Yuletide Bride Read Free Page A

the second. Even his name was sexy. Holy cow, Batman ! “Hi, James, nice to meet you. Nice to meet you as well, Mr. and Mrs. Rochester.” Mary forced a smile. She felt embarrassed that she’d been caught staring earlier, and then again just now. She couldn’t help herself. She couldn’t think of a time when she liked looking at a man so much. .
    John cleared his throat.
    “So, Mary, are you married?”
    Red. Yep. She was really red now. “No, sir, I’m not married.”
    “Well, isn’t that interesting,” John said quietly, nudging Mary under the table by accident. Mary moved her foot and John’s face reddened. “Sorry about that, Mary. I had a little Charlie horse.”
    “Yeah, no problem,” she said. She looked over her right shoulder, pretending that she saw someone she knew. She waved and an odd old man waved his teeth at her! What the hell?
    She turned her head, and the expression on her face must have been funny because Ava and James shared a laugh. “Sorry, Mary, it’s just that…never mind.”
    “Yes, that’s okay. Anyway, I hope you don’t mind, but I would like to record our conversation so I can play it back later when I write the article.”
    John looked at Ava for confirmation, and Ava nodded. “We don’t mind,” he said and reached for his wife’s hand.
    “Okay, can you tell me how you two met?”
    John smiled and began.
    “It was 1938, and I was - seventeen-years-old. I had the most amazing family. My mother and father were alive and raised six of us—three boys and three girls. I am the only one of the sons left. My three sisters all live in Montana now—. I am the eldest of all the children, twenty years older than my youngest sister Susan. Ava and I, met through my middle sister, Catherine. Catherine was five years old at the time and needed someone to walk her home from school. Ava lived right down the block from us. Her mother and my mother were good friends. I didn’t know much about Ava— only what I had heard from our mothers—but enough. One night, my mother and father went out with her parents and made Ava and me, in charge all of the kids.” John looked at Ava and smiled.
    “Well, one thing led to another and Ava and I started dating. I loved her from the start. She, well, just look at her,” John said.
    Mary couldn’t help herself, she smiled. So did James.
    “She’s very beautiful, Granddad,” James said. “Then what happened? You put your name on the paper and so did she?”
    “You very well know what happened, Jimmy!” Ava exclaimed then looked at Mary. “He knows this story like the…well, he knows this story.”
    Mary didn’t think it was possible, but she felt her face heat up once more. “Then what?”
    “Well, then my father ordered—us to stop seeing each other.”
    “Wait. What? Why?” Mary asked.
    “Well, we were just in high school, and my father was very protective of me. I was an only child, and he and my mother worried about John. He had a big family.”
    Mary looked at John and then focused back on Ava. “So, you stopped dating…when? After high school, or before?”
    “Well, it was one Friday night. We had a dance at the school, and John and I decided to go together. He bought me a beautiful flower to wear pinned to my dress, and we danced all night. When I came home, I’ll never forget what happened. I told my father that I loved John more than anything and would one day marry him. The next day, my father pulled me out of school and we moved across the state. It wasn’t until 1940, that I moved back, and went to the Christmas festival.”
    Mary leaned forward, then focused on John. “Did you know she came home, John?”
    John didn’t seem to understand where she was headed with the question.
    “No, I didn’t. My sister Mary Beth took me to the festival with her. I’d just come home on leave from the military. I actually just got there when Mary’s name was picked from the jar. I was so surprised to see her again, that I