Kathleen Creighton - Silhouette Christmas Stories

Dear Reader,

Christmas is a special season, and at Silhouette Books, we've created a special tradition to celebrate this time of giving-Silhouette Christmas Stories. This year marks the fifth volume of our Christmas collection, and I think you'll find it a treasure from start to finish!

Ann Major has written a heartwarming story of a lost love and the miracle of wishes, Santa and Christmas in "Santa's Special Miracle." Rita Rainville's "Lights Out!" holds all the wit, charm and high-voltage humor we have come to expect from this talented author. Critically acclaimed for her military romances, Lindsay McKenna has created a touching portrayal of the power of love in "Always and Forever." In Kathleen Creighton's "The Mysterious Gift," two lonely people find that the magic of Christmas is really the magic of love when a mysterious gift appears.

From beginning to end, these four gifted authors have created a special gift for you, their readers, with this collection. All of us at Silhouette Books thank you for your support, and wish you the very best this holiday season and in the coming year.

Happy Holidays!

Isabel Swift

Editorial Manager

A recipe from Ann Major:

CHRISTMAS DATE-NUT FRUIT CAKE

4 whole eggs

2 lbs (8 cups) pecans (whole halves)

1 lb (1/2 cups) whole Brazil nuts

2 cups flour

2 cups candied pineapple

2 cups candied cherries, halved

2 cups dates

1 cup sugar

1/2 cup rum or 1/2 cup bourbon (I use bourbon)

2 tbsp vanilla

2 tsp baking powder

1/2 tsp salt

In a large bowl, beat eggs. Gradually add sugar and vanilla. Cream together. Add flour, baking powder, salt, nuts and fruit, mixing well with large spoon after each addition.

Line 2 bread loaf pans with wax paper, glossy side inward. Divide mixture between pans. Firmly mash into pans, making sure all air pockets are removed and mixture is compact.

Place in cold oven. Set oven at 325° F. Bake for 1 hour or until knife inserted in center of cake comes out dry.

Remove pans from oven and pour rum or bourbon over cakes while hot.

Serve cake sliced into thin pieces as a snack or dessert, adding ice cream or whipped cream as desired. The nuts and fruit may make the cake appear like stained glass. Any way you serve it, this cake is beautiful in appearance and delicious in taste.

Oh, why had she let Sara and Jim and their children talk her into driving with them into San Antonio to shop?

Lights and red and gold velvet streamers sparkled from the ceiling of San Antonio's River Center Mall. A festive, last-minute mania infected the shoppers and salespeople who hustled and bustled everywhere.

But Noreen Black couldn't get into the Christmas spirit. Instead she felt a quiet desperation, an aching loneliness. Oh, sure, she'd bought half a dozen gifts. Sure, she was being jostled along in the crowd like everybody else during the holiday season. And right now she was struggling to keep a tight grip on Darius's little hand as well as manage her huge shopping sacks. But unlike everyone else who seemed in a joyful mood, Noreen felt only despair.

Suddenly through the crowd Noreen saw a tall man with broad shoulders and darkly handsome good looks threading his way toward her.

It couldn't be! No! Not Grant! Not after all these years. Not when she had Darius clinging tightly to her fingers.

She wanted to run, to cry out. Instead her panic overwhelmed her, and she did the most foolish thing of all. She simply froze.

Then, right before he headed into a luxurious lingerie shop, the man turned and saw her. She felt an instant sensation of doom. For a fleeting second he studied her with one of those quick, assessing, male glances. He saw a beautiful woman in her early thirties who was tall and delicate of feature. A woman who had enormous, dark, frightened eyes. A woman with a shocking mass of jet-black hair bound untidily in a lopsided knot. A woman who wore a bright animal-print scarf and baggy sweater and had a Bohemian air about her. But she was not someone he knew. He smiled briefly and vanished inside the shop.

He was just a stranger. A stranger with gray eyes instead of Grant's vivid, beautiful blue ones. A stranger who probably thought her too dull in her unfashionable clothes, or too skinny. He wasn't Grant. Wasn't even remotely like Grant. Still, it took a second for Noreen's shock to subside.

Just being in San Antonio was enough to make Noreen as nervous as a cat, and today, despite her cheery pretenses, had been no different. San Antonio was part of her past, part of that other life that she had deliberately walked away from five years ago, part of Grant. Even the briefest visit to the city could fill her with an intense sensation of loss and loneliness and leave her depressed for days. A part of her had died here, and she had never recovered.

Of course, living as she did only fifty miles away in a Texas town so small and so poor that it had no doctor or shopping facilities, she had to come into the city from time to time. Never once had she run into Grant or his mother, but the threat of that happening had always been in her mind. She found herself look-ing around with a strange mixture of excitement and dread in the pit of her stomach, as if she were unconsciously searching the crowd for Grant's black head, for his tall, wide-shouldered form.

Darius suddenly yanked free of his mother's grip, and Noreen felt close to panic again. Then she saw that he was racing for the line of children waiting to talk to Santa. Darius loped ahead of her as eagerly and trustingly as a puppy, his short quick legs spraddling everywhere, shoestrings snapping in all directions, sure his mother would follow at her proper adult pace.

Watching him, she smiled fondly. Instead of Velcro fasteners, he insisted on shoelaces because his best friend's teenage brother, Raymond Liska, had laces. It did no good to tell Darius that big brothers could have laces because they were able to tie them.

There was an empty bench right in front of Santa's Workshop, and Noreen sank down on it, piling her bundles beside her. Her feet ached all the way up her calves to her knees. She loosened her scarf. It wasn't even noon yet, and she was exhausted from shopping and from chasing Darius-two jobs she vowed long ago never to take on simultaneously.

But Christmas was coming soon, and all four-year-old boys had to talk to Santa at least once. Darius had talked to five Santas since Thanksgiving. Every time he had done so, his big blue eyes had grown huge as he'd leaned into Santa's ear and whispered. When she'd asked him what he wanted he'd refused to tell her.

"Santa knows," he would say wisely.

Today Noreen had dragged him to every toy store in the mall. With huge shining eyes, Darius had handled the toys, at first with exuberant enthusiasm, until she'd asked him, "What do you want?" Then he had reluctantly set the toys back at cockeyed angles on the shelf. His darling baby-plump face had become still, and his answer had been reverent and enigmatic.

"Santa knows."

"You must tell Mommy."

"Why?"

Little did he know that she had almost nothing for him under the tree. That was the main reason she had let the Liskas persuade her to come into San Antonio.

As Noreen watched Darius jump joyfully into Santa's plump red velvet lap she thought, At least he'll sit still for a second and I can catch my breath.

"Silent Night," her favorite Christmas carol, was being piped over the sound system. For the first time since seven that morning when she'd climbed into the Liskas' Suburban, she relaxed. She glanced down at her wristwatch. She and Darius still had an hour to shop before they were to rendezvous with the Liskas and their four children for lunch on the river at Casa Rio.

Noreen groaned inwardly as she watched Darius unwrap the peppermint candy cane that Santa had given him and whisper into Santa's ear at the same time. Santa was going to have sticky ears. Sugar made Darius absolutely hyper. He wouldn't eat lunch, and he probably wouldn't nap on the way home.

"So what special present do you want Santa to bring you this year, young man?" Santa asked.

"Special?" The word was new. Darius licked his candy cane thoughtfully.

"The best present you've ever gotten?" Santa prompted.

Darius whispered again, but Santa couldn't make out the whisper and told him so.

Darius's eager, piping voice rang through the store. "The best present ever? A daddy that's even better than Leo's, that's what!"

Noreen looked up sharply at her son, all the old sorrow upon her. Her brown eyes grew bleak. She had tried to explain so many times to Darius that his father was in Heaven. She'd framed her favorite picture of Larry and kept it in Darius's room.

Noreen scarcely heard Santa's low rumble. But she heard her son's matter-of-fact reply. "Nope. Just a daddy."

"What about a toy truck or a car?"

Darius shook his black head as stubbornly as his father would have. As stubbornly as any Hale.

Santa was setting the child down, helping him get his balance as Noreen came over and gently took Darius's hand.

"You could have told me what you wanted," she said softly to her son, her voice immeasurably sad.

"Do you think Santa can really bring me a daddy?"

"Honey, I told you how your father died. You have his picture on that little table by your bed."