Emilie's Christmas Love Read Online Free Page A

with the occasional pat on the head and the comment on the way that she was dressed.
    They’d died when Emilie was eighteen, just out of high school. Their latest passion, racing planes, had gone terribly wrong and they’d crashed into a mountainside.
    Long before that, Emilie had taken over the day-to-day running of the big house and the extensive grounds. She’d made sure that her parents had food to eat and replaced her father's socks when they were worn. She’d purchased their plane tickets to Spain and kept them up to date with the family's charities.
    John and Regina Ferrier were both beautiful, charming people with swarms of friends. Emilie arranged lavish parties at the mansion, sometimes doing the catering for the hundred or so guests herself.
    The mansion had been a different place without their laughter and energy. Even when they’d been gone on some wild excursion and she was planning for their return, it had been exciting. Her world had become very quiet without them.
    Not being like her parents, Emilie had chosen a much different life. She'd gone on to college and started teaching school as soon as she'd finished.
    Joda had been outraged at a Ferrier lowering herself to teach school. Emilie wouldn't be dissuaded. She loved working with children, even the difficult ones. It gave her a purpose, a reason to get up in the morning.
    Emilie ate toast and coffee for breakfast, as she always did. She went down to the garage and started her father’s old BMW. It purred to life, even though she rarely drove it, or the other three cars there. She liked the Mercedes.
    She thought about Nick, and the maintenance he did on her cars to keep them running. She didn’t like the idea that she had ignored something that was done for her. It was one thing to pay someone, and another to appreciate that person. Emilie had always tried to do both.
    Or at least, she thought she had.
    Joda said the people in town hated them because they were Ferriers. Emilie wondered if it was more because she and her aunt kept to themselves. They were strangers in the town named for their family.
    Maybe she needed to get out more. There were probably many other new people she’d never met. Perhaps none so interesting . . .
    It had been the night and the disappointment, she reminded herself. She’d never been attracted to someone so quickly before.
    She pulled out of the huge garage that had been built to hold ten cars. She'd sold the other cars that her parents had left behind. She’d kept the Mercedes, the BMW and the Bentley. She’d also kept her father's red Lamborghini. It had been his particular favorite. She never planned to drive it, but didn’t want to part with the memory of seeing him behind the wheel.
    Sometimes, she thought, pulling down the long drive, glancing up at the red brick mansion silhouetted against the white hills, she felt that she should sell everything. The house was too big for two women. The stables had been empty for years. There was a cottage for the gardener and a cottage for the housekeeper that hadn't been used since she was a child. The estate covered most of the mountaintop, looking down at the lights from the town and the highway that snaked around it.
    She'd kept it all because she had wonderful memories of growing up there and had always thought her children would love to run through the apple orchard and play in the waterfall that rushed down the side of the mountain into the stream that meandered through the grounds.
    Joda was another obstacle to selling. Emilie knew she could never move the older woman to a condominium. She had been born and raised there, running wild with the moon, and she wanted to die there.
    Until then, Emilie sighed, she would have to rattle around in the big house that her great- grandfather had built. She hoped the time would come that she’d find a child to share her life.
    It was Wednesday morning, but the week had just begun for the children. Monday and Tuesday had been