Blessings of the Season by Annie Jones

Author:Annie Jones
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, pdf
Publisher: Steeple Hill
Published: 2009-03-24T16:00:00+00:00

Chad drove to the parking lot of a deserted old gas station. The concrete was cracked, and weeds had grown up and then died in the cold of winter. Cold. He liked that feeling. He liked the damp, brisk air that smelled like wood smoke from fireplaces and drying grasses, maybe a little fertilizer from a nearby farm.

But now what? He’d been writing to a kid for nearly a year, believing she was a woman. An adult woman. His face warmed, and there wasn’t anyone to witness his embarrassment. He could only imagine what the guys in his unit would say. They would have teased the old guy who had gotten duped by a kid. His face burned a little hotter. He rolled the window down all the way.

Those letters had taken him into the life of a woman he’d never met. Isabelle—dark hair, dark eyes and unspoken dreams that she had never shared. Her husband had died before the birth of their first child, Lizzie.

The real author of the letters, that child.

He smiled a little, because the kid had spunk. He should have seen it in the letters, the sometimes childish scrawl in her handwriting. He should have known it was a girl, not a woman.

But it was Isabelle’s story, her life, that had brought him here. The stories of a town that took care of its own had drawn him to Gibson. A town that helped a widow, raised money when someone was sick or provided when a family lost their home to fire—those were the things he wanted.

He had been in a foreign country fighting for towns like Gibson to stay safe, to remain in their peaceful cocoons where Christmas was still about a Nativity in the park and “Silent Night” was sung during a community gathering. He had been fighting to give that freedom to towns in a foreign country, to people who had dreams of their own.

Lizzie might have written the letters, but the town of Gibson was real. He had fallen in love with a community he’d never known before her letters. He wanted to meet Jolynn and eat pie at the Hash-it-Out Diner. He wanted to watch the lights come on during the annual Christmas Lighting Festival, held the first Sunday in the month of December.

Somewhere deep inside he admitted that he wanted to get to know Isabelle Grant, because her smile had been the first thing he thought of when he touched American soil two months earlier.

A car pulled up behind him. Lights flashed blue, and the door opened. A young cop, tall and cautious, got out of the car. Chad reached into his back pocket for his license.

He was ready for the officer, but the guy didn’t take the paperwork. “I don’t need those. I saw you sitting here and thought you might need help. There’s a garage down the street.”

Ed’s Garage where Isabelle worked three days a week, changing oil and fixing small mechanical problems.

Chad read the guy’s name tag

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