The Bachelor’s Christmas Bride (7 page)

Shannon was grateful when they finally reached it that Dag's truck was already running again—thanks to his remote starter—so he could instantly push the heat to full blast. Then he left her there to warm up while he ran into the Groceries and Sundries without telling her why.

“The fixings for my famous hot chocolate!” he announced when he returned to the truck and got in, holding a bag in the air as if it were a prize of war. “I'll build you a fire, fix you a cup of that and you'll forget all about being frozen.”

“Who says I'm frozen?” Shannon said defensively.

“Not who, what—those two bright red cheeks and that even brighter red nose.” He flipped down the visor on the passenger side and pointed to the mirror there. “See for yourself, Rudolph,” he teased as he put the truck into gear and pulled away from the curb. “There I was, skating along, looking at where we were going instead of at you, and then I catch a glimpse of your face and you're all lit up!”

Shannon didn't know whether to laugh or cry at the way she looked, but she
was
a sight—her nose and cheeks were beet-red.

Before she'd reacted in any way, Dag said, “Why didn't you tell me that you were cold?”

“And let you think I'm a sissy?” she challenged. “Besides, I shouldn't have been any colder than you.”

“
Ice
hockey, remember? I'm used to it. Apparently they heat kindergarten rooms, huh?” he added with a wry glance in her direction.

Shannon just laughed, glad that they'd reached the garage apartment.

While Dag built a fire, Shannon went to do some damage control. First—following his orders—she removed
the socks she had on and replaced them with two pairs of dry, heavier ones she'd snatched from a drawer and brought into the studio apartment's bathroom with her. After that she focused on what she was most concerned with and went to the mirror above the sink.

She was glad to discover that her nose was no longer bright red and that her cheeks had calmed to merely a rosy glow. The knit cap she'd worn and now removed had mussed her hair, so she put a brush through it and then applied a little lip gloss.

Despite the calming of her coloring, she was still feeling chilled when she left the bathroom, so she made a beeline for the fireplace.

“Fire is definitely more my speed than ice,” she said with one last shiver. “You
are
a sissy,” he teased, bringing two steaming cups with him when he joined her.

Shannon took one of the mugs he offered, first encircling it with both hands to warm them and then tasting the rich, frothy brew that it held. “Oh, wow, you and chocolate must be a match made in heaven—this is
not
everyday stuff.”

“It's my special blend,” he said, not offering exactly what that special blend was.

But all Shannon cared about was chasing away the chill and enjoying her hot chocolate, and to that end she sat on the hearth and sipped.

Dag sat beside her, leaving a few inches between them. Not too many inches, but enough so that there was no touching—except in Shannon's mind where she was imagining his thigh running the length of her thigh, and his upper body close enough for her to snuggle against….

Trying to ignore that image, she glanced sideways
at his oh-so-handsome, slightly beard-shadowed face with its rugged appeal, and said, “Professional hockey, huh?”

“Guilty.”

“Playing professional sports of any kind is the dream of a lot of little boys.”

“Playing pro-hockey was mine, that's for sure. It was already something I was fantasizing about and acting out with my friends when I asked for my first pair of skates.”

“Which was when?” Shannon probed to learn more about him.

“I was four. There was a pond near our house that froze solid every winter. All the kids skated there and the bigger guys played hockey. I was itching to get in on the action. So I asked for the skates for Christmas and the minute I put them on they just felt right. I knew I was going to be able to fly in them—”

“That seems so young,” Shannon marveled.

Dag laughed. “I know guys who think if their kid can walk, he can skate, to get a head start in the game.”

“And you were a natural?”

“Let's just say I was a quick learner. But I was right about the skates—once I learned how to get around on them, I could move as if my feet had wings.”

“And because of the older guys playing hockey, rather than figure skating, you went in that direction?” Shannon asked after another sip of her hot chocolate.

“I didn't even know what figure skating was as a kid. But hockey was everywhere around here. I played in the amateur league, I spent two summers in Canada at hockey camp, and I played one season of midget before I finally started high school and could play there—”

“And then through college,” she contributed, recalling that he'd said he'd had a scholarship, “before you went pro.”

“Right,” he confirmed, drinking his own hot chocolate quicker than she was.

“You must have been really good.”

“Good enough,” he said.

But this evening someone had marveled at Dag being twice-named MVP, so she knew he was being humble.

“Was it all you'd hoped it would be?” she asked, wondering why he wasn't still doing it.

“Oh, God, yes,” he answered heartily. “Making a living doing something you love? Being treated like a king by fans? By women—”

Shannon laughed at that. “Groupies?”

“Some…” he said the same way he'd refrained from bragging about his skills. But rather than elaborating on that, he went on talking about how hockey had been everything he'd hoped it would be.

“But it doesn't make for a long career?” she said to encourage him to tell her why he wasn't still playing.

Dag shrugged. “Some guys make it into their forties. One guy played until he was fifty-two.”

“But you…”

“I'm definitely not forty or fifty-two,” he said wryly.

“But you're not still playing the game you love,” she persisted.

“Nope, now I'm a land-and homeowner,” he said.

Shannon sensed that his positive attitude about this change was some sort of spin, that he wasn't actually happy to have stopped playing hockey.

And her feeling grew stronger when he abruptly changed the subject. “So, your face is back to its normal
color. How about your hands and feet—any pain? Can you feel all of your fingers and toes?”

“I'm fine.”

“I can stop worrying about frostbite and hypothermia?”

Shannon smiled. “
Were
you worrying about me having frostbite and hypothermia?”

“A little,” he admitted.

She knew it shouldn't matter, but it felt good that he'd been concerned, that he cared. Not that it meant anything, she told herself in order to keep from reading more into it than she should.

She did, however, sorely regret it when Dag stood then and said, “I should probably get going.”

She wanted to say,
Do you have to?

But she didn't. She just stood, too, and walked him to the door.

“I can't thank you enough for today…and tonight—”

“Don't thank me at all,” he said as they reached the door and he was shrugging into his coat. “I got my own Christmas shopping finished, too.”

But once his coat was in place, he turned to face her and added in a quieter tone, “Besides, I had a great time. Getting into town, having pizza, an hour on the ice, hot chocolate in front of a fire—all of it with you—there's no chore in any of that.” Then he smiled a slow, sexy smile. “Actually, now that I think about it, maybe
I
should be thanking
you
.”

Even knowing nothing about hockey or its players, Shannon connected the sport with bruisers, not with charmers. But as she smiled up at Dag, it was his charm that was getting to her.

And his dark eyes.

And his chiseled features.

And everything else about him…

And it all suddenly bowled her over and left her unable to recall another time, another man, she'd ever wanted to have kiss her quite as much as she wanted that man to kiss her at that moment.

It was so potent tonight that it seemed impossible to hide what was on her mind and she felt her chin tip upward with a will of its own, silently sending a message.

Dag smiled a small, knowing smile and grasped her upper arm, sliding down to catch her hand, to enclose it in his and hold it tight.

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!

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.