starts getting dark.”

  They picked their way over muddy, rocky ground, heading uphill through the woodland area. Though the air was still cold, the wind had died down, and Joel was grateful for the extra layers he’d put on. He shocked himself by realising he was enjoying being outside… not running from the car to the supermarket or the office, or dodging bursts of rainstorms, but being out in this little patch of countryside south-west of the city.

  He took a deep breath of crisp, cold air.

  “Well, about five years ago I was the lead veterinarian for an animal welfare charity,” Nick said, “and we got word about a herd of reindeer that weren’t being particularly well looked-after at a safari park. I went along, flashed my credentials at them, and they let me go in and have a look.”

  “Just like that?”

  “I have very good credentials,” Nick said with a grin. “Anyway. I went back a few times to check in on them, and in the end the safari park agreed to let me buy the herd. For not that much money, really.”

  “I didn’t even know that was legal.”

  “I mean, you couldn’t just go and buy a reindeer herd. The rules around that sort of thing are quite strict. But…”

  “You and your credentials.”

  This time, Nick laughed. “Exactly. I also had a contact here in Scotland—a farmer who owns a few hundred acres up in the Cairngorms. It turns out my reindeer get on exceptionally well with his Highland cows, so they live together for most of the year, and come down to the paddock here for the six weeks before Christmas.”

  “That sounds… expensive.”

  “Well, they go all over Scotland during the Christmas season. Up to Aberdeen, down to Dumfries, across to Glasgow. They’re popular animals.”

  “And you’ve got a dozen of them?”

  Nick nodded. “I started out with nine, and we’ve had three calves in the past couple of years. I know it’s more mouths to feed, but it’s a sign of a healthy herd, so I’m not upset about it.”

  “Is that why you came back to Edinburgh? To be closer to your reindeer?”

  “That was just a bonus.” He paused for a moment, looking around the small clearing they’d emerged in. Then he shook his head. “I don’t think they came in this direction. Anyway. Sorry for interrupting your Christmas break.”

  “Oh, it’s fine,” Joel said. “It’s not like I was doing anything important.”

  “Taking some time to relax and not work is important.”

  “Well, that’s both profound and sounds like the voice of experience.”

  “I have been accused of being a workaholic.”

  “Is it true?”

  He shrugged. “I like my work. Animals are kind of a twenty-four/seven job; it’s not like they know it’s Christmas. If they’re going to get sick, they need a vet who can get out to them.”

  “And if they get lost, a vet who will go and look for them.”

  “I don’t mind,” Nick said, and Joel could feel Nick’s gaze sweep over him. “I’m enjoying the view.”

  Nick rubbed his hand over a tree.

  “If you tell me what you’re looking for, I can help,” Joel said.

  “Sorry.” Nick fought to hide his frustration. Not with Joel—he was great. Just the situation. “Mostly I’m looking for any signs that the reindeer have been rubbing their antlers against the trees. And for poop.”

  “Reindeer poop.”

  “Yeah.”

  “I’m not sure I could tell reindeer poop from any other type of poop.”

  Nick grinned—aware that he was spending a lot of time in Joel’s company smiling. That wasn’t a bad thing, of course, he just needed to manage his own expectations. There was no point in getting all twisted up over a guy from the village.

  “Just keep your eye out for the animals, then. They’re about a meter and a half tall, including the antlers.”

  “Not difficult to spot, then.”

  “Well… they’re also quite shy, and very good at camouflaging themselves in woodland.”

  “Excellent.”

  “This herd is actually woodland caribou, so they’re not migratory like a lot of other subspecies of reindeer.”

  “So why did they escape?”

  “Boredom? Curiosity? Trying to find the rest of their herd, maybe. I don’t really know. They’re semi-domesticated animals, in as much as they’re used to living in protected areas and we supplement their food during the winter, but during the summer they have a huge area they can roam.”

 

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