The Bachelor’s Christmas Bride Read Online Free

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.
    â€œCan I see the brace-a-let?” Tia requested.
    â€œYou 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.
    â€œI 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.
    â€œSo, Shannon, you’re pretty much a stranger to Northbridge even though your grandmother lived here?” Logan asked then.
    â€œI 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.”
    â€œWhat was their business?” Hadley asked.
    â€œThey 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 themselvessix 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.”
    â€œDid they have serious health problems long before they died?” Chase asked.
    â€œMy 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.”
    â€œI’m a little surprised that people in that kind of physical shape were allowed to adopt a child,” Meg observed.
    â€œThe situation at the time helped that,” Shannon said. “What I was told was that my birth parents were killed in a car accident—”
    â€œTrue,” Chase confirmed.
    â€œThere 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 reverend helped persuade the authorities to let them have me despite their health issues—which