Read the book: «A Wedding For Christmas»

CHAPTER ONE

SHE SAW HER through the window.

Curious, Christina Roman MacDonald made her way to the garden. Her older sister, Alexandra, was just standing there, staring off into the horizon from the looks of it.

For most of her twenty-eight years, Alex had been the very definition of a workaholic, a veritable tribute to perpetual motion. Seeing her so still wasn’t normal.

But then, this wasn’t exactly a period of business as usual for her sister. Not with the all-important step she would be taking in just six short weeks.

“Having second thoughts?” Cris asked, coming up behind Alex.

The gardener, Silvio Juarez, had just finished mowing the lawn and the air was heavy with the scent of freshly cut grass.

Caught off guard, Alex whirled to find her sister standing behind her. “About?”

“Running for prom queen of Munchkin High,” Cris said impatiently. Most brides-to-be lived and breathed wedding details this close to the event. Alex, apparently, was different. “About getting married, of course.”

Alex merely shook her head. “All my doubts had come before Wyatt’s proposal and I’ve long since worked them out of my system.” Clearly, she was looking forward to being his wife.

“No, no second thoughts,” she replied with a small, peaceful smile.

“Regrets, then?” Cris guessed, watching the set of Alex’s shoulders. The two girls were closer than most. She could draw clues from Alex’s body language. “Prewedding jitters?”

“No,” Alex answered and then pointed out, “and it’s too soon for prewedding jitters.”

Cris laughed shortly. “Tell that to Stevi,” she said. Of their younger sisters, Stephanie, two years Cris’s junior, was the temperamental artistic one. “By the time your wedding day arrives, she’ll have gone through three meltdowns. I’ve never seen her quite like this. At the very least, you’d think she was the one getting married, not you.”

Alex gave a half shrug. Stevi tended to get caught up in whatever she was doing. The moment she’d heard that Alex was marrying Wyatt, she’d volunteered to handle all the details. Alex had been glad to have one less situation to deal with.

“Maybe she thinks that if it’s not perfect, I’ll hold it against her,” Alex speculated. “She should know better.”

“She should,” Cris agreed, coming to stand beside Alex in the garden, “but you know Stevi. She’s a bit of a drama queen when her nerves get strung out. Maybe you shouldn’t have put her in charge of your wedding.”

“As if I’d had a choice,” Alex said with a smile. Stevi had commandeered the position. “Too late now. Besides, she was following me around on her knees until I finally gave in.” She eyed Cris. “What would you have done?”

That was an easy one, Cris decided with a grin. “Eloped.”

It was Alex’s turn to laugh. “Right. Sorry, I forgot who I was talking to. The daughter who eloped and almost broke her father’s heart.”

“Don’t exaggerate,” Cris chided. “Dad knew the reason.” And so did Alex. She’d met her late husband’s parents at Mike’s funeral, and although polite, they were so formal Alex had told Cris she was completely uncomfortable in their presence, something that rarely happened to her. “We did it so Mike wouldn’t have to invite his parents to the ceremony and be forced to put up with them trying to talk him out of making ‘a foolish mistake he’d regret for the rest of his life,’ as they said.”

“They were—and are—snobs and I’ll always hold it against them that we didn’t get to see you as a blushing bride,” Alex said, immediately defensive on her sister’s behalf. “Speaking of which...”

“Yes?” Here it is, Cris thought, the reason Alex was standing pensively out here rather than working at the front desk.

“I’m as calm about the wedding as a human being can be,” she told Cris. “I feel like I’m finally getting it right.” She pointed to the azalea bush that someone had given their father at their mother’s funeral. A healthy plant, it seemed to bloom at odd times, generally when something momentous was occurring in their lives.

This time, though, Cris took the words to mean that Alex felt she had been a screwup until a couple of months ago, whereas nothing could have been further from the truth.

“Don’t run yourself down,” Cris insisted. “You’ve been Dad’s right hand—sometimes his left one, as well—for years now, running the inn when he was sick, being here day in, day out, no matter what else was going on. It even took you longer to graduate from University of San Diego because you were here all the time, performing feats of magic—”

Alex waved off her sister’s accolades. “Not quite. And I wasn’t talking about my work anyway. I meant the direction of my life.”

She glanced around the garden and it seemed to her that despite the fact they were in San Diego, it was November, yet the garden was in full bloom. The sight filled her with joy.

“I always figured that running the inn would be it for me. You know, like being here would be the sole purpose of my life. Making sure things ran smoothly while I watched you and Stevi and Andy get married, have kids. Grow,” she added wistfully.

“Grow what? Fat?” Cris asked with a laugh.

Alex shook her head. “No, just grow. As women, as people,” she elaborated, then added for good measure, “become multidimensional.”

This definitely did not sound like the Alex Cris had grown up with. She scrutinized her sister.

“Are you feeling all righ? You’re getting me a little uneasy. You’re beginning to sound like some college professor OD’ing on Adlerian self-actualization. Besides,” she added with a touch of asperity, “I didn’t exactly ‘grow’ as a wife.”

“That’s because you weren’t allowed to be one for very long,” Alex reminded her. Cris and Mike were barely married before he was shipped out to Iraq, where his young life was cut short by a roadside sniper. The letter from Cris telling him she was pregnant was found in his breast pocket. “Next time will be better.”

“Not going to be a next time,” Cris informed her with quiet conviction.

Alex’s mouth curved in a smile. “I think Shane’s got other ideas on that subject,” she said. They’d hired the general contractor for the latest renovations to the 120-year-old inn. Aside from excellent references, Shane McCallister was also the older brother of one of Cris’s high school girlfriends.

Alex’s pending nuptials had her evaluating everything around her with fresh eyes, and the way Shane was looking at Cris spoke volumes.

“Now you’re babbling,” Cris said dismissively, then eyed Alex. “This is your clever way of deflecting questions, isn’t it?” she said, shaking her head. “I’m not prying, Alex, I was just being concerned about you.”

“I’m fine,” Alex replied with finality, calling an end to what she deemed an unnecessary discussion.

“Then what are you doing out here, communing with the azalea bush in the middle of the morning?” Cris didn’t add that the behavior just wasn’t like Alex, but her tone implied it.

Impatience creased Alex’s brow. “It’s called taking a break, Cris.”

That was fine, except for one thing. “You don’t take breaks.”

“I didn’t used to take breaks,” Alex corrected. “This is the new, improved me.” Alex smiled. “‘The times, they are a-changin’,’ little sister,” she added glibly. And then she glanced at her watch. Alex-in-Charge was back. “Shouldn’t you be in the kitchen, working on lunch, using whatever time you have left before your three-foot assistant gets sprung from kindergarten? According to my calculations, Stevi should be picking Ricky up soon and bringing him home. Don’t forget, Wyatt’s back in L.A. for a week, so he’s not here to play with your energized off-spring and be his sidekick.”

Cris knew she could count on her father to spend a little one-on-one time with his only grandchild. That was the good part about living at the inn with the rest of her family. Someone was always around to help out with Ricky when she was busy cooking.

“I did forget,” Cris confessed. “But have you worked out the logistics yet?”

“What logistics?”

“Where you and Wyatt will live after the ceremony?”

“Here,” Alex said with finality. “Where else would we live?”

Granted Wyatt had grown up spending summers at the inn with his father, but a lot of men would have wanted to begin their marriage in a place of their own. “Well, Wyatt does have that house in Brentwood.”

To Cris, Alex had always had an answer for everything. Now was no different. “Where he’ll stay when he can’t avoid being in L.A. Otherwise, we’ve got dibs on the new section being added to the inn. Whenever your guy gets around to finishing it, that is.”

“He’s not my guy,” Cris protested, even as a bit of color climbed her cheeks, highlighting her embarrassment. “You hired him.”

“You knew him,” Alex countered.

“That has nothing to do with anything,” Cris declared. At the time, they’d needed a general contractor and giving her old friend’s brother a job seemed the right thing to do. Her father and Alex made those kinds of decisions, so her input wouldn’t have carried much weight, Cris told herself.

But Alex had a different take on the situation. “Your knowing Shane helped seal the deal,” she told Cris.

Cris couldn’t help wondering if there was a reason Alex was laying this at her doorstep. If so, her sister was overlooking one obvious fact.

“Ha. He could have been Santa Claus, and if you hadn’t liked his references and his plans for the extension, you wouldn’t have hired him and you know it.”

“Let’s just say you have a point. Meanwhile, break—not that it actually turned out to be that—is over, and I’ve got to be getting back to the front desk. I left Dorothy in charge and you know how much she dislikes being in a position of authority.”

Cris smiled sympathetically. She herself didn’t exactly care for manning the front desk, although she was getting better at it.

As for Dorothy, she was one of her father’s lost souls, people who occasionally turned up at the inn. Their father would extend a helping hand until that person could stand on his or her own two feet.

Dorothy, her life in shambles, had come to them years back. She’d booked a room for one night so that she’d spend her last night on earth in a place with clean sheets and the smell of the sea through the opened window. Sensing her hopelessness and desperation, Richard Roman had stayed up all night with her, talking about everything and anything. When dawn finally arrived, the world somehow didn’t seem quite so bleak for the woman.

Because she confessed that she couldn’t pay for the room and she wouldn’t take charity, Richard gave her a job. That allowed Dorothy to keep her dignity. The job turned into a vocation and she worked her way up. She became head housekeeper—and was fiercely devoted and loyal to Richard and his four daughters.

As they walked into the front room, Dorothy immediately released a sigh of relief. She moved away from the desk as if the floor had suddenly caught on fire and she was barefoot.

“You act as though you didn’t expect me to come back,” Alex remarked, amused.

Now that Alex had returned, Dorothy could be a little magnanimous. “Of course I did. It’s just that those were the longest twenty minutes I’ve ever spent.”

“Don’t understand how,” Alex commented, “seeing as I was only gone for fifteen. And I would have been back sooner, but Cris just kept talking and talking.” She slanted a sideways glance at her sister, then added with a completely straight face, “Didn’t seem right, cutting her off and walking away just like that.”

“No, of course not,” Dorothy agreed solemnly. “I wouldn’t have expected you to.”

“She’s pulling your leg, Dorothy,” Cris said. There was never any winning with Alex. “You are impossible. I should start composing my letter of condolence to Wyatt now. Better yet, I should tell him to run for the hills while he still can.”

“Don’t you dare,” Stevi warned, entering with Cris’s five-year-old son in tow. “You do anything to mess up this wedding I’ve been working so hard on and I swear, it’ll be the last thing you ever do.” Stevi’s eyes narrowed as her threat became more menacing. “Alex and Wyatt are getting married Christmas Day if I have to hog-tie both of them and pull them up to the altar in a horse-drawn cart.”

“Nothing weird about that statement.” Alex laughed, shaking her head. “Maybe I should elope.”

“You do and I’ll hunt you both down and make you pay dearly for my pain and suffering,” Stevi warned.

Threatening vibes were all but wafting from Stevi’s five-six form. “You do realize,” Alex said, “that you’re just organizing a small wedding reception and not staging the second invasion of Normandy or a military coup in a third-world country, right?”

“What I realize,” Stevi responded, “is that you have no concept of what’s involved in carrying off a successful reception.”

Alex extended a sympathetic smile and an offer she knew would be refused. “If it’s too much for you, Stevi, I’ll gladly relieve you of the responsibility.”

Stevi’s blue eyes widened with complete surprise. “You wouldn’t dare,” she breathed.

Alex chuckled as she shook her head. “I can’t decide if you just uttered a frantic plea or tossed out a challenge without remembering to throw down the symbolic glove.”

Stevi blew out a breath, doing her best to rein herself in. “Okay, maybe I am being a little intense,” she allowed.

Alex’s eyes met Stevi’s, pinning her where she stood. “Maybe?”

Stevi relented. “Okay, I am being a little intense—”

“Only in the sense that World War II was a ‘little’ conflict. Stevi, I love you, but get a grip. This is just supposed to be a small gathering.”

“There’s nothing small about three hundred people in my book.”

“What three hundred people?” Alex inquired incredulously. Her list had under a hundred people on it. Well under a hundred. “Are you throwing the doors open to the general population?”

“No,” Stevi insisted. “I’m just counting Wyatt’s list.”

“Wyatt’s got over two hundred people coming?” she asked.

“That’s how many names are on his final list.” Stevi nodded. “Wyatt pared it down from five hundred,” she added. “He didn’t want you to be overwhelmed.”

“Too late,” Alex retorted.

“How could you and Wyatt not have discussed the invite list?” Cris asked her in disbelief.

“Well, I...just assumed he was...leaving this to me...” Alex trailed off. “His work has kept him away from the inn a lot. Say, Stevi, when did he have time to—”

“Now, Miss Alex,” Dorothy interrupted loyally. “You only get married for the first time once.”

“Wyatt knows I don’t want the wedding to get out of hand or come off like a three-ring circus. It’s supposed to be more or less an intimate gathering. Why is he inviting the immediate world? I want to see the list, Stevi.”

“I don’t have it with me,” her sister protested. “I went to pick up Ricky, remember?”

“I can wait,” Alex said matter-of-factly, indicating that she expected her to retrieve the list—now.

Stevi lifted her chin. “You don’t believe me? Or is it Wyatt you’re asking me to check up on?”

“Yes” was Alex’s answer. “Now go get the list.”