Coming Home for Christmas Read Free Page A

stiffly.
    â€œNo,” she agreed, “it doesn’t. But I was just trying to get a feeling for the situation—and you. It helps me do a better job.” Maizie knew she had to sell this to the young man, who needed far more than the sale of this house to tie up loose ends.
    He needed peace, she thought.
    â€œI don’t care what you get for it. Just sell it,” Keith was saying. “I don’t want it hanging around my neck like the proverbial albatross.”
    â€œYou might not care about the sale price now, but you will someday soon. Perhaps even very soon.” Maizie paused, her sharp eyes sweeping over everything in the living room. “If you don’t mind my asking, what are you planning on doing with the furnishings?”
    â€œFurnishings?” Keith repeated uncomprehendingly.
    â€œThe furniture, the clothing in the closets, the books—”
    He hadn’t even thought about that. He supposed he was still coming to grips with the idea that as far as his mother was concerned, there would be no more tomorrows and all that entailed.
    Replaying the agent’s words in his head, Keith waved his hand, dismissing the problem. “Get rid of it. All of it.” The things she’d enumerated represented a place in his life he had no intention of revisiting. “Throw it all away.”
    That would be a terrible waste, and Maizie wasn’t about to be wasteful if she could possibly help it. “I think if you do that, if you just throw all this away, you’ll live to regret it.”
    He was already regretting this conversation. However, he told himself that it cost him nothing to hear her out. “All right. What do you suggest?”
    Maizie thought of the conversation she’d just had yesterday with Theresa over a late lunch. It involved the daughter of a mutual friend.
    The
single
daughter of a mutual friend.
    A wide smile blossomed on Maizie’s lips. “I think I have an idea you just might like.”

Chapter Two
    â€œY ou do realize you work too hard, right?”
    Marcy Crawford aimed the question at her younger sister, MacKenzie Bradshaw, as she followed her sister around a showroom that was nothing short of an obstacle course for anyone who wasn’t a size three. And in her current state of pregnancy, Marcy admittedly hadn’t been a petite size three for a little longer than eight months now.
    Her question was a rhetorical one, and it was meant to get Kenzie, the youngest of five and the one everyone in the family doted on, to reassess her present life. However, her supposedly impromptu visit to Kenzie’s place of work wound up getting the latter to fall back on her usual evasive maneuvers. Whether or not she actually meant to, Kenzie was weaving her way in and out of small pockets of space. Pockets that Marcy was frustratingly finding close to impossible to get into. Thus she was completely unable to follow.
    Kenzie glanced over her shoulder, pausing only long enough to blow her light blond bangs out of her eyes—she
had
to find time to get a haircut, she silently noted. With Christmas almost here, business had been good lately, really good. The turnaround at her shop, Hidden Treasures, both with items coming in and going out, had been more than a little gratifying.
    â€œSaid the woman who’s more than eight months pregnant and carrying a fourteenth-month-old around in her arms,” Kenzie pointed out.
    She dearly loved her sister—loved all four of her siblings and her mother—but she instantly went into withdrawal mode the moment Marcy or the others felt compelled to change around the structure of her life. She liked it just the way it was—busy and profitable.
    â€œExactly my point,” Marcy said, shuffling so that she was finally able to move in front of her sister by coming in from the other side. The less than fluid movement managed to trap Kenzie with an ornate carved turn-of-the-century credenza