Tanya Michaels: Their Precious Christmas Miracle: Mistletoe Baby / In the Spirit of...Christmas / A Baby By Christmas

For just a second, her memories reverted to her own walk down the aisle four and a half years ago. The sanctuary doors had opened, and despite the dozens of people present, her gaze had gone straight to David standing at the front of the church. Dark-haired and blue-eyed, he’d been impossibly handsome in his tuxedo. It was the smile, the way he’d beamed at her, though, that had made him breathtaking.

When she’d made the painful decision after Thanksgiving to separate from her husband, it had been in part because she couldn’t remember the last time she’d seen that smile. The two of them had become so much less than they once were, than they should have been.

Marshaling her expression into a smile, Rachel smoothed a few wayward strands of her long black hair and drew aside the curtain. “Ta-da.”

Lilah Baum clapped her hands to her cheeks, like a little girl delighted with what Santa had left. For a moment, the auburn-haired woman resembled the fourth-graders she taught. “Oh, Rachel . You look just beautiful! Everything is going to be so … so …” She fanned her fingers in front of her face, trying to stem tears as she sobbed something apologetic.

Behind Lilah, twenty-three-year-old Arianne Waide rolled her eyes with wry affection, looking a lot like her oldest brother. “She’s a little emotional lately.”

The maid of honor, petite and blond Arianne wore a dress that was completely different from Rachel’s but cut from the same green satin. Clover, the seamstress had called the color. Arianne and Lilah were longtime friends who would be sisters-in-law by the end of the month. For the past four and a half years, Arianne had been Rachel’s sister-in-law, too. Rachel was closer to the young woman than she was to her actual sister back in South Carolina. Throughout Lilah and Tanner’s engagement, Arianne had joked that at long last, women would outnumber the men in the Waide family.

Her eyes stinging again, Rachel ducked her head. “Nothing wrong with being sentimental, especially right before your wedding.”

“Yeah, but it’s not your wedding.” Arianne stepped closer while Lilah dug a tissue out of her purse. She lowered her voice, her pixie features unusually somber. “You okay?”

God, no. Ending a marriage had to be painful at any time or place, but here in the close-knit community of Mistletoe, Georgia, surrounded by people who loved her and David and didn’t know they lived in opposite sides of their house, made it impossible for her to start the grieving process and move forward. Mercifully, in a few days she’d get some respite. She’d leaped at the chance to house-sit while a neighbor with multiple dogs took a fourteen-day luxury cruise. It provided Rachel a socially plausible excuse for not sleeping under the same roof as her husband, not that she’d been sleeping much.

On the plus side, she was providing tons of job security for people who manufactured under-eye concealer.

“I bet I can guess what’s wrong,” Ari said softly.

“Really?” Rachel’s heart skipped a beat. It was bad enough she and David shouldered this secret, an ironic final intimacy; she didn’t want to burden Arianne with it.

“Maybe it’ll happen next month.” Arianne squeezed her hand. “I just know you guys will make wonderful parents.”

Rachel choked back a semihysterical laugh. She thinks I started my period . It was true that, for months, she’d thought that glimpsing those first telltale signs of blood was the most upsetting thing that could happen to her. She’d recently revised her opinion.

“Someone’s gonna have to help me with this blankety-blank zipper,” came a cantankerous voice from the third dressing room. “I ain’t as limber as I used to be.”

Lilah had blotted her eyes and was now grinning. “On my way, Vonda!”

If Lilah’s bridal party wasn’t the most eclectic ever seen in Mistletoe, Georgia, it had to be in the running. Top five, easily. She had thirty-year-old Rachel, a woman who would be trying to look anywhere but at her own husband during the wedding; a maid of honor who constantly joked that after growing up with two older brothers, you couldn’t pay her to live with a man willingly again; second-grade teacher Quinn Keller, who had the face of an angel and an unexpectedly devilish sense of humor; and seventy-four-year-old Vonda Simms Kerrigan, a town fixture who’d had a hand in Lilah and Tanner’s courtship last winter. The woman was a spitfire who won nearly every card game she played and dated younger men, or as she put it, “hotties in their sixties.”

“Sorry I’m late!” Quinn said breathlessly as a saleswoman escorted her past the mirrored dais toward the fitting rooms. “Our meeting ran over.” She was on a committee bringing Christmas to local families in need.

Rachel nodded toward the space she’d just vacated. “You can use that one.”

No doubt Quinn would look sensational in her dress. Rather than try to find a gown that would suit four differing body types and ages, Lilah had asked the seamstress to create three individual dresses and, for Vonda, a suit. Quinn was the only one with the figure and attitude to pull off a strapless gown in December.

As they waited for the other women to emerge, Arianne turned to Rachel. “You know what might cheer you up? Shopping! Want to hit some stores after this?”

“Um …” In the past, she would have jumped at the suggestion, but time alone with Ari might provide too much temptation to confide in someone.

“Well, think about it,” Arianne said as she turned her attention toward a shelved display of shoes. She picked up a sling back. “Unless you and David have plans?”

“Nothing specific.” Just awkward silence and retreating to separate corners.

If she curled up in the den with a book, he turned on the television in the front living room. If she watched TV, he went for a run. She wasn’t sure if he was avoiding her because he was angry or simply trying to defuse the tension by giving her space. She wasn’t even sure how she felt about it. When he was in the room with her, it was like she couldn’t breathe and just wanted either of them to be anywhere else. Yet whenever he left, her chest hitched with the urge to call him back: Don’t go, hold me, make it better .

But that was part of the problem, wasn’t it?

She’d met him at a time in her life when she was overstressed and questioning what she wanted in life, taking a vacation from her South Carolinian life as an advertising executive in Columbia. David was a natural-born leader, evidenced by civic committees he’d headed and his volunteer duties coaching touch football in early fall and soccer in the spring. They’d barely been on two dates before he was encouraging her to let him shoulder her burdens. He’d advised her as confidently as he did five-year-olds who were confused about which goal to kick toward. It had felt like a blessing at the time.

Unfortunately, in “simplifying” her life and inviting David to gloss over her problems, Rachel had lost herself somewhere along the way. In the past year, she’d begun to question whether her husband loved her—romantically, not just dutifully—but could she really blame him for not seeing her? She wasn’t even sure who she was. Resolution number one for the New Year: find out.

David was stepping out of the shower that evening when he heard the tentative “Hello?” from the outer room. Reflexively, he clutched his towel around him, as if the woman on the other side of the door hadn’t seen his nude body a thousand times. As if she might accidentally burst in while he was undressed and make the strain between them even worse.