by Teresa Hill
Allie stood there in his arms, unable to say anything at all. The sun was streaming through the tops of the trees. The sky was a surreal blue with big, puffy clouds ambling along within it. Birds were singing, she realized. There was a slight breeze blowing, and she could smell the river that flowed through town. She could almost hear it.
There were times, between all the worry and all the little revelations, that this place called to her, when a part of her recognized it and felt like it was right to be here, yet never more so than in this moment with him.
There was vibrant color spreading through the tall trees, and she had to admit it was beautiful here, that she'd found the sense of belonging she'd always craved. Somehow, deep inside, she recognized this place. This was her home, the one she'd always wanted, and it was here with him.
"Is that enough?" he whispered. "I have a half a dozen more reasons—"
"It's enough," she said as he kissed her through her tears.
The End
Page forward for excerpts from Teresa Hill's
Award-winning
McRae Series
Excerpt from
Twelve Days
The McRae's Series
Book 1
by
Teresa Hill
USA Today Bestselling Author
On the first day of Christmas, eleven-year-old Emma sat in the backseat of the social worker's car, her little brother Zack on one side of her, baby Grace sleeping in a car seat on the other side.
The light was fading fast, street lights coming on, and the entire neighborhood glowed with a light of thousands of tiny Christmas bulbs strung on just about everything she could see. Snow was falling, big, fat flakes, and everything was so pretty.
For a moment, Emma thought she might have stepped inside the pages of one of the Christmas books she read to Zach or that maybe she'd shrunk until she was an inch high and was living inside one of her most prized possessions—a snow globe.
It was so beautiful there, inside the big, old, magical-looking house, so warm, so welcoming. Emma could make it snow anytime she wanted with just a turn of her wrist, a bit of magic that never fail to delight Zach and the baby. She thought nothing bad could happen in a place like that and often wished she could find a way to live inside that little ball of glass.
Blinking through the fading light in the gently falling snow, she thought for a moment the neighborhood they were driving through looked oddly familiar though she was sure she'd never been here before. She would have remembered the big, old houses reaching toward the sky, with all those odd angles and shapes, the fancy trim and silly frills that seem to belong to another place and time.
Rich people's houses, she thought, the knot in her stomach growing a bit tighter. What would anybody with a house like that want with her and Zach and the baby?
Zack leaned closer to the window, his nose pressed flat against it, flogging a little circle of glass. "It's almost Chris'mas. Everybody has their tree 'n' stuff up."
"I know, Zach." There were wreaths on the doors and on the old-fashioned black lamppost topped with fancy metal curls, the lights perched delicately on top. There were stars made of bright Christmas lights, even Christmas trees in people's yards.
Emma had never seen people go to so much trouble for Christmas. They must've spent hours. And the money... it must take a lot of money to decorate a house like this just for Christmas. She couldn't imagine what the insides of those houses must be like. She and Zach and the baby didn't need anything fancy. Just a place where they could stay together. She couldn't bear it if they were separated. Emma had to make sure that didn't happen.
The social worker pulled the car into a long driveway and at first Emma thought they were going to the house on the right, all castle-like and fairy-talish.
Aunt Miriam—that's what she told them to call her—turned off the car and pocketed the keys. She twisted around in her seat and said, "Let me make sure someone's here before we take the baby out in the cold, okay?"
Emma nodded, knowing they were running out of chances.
"Zach," Miriam said. "You stay in your seat belt and in that backseat. Emma, don't let him near the steering wheel or the gearshift. Cars aren't playthings. I'll be right there on the porch. You yell if you need me."
"Yes, ma'am." Emma put her arm around Zach. She could take care of him and the baby. If someone would just give them a place to stay and something to eat, she could take care of everything else.
Ana Miriam got out of the car, a blast of cold air came in before she got the door shut again. Emma shivered a bit. This had to work, she thought closing her eyes and wishing, praying. This might be their last chance.
Zack brushed past her to get to the window on the other side of the car.
"Zach!" She scolded.
"I gotta see.! I gotta see the house," he said, then wailed, "Oh, no!"
"What?" Emma leaned over the sleeping baby to look herself. It was like all the other houses, big and expensive, certainly like no place they'd ever lived.
"Chris'mas!" Zach cried.
"What?"
"It's not comin' here," he cried. "No Chris'mas."
"Oh," Emma said, realizing now what was different about this house.
She should have known they didn't belong in a place like this. From the moment they pulled into the neighborhood, it all seemed too good to be true. The nice lady from social services had brought them to the only house on the street with no Christmas lights, no tree, no ribbons, no bows, no fake reindeer statues decked out in lights on the lawn.
Christmas wasn't coming here.
Emma didn't believe it was coming for her in sac and the baby, either.
* * *
The doorbell rang, disturbing all the silence in Rachel McRae's house, and she honestly thought about ignoring it, as she often did these days.
She was sitting in her great-grandmother's rocking chair, deep in the corner of the living room, in what she now realized was near darkness. When had it gotten so dark? Surprise, she looked at the clock on the wall. Five-thirty? Where had the day gone?
Sam would be home soon. Maybe. She hadn't even started dinner, hadn't done much of anything. She slowly retreated from everyone and everything over the past few weeks. Once again, she found herself at the end of a long day in which she done nothing. It all seemed to be too much for her lately. She had the odd feeling that the world was moving too fast all around her and she couldn't quite keep up.
The doorbell rang again, and Rachel decided it would be easier just to open the door and deal with whoever was there this time.
Moving slowly and quietly through the house, she flicked on the overhead light and blinked as her eyes adjusted to the brightness. At the front door she flipped on the porch light and pulled open the door, finding her aunt, a kindhearted, sixty-something-year-old woman with more energy than most half her age, standing on the porch. "Aunt Miriam? Hi."
"Hello, dear." Her aunt smiled. "I just wanted to make sure you were home. I brought you something," Marian said, turning and heading for her car.
"Oh, okay. Do you need help?" She crossed her arms in front of her, shivering a bit in the cold. "No, we can get ourselves inside, Rachel."
Rachel frowned. Who could Miriam and have brought to visit? It couldn't be family, because they'd all been here over the weekend, all forty-six of them for brunch on Sunday. She'd spent Monday putting the house back together after everyone left. It wouldn't get messed up again until the family came for Christmas. Rachel and her husband Sam weren't messy at all, and it was just the two of them problem, probably always would be.
Neat, clean, and quiet, that was Rachel's life. Her sister Gail, who had four children, the oldest of whom was twelve, actually said she envied Rachel at one point over the weekend when the chaos level hit its peak.
Envied?
Rachel had nearly broken down. She'd hidden in the laundry room, wiping away her tears. Sam had caught her coming out. As he always did lately when he
saw that she'd been crying, he stiffened. His whole body went on alert, sending out all those signals that said, "Don't start, Rachel. Not now."
Not ever, she supposed. They weren't going to talk about it. It didn't matter if they did. Nothing would change. So many bad things had happened, and there were no children in this house. Probably, there never would be. How in the world was she supposed to accept that? How was she supposed to go on?
Rachel crossed her arms in front of her, shivering a bit from the cold, and walked to the edge of the porch. That's when she saw the little face inside the car pressed against the window. A nose smashed flat against the glass. A mouth. A child-sized hand.
The door opened, and a boy hopped out. He was four or five, Rachel guessed. She had lots of nephews and cousins. She knew about little boys.
Looking up again, Rachel saw a second child climb out of the car, a girl in a thin sweater, an ill-fitting dress that was too short and showed her thin legs and bony knees. She must be freezing, Rachel thought. The girl took the little boy's hand, and they stood staring at Rachel in the house. She couldn't help but wonder if they were scared. They had to be cold, and she'd bet they hadn't had enough to eat lately, maybe not for long, long time. It hurt to think about that, hurt in places Rachel hadn't hurt for a long, long time, places in her heart she thought had died. It would be better if all those sad, lonely corners of her heart just shriveled up and died. Miriam knew that. She had to understand. So Rachel couldn't understand why her aunt was doing this to her.
Then, in the worst betrayal of all, her aunt leaned into the car and came out with a baby in her arms.
"Oh." Rachel closed her eyes. A baby.
Miriam walked right up to her and put the child into her arms, giving Rachel no choice but to take it. The other two children gazed up at Rachel waiting for her reaction, their own expressions hard to read. Sadness, uncertainty, fear? Little children shouldn't ever be afraid.
So although Rachel wanted to shove the baby back into her aunt's arms and run inside, she didn't. Not at first. She didn't want the children to think she was rejecting them. She wasn't. She was rejecting the pain of her own memories and the most dangerous thing of all. Hope. For years, Rachel had had a dream. An utterly elusive fantasy that one day she opened her front door and someone would put a baby in her arms. It was her own, personal version of the Publishers Clearing House Sweepstakes. They could put her on national television if they wanted, broadcast live from her front porch, if she ever won the baby sweepstakes.
A little shiver ran down Rachel's spine. She had the baby dream just a few hours ago. It had snowed in her dream, she remembered, and it was snowing today. She'd missed that, too. There was a soft, pristine white blanket of snow covering the ground, and it was cold. Just like in her dream.
The dream, too, always started with the doorbell ringing. Sometimes Rachel opened the door and saw no one. Then she looked down and found a basket at her feet, an oval-shaped basket filled with something that might have been mistaken for laundry. But the linens would wiggle, and she pulled them aside to find the baby waiting for her. In a basket, at her front door, like a present. Sometimes—the last time she'd had a dream in fact—she opened the door and found a person standing there. She didn't know who, didn't see anything except the baby in that person's arms. She held out her arms and found them filled with the warm, soft, sweet-smelling baby. Right there, on an otherwise absolutely ordinary day.
Just like today.
She looked down at the baby in her arms, hardly able to believe it, fighting fiercely not to hope that this time, it would all work out.
Twelve Days
The McRae's Series
Book One
by
Teresa Hill
~
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Twelve Days
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Page forward and continue your journey
with an excerpt from
Edge of Heaven
The McRae's Series
Book Two
Excerpt from
Edge of Heaven
The McRae's Series
Book 2
by
Teresa Hill
USA Today Bestselling Author
He got into town just before dawn, having driven all night. Once he decided to go, he got into his truck and left, not wanting time to think about giving into this impulse one more time.
There was a note on the seat of the pickup with directions to the town and an address, but he didn't need to look at them. He'd memorized them long before he found the courage to come.
He wasn't sure what he was going to say once he got there. He usually played it by ear, and so far, it hadn't been too difficult to find out what he wanted to know. The hard part has been making himself keep searching.
It started snowing on a I-75 in the mountains in Tennessee and kept it up the whole way to the tiny town of Baxter, Ohio, on the banks of the Ohio River just west of Cincinnati.
There were 8,436 people living here, according to the sign on the edge of town, which also bragged about being the home of an artist named Richard Landon, who made, of all things, snow globes.
Rye shook his head over that. A town would have to be pretty hard up for things to brag about to mention a man who made kids' toys.
But it was pretty here, like something out of a wintry postcard. The streets of downtown were wide, the sidewalks broad, many of the old brick storefronts preserved intact, everything neat and polished. There was an honest-to-goodness town square, an old Courthouse behind it, a block of streets surrounding it with a park-like setting in the middle.
He turned into a neighborhood of Victorians, late 1800s, three stories, high-pitched roofs, stained-glass windows, wide porches. As someone who worked in construction, he couldn't help but admire the workmanship that had gone into restoring them.
He drove slower and slower, the closer he got. If he wasn't careful some would call the law on him, and that was the last thing he needed.
Finally, he saw it. No. 12. Maybe the prettiest house on the street. A soft gray with touches of blue on the trim and in the exquisitely beautiful stained glass in the windows and the panels of the front door.
There was money here. He frowned even more.
A pretty sign also in stained-glass hung from the mailbox and said, McRae Construction, Props. Sam and Rachel McRae.
Yeah, this was it.
He parked on the opposite side of the street, cut the engine and the lights, and sat there, snow falling softly all around him, the neighborhood just starting to stir.
What now? Knock on the door?
It was too early for that.
But soon, lights started coming on inside the house, one by one, upstairs first and then down. A car came by, driving slowly, and the morning paper was hurled onto the front lawn. The front door of the house opened. A dark-haired man in worn jeans and a faded gray sweatshirt came outside and retrieved the paper. What was he? Early forties? Late thirties? That would be about right.
Not five minutes later, a taxi stopped in front of the house. Doors to the taxi and the house were thrown open. The man came back out. He must have been watching and waiting himself.
A woman climbed out of the taxi and ran to him, throwing her arms around him. He picked her up and spun her around the circle before lowering her to her feet and giving her a quick kiss on the cheek. They were both laughing.
It looked like she'd been gone wild.
The men picked up her bag to go inside, but she stood there for a minute staring up at the house like she'd been absolutely aching to see it.
Someone was home.
Rye wondered if he ever would be again.
* * *
He drove around town, had breakfast, killed some time th
inking about his options.
This Sam McRae was in construction, probably a small contractor if his business was based out of the house. Rye could ask about a job. It would probably get him in the door, give him a chance to talk to the man. That's all it had taken before. A little conversation, a few subtle questions, and he'd known he was in the wrong place.
But as he drove back to the house, he saw the man come outside again, another suitcase in hand. The man hugged the woman for a long time, then got into a big SUV and left.
One thing about getting the urge to do this at Christmas—people tended to go away. This is the third time he'd gone looking for a man named Sam McRae, and he was surprised he hadn't found people leaving before this. He sat drumming his fingers on the steering wheel thinking about Christmas at some little motel in this little town, waiting for the man to come back. It wasn't a very pretty picture, but then Christmas hadn't been for years.
Why couldn't everyone just work through a holiday? He always found himself at loose ends, with time off for nothing to do. Then he'd pull out his list, think about trying to cross one more name off it.
What the hell? Tis the season.
It had become one of searching for him.
Looking toward the house once again, he saw the woman was still standing on the porch, her arms wrapped around herself to ward off the chill, and she was staring at him. There was really no reason to put this off any longer. First steps were always the hardest. He'd take one right now.
He climbed out of the truck and slowly made his way up the walk. As he got closer, he realized she was younger than he thought. Early twenties, he guessed, pretty in a quiet, clean-cut, good-girl kind of way, with dark green eyes and soft brown hair. It hung to the top of her shoulders, curling up at the ends. He liked the smoothness of her skin, the clean lines of her face. She seemed too young to be the man's wife, too old to be his daughter.
