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I'll Be Home for Christmas

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Overview

A collection of heartwarming holiday stories from today's stars of passionate romance!

LINDA LAEL MILLER

delivers a holiday miracle in the bittersweet tale of a young woman who can't hide her broken heart -- or her past -- when she returns to her hometown. But a sexy widower may just help her discover the true meaning of home in "Christmas of the Red Chiefs."

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Author Information

Bio of Linda Lael Miller

In 2006, New York Times bestselling author Linda Lael Miller left the Arizona horse property she's called home for the past five years and listened to the call of her heart. Packing up her dogs, Sadie and Bernice, and her four horses, the author of more than seventy novels bid farewell to her home in the desert and returned to the place of her birth, Spokane, Washington. The daughter of a town marshal, Linda grew up in Northport, WA, a community of 500 on the Columbia River, 120 miles north of Spokane. Her childhood remembrances include riding horses and playing cowgirl on her grandparents' nearby farm. Her grandparents' spread was so rustic that in the early days it lacked electricity and running water. As delightful as this childhood was, Linda longed to see the world. After graduating as valedictorian of her high school class, she left to pursue her dream at the age of eighteen. Because of the success of her writing career, Linda was able to live part-time in London for several years, spend time in Italy and travel to such far-off destinations as Russia, Hong Kong and Israel. Now, Linda says, the wanderlust is (mostly) out of her blood, and she's come full circle, back to the people and the places she knows and loves. Before Linda begins her writing day, she takes her first cup of coffee while enjoying the scenic view of the wooded draw behind her new home. The first morning there, a snowfall blanketed the pine trees, something she had missed in the desert outside Scottsdale. Still enamored with the people she came to love in Arizona, she says she will still set books in that starkly beautiful area, and, of course, Washington. Devoted to helping others pursue their dreams, the author will launch her seventh round of the Linda Lael Miller Scholarships for Women in May 2007. A talented speaker, she donates all her speaking honoraria to her scholarship fund. The stipends are awarded to women who seek to better their lot in life through education. It's no wonder the protagonists in Miller's novels are women her readers admire for their honor, courage, trustworthiness, valor and determination to succeed, despite overwhelming odds. "These qualities make them excellent role models for young women," Miller explains. "The male leads possess equally noble traits that today's woman would be delighted to find in her life's mate." The author traces the birth of her writing career to the day when a Northport teacher told her that the stories she was writing were good, that she just might have a future in writing. Later, when she decided to write novels, she endured her share of rejection before she made her first sale.

Bio of Catherine Mulvany

Catherine Mulvany is also the author of Run No More. She holds a master's degree in popular fiction from Seton Hill University in Pennsylvania and has taught school for fifteen years. Married with three children, she lives in the Pacific Northwest. Visit her website at www.catherinemulvany.com.

Bio of Julie Leto

With twenty novels under her belt, USA Today bestselling author Julie Leto has established a reputation for writing ultra-sexy, edgy stories. A Florida native, Julie lives in her hometown of Tampa with her husband, daughter, a very spoiled dachshund, and a large and beloved extended family. She's currently writing the next installment in her Marisela Morales series for Downtown Press, tentatively titled Dirty Little Lies. For more information about Julie's upcoming releases, visit her website at www.julieleto.com

Bio of Roxanne St. Claire

Roxanne started writing stories during eighth grade algebra class to escape x. She didn't know what x equaled. She didn't believe x actually equaled anything. Letters belong in words and words belong in sentences and sentences belong in the most magnificent place of all ' books. Books have been her passion since she galloped through Black Beauty at nine, breezed through Gone with the Wind at 11, soared with The Moonspinners at 13, and then wallowed in the Valley of the Dolls right around the time her braces came off and she discovered ' boys. Although she reads anything and everything ' including four newspapers a day ' Roxanne has never left the comfort of romance novels for very long. While attending UCLA, she worked at a Los Angeles TV station where the news producer convinced her to legally change her last name from Zink to St. Claire so he could do a segment on how to change your name, complete with cameras in the courtroom when the decree was pronounced official. Only in L.A.! After graduating with a degree in mass communications, Roxanne appeared on the sitcoms Laverne & Shirley and Bosom Buddies and hosted a talk show called Between the Piers. Since it soon became evident she didn't have a future as Loni Anderson or Jane Pauley, she took her glamorous, legal name into the world of public relations and immediately found her niche. By day she promoted products and people, but at night ' she still read and scribbled tales of love and adventure.

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Additional Info

Imprint

Pocket

Filesize

685.71 KB

Number of Pages

432

eBook ISBN

9781416548348

Awards

  • RITA Award

Excerpt from: I'll Be Home for Christmas by Linda Lael Miller

From Christmas of the Red Chiefs

Chapter One



The bus door opened with a pneumatic whoosh, alongside the Mega-Pumper gas station, and expelled my twelve-year-old stepdaughter Marlie and me on the exhale. Marlie juggled her backpack and fashionably tiny purse while I schlepped a weekender and my tote bag.

We were the last two passengers, arriving in a place where neither of us wanted to be -- my hometown of Bent Tree Creek, California -- and as we stood there on the asphalt, our ears stinging from a snow-laced breeze and our most recent scathing argument, my heart attempted a swan dive and belly flopped instead.

"It so seriously sucks that we don't even have a car," Marlie said. Toes curled over the edge of the precipice between childhood and raging adolescence, she'd recently morphed from a sweet and very girly girl into the reigning mistress of hormonal contempt.

I raised the collar of my too-thin coat against the bitter cold and stifled a sigh. These days Marlie did enough sighing for both of us, but it wasn't as if she didn't have reason. Her dad and my husband, Craig Wagner, had been killed in the crash of a small private plane eighteen months before. Since then, we'd lost a lot -- the beach bungalow in San Diego, the family printing business, two cars, and a lot of illusions.

At least I'd lost my illusions. Marlie was still clinging to hers, and who could blame her? She was so very young, and the world she'd known before Craig's death had collapsed around her.

Her Real Mother -- recently, Marlie had taken to capitalizing the words every time she uttered them, lest I think for one moment she was talking about me, mama non grata -- worked as a pole dancer in some second-rate club in Reno, when she wasn't in rehab for alcohol and/or drugs. Brenda, stage name: Bambi, was a subject we mostly avoided.

"Yes," I agreed, remembering my vintage MG roadster with a pang. "It sucks that we don't have a car." My eyes burned, but it wasn't an opportune time to cry. I had two rules about shedding tears: I had to be alone, and I had five minutes to feel sorry for myself, max. At first, when I'd found out Craig had let all but one of his life insurance policies lapse, lied to me about our financial situation in general, and left us with a pile of debt, I'd actually set one of those little electronic kitchen timers to make sure I didn't go over the time limit for helpless weeping.

Of course there had been good times with Craig -- he'd been handsome, funny, and full of life, but now those things seemed more like half-forgotten dreams than reality.

While the bus driver unloaded the rest of our earthly belongings -- stuffed into four large suitcases and two moving boxes sealed with copious amounts of duct tape -- Marlie took in her new surroundings.