Stella Bagwell - The Christmas She Always Wanted

“Looks like you’re not going to cut me any slack, are you?”

“Why should I?” Angie quickly countered.

“All right, I deserve that. But when I saw you, I was shocked. What are you doing here on the Sandbur?”

“I’m working. What are you doing? Rubbing elbows with the rich? Oh, sorry. I forgot—you are the rich.”

Frowning, Jubal stepped closer. “You’re still a very beautiful girl, Angie, but you’ve changed. That’s easy to see.”

“I’m not a girl any more, I’m a woman. And no, I haven’t changed. When we were together you just never saw this side of me.”

When she’d been dating Jubal she’d been a loving, carefree person. There hadn’t been a bitter bone in her body— until he’d decided to marry someone else.

Stella Bagwellbegan writing romance novels more than twenty years ago. Now, more than sixty books later, she likens her job to childbirth. The pain is great, but the rewards are too sweet to measure.

Stella married her school sweetheart thirty-seven years ago and now the two live on the Texas coast where the climate is tropical and the lifestyle blessedly slow. When Stella isn’t spinning out tales of love, she’s usually working outdoors on their little ranch, 6 Pines, helping her husband care for a herd of very spoiled horses.

They have a son, Jason, who is a maths teacher and athletic coach.

www.millsandboon.co.uk

To my son, Jason,

for keeping all my technical gadgets going!

Love you!

“How do I look? Fine enough to serve dinner guests?”

Lifting her arms away from her body, Angela Malone turned on the heel of her sandal in front of the Sandbur cook, then dropped a playful curtsy.

“Hmm,” Cook said, as she thoughtfully surveyed her young helper. “If you took off the apron you’d look like a princess in that little black dress. But since we’re serving barbecue tonight, you might ought to keep it on.”

Angela was inclined to agree. The little black dress was just a simple cotton sheath, but in spite of her having worked as a waitress at The Cattle Call Café for the past two years, she wasn’t always the most graceful. There had been times gravy and sauces had landed on her instead of on the table she was serving. But that was then. She’d moved up in life since her friend Nicci Saddler Garroway had gotten her this job on the Sandbur Ranch in south Texas. Now she was Cook’s kitchen assistant in the “big house” where the matriarch Geraldine Saddler and her son, Lex, resided. Besides helping Cook prepare and serve meals, Angela also oversaw the maids’ housecleaning, shopped for both households and generally took care of any leftover task that the maids couldn’t deal with.

“You’re probably right about the apron, Cook,” Angela told the woman. “But I do want Ms. Saddler to think I look presentable. She really seems to want to put on the dog tonight.”

Cook, a tall, thin woman in her seventies with hair that was more black than gray and lips painted as deep a red as her fingernails, walked over to where Angela was about to pick up a tray of appetizers.

“Don’t be nervous, honey. You’ve served many a table before.” Reaching up, she adjusted the tortoise-shell barrette that was holding the front of Angela’s heavy, brown hair off her face, then patted her cheek. “Pretty as a June mornin’. Now shoo. Go on with those appetizers before Geraldine comes back here to see why we’re dawdlin’.”

Grinning, Angela picked up the tray. “I’m on my way!”

Shouldering her way through the kitchen’s swinging door, Angela hurried down the long hallway that would lead her to the formal living room. Along the way, the smell of smoked shrimp, brought fresh from San Antonio Bay only the previous day, wafted up to her nose, reminding her that she’d not taken time to eat since breakfast at five that morning.

With a dinner party scheduled, she’d not had time to do anything, except help Cook prepare a whole table of elaborate dishes and make sure the maids had cleaned all the rooms and arranged fresh flowers.

As Angela neared the opening of the living room, she caught the sound of voices, both male and female, intermixed with light laughter. In the background, a CD of Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys was softly playing a waltz.

One, two, three. One, two, three, she silently hummed to the beat. How lovely it would be to be dancing, waltzing in the arms of some nice guy who didn’t care that she was a single mother.

Pushing that wishful thought away, Angela took a deep breath and stepped into the living room. One quick glance from the corner of her eye told her the space was full of people.

Careful to skirt the crowd, many of whom were standing about the room in small groups, Angela headed straight to a long table that had been set up near the wet bar. She was about to place the tray of shrimp next to a platter of fried jalapeños when Geraldine Saddler spoke up from behind her.

“Angie, if that’s the shrimp, bring it over here, please. There’s plenty of space on the coffee table.”

Turning quickly to follow the woman’s orders, Angela made her way to the middle of the room where a chesterfield couch and matching armchairs were grouped around a low coffee table.

As she carefully placed the tray on the polished oak, Geraldine spoke behind her.

“You should try these, Jubal. They’ll melt in your mouth.”

Angela momentarily froze. Surely it wasn’t him! He couldn’t be the new veterinarian for the Sandbur, the reason for this party, she thought wildly.

Her heart thudding with heavy dread, she slowly raised her head and found herself staring into the face that she’d spent the past five years desperately trying to forget.

Jubal. She didn’t know whether she whispered the name, mouthed it with her lips or silently shouted it. In any case, she could feel the blood draining from her face, hear a loud rushing noise in her ears.

She watched a flicker of recognition, then shock, cross his face, but she didn’t wait around to see if he would actually acknowledge her. She excused herself to Geraldine, then practically raced from the room.

By the time she got back to the kitchen, she was out of breath and her legs were so weak that all she could do was slump onto a bench seat.

Seeing Angela’s shaky entrance, Cook dropped a pair of tongs and hurried over to her. “Angie, what’s wrong, girl? You look like you’re gonna be sick!”

Gulping in breaths of air, Angela wiped at the sweat that had popped out suddenly on her brow and upper lip. “I—I’m okay, Cook. I think—I’ve gone too long without eating.”

That was true enough, Angela thought, as Cook stood with her hands on her hips, her black eyes full of concern.

“Hmmp. Well, it’s funny to me that you just now remembered you were starving.” Her red lips puckered into a frown. “What happened in there?”

There was no need for Cook to explain that “in there” meant the living room where he had been sitting with the Sandbur families and their friends.

“Nothing.”

“Did you spill the tray? Trip over somebody?”

She’d tripped all right, and fallen. But that had happened five years ago, she thought miserably.

“Everything is—okay, Cook. I just feel shaky.”

Closing her eyes, Angela tried to tamp down the panic racing through her. How could she go back in there and serve five courses around a table where he’d be sitting, she wondered frantically.