The Christmas Brides Read online

  “Because she doesn’t believe I exist?” Mr. Christian asked, his smile muted now, and full of quiet amusement.

  Lizzie sighed. “Not only that,” she protested. “Lorelei probably knows your family and—”

  “I have no family, Lizzie. Not the kind you mean, anyway.”

  “But you said—”

  Again, the faint and mysterious smile came. The glow Lizzie had noticed before intensified a little. And it came to her that Mr. Christian simply could not have recovered so completely in such a short time. Had he… died? Was she seeing his ghost? She’d heard of things like that, of course, but never given them serious consideration before that moment.

  “Who are you?” she heard herself ask, in a near whisper.

  He didn’t answer.

  Lizzie reached out, meaning to clutch at his sleeve, a way of insisting that he reply, but grab though she might, she couldn’t seem to catch hold of him. It was the strangest sensation—he was there, not transparent as she imagined a spirit might be, but a real person, one of reality and substance. Without moving at all, he still managed to evade her touch.

  “Who are you?” she repeated, more forcefully this time.

  “That’s not important,” he said quietly. Then he pointed to someone or something just past Lizzie’s left shoulder. “Look there,” he added. “There’s your young man, coming to make things up. Give him every opportunity, Lizzie. He’s the one.”

  Lizzie turned to look, saw Morgan vaulting over the schoolyard fence, starting toward her. She turned again, with another question for Mr. Christian teetering on the tip of her tongue, but he was gone.

  Simply gone.

  Startled, her heart pounding, Lizzie swept the large yard, but there was no sign of Mr. Christian. She hurried to look behind the building, but he wasn’t there, either. Nor was he behind the outhouse or the little shed meant to house a horse or a milk cow.

  “Lizzie?”

  She whirled.

  Morgan stood at her side. “What’s the matter?” he asked, frowning.

  “Mr. Christian,” she sputtered. “He was just here— surely you must have seen him—”

  Morgan frowned. “I didn’t see anybody but you,” he said, taking her arm. “Are you all right?”

  She was shaking. She felt like laughing—and like crying. Like dancing, and like collapsing in a heap in the powdery snow.

  The snow.

  She searched the ground—Mr. Christian would have left footprints in the snow, just as she had. But there were no tracks, other than her own and Morgan’s.

  She sagged against Morgan, stunned, and his arms tightened around her. “Lizzie!” There was a plea in his voice. Be all right, it said.

  “I…I must be seeing things—” She gulped in a breath, shook her head. “No. I did see Mr. Christmas— Mr. Christian—he was right here. We spoke…he told me—”

  “Lizzie,” Morgan repeated, gripping her upper arms now, looking deep into her eyes. “Stop chattering and breathe.”

  “He was here!”

  Morgan led her around to the front of the schoolhouse, sat her down on the side of the porch, where the snow had melted away, took a seat beside her. “I believe you,” he said, holding her hand. She felt his innate strength, strength of mind and spirit and body, flowing into her, buoying her up. Sustaining her. “Lizzie, I believe you.”

  She let her head rest against his shoulder, not caring who saw her and Morgan, sitting close together on the schoolhouse porch, holding hands, even though it was highly improper.

  For a long while, neither of them spoke. Lizzie was willing her heartbeat to return to normal, and Morgan seemed content just to be there with her.

  Finally, though, he broke the silence. “You’re really not going to marry Carson?” he asked, looking as sheepish as he sounded.

  “I’m really not going to marry Whitley,” Lizzie confirmed. Her heart started beating fast again.

  “He was right,” Morgan went on, after heaving a resigned sigh. He gazed off toward the distant mountain, where they’d been stranded together, nearly buried under tons of snow. “About all the things he said earlier, back at the hotel, I mean. I can’t offer you what he can. No position in society. No mansion. No money to speak of.”

  Lizzie blinked, studied him. “Morgan Shane,” she said, “look at me.”

  He obeyed, grinned sadly.

  “What are you saying?” she asked.

  He hesitated for what seemed to Lizzie an excruciatingly long time. Then, with another sigh, he answered her question with one of his own. “Can you imagine yourself being courted by a penniless country doctor with no prospects to speak of?”

  Lizzie’s breath caught. She considered the matter for all of two seconds. “Yes,” she said. “I can imagine that very well.”

  He enclosed the hand he’d been holding in both his own, looked straight into Lizzie’s soul. “I know it will take time. There’s a lot we don’t know about each other. You’ve got classes to teach, and I’ll be building a medical practice. But if you’ll have me, Lizzie McKettrick, I’ll be your husband by this time next year.”

  “D-do you love me?” Lizzie asked, color flaring in her cheeks at the audacity of her question.

  “I’m pretty sure I do,” Morgan replied, with a saucy grin. “Do you love me?”

  “I certainly feel something,” Lizzie said, blissfully bewildered. “But I’m not sure I trust myself. After all, I thought I loved Whitley. All I could think about, before we left San Francisco—” before I met you “—was whether he’d propose to me over Christmas or not.”

  Morgan chuckled.

  “I guess it proves something my grandfather always says,” Lizzie went on. “Be careful what you wish for, because you might damn well get it.”

  This time Morgan laughed out loud. “Amen,” he said.

  Lizzie turned thoughtful. “I’d want to go right on teaching school, even if we got married,” she warned.

  “And I’ll want children,” Morgan said.

  A great joy swelled inside Lizzie, one she could barely contain. “At least four,” she agreed. “Two girls and two boys.”

  Morgan’s eyes gleamed. “The room behind my office might get a little crowded,” he told her.

  “We’ll think of something,” Lizzie said.

  “The hardest part will be waiting,” Morgan told her, leaning in a little, lowering his voice. “To get those babies started, I mean.”

  Lizzie blushed, well aware of his meaning. She’d never been intimate with a man, not even Whitley, though she’d allowed him to kiss her a few times, but she craved this man, this “penniless country doctor,” with her entire being. She wondered if she could endure a whole year of such wanting.

  Reading her expression, Morgan chuckled again, rested his forehead against hers. “I’m about to kiss you, Lizzie McKettrick,” he said. “Like I’ve wanted to kiss you from the moment I first laid eyes on you. And if the whole town of Indian Rock sees me do that, so be it.”

  Lizzie swallowed, tilted her head upward, ready for his kiss. Longing for it. And feeling utterly scandalized by the ferocity of her own desire.

  He laid his mouth to hers, gently at first, then with a hunger to match and even exceed her own. His lips felt deliciously warm, despite the frigid weather, and wonderfully soft. She trembled as the kiss deepened, caught fire inside when his tongue found hers. It was a foretaste of things to come, things that could only happen when they were married, but she felt it in her most feminine parts, as surely as if he’d laid her down on that schoolhouse porch and taken her outright, made her his own.

  She moaned.

  Morgan’s soft laugh echoed in her mouth.

  He knew. He knew what she was thinking, what she was feeling.

  Lizzie’s face felt as hot as the blood singing through her veins.

  “Oh, my goodness,” she gasped, when the kiss was over.

  “Only the beginning,” Morgan promised gruffly, twisting a loose tendril of
her hair gently around one finger.

  “Hush,” she said helplessly.

  He let go of her face, which he’d been holding between his hands while he kissed her, while he possessed her, and put a slight but eloquent distance between them. “I’d better get back to the hotel,” he said. “I’m expecting some patients, now that I’ve figuratively hung out my shingle.”

  “I’ll go with you,” Lizzie said, not because she particularly wanted to return to the hotel, where she would be treated like an invalid, albeit a cherished one, but because she couldn’t be parted from Morgan.

  Not yet. Not after what had just happened between them—whatever it was.

  As Lizzie had expected, word had gotten around that the new doctor was young, handsome and eligible. Three women, all of them known to Lizzie and notoriously single, awaited him, in varying stages of feigned illness.

  She had the silliest urge to shoo them away, like so many hens fluttering around a rooster. Fortunately, she recovered her good sense in time, and simply smiled.

  Whitley had left the lobby, perhaps retreating to his nearby room, and Lizzie was relieved by that. She’d be glad when he left Indian Rock, but she knew it might be a while before the train ran again, and the roads were all but impassable.

  Suddenly hungry, she made her way through the empty dining room to the kitchen, and found Lorelei there, chatting with the Chinese cook.

  “There you are,” Lorelei said, in a tone of good-natured scolding. “Your cheeks are flushed. Have you taken a chill?”

  Lizzie still felt the tingle of Morgan’s kiss on her mouth, and things had melted inside her, so that she was a little unsteady on her feet. She sank into a rocking chair near the stove, smiling foolishly. “No,” she said. “I haven’t taken a chill. But I’m famished.”

  The cook dished up a bowl of beef stew dolloped with dumplings and handed it to Lizzie where she sat, along with a spoon, then left.

  Lorelei drew up a second chair.

  “Something very strange happened to me today,” Lizzie confided, without really intending to, between bites of savory stew.

  “I saw you come in with Dr. Shane,” Lorelei said, with a gentle but knowing smile. “Lizzie McKettrick, I do believe you’ve fallen in love.”

  Perhaps she had fallen in love, Lizzie thought. Time would tell.

  “Lizzie?” Lorelei prompted, when Lizzie didn’t confirm or deny her stepmother’s assertion.

  “He’s going to court me,” she said. “Do you think Papa will object?”

  “No,” Lorelei responded, watching Lizzie very closely. “Would it matter if he did?”

  Lizzie laughed. “No,” she said. “I don’t think it would.”

  Lorelei smiled, her eyes glistening with happy tears. “It’s love, all right. When I met your father, I figured we were all wrong for each other, and I wanted to be with him so badly that I couldn’t think straight.”

  “Something else happened,” Lizzie went on, because there was very little she didn’t share with her stepmother. Quietly, carefully, she told Lorelei about her encounter with Mr. Christian, at the schoolyard, leaving nothing out.

  “Good heavens,” Lorelei said, when the tale was told. Then she reached out and tested Lizzie’s forehead for fever. Finding her flesh cool, she frowned and managed to look relieved at one and the same time.

  “You believe me, don’t you?” Lizzie asked shyly.

  “If you say you saw this Mr. Christian,” Lorelei said, without hesitation, “then you saw him. You are no flibbertigibbet, Lizzie McKettrick.”

  “But how could he have just—just disappeared that way?”

  “I don’t have the faintest idea,” Lorelei answered. Then she rose from her chair. “Finish your stew. I’ll be back in a few minutes, and we’ll have tea.”

  Lizzie nodded and her stepmother hurried out of the kitchen, only to be replaced by Angus. He helped him self to a cup of coffee from the pot on the stove and stood watching Lizzie curiously, as though she’d changed in some fundamental way.

  And perhaps she had.

  “You did a fine job after that avalanche,” he told her. “Looking after folks. Trying to keep their spirits up.”

  “Thank you,” Lizzie said. Hers was an independent spirit, but she valued her grandfather’s opinion of her, along with those of Lorelei and, of course, her papa.

  He sipped his coffee. “You’re all right, aren’t you, Lizzie-girl? You seem—well—different.”

  “It’s possible I’m in love,” she said.

  Angus smiled, lifted his coffee cup as if in a toast. “I’ll drink to that,” he replied, just as Lorelei returned to the kitchen, carrying a Bible.

  Lizzie set aside her bowl of stew, and Lorelei practically shoved the Good Book under her nose.

  “Read this,” she ordered, pointing to a passage in Hebrews, thirteenth chapter, second verse:

  “Be not forgetful to entertain strangers; for thereby some have entertained angels unawares.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  “MR. CHRISTIAN MAKES AN UNLIKELY ANGEL,” Lizzie told Morgan, standing in his examining room, several hours after Lorelei had shown her the Bible verse in the hotel kitchen. “Don’t you think?”

  Morgan pulled his stethoscope from around his neck and set it aside. “Not having made the acquaintance of all that many angels,” he replied, “I couldn’t say.”

  “He played cards with the children,” Lizzie said, groping for reasons why Mr. Christian could not be a part of the heavenly host. “He pulled a gun on Whitley once, and he gave you whiskey when you went out into the blizzard—”

  “Positively demonic,” Morgan teased. “I guess I missed the part where he drew a gun.”

  “You were outside,” Lizzie answered.

  “Why would a peddler feel compelled to threaten Carson with a gun, annoying though he is?”

  Lizzie shook off the question. “I’m trying to make some sense of what happened, Morgan,” Lizzie protested, “and you are not helping.”

  He grinned. “Some things just don’t make sense, Lizzie McKettrick,” he said. “Like why every unmarried woman in Indian Rock seems to have developed some fetching and very melodramatic malady.”

  Lizzie laughed, though she wasn’t amused. “No mystery to that,” she answered. “You’re an eligible bachelor, after all.”

  He moved closer to her, rested his hands on her shoulders. “Oh, but I’m not eligible,” he said, his low voice setting things aquiver inside Lizzie. “I’m definitely taken.”

  He was about to kiss her again, but the office door crashed open with a terrible bang, and both of them turned to see Doss, Lizzie’s seven-year-old brother, standing on the threshold.

  “Pa’s back!” he shouted exuberantly. “The roads are clear, and after church, we can go home and have Christmas!” He paused, his small face screwed into a puzzled frown. “Were you smooching?” he demanded, looking suspicious.

  Lizzie laughed, and so did Morgan.

  “No,” Lizzie said.

  “Yes,” Morgan replied, at the same moment.

  “You’d better get married, then,” Doss decided. “You’re not supposed to kiss people if you’re not married to them.”

  “Is that right?” Morgan asked, approaching Doss and ruffling his thick blond hair.

  “I bet it says so in the Bible,” Doss insisted solemnly.

  “Do we have a budding preacher in our midst?” Morgan asked Lizzie, his eyes full of warm laughter.

  Lizzie giggled. “Doss? Perish the thought. He’s more imp than angel.”

  At the word angel, a little silence fell. Lizzie thought of Mr. Christian, of course, and the insoluble mystery he represented.

  “We had to wait to have Christmas,” Doss complained. “There are a whole bunch of packages under our tree at home, and some of them are mine. And now we have to sit through church, too.”

  Lizzie’s attention was on Morgan. “Will you come with us?” she asked. “To celebrate a McKettrick Christmas,
I mean?”

  Morgan looked reluctant. “I’d be intruding,” he said.

  “That man with the broken leg is going,” Doss put in, relentlessly helpful.

  Morgan merely spread his hands to Lizzie, as if to say I told you so.

  “You belong with us,” Lizzie said, not to be put off. It would be awkward, celebrating their delayed Christmas with both Whitley and Morgan present, but that was unavoidable. To leave Whitley alone at the hotel while everyone else enjoyed roast goose and eggnog was simply not the McKettrick way.

  In the end Morgan relented.

  PASTOR REYNOLDS HELD A Christmas Eve service at sunset, and the whole town attended. Candles were lit, carols were sung, a gentle sermon was preached. After the closing prayer, gifts were given out to all the children, and Lizzie recognized her father’s handiwork, made in his woodshop, and the cloth dolls and animals Lorelei and the aunts had sewn. Every child received a present.

  Mr. and Mrs. Thaddings watched fondly, and somewhat wistfully, Lizzie thought, as Ellen Halifax showed off the doll she’d wanted so much. Jack received a stick horse with a yarn mane, and galloped up and down the aisle, despite his mother’s protests. John and Alice Brennan were there, too, with Alice’s parents and little Tad, who seemed fascinated with his toy buckboard.

  Lizzie approached the Thaddingses. She knew Pastor Reynolds had wired Clarinda Adams on their behalf, hoping she’d allow them to stay on until she either returned or sold the house, but there hadn’t been time for an answer.

  Mrs. Thaddings embraced her. “You look well, Lizzie,” she said.

  “I’m happy to be home,” Lizzie replied. Whitley, standing nearby, letting his crutches support his weight, looked despondent. She wondered if he’d ever considered staying on in Indian Rock, or if he’d always intended to insist they live in San Francisco, after they were married.

  She would probably never know, she decided. And it didn’t matter.

  “We’d better get back and see to Woodrow, dear,” Mr. Thaddings told his wife, taking a gentle hold on her elbow. “Before this snow gets too deep.”