The Christmas Brides by Linda Lael Miller Page A

meet his eyes. Shook her head. “I was twelve when I came to live on the Triple M,” she said.
    She offered nothing more, and Morgan didn’t pry, even though he wanted to know everything about her, things she didn’t even know about herself.
    â€œYou’ve been a help, Lizzie,” he told her. “With John Brennan and with Carson, too.”
    â€œI keep thinking about the conductor and the engineer—their families….”
    â€œDon’t,” Morgan advised.
    She studied him. “I heard what you told John Brennan—that he ought to think about fishing with his son, instead of…instead of dying—”
    Morgan nodded, realized he was still holding Lizzie’s hand, improper as that was. Drew some satisfaction from the fact that she hadn’t pulled away.
    â€œDo you believe it really makes a difference?” she went on, when she’d gathered her composure. “Thinking about good things, I mean?”
    â€œRegardless of how things turn out,” he replied, “thinking about good things feels better than worrying, wouldn’t you say? So in that respect, yes, I’d say it makes a difference.”
    She pondered that, then looked so directly, and so deeply, into his eyes that he felt as though she’d found a peephole into the wall he’d constructed around his truest self. “What are you thinking about, then?” she wanted to know. “You must be worried, like all the rest of us.”
    He couldn’t tell Lizzie the truth—that despite his best efforts, every few minutes he imagined how it would be, treating patients in Indian Rock, with her at his side. “I can’t afford to worry,” he said. “It isn’t productive.”
    She wasn’t going to let him off the hook; he could see that. Her blue eyes darkened with determination. “What was Christmas like for you, when you were a boy?”
    Morgan found the question strangely unsettling. His father had been a doctor, his mother an heiress and a force of nature, especially socially. During the holiday season, they’d gone to, or given, parties every night. “Minerva—she was our cook—always roasted a hen.”
    Lizzie blinked. Waited. And finally, when certain thatnothing more was forthcoming, prodded, “That’s all? Your cook roasted a chicken? No tree? No presents? No carols?”
    â€œMy mother wouldn’t have considered dragging an evergreen into the house,” Morgan admitted. “In her opinion, the practice was crass and vulgar—and besides, she didn’t want pitch and birds’ nests all over the rugs. Every Christmas morning, when I came to the breakfast table, I found a gift waiting on the seat of my chair. It was always a book, wrapped in brown paper and tied with string. As for carols—there was a church at the end of our street, and sometimes I opened a window so I could hear the singing.”
    â€œThat sounds lonely,” Lizzie observed.
    His childhood Christmases had indeed been lonely, Morgan reflected. Which made December 25 just like the other 364 days of the year. For a moment he was a boy again, he and Minerva feasting solemnly in the kitchen of the mansion, just the two of them. His dedicated father was out making a house call, his mother sleeping off the effects of a merry evening passed among the strangers she preferred to him.
    â€œIf you hadn’t mentioned a cook,” Lizzie went on, when he didn’t speak, “I would have thought you’d grown up in a hovel.”
    He smiled at that. His mother had regarded him as an inconvenience, albeit an easily overlooked one. She’d often rued the day she’d married a poor country doctor instead of a financier, like her late and sainted sire, and made no secret of her regret. Morgan’s father had endured by staying away from home as much as possible, often taking his young son along on his roundswhen he,