The Bachelor’s Christmas Bride Read Online Free Page A

weren’t as bad at the time, anyway.”
    â€œI don’t know if you know or not, but that reverend is my grandfather,” Meg said.
    â€œReally? No, I didn’t know that.”
    â€œAnd sick or not, your folks must have wanted a child a lot,” Hadley concluded.
    â€œA lot,” Shannon confirmed. “But having one of their own just wasn’t possible.”
    â€œDid you have a good life with them?” Chase asked.
    Despite the two occasions when she and Chase had met in Billings and the few phone calls and emails they’d exchanged, they’d barely scratched the surface of getting to know each other. And while she was aware that Chase’s upbringing in foster care had been somewhat dour, Shannon hadn’t gotten into what her own growing-up years had been like.
    â€œI didn’t have a lot of material things,” she told him now. “But no one was more loved than I was. My parents were wonderful people who adored each other and who thought I was just a gift from heaven,” she said with a small laugh to hide the tears that the memory brought to her eyes. She also glanced downward at Tia still playing with the bracelet in her lap and smoothed the little girl’s hair.
    When the tears were under control and she glanced up again, she once more found Dag watching her, this time with a warmth that inexplicably wrapped around her and comforted her before she told herself that she had to be imagining it.
    â€œIt must have been so hard for you to lose them,” Meg said, interrupting that split-second moment.
    â€œIt was,” Shannon answered, forcing herself to look away from Dag. “But at the same time, they had both gotten so sick. That’s why my grandmother left Northbridgea few years ago—to help me take care of them when it was just more than I could do on my own—”
    â€œYou took care of them?” Dag asked in a voice that sounded almost as if it was for her ears only.
    â€œI did—happily, and they made it as easy as they could, but I still had to work, too, and do what I could to help the man I’d hired to keep the business running. Plus my parents needed someone with them during the day, as well, so Gramma came to stay. By the time my dad died last January I couldn’t wish him another day of suffering just so I could go on having him with me. And he and my mom were so close that she just couldn’t go on without him. I think her heart really did break then, so it was no shock when she died just months later. And to tell you the truth, after spending every day of their adult lives together—working together, going up to the apartment together, never being without each other—it sort of seemed as if they belonged together in whatever afterlife there might be, too.”
    â€œAnd then there was just you and your grandmother?” Dag asked, his eyes still on her in that penetrating gaze.
    â€œRight, Gramma was still with me. And she seemed healthy as ever. She helped me go through all my parents’ things—personal and financial and business. She helped me find an apartment so we could sell the business and the building it was in. She helped me move. She was just about to come back to Northbridge—which was what she really wanted to do for herself—when she had a heart attack in August. She didn’t make it through that….”
    This time Shannon shrugged her shoulders to draw attention away from the moisture gathering in her eyes. When she could, she said, “Strange as it may sound, my grandmother’s death was actually the shock.”
    â€œAnd just like that—within a matter of eight months—you lost your whole family?” Hadley marveled sadly. “Chase said you had taken some time off from teaching kindergarten then, and it’s no wonder!”
    â€œBut now she has Chase and two more brothers out there somewhere who she and Chase are going to