The Bachelor’s Christmas Bride

by Victoria Pade

  Until he knew what was going on with Shannon, where he stood, everything else was inconsequential. He had to know….

  And he had to know now!

  He got up from the table and crossed the room to her, grateful that when he reached her the conversation she was having with the elderly couple was ending with them wishing her a merry Christmas and moving on.

  Grateful, too, that when she saw him, when her luminous blue-green eyes met his, her expression seemed to light up.

  “Any chance we might slip out of here?” he asked without segue.

  Shannon seemed more intrigued than surprised by that idea—which he was glad to see. “Think anyone will notice?” she asked.

  “I don’t care if they do,” he confessed, hearing the note of urgency in his own voice but not caring about that, either.

  “Okay,” Shannon said with a smile he’d seen several times the night before, a smile that let him know she thought it was something other than talk that he had in mind for them.

  But if all went well, talking could only be the beginning, so he didn’t elaborate. Instead he nodded in the direction of the doors and that was where they went.

  No one noticed them as Dag helped Shannon on with her coat, threw his on, too, and then ushered her out into the cold where a light, fluffy snow had started to fall.

  He was parked in a nearby spot in the church lot and they hurried to it.

  “This was a long day,” Shannon said as he held the passenger door open for her and helped her into the truck.

  “Way, way too long,” he agreed emphatically, not sure she meant what he did—that the day had dragged by because he hadn’t been with her…

  Once Shannon was settled, he shut the door and rushed around the front end of the truck, nearly bounding behind the wheel and starting the engine. Then he put it into gear and headed out, deciding as he did that he wasn’t going to beat around the bush.

  So, with a glance in her direction, he said, “I missed you so much today that I screwed up everything I tried to do. I nearly ran into the back of Chase’s car tonight following you here because I was looking at you instead of the taillights. I haven’t been able to take my eyes off you all night and while I was doing that I figured something out. I figured out what I want for Christmas.”

  “I hope it’s what I got you, because I don’t think there’s any twenty-four-hour shopping in Northbridge,” Shannon joked.

  But Dag merely looked over at her and said, “I want you, Shannon.”

  Her eyebrows formed two perfect arches over her eyes and he could see that she didn’t know what to say. But that was okay. He’d known this would shock her. It shocked him. But that didn’t deter him. In fact he liked that he knew her well enough already to have predicted this response and it just made him smile.

  “How long did your parents know each other before they realized what they had together?” he asked.

  “My father said it was love-at-first-sight for him. My mother said it took her ten or fifteen minutes. But I think that was a joke…”

  “Maybe it wasn’t…”

  Dag had to look back at the road, but he went on talking. “Here’s how it is for me—I love Northbridge, I really do. I love Northbridge as much as I loved hockey. Knowing the end of my career would put me back here was the only thing that got me through. But now there’s you and I have to tell you that when I think about being anywhere in the world—including Northbridge—without you, it isn’t where I want to be.”

  Another glance at her showed him the perplexed expression on her face, but still he was undaunted.

  “What we’ve had since we met hasn’t been like anything I’ve ever had with anyone else—there’s never been this kind of instant connection, as if I’ve stumbled into the one person I was honestly intended to be with. You know what you said about the guys in your life? About how part of what told you they were wrong for you was that you didn’t care when you didn’t see them?”

  “I remember…”

  “Well, I never realized it before, but the same has been true for me with every other woman in my life. Until you.”

  He had to brake for a stop sign and, despite the fact that there wasn’t any traffic to keep him there, he stayed so he could look at her again to say, “I wasn’t kidding when I said I hate not seeing you for even an hour—I hate it. There’s never been this… I’m not even sure how to put it… This feeling like nothing really matters unless I’m doing it with you. Or for you. And then there was last night…last night was off the Richter scale.”

  He watched her smile just barely, as if the memory of their night together was so remarkable for her, too, that she couldn’t help it. And that gave him the courage to say, “I think it’s been the same for you…”

  He finally drove on, giving her a moment to tell him that he was wrong, that she didn’t have feelings that were anything like what he was describing.

  But instead, in a quiet voice, she said, “It has been different for me than anything has ever been with anyone else. But—”

  “I know,” he said to stop her, guessing what she was going to say. “You want a bigger life than Northbridge has to offer. And you should have it. So I’ve been thinking, and if you want to be the first woman on Mars, I’m willing to be the first man—if that’s what it takes to be with you. If you decide to invest in your friend’s school and live and work in Beverly Hills, I’ll see if I can coach hockey somewhere there—”

  “You just bought my grandmother’s house!”

  “And I’ll turn around and sell it. The point is, Shannon, what I realized tonight is that the only thing that matters to me—that truly matters—is that I want you. I want to be with you. I want to live whatever kind of life makes you happy, because the only thing that’s going to make me honestly, genuinely happy, too, is you. Anywhere. Living with wild monkeys, if that’s what you want. As long as I’m with you…”

  The words were hanging in the air as Dag turned onto the road that led to Logan and Meg’s place. But that was when both Dag and Shannon spotted a black limousine up ahead, already parked beside the big farmhouse. A black limousine that certainly didn’t belong there. And abruptly put everything else on hold.

  Dag hit the brakes purely out of reflex, knowing instantly that there was only one person who was likely to have come to Northbridge in a limousine on Christmas Eve.

  “That can’t be…” he muttered darkly to himself.

  “Wes,” Shannon said, giving voice to Dag’s worst thoughts.

  Wes Rumson.

  In what Dag had no doubt was a grand gesture.

  And even if this one didn’t come with a crowbar, Dag thought it couldn’t have hit him any harder.

  The other guy from Shannon’s so-recent past.

  The guy Shannon had said she was finished with.

  And Dag couldn’t help wondering if it was possible that he’d made the same mistake twice—that Shannon wasn’t as finished with Rumson as she’d said. That a grand gesture from the rich politician might sway her still…

  “Can I turn us around and go the other way?” Dag joked feebly.

  “If it’s Wes, I’ll have to see him.”

  “If? Who else is it gonna be?”

  And what else is the politician going to do but pull out all the stops to get you to say you’ll marry him…

  Dag really was tempted to jam his truck into Reverse and back the hell out of that drive. Sweep Shannon away. Make that grand gesture.

  But he resisted the urge, knowing if she was determined to hear out the other guy, there was no stopping it.

  He took his foot off the brake and went the rest of the way up the drive, reaching the limo right about the time Wes Rumson got out the back of it—tall and straight, dressed in a suit and tie underneath a custom-tailored overcoat, looking as if he were ready to take the governor’s chair right then.

  Dag pulled to a second stop beside him and Shannon rolled down her window.

  “What are you
doing here, Wes?” she asked, not sounding thrilled to see him, but also not perturbed or angry—the way Dag would have preferred. And probably not knowing that that alone was like a sucker punch.

  “I came to talk to you,” the politician said as if he’d just driven around the block rather than from his family’s estate in Billings.

  Shannon didn’t jump at that and Dag took some comfort in what he interpreted as hesitancy. But then she said, “I’m staying in the apartment around back. You can follow us.”

  “Right behind you,” Wes Rumson said as if it had been an engraved invitation he was expecting and entitled to. Then he ducked into the limo’s rear seat and Shannon rolled up the window again.

  And Dag just sat there, fighting so many inclinations that he knew he couldn’t act on.

  But Shannon was looking at him again, her brow furrowed once more, and rather than reassuring him, she said a simple, “I’m sorry.”

  That Rumson is here? That you’re dropping me flat to talk to him? Or that you can’t say yes to me, either…

  Dag didn’t know. And there was no time to ask. And even if there was, was this really the best moment to force her into a corner?

  Dag knew it wasn’t, so he merely raised his chin in answer to her apology—whatever it was for—and drove around to the garage, followed by that damn black limousine.

  Without another word, Shannon got out of the truck at the foot of the apartment steps, and Dag watched her lead the politician up those same stairs he’d been climbing with her every other night. The politician—the man—who wanted her, too. Who could offer her more than he could. Who she must have had feelings for in one way or another. Who she might still have feelings enough for to take what he was offering after all…

  And that was when Dag felt something that hit him harder than any beating he’d ever taken. On the ice or off.

  Dazed and confused—that was how Shannon felt as she turned on the apartment’s lights and took off her coat. First there had been all that Dag had stunned her by saying. Now Wes. She was having trouble gathering her wits.

  But Wes was standing just inside the door, taking off his own coat as if she’d asked him to, and she had to deal with him. So she pushed aside what Dag had said and turned to face her former non-fiancé.

  “It’s Christmas Eve and you drove all the way to Northbridge?” she said when Wes hadn’t taken the lead.

  “I wanted to see you. To talk to you.”

  “And you had Herbert drive you? Didn’t he want to be with his family—his kids—tonight?”

  “I’m paying him well. If I’d driven myself I would have wasted the time. Instead I was able to work on my next speech while he drove—that is his job.”

  Shannon was thinking about the three kids the driver had shown her pictures of and of them not having their father with them tonight of all nights because Wes’s work came first. For Wes at least.

  Not to mention that even as he’d been coming to see her, she hadn’t been what he was actually focusing on.

  “I’m still not sure why you’re here, Wes,” Shannon said.

  The tall, impressive politician stepped nearer and took a velvet ring box from his pocket. “I thought maybe a private Christmas Eve proposal might be welcomed with a little more favor,” he said, opening the box to reveal the biggest diamond Shannon had ever seen.

  But even dazzled by the diamond, Shannon thought that this was nothing but another tack he was taking. A retry that had the earmarks of a new strategy he and his cousin had devised.

  Or maybe coming after what Dag had just said to her—full of so much emotion, so much passion—this just sounded rehearsed and superficial. Either way, it wouldn’t have swayed her even before all that Dag had said on the drive home.

  She shook her head, wondering how many times she was going to have to turn this man down to get him to accept that she wouldn’t marry him. “The way you propose, the timing, whether it’s public or private—those aren’t the reasons I won’t marry you, Wes. I told you—”

  “Yes, you did tell me. But I think you’re mistaken, Shannon. We may not have the mirror image of what your parents had, but we’re not so bad together. I know people who have much less to build on than we do and they make perfectly successful pairings. We get along, we can always find something to talk about, we have things in common, we both want to make our mark—”

  “You want to make your mark. I just want—”

  “I know what you want. But how much bigger can your life be than as the wife of the governor? As maybe the wife of a president some day? And you can make your mark, too. You can push education—I’ll push education, it’s a popular topic and with you being a teacher, you can do great things for the state, for the country. We make a good team.”

  “And you love me so much you can’t live without me,” she said facetiously, as if she were feeding him the line he should have used.

  “I do love you, Shannon,” he contended. “You know that. Maybe not the way you think your father loved your mother—”

  “It isn’t something I think, it’s something I know.”

  “Still, I care for you. The same way any normal husband cares for his wife. We could have a lifelong, fruitful marriage. Kids. And you’d never again have to spend a Christmas Eve, a Christmas, alone like this, without family.”

  “That’s why you’re really here now, isn’t it?” Shannon said as it dawned on her. “You came because you thought I’d be at a particularly low point tonight, tomorrow. That I’d be vulnerable…” Not because he wanted to make this first holiday after the loss of her family easier for her, not because he wanted to make sure she was all right. But to use what he’d hoped might be a weak moment to his own advantage.

  She considered telling him just how not-alone she’d been since arriving in Northbridge, or tonight, how not-alone she would be tomorrow with Chase and Hadley and Cody and Meg and Logan and Tia. And Dag… But it didn’t seem worth it, so she merely repeated, “No, Wes, I won’t marry you.”

  “I just don’t understand you, Shannon,” he said curtly, sounding frustrated and aggravated that this play still hadn’t accomplished his goal. “We’ve been involved for a long time. We’ve talked about marriage. Your parents are gone so there’s not that holding you back. You’ve said you want more out of life and I’m here offering that. Get your head out of the clouds and let’s be realistic—you idealized your parents’ relationship. You made it some sort of storybook love that nothing can live up to—”

  “In all the time we’ve known each other, Wes, you only met my parents twice. You don’t know what kind of relationship they had.”

  And Shannon knew that he was right when he’d said he didn’t understand her because he genuinely didn’t. He didn’t understand why there was absolutely no temptation, no appeal in this passionless Bigger Life that he was offering.

  But she wasn’t even slightly tempted by it. Despite the fact that he was Wes Rumson, that he was impeccably dressed, handsome, cultured, intelligent, wealthy, well respected. Despite the fact that they had had a pleasant-enough, enjoyable-enough relationship that had met some of her needs.

  It just didn’t matter to her because she hadn’t had even the tiniest thrill when she’d first seen his limousine, the tiniest thrill at thinking that he’d come all the way from Billings on Christmas Eve just for her. She certainly didn’t want to run into his arms. She wasn’t aching to have him touch her, kiss her—everything that came instantly with every thought, every glimpse of Dag.

  Dag, whom she’d had to leave hanging…

  “Go home, Wes,” she advised then. “Go back to Billings to be with your own family, let Herbert get to his. This—you and I—just wasn’t meant to be. I might vote for you, but I won’t marry you.”

  Wes snapped closed the ring box like the jaws of an alligator and put it back in his jacket pocket. “I don’t think you know what you want.”

  He was right about that, too, because it wasn’t as if she was
ready to rush to Dag and accept all he’d laid out for her either…

  “But I know what I don’t want,” she said quietly.

  Wes remained with his pale brown eyes boring into her from beneath a fierce frown, shaking his head. Then he put his coat back on, all the while watching her as if he thought she’d gone out of her mind.

  “Once I announce this publicly we’re through—you know that?” he warned. “The polls may like you now, but yo-yoing would cost me votes.”

  And she wasn’t worth the loss to him.

  “I know, Wes. Just make the announcement and get it over with.”

  “We could have had a good thing, Shannon. I hope you don’t regret this.”

  “I’m sorry, Wes,” was her only response, the second apology she’d made in the last half hour.

  And it brought back to mind the first one she’d made as Wes cast her a final glare and walked out of the apartment—it brought Dag back to mind.

  And all he’d said.

  And all she really needed to think about.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Almost the moment that Wes Rumson was out of sight, he was out of Shannon’s mind, replaced with thoughts of Dag. And the things Dag had been in the process of saying to her on the way home from the church.

  Because those things had been monumental.

  Dag was willing to give up everything for her….

  She hadn’t fully grasped it at the time but as she rehashed it all in her head, she began to realize that that really was what he’d been saying. Offering.

  He was willing to live any life she wanted to live. Anywhere. He was even willing to sell the house he’d just bought from her, to follow her to Beverly Hills, if she decided that was what she wanted.

  Her grandmother had left her own life behind to help Shannon care for her parents. But other than that, no one else—certainly no man—had ever been willing to do anything that big for her. All three of the other men who had proposed to her had wanted her on their terms and their terms alone.