The Bachelor's Christmas Bride. Victoria Pade

for him not to look at her, too, because his dark eyes seemed to have been on her most of the night.

      “I think that brace-a-let is kind of big for you, Miss Tia,” Dag said then. “You can get both of your wristles in it.”

      Tia tried that, putting her tiny hands through the hoop from opposite directions as if it were a muff. Then, giggling and holding up her arms for everyone to see, she said, “Look it, I can!”

      That caught Cody’s interest and the infant leaned far forward to try to take the bracelet for himself. Luckily Shannon had worn two, so she took off the other one and handed it to the baby. Who promptly put it in his mouth.

      “So, Shannon, you’re pretty much a stranger to Northbridge even though your grandmother lived here?” Logan asked then.

      “I am. I only visited here a few times growing up and that was all before I was twelve. Between my parents’ business and their health, there was just no getting away.”

      “What was their business?” Hadley asked.

      “They owned a small shoe repair and leather shop, and the building it was in. We lived above the shop and they couldn’t afford help—they worked the shop themselves six days a week—so in order to leave town, they had to close down and that was too costly for them. Gramma would come to visit us—even for holidays. Plus with my parents’ health problems they were both sort of doing the best they could just to get downstairs, put in a day’s work and go back up to the apartment.”

      “Did they have serious health problems long before they died?” Chase asked.

      “My mom and dad’s health problems were definitely serious and started long before they died,” Shannon confirmed. “As a young man, my dad was in an accident that cost him one kidney and damaged his other—the damaged one continued to deteriorate from the injury, though, and he eventually had to go on dialysis. My mom had had rheumatic fever as a kid and it took a toll on her heart, which also made her lungs weak and caused her to be just generally unwell.”

      “I’m a little surprised that people in that kind of physical shape were allowed to adopt a child,” Meg observed.

      “The situation at the time helped that,” Shannon said. “What I was told was that my birth parents were killed in a car accident—”

      “True,” Chase confirmed.

      “There wasn’t anything about other kids in the story,” Shannon continued. “I didn’t know there was an older sister who had a different father to take her, or that there was an older brother and twin younger brothers, that’s for sure. What my parents said was just that there wasn’t any family to take me, that the reverend here had put out feelers for someone else to. When my parents asked if that could be them, the reverend helped persuade the authorities to let them have me despite their health issues—which weren’t as bad at the time, anyway.”

      “I don’t know if you know or not, but that reverend is my grandfather,” Meg said.

      “Really? No, I didn’t know that.”

      “And sick or not, your folks must have wanted a child a lot,” Hadley concluded.

      “A lot,” Shannon confirmed. “But having one of their own just wasn’t possible.”

      “Did 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.

      “I 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.

      “It must have been so hard for you to lose them,” Meg said, interrupting that split-second moment.

      “It 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 Northbridge a few years ago—to help me take care of them when it was just more than I could do on my own—”

      “You took care of them?” Dag asked in a voice that sounded almost as if it was for her ears only.

      “I 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.”

      “And then there was just you and your grandmother?” Dag asked, his eyes still on her in that penetrating gaze.

      “Right, 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.”

      “And 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!”

      “But now she has Chase and two more brothers out there somewhere who she and Chase are going to find,” Meg reminded, obviously attempting to inject something lighter into the conversation.

      Shannon looked at her newly discovered brother. “Whatever I can do on that score…” she said to him.

      “I’ve hit a wall trying to find the twins,” Chase said. “I’m thinking about hiring a private investigator after the first of the year. But we can talk about that later.”

      To change the subject completely then, Shannon said, “So I know Chase and Logan grew up together as best friends and then traveled the country and ended up starting Mackey and McKendrick Furniture Designs, but were you all friends in school?”

      “Actually, no,” Meg answered. “I know—small town, you’d think we would have lived in each other’s back pockets. But I was younger than Chase and Logan, so I was barely aware of who they were and they say the same thing about me. I knew Hadley a little better, but again, we weren’t the same age, so we didn’t hang out together.”

      “But, Hadley, if Logan and Chase were close, you must have known Chase,” Shannon observed.

      “Oh, she knew him all right,” Dag said, goading his half sister.

      Hadley didn’t rise to the bait beyond throwing her cloth napkin at him before she said, “I knew Chase. I had the biggest crush on him ever. But we didn’t get together until