A McKettrick Christmas (13 page)

She went to the schoolhouse, a red-painted framework building with a tiny bell tower and quarters in back, for the teacher. Her aunt Chloe, Jeb’s wife, had once taught here, and made her home in the little room behind the classroom.

All the doors were locked, but she stood on tiptoe to peer in a window at what would be her home directly after New Year’s, when she took up her duties. There was a little stove, an iron bedstead, a table and chair and not much else. She’d looked so forward to teaching school, earning her own money, paltry though her salary was, shaping the lives of children in small but important ways.

Now it seemed a lonely prospect, as empty as those cheery packages under the Christmas tree in the mercantile.

She sighed and turned from the window and was startled to find Mr. Christian standing directly behind her. He looked particularly hearty, showing no signs of frostbite or exhaustion. In fact, there seemed to be a faint glow to his skin, and his eyes shone with well-being.

He touched the brim of his bowler hat. Smiled.

Lizzie felt something warm inside her, despite the unrelenting cold. “I’m so glad to see you,” she said. “No one seems to remember—”

“No one seems to remember what?” Christian asked kindly. He wore a very fine overcoat, one Lizzie hadn’t seen before, and his hands bulged in the deep pockets.

“Well,” Lizzie said, groping a little,
“you.”

Mr. Christian smiled again. “Dr. Shane remembers,” he said. “And the children will, too. Little Ellen and Jack will remember—always.”

The oddness of the remark struck Lizzie, but she was so pleased to see that her friend had recovered that she paid little mind to it. “I’ve just been to visit John Brennan,” she said. “I’m afraid—”

Mr. Christian cut her off with a kindly shake of his head. “He’ll recover,” he said with certainty.

Lizzie frowned, puzzled. “How can you be so sure?”

“Call it a Christmas miracle,” Mr. Christian said.

A little thrill tripped down Lizzie’s spine. The freezing air seemed charged somehow, as though electricity had gathered around the two of them, silent, a small, invisible tornado. “I’d like to introduce you to my stepmother, Lorelei,” she said, after a moment in which her heart seemed to snag on something sharp.

“Because she doesn’t believe I exist?” Mr. Christian asked, his smile muted now, and full of quiet amusement.

Lizzie sighed. “Not
only
that,” she protested. “Lorelei probably knows your family and—”

“I have no family, Lizzie. Not the kind you mean, anyway.”

“But you said—”

Again, the faint and mysterious smile came. The glow Lizzie had noticed before intensified a little. And it came to her that Mr. Christian simply could not have recovered so completely in such a short time. Had he…died? Was she seeing his ghost? She’d heard of things like that, of course, but never given them serious consideration before that moment.

“Who are you?” she heard herself ask, in a near whisper.

He didn’t answer.

Lizzie reached out, meaning to clutch at his sleeve, a way of insisting that he reply, but grab though she might, she couldn’t seem to catch hold of him. It was the strangest sensation—he was
there,
not transparent as she imagined a spirit might be, but a real person, one of reality and substance. Without moving at all, he still managed to evade her touch.

“Who are you?” she repeated, more forcefully this time.

“That’s not important,” he said quietly. Then he pointed to someone or something just past Lizzie’s left shoulder. “Look there,” he added. “There’s your young man, coming to make things up. Give him every opportunity, Lizzie. He’s the one.”

Lizzie turned to look, saw Morgan vaulting over the schoolyard fence, starting toward her. She turned again, with another question for Mr. Christian teetering on the tip of her tongue, but he was gone.

Simply
gone.

Startled, her heart pounding, Lizzie swept the large yard, but there was no sign of Mr. Christian. She hurried to look behind the building, but he wasn’t there, either. Nor was he behind the outhouse or the little shed meant to house a horse or a milk cow.

“Lizzie?”

She whirled.

Morgan stood at her side. “What’s the matter?” he asked, frowning.

“Mr. Christian,” she sputtered. “He was just here—surely you must have seen him—”

Morgan frowned. “I didn’t see anybody but you,” he said, taking her arm. “Are you all right?”

She was shaking. She felt like laughing—and like crying. Like dancing, and like collapsing in a heap in the powdery snow.

The snow.

She searched the ground—Mr. Christian would have left footprints in the snow, just as she had. But there were no tracks, other than her own and Morgan’s.

She sagged against Morgan, stunned, and his arms tightened around her. “Lizzie!” There was a plea in his voice.
Be all right,
it said.

“I…I must be seeing things—” She gulped in a breath, shook her head. “No. I
did
see Mr. Christmas—
Mr. Christian
—he was right here. We spoke…he told me—”

“Lizzie,” Morgan repeated, gripping her upper arms now, looking deep into her eyes. “Stop chattering and
breathe.
”

“He was here!”

Morgan led her around to the front of the schoolhouse, sat her down on the side of the porch, where the snow had melted away, took a seat beside her. “I believe you,” he said, holding her hand. She felt his innate strength, strength of mind and spirit and body, flowing into her, buoying her up. Sustaining her. “Lizzie,
I believe you.
”

She let her head rest against his shoulder, not caring who saw her and Morgan, sitting close together on the schoolhouse porch, holding hands, even though it was highly improper.

For a long while, neither of them spoke. Lizzie was willing her heartbeat to return to normal, and Morgan seemed content just to be there with her.

Finally, though, he broke the silence. “You’re really not going to marry Carson?” he asked, looking as sheepish as he sounded.

“I’m really not going to marry Whitley,” Lizzie confirmed. Her heart started beating fast again.

“He was right,” Morgan went on, after heaving a resigned sigh. He gazed off toward the distant mountain, where they’d been stranded together, nearly buried under tons of snow. “About all the things he said earlier, back at the hotel, I mean. I can’t offer you what he can. No position in society. No mansion. No money to speak of.”

Lizzie blinked, studied him. “Morgan Shane,” she said, “
look
at me.”

He obeyed, grinned sadly.

“What are you saying?” she asked.

He hesitated for what seemed to Lizzie an excruciatingly long time. Then, with another sigh, he answered her question with one of his own. “Can you imagine yourself being courted by a penniless country doctor with no prospects to speak of?”

Lizzie’s breath caught. She considered the matter for all of two seconds. “Yes,” she said. “I can imagine that very well.”

He enclosed the hand he’d been holding in both his own, looked straight into Lizzie’s soul. “I know it will take time. There’s a lot we don’t know about each other. You’ve got classes to teach, and I’ll be building a medical practice. But if you’ll have me, Lizzie McKettrick, I’ll be your husband by this time next year.”

“D-do you love me?” Lizzie asked, color flaring in her cheeks at the audacity of her question.

“I’m pretty sure I do,” Morgan replied, with a saucy grin. “Do you love me?”

“I certainly feel
something,
” Lizzie said, blissfully bewildered. “But I’m not sure I trust myself. After all, I thought I loved Whitley. All I could think about, before we left San Francisco—”
before I met you
“—was whether he’d propose to me over Christmas or not.”

Morgan chuckled.

“I guess it proves something my grandfather always says,” Lizzie went on. “Be careful what you wish for, because you might damn well get it.”

This time Morgan laughed out loud. “Amen,” he said.

Lizzie turned thoughtful. “I’d want to go right on teaching school, even if we got married,” she warned.

“And I’ll want children,” Morgan said.

A great joy swelled inside Lizzie, one she could barely contain. “At least four,” she agreed. “Two girls and two boys.”

Morgan’s eyes gleamed. “The room behind my office might get a little crowded,” he told her.

“We’ll think of something,” Lizzie said.

“The hardest part will be waiting,” Morgan told her, leaning in a little, lowering his voice. “To get those babies started, I mean.”

Lizzie blushed, well aware of his meaning. She’d never been intimate with a man, not even Whitley, though she’d allowed him to kiss her a few times, but she craved
this
man, this “penniless country doctor,” with her entire being. She wondered if she could endure a whole year of such wanting.

Reading her expression, Morgan chuckled again, rested his forehead against hers. “I’m about to kiss you, Lizzie McKettrick,” he said. “Like I’ve wanted to kiss you from the moment I first laid eyes on you. And if the whole town of Indian Rock sees me do that, so be it.”

Lizzie swallowed, tilted her head upward, ready for his kiss. Longing for it. And feeling utterly scandalized by the ferocity of her own desire.

He laid his mouth to hers, gently at first, then with a hunger to match and even exceed her own. His lips felt deliciously warm, despite the frigid weather, and wonderfully soft. She trembled as the kiss deepened, caught fire inside when his tongue found hers. It was a foretaste of things to come, things that could only happen when they were married, but she felt it in her most feminine parts, as surely as if he’d laid her down on that schoolhouse porch and taken her outright, made her his own.

She moaned.

Morgan’s soft laugh echoed in her mouth.

He knew. He
knew
what she was thinking, what she was feeling.

Lizzie’s face felt as hot as the blood singing through her veins.

“Oh, my goodness,” she gasped, when the kiss was over.

“Only the beginning,” Morgan promised gruffly, twisting a loose tendril of her hair gently around one finger.

“Hush,” she said helplessly.

He let go of her face, which he’d been holding between his hands while he kissed her, while he
possessed
her, and put a slight but eloquent distance between them. “I’d better get back to the hotel,” he said. “I’m expecting some patients, now that I’ve figuratively hung out my shingle.”

“I’ll go with you,” Lizzie said, not because she particularly wanted to return to the hotel, where she would be treated like an invalid, albeit a cherished one, but because she couldn’t be parted from Morgan.

Not yet. Not after what had just happened between them—whatever it was.

As Lizzie had expected, word had gotten around that the new doctor was young, handsome and eligible. Three women, all of them known to Lizzie and notoriously single, awaited him, in varying stages of feigned illness.

She had the silliest urge to shoo them away, like so many hens fluttering around a rooster. Fortunately, she recovered her good sense in time, and simply smiled.

Whitley had left the lobby, perhaps retreating to his nearby room, and Lizzie was relieved by that. She’d be glad when he left Indian Rock, but she knew it might be a while before the train ran again, and the roads were all but impassable.

Suddenly hungry, she made her way through the empty dining room to the kitchen, and found Lorelei there, chatting with the Chinese cook.

“There you are,” Lorelei said, in a tone of good-natured scolding. “Your cheeks are flushed. Have you taken a chill?”

Lizzie still felt the tingle of Morgan’s kiss on her mouth, and things had melted inside her, so that she was a little unsteady on her feet. She sank into a rocking chair near the stove, smiling foolishly. “No,” she said. “I haven’t taken a chill. But I’m famished.”

The cook dished up a bowl of beef stew dolloped with dumplings and handed it to Lizzie where she sat, along with a spoon, then left.

Lorelei drew up a second chair.

“Something very strange happened to me today,” Lizzie confided, without really intending to, between bites of savory stew.

“I saw you come in with Dr. Shane,” Lorelei said, with a gentle but knowing smile. “Lizzie McKettrick, I do believe you’ve fallen in love.”

Perhaps she
had
fallen in love, Lizzie thought. Time would tell.

“Lizzie?” Lorelei prompted, when Lizzie didn’t confirm or deny her stepmother’s assertion.

“He’s going to court me,” she said. “Do you think Papa will object?”

“No,” Lorelei responded, watching Lizzie very closely. “Would it matter if he did?”