The Man Who Hated Christmas

His employees call him The Grinch. His holiday-born daughter, sequestered in a dowdy Swiss finishing school, won't speak to him. The public, entranced by tge media pile-on a rival company seems to have initiated, vocally disapproves of his treatment of his exiled only child. Mothers in Boston are doing a novena. In Chicago, they're collecting plane fare.
Will multi-millionaire food mogul Lorne Foyle give up his detestation of the world's most popular holiday? Allow his employees to wear holly in their lapels? Let them warble White Christmas?
He can't. Foyle, 44, born into poverty, once homeless and now living in a luxurious West Side brownstone, titan of industry, philanthropist...is afraid.
Her employees call her an angel. Her clients think she's a miracle worker. Hard-driving but gentle-handed, Mar Lynn Portman runs a hundred-bed shelter for battered women and their children. She comforts, she encourages, she teaches, she keeps a financially-strapped operation from going under. She routinely works hundred-plus hour weeks, sleeps on an air mattress in her office. The cactus in her apartment is dying.
Will MaryLynn, struggling to keep a legacy afloat in a world hostile to her poverty-burdened clients, take time for herself before she collapses?
She can't. Mary Lynn Portman, 38, who dresses in clothes from the shelter's Last Chance shop and eats leftovers from the shelter's kitchen...is afraid.
What happens when these two not-anywhere-near-alike people are brought together as they struggle to protect a seventeen year-old heiress, an eight year-old pickpocket, and their broken hearts?