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“Uh-uh. You’re listening, remember?” He said it with a gentle smile.
Kara nodded and let him continue.
“I made up my mind that I would never love another woman. Not when it messed up my judgment to the point where I put my own child at risk. When I came here, when I started... pursuing you, that was the attitude I was clinging to. That I wouldn’t love you. That I was incapable of loving you. But you were... you were just too good to pass up. If I could have started from scratch and created the perfect mother for my son, she would have been you, Kara.”
She nodded. “I understand.”
“No, you don’t. I thought I’d stick around here maybe for a year or so and then talk you into coming back to Chicago with me. That I’d pick up my life right where I left off. But something happened while I was wooing and winning you, Kara Brand. Something happened to me.Youhappened to me. You made me fall in love with you.”
She drew in a soft breath, because those were the last words she had been expecting him to say to her tonight.
“I love you. It took me way too long to realize it. But I did, and when it hit me, it hit me hard, Kara. I love you. I want you to marry me because I love you. And the fact that you’re the best woman in the whole world and the perfect woman to help me raise my son—those are just bonuses.”
Tears welled in her eyes. She tried to blink them back, but they spilled over all the same. “I can’t believe—”
“Well, you will, because I intend to spend the rest of my life proving it to you. If... if you’re willing to let me after I botched this so badly the first time. So let me ask you again, Kara, for the right reasons this time. Will you marry me?”
She smiled through her tears and met his eyes, stunned to see they were damp as well. “Yes. I will. And if you really want to go back to Chicago, then I’ll go with you. I’ll go anywhere you want me to, Jimmy.”
“Stop sacrificing yourself, will you? You don’t want to go to Chicago. Kara, you deserve to ask for what you want. So tell me the truth. Where do you want to live?”
She blinked and searched his face. “I... I want to live here. Right here in Big Falls.”
He smiled and seemed to drink in her face with his eyes. “I don’t want to go back to Chicago either. My life is here now. With you and this town and your family.” He looked around the house. “This is the first place I’ve lived that... that feels like home.”
“That’s because itishome,” she whispered. “For you and Tyler and for me.”
“And it always will be,” he promised. And then he pulled her close and kissed her gently. “Always.”
“Dad? Kara?”
They pulled apart almost guiltily. Through the slightly open bedroom door, they could see Tyler awake and sitting up in his bed, watching them. They got up quickly, and went to him.
“What is it, Ty?”
He looked from one of their faces to the other, and smiling, said, “This is best Christmas ever.”
“It’s not even Christmas yet,” Kara said. “It’s still a week away.”
“But I already got just what I asked for. Santa did it. He did it. He got me a mommy for Christmas.”
He opened his little arms, and Kara hugged him to her, with tears streaming like rivers. When he let her go, he looked at his dad seriously. “Since I already got the mommy I asked for, and it’s not Christmas yes, do you think I could ask Santa for a puppy?”
Laughing, Kara looked at Jimmy, her husband and her son, laughing with her, and through tears, she said, “You’re right Ty. Thisisthe best Christmas ever!”
SWEET VIDALIA BRAND
CHAPTERONE
Vidalia Brand’s guilty secret walked in through the batwing doors of the OK Corral and just stood there—tall and lean and more dangerously handsome than he’d been before.
Vidalia was behind the long, gleaming bar, leaning over it to re-tape the draping pine garland that had come loose from the corner, when his dark silhouette appeared. It was almost like she knew it was him just from the way his shadow fell ahead of the street lights behind him. Even before she looked up, a chill ran the length of her spine. Or maybe that was a tingle. And then she straightened up and looked at him. The twinkling holiday lights that decked the saloon fell on his whiskered face, and the end of the pine garland she’d been holding dropped from her hand to hang limply again.
The familiar noise of her beloved saloon–clinking glasses, chinking ice, murmuring conversation—seemed to fall silent as he met her eyes and just stared at her. Vidalia blushed as if she was that young twenty something he’d known a thousand years ago. And she couldn’t take her eyes from his, even if she tried. They were still just as blue—that deep, dark midnight blue that could turn electric with emotion.
If not for Randy Travis’s version ofRockin’ Around The Christmas Treestill coming from the jukebox, you could’ve heard a pin drop. And she realized every patron she had was looking from her to the stranger and back again. Only he was no stranger. Not to her, he wasn’t.
“Miz Brand? You all right?”
