Christmas With A Stranger by Catherine Spencer

Author:Catherine Spencer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harlequin
Published: 2011-06-27T00:00:00+00:00

By great good fortune, Agnes had been a size eight, too. Her faded blue jeans, softened by many launderings to the texture of doeskin, fit perfectly. Sorting through the other items, Jessica selected a hand-knit sweater that came down past her hips, a cream down jacket with a fur-trimmed hood, two pairs of heavy wool socks to wear under the fleece-lined boots, and a pair of thick leather gloves. But she shook her head at the long red thermal underwear and tucked it back inside the box. She didn’t plan to spend any longer outside than it took to gather a few pieces of holly.

The problem was, whatever tool Clancy had used to cut the cedar was nowhere to be found and the holly branches were sturdy as well as prickly. The kitchen scissors were no match for the job, nor was the steak knife she seconded. Frustrated and out of breath, she surveyed the bright-berried limb dangling miserably but stubbornly from the tree. Obviously, without the proper tools, she wasn’t going to have much success.

“Stay inside the house”, Morgan had said. But the stables stood a mere hundred yards or so away. Hardly a life-threatening distance, now that she had the right kind of clothing to protect her, surely?

But the cold wind from which she’d been protected by the bulk of the house caught her as she turned the corner and just about froze the breath in her lungs. Hugging the jacket hood closely around her face and wishing she hadn’t been so quick to discard Agnes’s winter underwear, she struggled across the open ground to the stable and slid back the heavy door just enough to let herself through the opening.

Her arrival went unnoticed at first and for a moment she leaned against the door and simply inhaled the gentle warmth of the place. A window high on the end wall let in what was left of the daylight and two electric lamps suspended from a center beam spilled mellow pools of gold over the scene.

Shadowed stalls lined each side wall, five to the left and five to the right, with a concrete-floored aisle separating them. Steps immediately to the right of the door by which she’d come in led up to a half-loft piled high with bales of bright straw and pale-tinted hay.

To her left, another half-open door showed a small room, the walls of which were hung with the trappings one might expect to find around horses. Saddles and bridles, blankets and liniments, oils and brushes.

The entire place was filled with the scents of hay and clean straw and the faintly astringent smell of animals. The air was full of soft sound: hooves rustling on straw, contented munching, water gurgling down twin drinking channels, and somewhere out of sight the deep baritone murmur of men at work together.

Something about the place—the hushed tranquillity perhaps, or the far window, stained now with the deep blue of the midwinter afternoon and shot with rose from the dying sun—reminded her of a church.

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