Meet Me Under The Mistletoe (O'Rourke Family 5) Read Free

signed the credit slip, accompanied by applause from the line of postal customers. He walked outside with Jeremy while Shannon was still waiting to pull into the busy street, and his son dragged his feet, watching sadly as her sleek sports car finally merged into traffic.
    “Come along, son.”
    “I like her, Daddy.”
    “I know. I’m sure you’ll see her again. Shannon is our next-door neighbor.”
    Jeremy let out a very adult sigh. “But you made her mad.”
    It was undeniably true, even though she’d appeared to forgive what he’d jokingly implied about her brother. Yes, Shannon O’Rourke was temperamental, but she’d also shown that she was loyal.
    A far cry from his own family.
    After his parents divorced, Alex and his two siblings had been pawns in their incessant power struggles. And now they didn’t see one another anymore. They were too far-flung for one thing; his brother was in the Arctic studying global warming and his sister was working in Japan. As for his mother and father, they’d each been married and divorced several times to other people, and they still hated each other with a passion that poisoned everything around them.
    “Shannon isn’t upset with you,” he said finally. “So it’s okay.”
    “But she’s mad at you, Daddy.” Jeremy was obstinatein his own way, and he obviously felt that Shannon being mad was a problem, regardless of who she was mad at.
    Alex rubbed the back of his neck. After his rotten up-bringing, he’d worried he couldn’t love a child. But from the minute his newborn son, all red and wrinkled, opened sleepy eyes and blew a bubble at him, he’d turned into a marshmallow where the kid was concerned.
    “I know, son, but you still don’t need to worry about it.” He would have said everything was “all right,” but he’d said it too often when Kim was sick, and he’d felt like a hypocrite each time Jeremy crawled into his arms and believed him.
    His son gave him an exasperated look, which would have been comical if his eyes weren’t so serious. “Can we get her a Christmas present?”
    A Christmas present?
    What did you get for a woman who must have everything?
    “We’ll get a poinsettia,” Alex promised. Plants were usually safe, especially since it should look like a seasonal gesture. Or as an apology for the verbal faux pas he’d stumbled into over her brother.
    Jeremy looked relieved, and as they trudged back to the Cherokee, he turned his head to gaze in the direction Shannon had driven. For the first time in a year he wasn’t clutching Mr. Tibbles to his chest; instead, he was casually swinging the rabbit by one arm.
    Alex let out a sigh of his own. He had to be careful. Seeing too much of the woman next door could lead Jeremy into getting ideas about a new mommy.
    Yet as he fastened his son into the child’s car seat, Alex couldn’t help thinking about Shannon. She was undoubtedly headstrong and opinionated, as different from his wife as a woman could be. He’d considered casual dating sinceKim’s death, but none of the women he’d met were particularly interesting.
    And none of them were like Shannon O’Rourke.

Chapter Two
    S hannon let herself into the condo and tossed her purse onto the couch before plugging in the lights on the Christmas tree. She had to be out of her mind even to have considered offering to babysit.
    “Me, babysitting. Hah!”
    Yet even as she scolded herself, she remembered Jeremy McKenzie’s solemn blue eyes and a familiar ache filled her. She’d been eight when her father died, leaving her confused and hurt. The thought of Jeremy feeling the same way tore at her heart.
    “I’m not the motherly type,” she muttered. She couldn’t change a diaper or even heat a can of soup, though Jeremy was surely old enough not to need diapers any longer. Even that she wasn’t certain about, though she was pretty sure most kids were potty-trained by the time they were two or three. How old were her twin nieces when