The Bachelor's Christmas Bride. Victoria Pade

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СКАЧАТЬ They were sort of the co-guests-of-honor. If Shannon was here, he should go down. If she wasn’t here yet, there was no rush.

       Yeah, right, it’s just manners…

      Okay, maybe he didn’t hate the idea that he was going to get to see her again. But only because she made for a pleasant view.

      Dark, thick, silky, walnut-colored hair around that pale peaches-and-cream skin. A thin, straight nose that came to a slight point on the end that turned up just a touch. Lips that were soft and shiny and too damn kiss-able to bear. Rosy cheeks that made her look healthy and glowing from the inside out. Eyes that at first had seemed blue—a pale, luminous blue—and then had somehow taken on a green hue, too, to blend them into the color of sea and sky together. And a compact little body that was just tight enough, just round enough, just right…

      A beauty—that’s what Shannon Duffy was. No doubt about it. So much of a beauty that he hadn’t been able to get the image of her out of his head even after he’d left her to her brother this afternoon when he’d come up here to shower.

      So much of a beauty that he’d had to rein in the urge to stare at her every time he’d had the opportunity to see her today.

      No wonder she’d snagged herself a Rumson….

      Wes Rumson, the newest Golden Boy of the Montana clan that had forever been the biggest name in politics in the state. It had been all over the news a couple weeks ago that not only was he going to run for governor, he was also engaged to Shannon Duffy. When Dag had heard that, he’d figured that was the reason she was selling her grandmother’s property.

      It was also one of the reasons that no matter how great-looking she was, he would be keeping his distance from her.

      Engaged, dating, separated—even flirting with someone else—any woman with the faintest hint of involvement or connection or ties to another guy and there was no way Dag would get anywhere near her. And not only because he wasn’t a woman-poacher—which he wasn’t.

      He’d learned painfully and at the wrong end of a crowbar that if a woman wasn’t completely and totally free and available, having anything whatsoever to do with her could be disastrous.

      So, beautiful, not beautiful, he wouldn’t go anywhere near Shannon Duffy.

      At least not anywhere nearer than anyone else who was about to share the holiday with her as part of a larger group.

      Nope, Shannon Duffy was absolutely the same as the decorations on the Christmas tree, as the lights and holly and pine boughs and ribbons all over this house, all over town—she was something pretty to look at and nothing more.

      But damn, no one could say she wasn’t pretty to look at….

      “A neckruss goes on your neck, a brace-a-let goes on your wristle.”

      “Right,” Shannon confirmed with a smile at three-year-old Tia McKendrick’s pronunciation of things.

      After a lovely dinner of game hen, wild rice, roasted vegetables and salad, followed by a dessert of fruit cobbler and ice cream, everyone was still sitting around the table in the dining room of Logan and Meg McKendrick’s home.

      Wine had also been in abundance and had left Shannon more relaxed than when she’d arrived this evening. She assumed the same was true for her dinner companions because no one seemed in any hurry to get up and clear the remainder of the dishes.

      Tia, on the other hand, had ventured from her seat to sit on Shannon’s lap and explore the simple circle bracelet and plain gold chain necklace that Shannon had worn with her sweater set and slacks tonight.

      “Can I see the brace-a-let?” Tia requested.

      “You can,” Shannon granted, taking it off and handing it to the small curly-haired girl.

      Looking on from Shannon’s right were Meg and Logan—Tia’s stepmother and father.

      To Shannon’s left were Chase and his soon-to-be bride, Hadley—who also happened to be Logan’s sister.

      On Hadley’s lap was fifteen-month-old Cody, and directly across from Shannon was Dag.

      Which made it difficult for her not to look at him in all his glory dressed in jeans and a fisherman’s knit sweater, his well-defined jaw clean shaven and yet still slightly shadowed with the heaviness of his beard.

      Their positioning at the table apparently made it difficult for him not to look at her, too, because his dark eyes seemed to have been on her most of the night.

      “I think that brace-a-let is kind of big for you, Miss Tia,” Dag said then. “You can get both of your wristles in it.”

      Tia tried that, putting her tiny hands through the hoop from opposite directions as if it were a muff. Then, giggling and holding up her arms for everyone to see, she said, “Look it, I can!”

      That caught Cody’s interest and the infant leaned far forward to try to take the bracelet for himself. Luckily Shannon had worn two, so she took off the other one and handed it to the baby. Who promptly put it in his mouth.

      “So, Shannon, you’re pretty much a stranger to Northbridge even though your grandmother lived here?” Logan asked then.

      “I am. I only visited here a few times growing up and that was all before I was twelve. Between my parents’ business and their health, there was just no getting away.”

      “What was their business?” Hadley asked.

      “They owned a small shoe repair and leather shop, and the building it was in. We lived above the shop and they couldn’t afford help—they worked the shop themselves six days a week—so in order to leave town, they had to close down and that was too costly for them. Gramma would come to visit us—even for holidays. Plus with my parents’ health problems they were both sort of doing the best they could just to get downstairs, put in a day’s work and go back up to the apartment.”

      “Did they have serious health problems long before they died?” Chase asked.

      “My mom and dad’s health problems were definitely serious and started long before they died,” Shannon confirmed. “As a young man, my dad was in an accident that cost him one kidney and damaged his other—the damaged one continued to deteriorate from the injury, though, and he eventually had to go on dialysis. My mom had had rheumatic fever as a kid and it took a toll on her heart, which also made her lungs weak and caused her to be just generally unwell.”

      “I’m a little surprised that people in that kind of physical shape were allowed to adopt a child,” Meg observed.

      “The situation at the time helped that,” Shannon said. “What I was told was that my birth parents were killed in a car accident—”

      “True,” Chase confirmed.

      “There wasn’t anything about other kids in the story,” Shannon continued. “I didn’t know there was an older sister who had a different father to take her, or that there was an older brother and twin younger brothers, that’s for sure. What my parents said was just that there wasn’t any family to take me, that the reverend here had put out feelers for someone else to. When my parents asked if that could be them, the СКАЧАТЬ