A Heartwarming Christmas
Box Set 2 in Heartwarming Christmas Town
Welcome to Christmas Town, Maine!
Hang the stockings, polish the Christmas tree topper, and get ready to sing carols, because the Harlequin Heartwarming authors are bringing you a dozen sweet romances set in charming Christmas Town. This year is all about family - sisters, brothers, parents, and the family you make along the way!
Here’s an excerpt from Melinda’s contribution to the collection.
Excerpt:
Theodore Lincoln could not screw up.
If he did, he’d let down the ten previous generations who’d run the family apple farm and the three living generations expecting a Lincoln family Christmas with all the bells and whistles.
Everyone – dead or alive – expected Ted to make the right decisions.
But there was a glut of apples on the market driving the price down. Last year’s crop had barely covered the taxes, much less a living for Ted, his younger sister Abigail, his parents or Uncle Ben. Abigail was on a crash course to ruin her eighteen-year-old life and the future for her two year-old daughter Lizzie. And Lizzie? She deserved Christmas to be magical. Big tree. Sparkly lights. And presents. Credit card bending presents.
Ted shouldn’t have been standing in front of the Wright grist mill on the outskirts of Christmas Town, Maine, on Thanksgiving afternoon, thinking about taking out a home equity loan to expand the farm. But there he stood, thinking, stress like a sprawling, sleeping giant in his gut.
“Well, if it isn’t Teddy Lincoln.”
Not her.
Not her.
Not her-not her-not her.
Ted popped an antacid, and then turned to face her.
Chloe Wright was the only person who called him Teddy anymore. She’d had a crush on him since she was in the third grade and he in the fourth. Back then she was a non-stop talker. Nerd to the nth degree. Overbite. Brillo copper curls. Belly fat. Dress her in green tights and a pointed red cap and she could have been a stand-in for a garden gnome.
She’d followed him around like a puppy. Through braces and bras and middle school. The other boys in Christmas Town made fun of her. And of him. Ted had wanted her to be struck by lightning. Dropped into a manhole. Teleported into another dimension.
And then, on the first day Chloe entered high school – a day Ted had been dreading – he turned at the sound of her laughter and realized she wasn’t a roly-poly puppy with an overbite. She was tall and curvy and word-stealing pretty. Her smile was worth every penny her adoptive parents had paid. And her hair…she’d straightened and tamed it. It looked touchably soft. Every guy in high school bent over backward for her attention. Every guy but Ted.
By then, he’d treated her like dirt for so long, he couldn’t swallow his pride and regret and be nice to her. For her part, she treated him as if he were dead. And who could blame her?
Ted turned to face her now, ignoring the way stress banged awake in his belly.
There was the beauty he knew so well. The long, tamed curls. The bright blue eyes. The temptingly smooth skin. But physical attributes had never outshone her personality – the optimism, the wry humor, the kindness underlying the thick skin she’d developed.
“I was sorry to hear about your father, Chloe.” A local businessman, Harold Wright had died a few months ago after a long battle with bone cancer.
“They tell me we all have to go sometime.” Her optimism had faded, he thought, her humor turned to sarcasm. She shaded her eyes from the sun gleaming off snow and the worn walls of the mill.
“He was a good man.”
She tromped through the drifts, moving closer to the mill, studying it as if it held an answer to a confounding question. Or held a memory she wasn’t sure how to categorize.
Words came to mind: perfect, mind-blowing, once-in-a-lifetime magical.
She spared Ted a half-glance as she passed.
That glance said what she thought of him: Disappointing, hurtful, liar.
The Story Behind the Story
The Annas (Adams, Stewart) and I invited 9 of our Harlequin Heartwarming author friends and put together a collection of trilogies, all set in Christmas Town. This was really fun, mostly because of the energy the authors brought to the project and how they wanted to create their own businesses in town.
The Annas and I wrote another trilogy, this time about three adopted sisters. The stories are heartfelt, but fun, too.
Amazon (now in Kindle Unlimited)
Barnes & Noble (print only)
Learn about the next box set HERE.
