His Holiday Matchmaker. Kat Brookes

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СКАЧАТЬ shook her head, sending her head full of dark brown curls bouncing. “Nope.”

      “A doll?”

      “Uncle Logan just bought me a new dolly. Guess again,” his daughter urged with youthful impatience.

      Rubbing his chin as if in deep thought, he hemmed and hawed for several seconds before saying, “I know. You want a giant pink pony?”

      Katie giggled. “That’s silly, Daddy.”

      “Okay, I give up. What do you really want for Christmas?”

      She leaned forward, folding her arms just like his were and said determinedly, “I want a mommy.”

      Nathan was speechless. She’d had a mommy. And he’d had a wife. How could he make Katie understand that no other woman could ever fill the void left behind when Isabel died?

      “You have your daddy,” he pointed out, trying to sound unaffected by the turn in their conversation, when in truth he was anything but.

      “I know, but Bettina’s mommy braids her hair every morning before school.”

      “I can braid your hair.” He’d done so for three of the birthday parties Katie had been invited to that past year and had done a pretty good job of it if he did say so himself.

      “But her mommy makes a French braid.”

      He hated feeling like he had somehow failed his daughter. Something he never wanted to do. “I’ll see what I can do.”

      Her eyes lit up. “About getting me a mommy?”

      “About learning how to French braid your hair.”

      She sank back against the padded seat, crossing her tiny arms. “But I want a mommy.”

      “That’s not gonna happen, Cupcake,” he told her, fighting to keep the turmoil going on inside him from his voice.

      Her stubbornness kicking in, his daughter lifted her chin and pouted.

      “Katie,” he began, only to be saved from saying anything else as Lizzie came back with their orders, instantly distracting his daughter from her mommy quest. Thankfully. Marrying again was not an option for him.

      And it never would be.

      * * *

      December first had finally arrived. Alyssa McCall walked her best friend back to her SUV, a tight ball of anxiety in her stomach.

      “Are you sure you wanna do this?” Erica asked.

      She nodded. “Yes.” Despite her fears and reservations, Alyssa truly felt that this was where she needed to be. Where the Lord wanted her to be. Not only would she be helping to reconstruct a part of the town that had been destroyed by the tornado, she would be proving herself to the interior design firm she worked for.

      Since the car accident that had nearly taken her life three years before, she’d gone from being a highly sought after interior designer working full-time to being placed on the back burner with her firm, only being given small, mostly part-time jobs.

      Pure Perfection Designs, the firm she’d been working for since college, felt that her visual disability, damage done specifically to the visual cortex of her brain in the accident that left her medically diagnosed as <00201Clegally blind,” left her incapable of handling the more intricate design planning and extensive hands-on attention their customers were seeking. While the pathway sending visual messages from her eyes to her brain didn’t always function as it should, she could still manage to perform the tasks required of her job. So this opportunity in Braxton was her chance to prove herself. To her firm and to herself.

      “Isn’t there some other way you can contribute to the cause without having to stay so long?” Erica asked with a frown as they stopped beside her friend’s shiny new silver Ford Explorer. “We’re talking about spending most of December in a town where you don’t know anyone.”

      Alyssa laughed softly. “Hey! Weren’t you the one giving me the you-can-do-this pep talk back at Big Dog’s when I went into that teeny tiny panic attack?”

      “Sorry,” her friend apologized. “I have all the faith in the world you can do this. Really I do. It’s just the mom in me coming out. It can’t be helped.”

      “It’s okay,” Alyssa said with a grateful smile. “It’s nice to know I have someone in my life that truly cares about me.”

      “The right man is gonna come along,” her friend assured her, knowing that Alyssa longed to have the kind of family Erica had.

      “Not if I keep dating Mr. Not-So-Rights.” Not that she had dated much since the accident. As soon as her dates found out she was legally blind, they bailed. She supposed she couldn’t blame them. A relationship with her would involve some major adjustments. But at least her visual impairment wouldn’t get any worse than it was now. She could live with that, even if the men she had dated couldn’t.

      “Don’t give up on love,” Erica beseeched her. “Mr. Right is out there.”

      Reaching out, Alyssa opened the back passenger door to collect her suitcase. “I suppose I’ll just have to take your word for it.”

      She leaned into the vehicle and grabbed her suitcase. Lowering the black spinner onto the sidewalk beside her, she stepped away from the SUV and turned to her friend. “I guess I’ll see you in a few weeks. Maybe sooner.”

      Erica gave her a hug. “If you change your mind about doing this—”

      “I know,” she said, cutting her off with a grin. “You’re only a phone call away.”

      “I’ll miss you,” Erica called out as she made her way around to the driver’s side door.

      “Same here,” she replied, lifting her hand in a wave as her friend drove away. Then she stood watching as the blurred image of her friend’s SUV disappeared from sight. A sudden surge of panic had her entire body tensing.

      Her hand moved over the soft leather of the purse she had draped across her as she fought the urge to dig inside it for her cell phone. No, she thought determinedly, she would not call Erica to come back for her. Fear would not control her. She could do this. Closing her eyes, she prayed for the Lord to give her the strength to do what she had come to do. As she did so, a sense of calm slowly settled over her.

      Opening her eyes, she let her gaze drift down what she knew to be the main street of town. Braxton, much smaller than San Antonio according to the information she’d found on the town’s website, stretched out before her in a distortion of shapes and colors. The closer buildings she could almost make out, just not the fine details. Never since the damage done to her vision from the accident had she felt the loss of her perfect eyesight more. She was far from familiar surroundings in a town where she knew no one. At the same time, she was grateful that her impaired vision would get no worse when so many others were forced to live their lives in total darkness.

      “Hurry up, Daddy!” a tiny voice squealed behind her.

      Alyssa turned just as a flash of red whooshed by, bumping into her with СКАЧАТЬ