Their First Noel Read Free

awe she would feel at just coming through the doors of… “The Snowy Eaves Inn. I’m really here.”
    â€œYeah, but why are you here?” The man stopped in a huge, darkened room with exposed framework and wiring where walls should have been. He stood there like a wall himself, only in faded jeans and a dusty flannel shirt. Big as life. Bigger, actually, in contrast to the huge windows with rain pounding against them. The occasional lightning flash in the distance highlighted the breadth of his wide shoulders. “You said something about a problem?”
    Be bold. There is no recipe. If she gave him the chance, he would find a reason to rush her away and Corrie wasn’t ready to leave yet. So she gripped theoversized bag tucked under her arm and met his question with one of her own. “ You said something about drying off and warming up?”
    â€œI haven’t said anything yet but if I did…” interjected the little girl in pink jammies and jet black pigtails clutching the sock monkey tugging at Corrie’s thick coat, “I’d say, can you make hot chocolate?”
    â€œAre you kidding?” Carrie whooshed out one long, relieved sigh. This was perfect. Cooking always cleared her head and now having met Andy McFarland and finding him just a bit intimidating, she needed a clear head more than ever. “I grew up in my mom’s bakery making every kind of sweet concoction you can imagine. Just point me to a kitchen and—”
    â€œThis way.” The child clamped both hands around Corrie’s wrist and tried to drag her across the spacious lobby toward a closed door.
    â€œWait!” Andy made a lunge. He caught Corrie by the coat sleeve.
    That was perfect because Corrie needed to get out of the cumbersome outerwear. She happily slid her arm free from the heavy, wet sleeve then gave a twirl to slip the rest of the way out.
    She felt lighter already, just not because of the coat. She was in the place she had dreamt of seeing for most of her life, she had a pretty good idea what she wanted to do and she had just made an ally. “Thanks. Once you hang that up why don’t you join me and your daughter in the kitchen and we’ll discuss the details of the job I have for you?”
    â€œShe’s not my daughter!” he called after her.
    That news shouldn’t have made one bit of differenceto Corrie, but it did. It made her heart and her footsteps instantly lighter.
    â€œI’m his sister, silly,” the child said with a giggle as if it were perfectly obvious that the big lumberjack-looking, auburn-haired man and the delicate Chinese girl were siblings. “My name is Greer.”
    Corrie’s clunky fur-lined boots—the ones she had had to order special since the stores in her tiny town in the southern most part of South Carolina didn’t usually sell snow boots—scuffed over the grit-sprinkled concrete floors of the lobby and hallway. When they stepped into a large, totally dark room, the floor beneath her soles changed.
    Greer hit the light switch and the room flooded with brightness.
    Corrie gasped. Unlike what she had seen of the rest of the place, the kitchen was not just finished, it was gorgeous. Though totally updated, careful attention had been paid to getting the ambiance right, the way it must have felt from the time it opened sixty years earlier until the place suffered a fire more than a decade ago. “This must be almost how it looked when they walked in here all those years ago.”
    Corrie settled her bag gently on the butcher-block countertop as she swept her gaze over every inch of the expansive, immaculate room.
    Greer skidded across the shiny, red-tile floor toward the huge double-doored stainless steel refrigerator, asking as she went, “How it looked when who walked in?”
    â€œMy parents.” Corrie paused. She so rarely had a reason to use that term. Corrie’s father had