The Bachelor’s Christmas Bride

by Victoria Pade

  Don’t just hold my hand…and please don’t just kiss that again tonight…

  But that’s what he did.

  And despite the fact that the kiss lingered longer than it had the night before, despite the fact that his thumb did a sexy massage on the top of her wrist, Shannon couldn’t help wishing that chivalry was dead and buried!

  But he thinks you’re engaged, a little voice in the back of her head reminded her.

  And she’d given her word that she wouldn’t tell anyone otherwise….

  Then Dag squeezed her hand and lingered at that, too, as if he were having trouble giving her up.

  And no matter how much Shannon willed him not to, he still did, saying, “G’night,” in a tone that seemed to shout, If only things were different…

  And it was so tempting to tell him that they were!

  But she didn’t. She merely whispered back, “Good night,” trying to keep the disappointment from her voice as she watched him flip up the collar on his coat and slip outside into snow that had begun to fall since they’d arrived home.

  Then she closed the door and pressed her forehead to it, sighing a deep sigh of regret.

  But Dag was right in practicing restraint, she told herself. Right to be respectful of her supposed engagement.

  And she was wrong, wrong, wrong to want him not to.

  It was just that wrong, wrong, wrong or not, she still couldn’t help wishing that he would have kissed her until she begged not to be kissed any more.

  On the mouth!

  Chapter Seven

  A blizzard struck overnight and Shannon woke up Monday morning to a winter wonderland. And to two and a half feet of snow separating the garage apartment, Chase’s loft and the main house.

  The snow was still falling in big, fluffy potato-chip-size flakes as Chase shoveled a path between the loft and the garage, and Dag shoveled one from the rear entrance of the main house to the garage. By lunchtime the two connecting paths provided a way for Chase, Hadley, Cody and Shannon to join Meg, Logan, Tia and Dag for a snow day all together in the big farmhouse.

  The Christmas lights were lit and Logan made sure the fire never got too low in the fireplace. They spent the early part of the afternoon munching on an abundance of fresh popcorn and drinking mulled cider while watching a Christmas movie.

  When it was time for the kids to take naps, Chase and Logan were dispatched to bed them down while Shannon, Hadley and Meg began cooking a roast for dinner, started dough to rise for homemade bread and made an apple pie that would go into the oven when the roast came out.

  Then Meg and Hadley joined their mates for naps, too—Meg and Logan on the sofa, and Chase and Hadley in the overstuffed recliner—leaving Shannon and Dag on their own.

  That was when Dag said to Shannon, “Why don’t we go through the boxes of your grandmother’s things from the house and find those pictures of you as a kid? We can do it in the kitchen without disturbing anybody and then you’ll have them to start the photo albums.”

  Shannon jumped at the idea and while she cleared space on the big, country-kitchen table, Dag put on his fleece-lined suede coat.

  He had to reshovel the path to the garage where her car was parked to get to it. Shannon watched from the window over the sink, enjoying the sight of the burly man cutting a swath through the pristine white powder. She was looking forward to a little time alone with him. More than she should be, she knew, but it didn’t matter.

  Should I tell him now or wait? she wondered as she watched.

  She’d had a phone call from Wes’s secretary before she’d even gotten out of bed this morning telling her to watch the evening news. The press had been invited to the Rumson compound for the arrival of all the Rumsons for their Christmas holiday. The secretary hadn’t said that Wes would be announcing that the engagement was off, but Shannon couldn’t think of any other reason why she would be encouraged to watch.

  And if Wes was finally going to go public with the news, then it didn’t seem like it would do any harm for her to tell Dag only a few hours earlier, when they were snowbound and it wasn’t likely for her secret to get beyond the walls of the house.

  Except that again she thought of the vow she’d made not to tell anyone, and decided she could probably wait those few hours herself.

  But she was definitely going to be glad when she didn’t have to continue this charade.

  The frustration of wanting Dag to kiss her good-night the last few evenings and not having it happen came to mind just then, accompanied by the fleeting idea that this could change once he knew she was free.

  She pushed those thoughts away and reminded herself that the illusion of an engagement was not the only reason she shouldn’t be kissing Dag McKendrick, that her life was in flux, that her time with him was just a brief interlude, and that she couldn’t allow herself to be swept up in the cozy comfort she was experiencing here, with him.

  But a tiny, secret part of her, deep down inside, was still excited at the prospect of finally having it known that she wasn’t engaged to Wes Rumson. And seeing what happened…

  “I didn’t bring the box with the blankets and clothes in it,” Dag said when he returned to the warmth of the kitchen with only one of the two cardboard boxes he’d filled for her at her grandmother’s house. “The pictures should be in this one—I put them in the jewelry box so they wouldn’t get any more worn than they already are.”

  Shannon rummaged through the box of odds and ends until she found an old jewelry box she remembered playing with as a child—it was cream colored with an inlay of flowers on top, and when the lid was lifted, a tiny ballerina sprang up from the center of the top tier of velvet-lined compartments.

  “I loved this as a kid,” she told Dag. “When you wind it up—” which she did, using the turnkey hidden on the back “—it plays music and the ballerina dances.”

  Surprisingly, it still worked, and for a moment Shannon watched the ballerina turn on her pedestal just like she had as a child.

  Then the music ran out, the ballerina came to a stop, and Dag said, “The pictures are in the bottom. Oh, and there’s a ring, too—that was in the jewelry box when I found it. I forgot about that until just now.”

  Shannon retrieved the ring first, remembering it, too. “This was my grandmother’s—she got it when she turned sixteen,” she explained of the delicate gold band with three small amethyst stones set in it. “It only has sentimental value, but I’m glad it wasn’t lost.”

  She slipped it on her left ring finger. “I used to pretend it was my wedding ring,” she confided with a laugh, holding out her hand, fingers splayed upward the way she had done many times in her young life on visits to her grandmother.

  “I suppose you could use it for that now, but I’m betting the wife of a Rumson is supposed to have something flashier.”

  Letting his remark pass, Shannon said, “I think I’ll get a chain for it and wear it as a necklace, instead.”

  She took off the ring and set it in the top tier of the jewelry box beside the ballerina. Then she reached into the lower portion for the photographs she’d spotted there.

  They were a little ragged from age and the wear and tear of wherever they’d been hiding until Dag found them, but Shannon thought they were still usable.

  She set them all out on the table.

  “There’s six,” Dag said. “I thought there were five.”

  “Five of me,” Shannon said, looking over four photographs of her taken the summer she was nine, all of them from a Fourth of July picnic she remembered. The fifth snapshot was from her last visit to Northbridge when she was not quite twelve—looking gangly and awkward.

  “Oh, this one is bad!” she said with a laugh. “My mom gave me a perm just before I came here and it was sooo awful!”

  Dag picked up that picture to take a closer look at it and laughed, too. “That is pretty bad. You look like you’re wearing a fright wig.”

  “I don’t think that one is going into albums
.”

  “Ah, come on, Chase would get a kick out of it. Give him that one and one of the others—he should get two since it’s his Christmas present.”

  “I’ll have to think about that…” was the most Shannon would concede to.

  Dag replaced the fright-wig photo on the table and studied the others.

  “These are good, though,” he decreed. “You just look like a happy kid.”

  “Probably because that’s what I was.”

  “So that’s something to share with the brothers who weren’t there to know you then.”

  “What’s this other one?” Shannon said as she picked up the sixth picture.

  Sitting next to her at the oval table, he stretched an arm across the top of her high-backed chair to lean over and peer at the photograph, too.

  He was wearing a plaid flannel shirt with a white thermal T-shirt visible underneath it, and a pair of jeans. He had a fresh, woodsy smell to him that seemed warm and cozy, and between that and having his big body only inches away, something inside of Shannon went a little weak.

  She made a conscious effort not to lean in even nearer to him, but it did take some forethought because she felt an almost magnetic pull toward him.

  Just look at the picture, she told herself sternly, forcing herself to do that.

  “It’s Gramma,” she said as she did. “And me, I think—that looks like me in the pictures my parents took when they first got me. I don’t recognize that other woman, though, or those two really small babies she’s holding…”

  “I didn’t look at these when I found them, but now that I am…if I’m not mistaken, that other woman is a young Liz Rudolph,” Dag said. “Turn it over, I think there’s something written on the back.”

  Shannon did as he’d suggested, reading what was there along with the date. “Liz and me with the new members of our families.”

  Shannon flipped the picture over again to study it even more closely. “It’s the right year, the year I was adopted. And those babies are twins—they look just alike. Could this be a picture of my twin brothers?”

  “The new members of our families,” Dag repeated what was scribbled on the back of the photo. “You were the new member of Carol’s family. The twins were what—two months old—when they were adopted?”

  “Yes.”

  “I don’t know much about babies but those are some pretty small ones. And you’re right—they do look alike, so I’d guess they were twins, too. I’d say it’s possible they’re your brothers.”

  Shannon continued to stare at the photograph as if she might see something else in it if she looked long enough. “You know this Liz person?”

  “Liz Rudolph. She’s your grandmother’s age. Of course my earliest memory of her is long after this. But maybe she and your grandmother were friends.”

  “Was she related to that couple Chase said adopted the twins—Lila and Tony Bruno?”

  “I’ve never heard those names other than from Chase. The reverend told him that he placed the twins with the Brunos. But Liz could be related to the president and I wouldn’t know it. I only know Liz because when I was a teenager I mowed her lawn a few summers after her husband died. It wasn’t as if we talked or anything.”

  “Is she still living? And around here?”

  “Actually, she moved out of town to be nearer to her sister after my third summer of mowing. But you’re in luck because rather than sell her house, she rented it all this time and she moved back into it this summer—I met her at the post office about a week after I got here in September. We were both picking up forwarded mail.”

  “So Chase and I could talk to her…”

  “She’s a nice lady, I don’t know why not. Chase may or may not remember her, but when the snow clears I can take you over there and introduce the two of you. We could bring the picture with us and ask her about it.”

  The old photograph was the topic of conversation all through dinner. Meg, Logan, Hadley and Chase all knew Liz Rudolph by name—as an older woman who had lived in Northbridge when they were all kids. But none of them knew anything more about her or were even aware that she’d returned to Northbridge.

  Both Shannon and Chase were encouraged by the possibility that the infants in the picture could be their lost siblings, though, and that they might suddenly have a way of garnering some information about what had happened to them. But Shannon’s general excitement over that and the pleasure she was finding in the day both ebbed slightly after the family had all watched the evening news at her prompting.

  Wes’s secretary was right—there was a report on Wes arriving with the rest of his extended family at the Rumson compound, which was decorated in Christmas splendor. But even when one reporter asked where Wes’s fiancée was, he merely said Shannon was spending Christmas with her own family this year. No announcement was made that he did not actually have a fiancée.

  Shannon was still steaming over that fact when she placed a call to Wes after dinner and left him the curt message to please call her back.

  Of course he didn’t do that immediately so she silently simmered all through the evening of board games.

  Then the power went out and while both couples decided the best thing to do was just get the kids and themselves into nice warm beds for the night, Dag volunteered to go out to the garage apartment with Shannon, build a fire for her for heat, and set her up with candles and flashlights so she would be prepared should the power not be restored until morning.

  It wasn’t an offer Shannon could make herself refuse, and so she and Dag bundled up and she followed behind him as he reshoveled the path between mounting walls of snow to the garage apartment.

  Dag had just lit two candles for light and begun to put the logs in the fireplace when Wes finally returned Shannon’s call.

  “I have to take this,” she told Dag when she checked to see who her caller was.

  “Want me to make myself scarce and come back in a little while?”

  A scarcity of Dag was the last thing she wanted, especially in a blackout, and she could not, in good conscience, make him leave and come back.

  “No, it’s okay,” she said, moving across the small studio apartment to the kitchen section to talk with her back to Dag while he went on laying the fire.

  “Wes,” she said into the phone when she answered it, keeping her voice low even though she knew Dag probably still couldn’t help overhearing it.

  “Can you hold on just a minute?” was Wes Rumson’s response.

  He didn’t wait for her to answer before she could hear him talking to his campaign manager—who also happened to be his cousin—about the photo opportunities that would be provided by Christmas shopping in Butte the following day.

  Then Wes came back on the line. “Sorry. You know how it is.”

  Too well.

  “How are you? Is everything all right?” Wes asked then.

  “No, it isn’t,” Shannon said tightly to keep her voice from rising the way it was inclined to do. “When your secretary called this morning to tell me to watch the news tonight I thought it was because you were making the announcement.”

  “She didn’t tell you that, did she?”

  “No, it was what I assumed because it needs to be done, you said you would do it and it should have been done long before now,” Shannon said a bit heatedly.

  Wes ignored that and said, “I was just thinking about how much you liked it here when you visited that one time—remember? It occurred to me that maybe if you saw the place again on TV and pictured yourself here with me next Christmas—the way you could be—you might change your mind.”

  So his secretary calling to make sure she watched the news had been a manipulation. Much like the trip they’d taken to Europe a few months earlier.

  Shannon shook her head despite the fact that Wes couldn’t see how much that irked her.

  “I saw it all on the news,” she said curtly. “It didn’t change my mind. You need to make the announcement.”


  “Everywhere I go, every hand I shake, people want to know when the wedding is. Yesterday Bill Muny and I were both at the same event—”

  Bill Muny was the gubernatorial candidate for the other party.

  “—and every reporter flocked to me, all wanting to know about you and the wedding. Bill Muny couldn’t get the time of day from any one of them! Plus it’s Christmas, Shannon. No one wants to hear about breakups now.”

  “In other words, you aren’t going to announce it until when?”

  Silence.

  “Wes…” Shannon said through clenched teeth. “You need to do this.”

  “When the time is right—you left it to me, remember? Are you going back on that?”

  “It’s getting more and more difficult for me,” she said, thinking of Dag, knowing he shouldn’t be a factor and reasoning that she also didn’t like having to pretend with Chase and Hadley and Logan and Meg, either. Or with any of the other people she was meeting in Northbridge now who all believed she was engaged.

  “I just don’t think it can be done before the holidays,” Wes said then. “It could kill my momentum and I might not be able to pick up speed again. If we release the story in January, there could be some sympathy and that could carry us over.”

  “Sympathy? Are you going to make me the villain in this? I thought we agreed that you would say it was a mutual decision!”

  Okay, that time her voice had gotten a little louder and she knew Dag must have heard. But she couldn’t help it. She didn’t want to have to face public scorn for rejecting one of Montana’s favorite sons any more than she liked having to pretend she was engaged.

  “Sure, yes, right—we’ll say it was a mutual decision,” Wes said insincerely.

  “And that you didn’t want to be distracted from your dedication to the constituents—that’s what you said you would say so it sounded like you were doing it for the good of your voters,” she reminded insistently because she’d thought that if he took that tack neither of them would come out the worse for wear.