A Heartwarming Christmas: A Boxed Set of Twelve Sweet Holiday Romances

by Melinda Curtis

  A Heartwarming Christmas

  A Boxed Set of Twelve Sweet Holiday Romances

  Contributors:

  Melinda Curtis

  Anna J Stewart

  Anna Adams

  Carol Ross

  Cheryl Harper

  Amy Vastine

  Tara Randel

  Cari Lynn Webb

  Leigh Riker

  Liz Flaherty

  Patricia Bradley

  Rula Sinara

  Copyright © 2015 by:

  Melinda Curtis

  Anna J Stewart

  Anna Adams

  Carol Ross

  Cheryl Harper

  Amy Vastine

  Tara Randel

  Cari Lynn Webb

  Leigh Riker

  Liz Flaherty

  Patricia Bradley

  Rula Sinara

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior written consent of the Publisher, excepting brief quotes used in reviews.

  This book was built at IndieWrites.com. Visit us on Facebook.

  150921.175527

  Introduction

  This holiday season, warm your heart with 12 connected sweet holiday romances set in Christmas Town from 12 Harlequin Heartwarming authors who are USA Today, national bestselling, and award-winning authors.

  There are four connected books in A Heartwarming Christmas. That means each set of three novellas shares characters and storylines! This collection of PG-rated holiday romances are all set in Christmas Town, a location introduced in the 2014 Harlequin Heartwarming release Christmas, Actually. A Heartwarming Christmas will bring you laughter, tears, and happily-ever-afters (no cliffhangers), for more than 1200 pages.

  Foreword by small town lover and New York Times bestseller Kristan Higgins.

  Book 1: Coming Home to Christmas Town by Melinda Curtis, Anna Adams, & Anna J Stewart: Three adopted siblings gather for the holiday season and closure after their father dies.

  Novella 1: A Comeback Christmas by Melinda Curtis, award-winning, USA Today bestselling, Harlequin Heartwarming author.

  Novella 2: Bells Are Ringing by Anna J Stewart, award-winning, USA Today bestselling, Harlequin Heartwarming author.

  Novella 3: A Home by Christmas by Anna Adams, award-winning, Harlequin Heartwarming author.

  Book 2: The Fisher Brothers Christmas by Carol Ross, Cheryl Harper, & Amy Vastine: Three brothers with a Christmas Eve family tradition in jeopardy until love leads them home.

  Novella 1: The Christmas Bell by Carol Ross, Harlequin Heartwarming author.

  Novella 2: Making Up Under the Mistletoe by Cheryl Harper, Harlequin Heartwarming author.

  Novella 3: My Christmas Hero by Amy Vastine, Harlequin Heartwarming author.

  Book 3: Gifts of the Heart by Tara Randel, Leigh Riker & Cari Lynn Webb: In the spirit of Christmas, three siblings reconnect to find romance, special gifts - and each other.

  Novella 1: An Unexpected Gift by Tara Randel, Barnes and Noble bestselling, Harlequin Heartwarming author.

  Novella 2: A Gift of Home by Cari Lynn Webb, Harlequin Heartwarming debut author.

  Novella 3: His Christmas Gift by Leigh Riker, award-winning, Harlequin Heartwarming author.

  Book 4: The Gingerbread Men by Liz Flaherty, Patricia Bradley & Rula Sinara. When two sisters and their widowed mother are reunited for the holidays, falling in love isn't on any of their Christmas wish lists, but sometimes the best gifts are unexpected...

  Novella 1: The Gingerbread Heart by Liz Flaherty, Harlequin Heartwarming author.

  Novella 2: The Gingerbread Pony by Patricia Bradley, award-winning, Amazon bestselling, Harlequin Heartwarming author.

  Novella 3: The Gingerbird House by Rula Sinara, award-winning, Harlequin Heartwarming author.

  Foreword

  When you think of Christmas, small towns immediately leap to mind.

  I live in a small town in Connecticut—my hometown, in fact, and Christmas is my favorite time. The historic houses on Main Street are decked out with gorgeous wreaths on every door, candles in the window and white lights in the trees, along with the occasional old sled piled high with gift-wrapped boxes. Santa comes to the library, there’s a food drive at Town Hall, and the tree-lighting ceremony on the green draws hundreds of people bundled up against the cold to sing carols. You see people you grew up with, your neighbors, your former teachers and the kids of people you used to babysit.

  It’s idyllic, one of those times when life in a small town is just as warm and wonderful as a Christmas card. Or a Christmas story!

  A Heartwarming Christmas is a real gift to those of us who love the holidays. Twelve talented authors, four anthologies, each containing three connected stories, and every one with a happily ever after. All stories take place in a town that enthusiastically embraces Christmas. The stories run the gamut from lonely firefighters (a personal favorite), kids in need of love, family traditions, past loves and even a few adorable animals.

  If you love Christmas stories, small towns and sweet romances that will last a lifetime, A Heartwarming Christmas is for you.

  Happy reading!

  Kristan Higgins

  New York Times bestselling author

  www.KristanHiggins.com

  The Comeback Christmas

  Melinda Curtis

  Copyright © 2015 by:

  Melinda Curtis

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior written consent of the Publisher, excepting brief quotes used in reviews.

  This book was built at IndieWrites.com. Visit us on Facebook.

  150921.175514

  Acknowledgments

  To my family, who love and support me in all I do.

  To my team, who keep me sane.

  And to my sisters at the Harlequin Heartwarming line, who bravely stepped up when I asked them to write a Christmas Town novella for this set.

  Praise and Awards

  USA Today Bestselling Author

  RT Top Pick

  "Ms. Curtis has got it all right with this story. The characters are so well written and the story line is such that you will need tissues for the happy and the sad parts."

  ~ Harlequin Junkie Blog

  “Wonderfully entertaining...”

  ~ Jayne Ann Krentz of The Hollywood Rules series

  “Season of Change has found a place on my keeper shelf.”

  ~ Brenda Novak

  Chapter 1

  Theodore Lincoln could not screw up.

  If he did, he’d let down the ten previous generations who’d run the family apple farm and the three living generations expecting a Lincoln family Christmas with all the bells and whistles.

  Everyone – dead or alive – expected Ted to make the right decisions.

  But there was a glut of apples on the market driving the price down. Last year’s crop had barely covered the taxes, much less a living for Ted, his younger sister Abigail, his parents or Uncle Ben. Abigail was on a crash course to ruin her eighteen-year-old life and the future for her two year-old daughter Lizzie. And Lizzie? She deserved Christmas to be magical. Big tree. Sparkly lights. And presents. Credit card bending presents.

  Ted shouldn’t have been standing in front of the Wright grist mill on the outskirts of Christmas Town, Maine, on Thanksgiving afternoon, thinking about taking out a home equity lo
an to expand the farm. But there he stood, thinking, stress like a sprawling, sleeping giant in his gut.

  “Well, if it isn’t Teddy Lincoln.”

  Not her.

  Not her.

  Not her-not her-not her.

  Ted popped an antacid, and turned to face her.

  Chloe Wright was the only person who called him Teddy anymore. She’d had a crush on him since she was in the third grade and he in the fourth. Back then she was a non-stop talker. Nerd to the nth degree. Overbite. Brillo copper curls. Belly fat. Dress her in green tights and a pointed red cap and she could have been a stand-in for a garden gnome.

  She’d followed him around like a puppy. Through braces and bras and middle school. The other boys in Christmas Town made fun of her. And of him. Ted had wanted her to be struck by lightning. Dropped into a manhole. Teleported into another dimension.

  And then, on the first day Chloe entered high school – a day Ted had been dreading – he turned at the sound of her laughter and realized she wasn’t a roly-poly puppy with an overbite. She was tall and curvy and word-stealing pretty. Her smile was worth every penny her adoptive parents had paid. And her hair…she’d straightened and tamed it. It looked touchably soft. Every guy in high school bent over backward for her attention. Every guy but Ted.

  By then, he’d treated her like dirt for so long, he couldn’t swallow his pride and regret and be nice to her. For her part, she treated him as if he were dead. And who could blame her?

  Ted turned to face her now, ignoring the way stress banged awake in his belly.

  There was the beauty he knew so well. The long, tamed curls. The bright blue eyes. The temptingly smooth skin. But physical attributes had never outshone her personality – the optimism, the wry humor, the kindness underlying the thick skin she’d developed.

  “I was sorry to hear about your father, Chloe.” A local businessman, Harold Wright had died a few months ago after a long battle with bone cancer.

  “They tell me we all have to go sometime.” Her optimism had faded, he thought, her humor turned to sarcasm. She shaded her eyes from the sun gleaming off snow and the worn walls of the mill.

  “He was a good man.”

  She tromped through the drifts, moving closer to the mill, studying it as if it held an answer to a confounding question. Or held a memory she wasn’t sure how to categorize.

  Words came to mind: perfect, mind-blowing, once-in-a-lifetime magical.

  She spared Ted a half-glance as she passed.

  That glance said what she thought of him: disappointing, hurtful, liar.

  “You got divorced,” she said, as if she’d only recently caught up on ancient history. Possible, since she’d been living in Boston the past nine years. But it was more likely she was taking this chance to clear the air, since they hadn’t spoken to each other alone in nearly a decade.

  About ten years ago, he’d been a senior in high school and Chloe a junior. They’d been briefly unattached to others at the same time. Things had…happened.

  Ted stared up at the mill, which sat at a bend in the river and had a magnificent old water wheel.

  Who could have predicted the two of them? Together? After all those years? Saying I love you. Hearing it back. Feeling as if this was meant to be. As if they were meant to be.

  But they weren’t. Ted’s ex-girlfriend, Gwen, announced she was pregnant the next day. And Ted knew what he had to do. He had to break Chloe’s heart, as well as his own.

  Maybe if Ted hadn’t grown up in a small town, maybe if he wasn’t next in line to lead the Lincoln family, maybe if Chloe would have asked, he’d have done something different. Maybe. Instead, he’d married Gwen a few weeks later after high school graduation.

  “I had to do what I thought was right. I knew it wasn’t true love,” he said now. It couldn't have been. Gwen’s hair wasn’t as red as Chloe’s. Her smile not as bright. Her heart not as loyal. “A month later, she miscarried.”

  “I’m sorry about the baby.” Chloe marched up the stone steps, as if intent upon pushing open the door to the past and going inside. She stopped before the eight-foot tall, double wooden doors and faced him instead. “But you chose honor over true love.” Her tone was accusing, the same as it had that morning all those years ago.

  What good is love if you cast it aside when things get tough? Her words came back to him, filled with the hurt of a child given up for adoption, a child who wanted to rely on love no matter what.

  Ted released a breath. “There was the right thing to do, and there was you and me. One or the other.” He carefully avoided mentioning true love. Was there such a thing? Gwen had pledged her love, but all she did was complain about the lack of money and lie about where she went at night. She’d left him for a cross-country truck driver on their third wedding anniversary.

  “Most lessons are learned the hard way.” Chloe started to say more – he deserved the more part – but then she traipsed back down the steps, heading toward the grove of pines separating her dad’s house from the mill. “Goodbye, Teddy.”

  ~*~

  Speed was one of Chloe’s strengths.

  When she saw a great deal, she swooped in. Sometimes with stellar results (like the time she’d bought the hot dog cart in college) and sometimes with disastrous ones (like the car wash chain she’d bought right before a water-restricting drought hit).

  Decisiveness was another strength. Chloe looked at the facts and figures, sure. But nine times out of ten, she came, she saw, and she went with her gut. She’d made a good living off buying, fixing, and selling businesses. Most of the time.

  No regrets.

  That’s what Dad used to say when she’d come home after a failure, with a heavy heart and sometimes an empty bank account.

  He wasn’t here this time to help her pick up the pieces and start over. Chloe had walked to the mill to try and see it through Dad’s eyes. He’d left each of his adopted daughters some property– Marnie the wedding chapel, Noelle the house, and Chloe the mill. But when she looked at her inheritance, Chloe saw nothing. No potential, no obstacles. Only the past.

  And then she’d seen Teddy.

  Her childish hero-worship of Teddy Lincoln had started quickly and resolutely. All he’d done was given a newly adopted, new-to-town kid his place in line to see Santa, and he’d earned her affection for seven years. He probably could have smashed a mirror and had better luck. It had taken an intervention from her sisters in the summer before high school to make her see what an idiot she was. Too bad that hadn’t saved her from one last Teddy-based humiliation.

  Chloe walked away from Teddy with all the speed of a snowshoe racer – which meant her speed was laughable. Her boots crunched through the thin layer of ice covering two feet of snow. She was bundled up like a tourist for a Maine winter – stocking cap, muffler, heavy jacket, gloves. She started to sweat as she cut through the pines toward the rambling white farmhouse and the back gate.

  She tugged on the latch, which was frozen again. Didn’t matter that she’d just done battle with it half an hour ago to escape the Thanksgiving after-meal malaise. It was as frozen as her heart.

  Dad was gone. Her money was gone. And she’d lost whatever insight and instinct she needed to move on.

  Chloe slammed her gloved palm against the wood.

  “Here.” An arm came over her shoulder. A gloved hand forced the latch free.

  Chloe – not a fan of horror movies – leapt sideways and fell into a snow drift.

  “Sorry.” Her white knight in snow boots and a lightweight black jacket was Teddy.

  It was third grade all over again. Her feeling down and alone. Him looking at her with that put-your-troubles-on-my-shoulders smile. The sun glinted off his dark brown hair as he extended a hand to help her up. Teddy was strong and fit and level-headed. Certainly not the type to lose his life savings on a car wash (like her). Certainly not the type to have had a second piece of pecan pie (like her). Certainly not the type to whisper theirs was a forever
kind of love in a run-down grist mill (like…wait a minute; that was him!).

  Chloe swatted away Teddy’s hand and battled the snow to get to her feet.

  He leaned a bit to the left, looking at the snow drift where she’d fallen. “Worst snow angel ever.”

  Chloe had a lifetime of please-let-the-ground-swallow-me-whole moments with this man. They came with cheek-heating, gut-dropping intensity, and left with soldiering smiles and – only in the past decade – snappy comebacks. This time her soldier was on leave (no smile) and her snap had been buried with Dad, along with her debt (no comeback).

  This was the man who’d broken her heart. Repeatedly. This was the man who plagued her dreams with regrets and should-have-saids. Repeatedly. This was the man she should be telling to get lost. Forever.

  Her mouth was dry. Snow melted down her back. And words? She couldn’t find any. She pushed past him into the backyard.

  “I didn’t mean to scare you.” He sounded as bone-weary as she was.

  She whirled. “Did you follow me through the woods, Teddy? That’s creepy.”

  Romantic, her heart whispered, pounding for a reason not associated with fear.

  His dark brown eyes looked as if he hadn’t slept well in days. “I just wanted to talk. Don’t make it sound like those horror movies you hate.”

  He remembered, her heart whispered, settling into a Teddy-is-near rhythm.

  She gathered her breath, her dignity, and her kindness. “If you want to share a kind memory about Dad, I can’t do that now.” Not on Thanksgiving. Not when Dad had never started a business that failed and Chloe was such a failure.