The Bachelor’s Christmas Bride

by Victoria Pade

  Dag just didn’t seem to be able to stop himself.

  Yes, she was beautiful and maybe if that was all there was to it, it would be easier to maintain some control. But he also liked her. A lot. She was nice, she was kind, she was calm, she was good with the kids, she was funny and easy to talk to. She wasn’t judgmental, she was sexier than she seemed to know, and more down-to-earth than she might want to be. And every minute he was with her was so good he didn’t want it to end.

  But it was going to end! One way or another, when Christmas was over, Shannon Duffy was gone.

  And if he was in too deep with her, it was going to be his own tough luck, he told himself when he’d finished the path from the front porch out to the drive that ran along the house.

  But as he turned the corner to shovel from the side of the house to the garage—where Logan was starting an old tractor he and Chase had bought with a blade attached to the front of it to deal with the driveway snow removal—Dag’s perspective suddenly took a turn, too.

  Wasn’t he getting ahead of himself when it came to Shannon? Wasn’t he thinking about things on too large a scale?

  There wasn’t actually much time at stake. Christmas was in a few days. How deep could he get in just a few days? Especially knowing that that was all the time he was going to have with her? Why was he thinking about her in an all-or-nothing way?

  Traveling for hockey—to training camp, to tournaments, on publicity tours—there had been plenty of times when he’d known he was only going to be in a city for a short time. But if he’d met someone he was interested in, attracted to, that hadn’t kept him from asking them out.

  Brief was better than nothing, and that hadn’t meant a string of one-night stands. Sure there had been those, too. But sometimes nothing had come of things but a dinner or two, some clubbing, maybe an afternoon at a museum or a zoo. Just some relaxation, some fun, some entertainment, some company. Why was he thinking this thing with Shannon was any different?

  Sure, after the fiasco with Sandra, after the end of hockey, after settling in Northbridge again, he’d been doing more thinking about settling down with one particular woman. But who said Shannon was that one particular woman? Or that he couldn’t have this time with her the way he’d had short-lived times with other women—knowing it would come to an end—before he moved on to looking for that one particular woman?

  It was no big deal. He would just do what he’d done on those other occasions—go with the flow. He’d done it in the past, why couldn’t he do that now? Shannon wasn’t engaged so it wouldn’t be cheating on her part, or anything sleazy on his. True, he had vowed to steer clear of any situation that even resembled his last one. But the last relationship had gotten serious. And this one wouldn’t. So that made it different.

  And it was Shannon who was moving on after Christmas, Shannon who would be leaving him behind. If she was willing to see him before that, to let him kiss her, why was he sweating it?

  Just don’t take it for anything more than it is, he advised himself.

  And he thought he could do that. That he could be okay with a casual holiday hook up—if it went that far. He could be okay with going with the flow as long as he kept in mind that things with Shannon would end.

  And he would definitely keep that in mind, he decided. But in the meantime he could have a few days, he could have Christmas, with Shannon.

  Then she’d go her way, he’d go his.

  And as for kissing her?

  He knew he was likely to do that again because he couldn’t even stop thinking about it.

  As long as he didn’t lose sight of the fact that there was an end to whatever it was that was between them, it would keep him from getting too attached and he could just enjoy the ride and be happy for whatever time he got with her and however far it went.

  But the end would come, he reminded himself.

  Time with Shannon was like Christmas cookies—they were around now, he enjoyed them, indulged in them, but when Christmas was over, that was it for the treats.

  And after Christmas was over this year, that would be it for his time with Shannon, too.

  But at least he’d have had this time with her, and in the same way he wouldn’t deny himself the cookies just because they weren’t around forever, he couldn’t deny himself these few days with her, either…

  It was midafternoon before the snow-shoveling was complete, before Dag and Chase decided they could probably make it into Northbridge to visit Liz Rudolph.

  Shannon was curious about what had happened to her other brothers and eager to get any information. But Monday’s snow day had been so nice she wouldn’t have minded putting off the visit until Wednesday and having a second snow day today.

  Or was it just a second day secluded with Dag that she wouldn’t have minded having? she wondered as she sat close beside him on the bench seat of his truck with Chase on the passenger’s side.

  She decided that it might be wiser not to delve too deeply into that possibility, but she certainly didn’t have any complaints about the tight quarters that had her sitting right up next to Dag as he drove.

  Unfortunately when he was forced to plow the truck through a mound of snow to get onto Liz Rudolph’s driveway, sitting so snugly next to him caused Shannon’s shoulder to jab into Dag’s rib cage.

  “Sorry,” she said.

  Dag grinned down at her. “For what, that tiny bodycheck? I’ve taken a little worse,” he joked as he turned off the engine.

  A well-dressed elderly woman was standing in the open doorway by the time the threesome maneuvered the narrow path of cleared cement to get up to the house. Petite, she stood straight and unbowed by time. Her silver hair was in a perfect bob around her lined face and she looked very much just like an older version of the woman in the picture—unlike Shannon’s grandmother who had gathered many pounds over the years and had not aged quite so gracefully.

  Liz Rudolph greeted Dag warmly as she ushered them inside and closed the door behind them.

  “I don’t know if you remember Chase—” Dag said as they all accepted her invitation to take off their coats.

  “I do. While I still lived here I was curious to watch you grow, knowing you were the twins’ brother,” she said as she draped each coat over a branch of a hall tree. “I was always praying that a nice family would take you but… Well, Alma Pritick was good to you as a foster mother, wasn’t she?”

  “She was,” Chase assured.

  Shannon noted that there was no mention of Chase’s foster father, Homer, who Shannon knew hadn’t abused Chase but had also not been a loving caregiver by any stretch of the imagination.

  Then Liz Rudolph turned her attention to Shannon. “And you’re Shannon,” she said affectionately. “I was so, so sorry to hear about your mother and father. And then Carol…she and I were close all the years we both lived in Northbridge, and kept up with each other through Christmas cards when I moved away. I wanted to go to her funeral but I’d just had a pacemaker put in when I heard and I couldn’t travel. I can’t tell you how surprised and sorry I was…”

  “It was very sudden and unexpected—it took me by surprise, too,” Shannon said.

  The older woman offered tea but when they all declined, she led them into her spotless living room where Shannon, Dag and Chase sat on the sofa facing the overstuffed chair Liz took. That was when Chase got to the point, showing her the photograph Shannon had found.

  “We wondered if the babies in the picture are our brothers,” he said.

  “They are,” the elderly woman answered without hesitation.

  She repeated what they already knew about how they’d come to be in need of new homes.

  “My sister’s son and his wife wanted children and couldn’t have them,” she went on from there. “As tragic as the whole situation was—a young couple losing their lives, children orphaned—to Lila and Tony it was…well, it was a blessing. They were willing to take the twins so the twins wouldn’t be separated from each
other at least, and that went a long way in persuading Human Services to allow them to adopt the boys. And of course, Shannon, your mom and dad took you.”

  “Do you know why they—or Gramma—never told me there were other kids?” Shannon asked a question that had been on her mind since Chase had first contacted her.

  “Oh, everyone just wanted to make their own little family. They didn’t want it all spread out. Your grandmother and I were so close and we imagined that everyone might become one big happy family, but we were naive. Your parents wanted you to just be their little girl, without outside ties to anyone else. And Lila and Tony felt that way, too. Maybe it was sort of selfish, but in a way I understood—sometimes I think there’s some insecurity connected to adoptions. Getting the twins away from here was actually part of why Lila and Tony left town when the babies were just six months old—they wanted to be somewhere where no one knew the twins as anything but their sons.”

  The older woman cast a guilty-looking glance at Chase and said, “Plus everyone felt bad about you, Chase. No one thought they could take on more, but being in the same small town with you, knowing you were at the boys’ home all alone…”

  Shannon saw Chase nod his understanding. But that seemed to be as much as Liz Rudolph wanted to say about the touchy subject because then she went right back to speaking mainly to Shannon as if they had more of a connection than she had with Chase.

  “And then Lila and Tony’s little family didn’t even stay together,” Liz informed her.

  “They didn’t?” Shannon asked.

  The silver head shook. Liz pursed her lips disapprovingly for a moment before she said, “A year after Lila and Tony left, they divorced. Lila got custody of the twins and when my sister died, I lost contact with my nephew—”

  “So, are you saying that you don’t know what happened to the twins?” Shannon asked.

  “I do know that by then my nephew Tony had been persuaded to give up his rights to the boys—they were barely two years old. But Lila had found a new husband and her new husband wanted to officially be their father since he’d be raising them. Tony was a housepainter and what he could provide for them just couldn’t compare, so for their sake, he relinquished his paternity.”

  “What do you mean that what he could provide couldn’t compare?” Chase asked.

  “Lila married Morgan Kincaid,” Liz Rudolph said with some awe in her voice.

  “Morgan Kincaid the football player?” Shannon said to verify because while she didn’t follow sports of any kind, Morgan Kincaid—and what he’d parlayed his football fame and fortune into—was well known in Montana.

  “Morgan Kincaid,” the elderly woman confirmed, “the football player, the owner of The Kincaid Corporation and all those restaurants and buildings and hotels and car dealerships and who knows what else,” the elderly woman confirmed. “Those boys—Ian and Hutch they were called—ended up Kincaids.”

  Chapter Nine

  “Why don’t you guys go and I’ll stay with the kids?” Shannon offered as dinner ended on Tuesday evening.

  The plans for the night had been for them to drive into Northbridge for the Christmas Bazaar being held at the town square. But when Dag, Shannon and Chase had returned home from visiting Liz Rudolph that afternoon, both Tia and Cody seemed to be a little under the weather. After discussing that fact over another communal meal, the two couples decided that the kids shouldn’t be taken out into the cold. That prompted Shannon to volunteer babysitting services so everyone else could go anyway.

  “To tell you the truth, I think we all actually want to stay in tonight, don’t we?” Meg insisted, looking around the rest of the group for support.

  Hadley and Chase assured Shannon that they would rather watch TV tonight. Logan said he’d had enough of the snow for today and wanted nothing but to sit in front of a fire.

  “I don’t know,” Dag piped up then. “It still sounds good to me. If it still sounds good to you, Shannon, why don’t you and I go?”

  And much to Shannon’s dismay, that had more appeal than any of the other options.

  So when the rest of the group chimed in with their encouragements, Shannon took up Dag on his counter-offer and the next thing she knew, she was in his truck again, headed for Northbridge and looking forward to seeing what else the small town did for the holiday.

  And to once more spending the evening with Dag…

  “So…proposed to by a Rumson, now related to Kincaids—maybe you not only want a bigger life, maybe you’re destined to have one,” Dag said as they turned from the driveway onto the road leading to Northbridge for the second time today. “How does it feel to be related to the Kincaid dynasty?”

  Shannon laughed. “It feels exactly the same as it felt not being related to anyone in the Kincaid dynasty.”

  “What did you and Chase decide about contacting the twins after I dropped you off this afternoon?”

  “We’re trying to locate them,” Shannon said. “We looked them up on the internet—there’s a lot about Morgan Kincaid and The Kincaid Corporation, but less on Ian Kincaid or Hutch Kincaid. It looks like Ian works with something called an expansion football team…”

  “Morgan Kincaid is bringing a pro-football team to Montana—it’s been in all the papers and on the news. You must have heard about that…”

  “I told you, I honestly don’t pay any attention to sports,” Shannon said. “It could have been on the front page of the newspaper—”

  “It has been—more than once.”

  “Even then, if it had to do with sports, I would have just turned to page two.”

  Dag laughed in disbelief and glanced at her. “I mean, it may not be hockey…” he said facetiously, “but football is pretty big, too. There’s that whole Super Bowl thing and all.”

  “Still, I know nothing about sports and don’t keep up with anything about them,” Shannon said.

  “Well, it’s a big deal to get a new NFL franchise—a huge deal,” he said, dumbfounded by how lightly she was taking that fact.

  But all Shannon could do was shrug and say, “Okay.”

  Dag laughed again and shook his head in dismay. Then he went on with what Shannon actually did have an interest in. “But Ian Kincaid’s name shows up in connection with the football team?”

  “Right, he’s listed on the website as the Chief Operating Officer so I guess that means he’s on the business end of things. But we couldn’t find anything recent on Hutch Kincaid at all. Apparently he played a lot of football himself a while ago, and was a star quarterback, but there’s nothing current about him and he doesn’t show up working for The Kincaid Corporation anywhere, so we’re thinking the only way to reach him will be through Ian.”

  “But it sounds like you might be able to reach Ian.”

  “I hope so,” Shannon said. “But sometimes the more public people are, the harder it is to get through to them.”

  “Like Wes Rumson, who can’t even be reached by people he should be close to.”

  “Let alone by strangers with a story about long-lost siblings that the twins were probably never told they had,” Shannon said. “There wasn’t a way to email Ian Kincaid through the new football team, so we sent one through The Kincaid Corporation—we used a Contact Us tab on that website. We’ll just have to see if the email gets to him.”

  “And if he answers it even if it does.”

  “True. I can tell you from my own experience with Chase that this whole thing comes as a shock and it’s hard to believe. And I’m nobody—”

  “Hey!”

  “You know what I mean. I’m a kindergarten teacher, nothing high profile—”

  “You were connected to a Rumson,” he reminded.

  “But until the public proposal, no one knew my name—in the few pictures of Wes and me at some charity function or another, if I wasn’t cut out of the shot when it was printed, I was never included in the caption. It wasn’t me who anyone cared to know. But for high-profile people, someone comi
ng out of the woodwork with a weird claim—”

  “Yeah, even if you’re not high-profile but just in the public eye, sometimes people do come out of the woodwork with some crazy claim to get to you,” Dag said as if he’d had experience with that. “And you’re right, if it was me, I would probably think it was a prank or scam or something.”

  “And from what Liz said, I doubt if the twins were ever told anything about us. So I wouldn’t be surprised if it takes more than an email to get through to them.”

  “Still, it’s a start,” Dag said optimistically.

  They’d made it safely into town by then, and as he pulled into a parking spot near the ice skating rink, there didn’t seem to be more to say on the situation. Plus there was so much going on in the town square that that was where their attention naturally turned.

  “After that blizzard yesterday, I can’t believe this is all still going on and so many people showed up,” Shannon observed.

  “One of the advantages of a small town—there aren’t a lot of streets to clean so the plow can take care of most of them in a day, and no one has to go too far to get around.”

  Before they left the heat of the truck’s interior, Shannon buttoned the top of her wool coat, tied her knitted scarf around her neck and put on her earmuffs and then her gloves.

  Dag fastened a few of his suede coat’s buttons and added fleece-lined gloves, but that was as far as he went in bundling up.

  Then they got out of the truck.

  “According to the schedule in the newspaper this morning,” Dag said, “we have a little while before the ice-sculpting competition—I understand there will be chain saws for that so we don’t want to miss it—”

  Shannon laughed at his enthusiasm for the chain saws. “No, we definitely wouldn’t want to miss that!” she agreed, as if it were of the utmost importance.

  Dag took the teasing in stride and merely grinned at her. “So we can either wander through the booths before that and then take the sleigh ride, or we can take the sleigh ride before the contest and walk through the booths after—your choice.”