The Bachelor’s Christmas Bride

by Victoria Pade

  “I think I can handle whatever you dish out,” he flirted back. “What is it?”

  As Shannon unlocked the trunk of her car, she said, “When the wedding is over, could you spare some time to go Christmas shopping with me? I bought Chase and Hadley’s wedding gift at a store in Billings where they’d registered, but Christmas gifts are different. I thought I might get an idea what to buy after being with them, and then it occurred to me that since you’re here and you know everyone better than I do, you’d also know what they might like.”

  “I could probably do that,” Dag said as he put the boxes in the trunk. “We can go on Sunday—ordinarily not all the shops in town are open on Sundays, but this close to Christmas everything is.”

  “I would be eternally grateful.”

  “No problem.”

  And there would be no scheduling conflicts or meetings or public appearances or other obligations that prevented him from accommodating her request—the things that would have kept Wes from doing it at all. Shannon had become so accustomed to Wes putting her off if she did ask something of him that Dag’s ready agreement seemed unusual to her.

  But she didn’t say that. Instead she closed the trunk and headed for the driver’s side of the car. Dag managed to reach it at the same time and leaned around her to open her door.

  Again she thanked him.

  “I’ll see you back at Chase and Logan’s place,” she said then.

  “Right behind you,” he answered, closing her door with that same big hand pressed to the panel that had been wrapped around hers a few minutes earlier.

  That same big hand that her eyes stuck to when he waved it at her and even as it dropped to his jean pocket to dig out his keys.

  It had felt so good….

  Shannon yanked her thoughts back in line and started her engine, putting her car into gear and heading for the road that led away from the house just ahead of Dag.

  Dag, who did stay right behind her all the way home, making it difficult for her to keep from watching him in her rearview mirror.

  Dag, who she was thinking about seeing again tonight during the rehearsal dinner.

  Dag, who she knew she shouldn’t let cloud her thinking at all.

  And yet somehow he seemed to be anyway.

  Chapter Four

  After the wedding rehearsal Friday evening, the dinner was in the poolroom section of a local restaurant and pub called Adz. The pool table had been removed and replaced by dining tables to accommodate what was a large wedding party. The lighting was dim and provided mainly by the candles on each table and there was a roaring fire in a corner fireplace made of rustic stone. The entire place reminded Shannon of an English pub she’d visited on a recent trip to London.

  Shannon knew very few people there, and those she did know—Chase and Hadley, Logan and Meg—were busy mingling. Dag was the only other person she knew and he ended up being a godsend because while he was not her formal date to the event, he stayed by her side as if he were, as if he recognized that she was an outsider and had taken it upon himself to make sure she didn’t feel that way.

  Not that Shannon hadn’t become accustomed to being in rooms full of strangers during the past three years. Dating a politician made that a common occurrence and she’d frequently been either expected to stand beside Wes, smile and say nothing, or had been left alone among strangers while Wes glad-handed and networked and basically scoured the crowd for votes or endorsements or funds. But still she appreciated that Dag kept her company. It was a nice change.

  And it came in particularly handy when Dag’s other brother and sisters headed their way.

  “Oh, I’m not going to remember which of your sisters is which,” she said quietly to Dag as they approached the spot in front of the fire where Dag and Shannon stood.

  “We just wanted to tell you how happy we are that Chase found family,” Tucker said as he and his sisters joined them.

  Tucker was easy—he was the only other McKendrick male. But even though Shannon had been introduced to the sisters earlier, she’d been introduced to so many people tonight that she couldn’t remember which was which.

  “I’m happy about it, too,” Shannon answered the third McKendrick brother.

  “I was just telling Shannon about our names,” Dag lied then. “About how with me and the girls, Mom filled in the birth certificates and chose the names when Dad wasn’t at the hospital so he wouldn’t have a say. How Dad knew the game by the time Tucker was born and made sure he got to pick Tucker’s name. But the rest of us—” Dag pointed to each sister as he explained “—Isadora, Theodora and Zeli—those were all Mom.”

  Shannon was so grateful to him for making that easy for her that she could have hugged him. Instead she just cast him a smile and went along with the ruse that they’d been discussing the names before. “I like unique names, and they give you all something to talk about right off the bat.”

  “That’s true,” Zeli agreed with a wry laugh that insinuated that she never got away without talking about her name the minute it was mentioned.

  “We all saw you on the news, Shannon,” Issa said then. “You looked so shocked—you must not have had any idea that you were going to be proposed to.”

  “It was a surprise,” Shannon agreed, hating that Wes hadn’t yet taken her off this hot seat.

  “What about a ring, though? You don’t have one,” Tessa contributed.

  “I noticed that, too,” Dag commented.

  “I’m not a big jewelry person,” Shannon said as if the lack of an engagement ring were nothing. Then, desperate not to talk about this, she said, “Speaking of jewelry, Tucker, you did get your cuff links for tomorrow, right? I don’t know how they got mixed in with my wedding things, but Chase said he’d get them to you.”

  “Got ’em,” he confirmed. Then, to Dag, he said, “So there was a last-minute change and now I’m walking Tessa down the aisle tomorrow and you’re walking Shannon?”

  It was news to Shannon that Tucker had ever been set to walk with her and she glanced at Dag to find an expression on his face that said he wasn’t pleased that his brother had mentioned this.

  “Yeah, I guess it was something to do with height or something,” Dag obviously hedged.

  “I’m half an inch shorter than you are—how much difference can that make?”

  Dag shrugged. “There must be a reason. Maybe for pictures or something. What do I know?”

  Shannon couldn’t help wondering if Dag had done some backstage rearranging in order to walk with her.

  Then with an enormous grin and in a tone that goaded his brother, Tucker said, “Is this another Dag-gets-a-dress-for-Christmas?”

  “Oh, cheap shot!” Dag muttered with a laugh.

  But that was as far as the confusing exchange went because just then three waitresses bearing dessert trays came into the room and all eyes turned toward them.

  “Chocolate Crème Brûlée,” Dag announced rather than saying any more to his brother. “Hadley says we’re all gonna love this. And you know Hadley knows chocolate.”

  “She really does,” Issa assured Shannon just before Tucker and the sisters moved back to the table they’d all been sharing so they could be served the dessert.

  “Looks like that tiny corner booth is empty—what do you say?” Dag suggested then.

  They’d had dinner at Hadley and Chase’s table, after which everyone had begun to mingle and table-hop. Now some—like Tucker, Issa, Zeli and Tessa—were returning to their original spots, some remained standing and some were taking new seats.

  Shannon had no problem with the idea of taking a new seat. In the corner. With Dag.

  Not because she wanted to be alone with him, she told herself. But merely because talking to Dag always seemed to come easily, and after a long evening of trying to remember names and relationships and make conversation with a whole lot of people she didn’t know, she was more than ready to sit back and relax a little.

  “The tiny corner boot
h it is,” she agreed, moving the few steps required to get there and sliding in from one side just as Dag was waylaid before he could slide in from the other.

  Shannon had been introduced to the man who had stopped to talk to Dag and thought she remembered him to be Noah Perry, Meg’s brother. He was intent on talking hockey with Dag—a subject that had cropped up several times tonight. Shannon didn’t know much about Dag beyond the fact that he was Logan’s half brother, but she had gathered here and there that for some reason he had a serious interest in the sport.

  But rather than eavesdropping on the conversation the two men were having tableside, Shannon instead fell into studying Dag.

  Dress had been decreed casual for the rehearsal and the dinner, so she was wearing charcoal gray pinstripe wool slacks and a white fitted shirt she’d left untucked.

  But Dag had gone more casual still. He—and several other men—had on jeans. Dressier jeans than Shannon had seen him in before, jeans that fitted him to a tee, but jeans nonetheless.

  And with the jeans he wore a bright pink shirt that he’d taken some ribbing for from Logan and Chase before they’d all left home. But if any man was masculine enough to wear a pink shirt, it was Dag. In fact, somehow the pink shirt topped off by a dark sport coat seemed to lend even more depth to his nearly black eyes, and both shirt and jacket were so expertly tailored that they accentuated the pure massiveness of his shoulders, leaving nothing at all feminine about the way he looked.

  Noah Perry didn’t keep Dag long and about the time one of the waitresses came to the corner table with the crème brûlées, Dag slid into the booth the way he’d initially intended.

  “We need three, Peggy,” he told the waitress.

  If the teenager wondered why, she didn’t ask, she merely left them three of the confections with three spoons and fresh napkins to go with them.

  “Hadley isn’t the only McKendrick who likes chocolate?” Shannon guessed.

  “Maybe I got the extra for you.”

  “Or maybe you got the extra for you,” Shannon countered with a laugh.

  “I’ll share,” he tempted.

  “I think I’ll be fine with one.”

  Shannon had cause to rethink that after her first bite of the rich, creamy delicacy lying beneath a crusty shell of caramelized sugar. But she kept her second thoughts to herself even as they agreed that Hadley had made an excellent choice of desserts.

  Then Shannon opted for giving Dag a tad more grief and said, “So, between the Dag-gets-a-dress-for-Christmas and the pink shirt, I’m beginning to wonder if there’s something I should know about you….”

  That made him laugh boisterously. “The shirt is salmon-colored—that’s what the sales guy said. Salmon, not pink.”

  Shannon leaned slightly in his direction. “The sales guy lied, it’s all pink.”

  Dag just laughed again. “Hey, I like this shirt.”

  Shannon did, too, but she didn’t tell him that. Or that Wes could never have worn it or been able to look the way Dag did in it.

  “And the Dag-gets-a-dress-for-Christmas?” she prompted only because she was curious about his brother’s earlier comment. And because she was enjoying giving Dag a hard time. “That was me being a brat as a kid,” he answered, referring to her remark that afternoon about herself. “The Christmas I was eight I asked for a fancy dump truck. It had all the bells and whistles—lights that lit up, a switch that made the bed of the truck rise on its own, it even beeped when it backed up. It was great!”

  “Uh-huh,” Shannon said indulgently.

  “I’d been asking for that truck since Thanksgiving and two days before Christmas, Tucker started saying he wanted it, too.”

  “And you were afraid he would get it and you wouldn’t?”

  Dag pointed a long, thick index finger at her. “Exactly! My mother was always making me hand something over to Tucker when he asked for it because he was The Baby. I figured the truck could be another one of those things, only she’d just give it to him herself.”

  “You didn’t believe in Santa Claus and that Santa would come up with two of them?”

  “I was on the fence about Santa by then—you know, hoping he was real, but skeptical. And with the dump truck, I didn’t think I could take any chances. It was just that cool,” he continued to gush, making Shannon smile as she finished her crème brûlée.

  “So what did you do?” she asked, inviting a confession.

  Dag had finished his first brûlée, too, and he replaced it with the second, pointing to it with his spoon before he answered her or dug in. “Want to share?”

  It was tempting. But Shannon shook her head. “It’s so rich—I don’t know how you can eat two of them.”

  “Nothin’ to it,” he assured.

  Then, after cracking the sugar shell to begin his second helping, he went on with his story. “Here’s how Christmas was done—presents from Santa weren’t wrapped, they were set up and waiting for us. Presents from our parents and other relatives were wrapped. But the presents from our parents never had tags on them. So when we came out in the morning there was a pile for each of us, some with tags from the relatives letting us know which pile was ours.”

  “And in each pile there were some untagged gifts—I think I’m getting the picture,” Shannon said.

  “So I snuck out of bed before dawn Christmas morning that year, before any of the other kids, hoping the truck would be set out like a Santa present. But no luck— Tucker and I both had some building blocks and a couple of puzzles—I think—from Santa. Then I checked out all the wrapped packages for Tucker and for me but I couldn’t tell what was what—”

  “No two were the same?”

  “Hey, I was eight, there was no logic to this. Anyway, I found a package in Tucker’s pile that I was convinced was the truck. So I took it. Then, in my pea-sized eight-year-old brain, I got the brilliant idea that if I mixed up a few more packages, no one would know I was the one who did it. So I did some of that, never paying any attention to what I was putting where or if I was only switching girls to girls, boys to boys—”

  “Oh what a tangled web we weave…” Shannon said with yet another laugh.

  “Right.”

  “And somewhere along the way you ended up with a dress,” Shannon concluded, laughing yet again.

  Dag made a face. “I think it was called a jumper—it was kind of like a plaid apron with a frilly blouse that went underneath it. Logan encouraged the folks to make me wear it but luckily my dad didn’t think that was such a good idea.”

  Once more Shannon laughed. “Did you get the truck?” she asked sympathetically.

  “Tucker and I both got them—in packages I hadn’t switched at all. But that was what he was talking about—it’s been known ever since as the Dag-gets-a-dress-for-Christmas Christmas.”

  Funny how Tucker was drawing a comparison between Dag making this secret switch and the change in who was walking her down the aisle tomorrow. So Dag must have done some manipulating to make sure he was her groomsman….

  Shannon had no desire to tease him about that. Maybe because she was just pleased that he had done it. Although there certainly wouldn’t have been anything wrong with walking with Tucker, she told herself. She was just more familiar now with Dag.

  At the head of the room, Logan stood up then to draw everyone’s attention. He made a toast to the last night of single life for both Chase and Hadley, joking at their expense before he wished them well and suggested that everyone get home to bed so they could all be well-rested for the wedding the next day.

  His advice was unanimously taken and the party broke up.

  Shannon had ridden to the church with Chase and Hadley, while Dag had driven his own truck. But because Chase and Hadley were the center of things, when Shannon was ready to go, Chase and Hadley were still saying good-night to people.

  “Why don’t you just ride with me?” Dag asked with a nod toward the exit after they’d both put on their coats.

&nbs
p; It was late, Shannon was tired and wanted to get things organized for the next day, so she accepted the invitation, ignoring the fact that she just plain liked the idea.

  There were still a number of good-nights that had to be said on the way out but they eventually made it to Dag’s truck. It was already running and warm when he opened the passenger door to let her in.

  “You never left—when did you start this to warm it up?” Shannon marveled.

  Dag held up his key ring. “Remote,” he said simply. “I did it before we ever stepped foot outside.”

  “Fancy,” Shannon said as she got in, luxuriating in the warmth.

  When Dag rounded the rear of the truck and slipped in behind the wheel, she said, “You don’t worry about somebody stealing your car when they walk by and see it running with no one in it?”

  “First of all, the doors have to be locked for the remote to work, and I have to have another key to open them. But even if that wasn’t true, we’re in Northbridge—everybody knows everybody, everybody knows everybody’s car or truck—no one could drive off in something they didn’t own and get away with it.”

  “There is a lot of everybody-knows-everybody, isn’t there?” Shannon said as Dag headed for home. “I couldn’t keep all the Perrys and Pratts and Walkers and Grants and Graysons straight.”

  “The Graysons are actually new to Northbridge, but since they married the Perrys and a Pratt, I can see where it would still get confusing. It’s good, though, like being one big—for the most part happy—family.”

  “And you know them all?”

  “Eventually you get to know them all, even the ones who move in. It’s just that kind of community.”

  “Did you like growing up here?” she asked because she could tell that he honestly was happy in his old hometown.

  “I know—you grew up in Billings and still felt like your life was small, so you figure growing up in a small town must have been ree-eally claustrophobic. But it wasn’t. I loved it. I mean, my mom was kind of a pain, but other than that? I had more freedom than you probably did growing up in the city. I pretty much came and went as I pleased as long as I checked in every couple of hours.”