The Real Christmas Message

Dear Reader,

One hundred. Doesn’t matter how many times I say it, I still can’t believe that’s how many books I’ve written. It’s a fabulous feeling but more fabulous still is the news that Mills & Boon are issuing every single one of my backlist as digital titles. Wow. I can’t wait to share all my stories with you - which are as vivid to me now as when I wrote them.

There’s BOUGHT FOR HER HUSBAND, with its outrageously macho Greek hero and A SCANDAL, A SECRET AND A BABY featuring a very sexy Tuscan. THE SHEIKH’S HEIR proved so popular with readers that it spent two weeks on the USA Today charts and…well, I could go on, but I’ll leave you to discover them for yourselves.

I remember the first line of my very first book: “So you’ve come to Australia looking for a husband?” Actually, the heroine had gone to Australia to escape men, but guess what? She found a husband all the same! The man who inspired that book rang me up recently and when I told him I was beginning my 100th story and couldn’t decide what to write, he said, “Why don’t you go back to where it all started?”

So I did. And that’s how A ROYAL VOW OF CONVENIENCE was born. It opens in beautiful Queensland and moves to England and New York. It’s about a runaway princess and the enigmatic billionaire who is infuriated by her, yet who winds up rescuing her. But then, she goes and rescues him… Wouldn’t you know it?

I’ll end by saying how very grateful I am to have a career I love, and to thank each and every one of you who has supported me along the way. You really are very dear readers.

Love,

Sharon xxx

Mills & Boon are proud to present a thrilling digital collection of all Sharon Kendrick’s novels and novellas for us to celebrate the publication of her amazing and awesome 100th book! Sharon is known worldwide for her likeable, spirited heroines and her gorgeous, utterly masculine heroes.

SHARON KENDRICK once won a national writing competition, describing her ideal date: being flown to an exotic island by a gorgeous and powerful man. Little did she realise that she’d just wandered into her dream job! Today she writes for Mills & Boon, featuring her often stubborn but always to-die-for heroes and the women who bring them to their knees. She believes that the best books are those you never want to end. Just like life…

Comfort and Joy: The Real Christmas Message

Sharon Wirdnam

writing as Sharon Wirdnam

www.millsandboon.co.uk

Contents

Cover

Dear Reader

About the Author

Title Page

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

Copyright

CHAPTER ONE

‘I WONDER if he’ll be home in time for Christmas?’

‘Who?’ asked Lara absently—she was unloading a last box of water for injections from a large cardboard container.

Dr Cunningham smiled at her from behind the old-fashioned spectacles he always wore. ‘Why, Nick, of course. You remember Nick, don’t you?’

Twenty ampoules of H2O almost hit the deck. Remember him? No woman who had met Nick Cunningham for a tenth of a second would be likely to forget him, she thought. But then of course—she hadn’t been a woman when she’d met him. Just a girl.

‘Yes, I remember him,’ she replied. ‘Vaguely.’

Just who did she think she was kidding? Sometimes she felt that she could have taken an exam on the subject of Nick Cunningham, she remembered him so well!

It was as bright and as clear as yesterday. . . Christmas Eve, seven years ago. . .

She had been fifteen. And fat.

Nick had been years older, of course—almost twenty-four. The whole town knew that he’d recently qualified as a doctor—following in his father’s footsteps. Rumours abounded in small towns, but one of the most enduring that festive season was that Nick Cunningham was coming home for Christmas.

Every female under forty had held her breath, wondering if he would attend the Christmas Eve dance. Lara could still recall it: the collective sigh like the cooing of a hundred wood pigeons as he’d walked into the hall.

It had been her first dance and the hall had looked magnificent. The sight of the pink and silver balloons and the garlands of laurel leaves had more than made up for the fact that finding something suitable to wear had proved a Herculean task, and that in the end she’d resembled a pink blancmange. But at least the heavy golden hair had come up trumps as usual, gleaming in a thick curtain to her shoulders. And her mother had allowed her the faintest smear of blue eye-shadow, which made her dancing eyes look impossibly blue.

And when the paper cloths covering the buffet supper on the trestle tables were removed, there was a murmur of appreciation. What food! Lara moved forward, to pile heaps of chicken drumsticks and sausage rolls and French bread and cheese on to her plate.

And just at that moment, Nick Cunningham had walked in wearing a dark overcoat, snow sprinkled on to the black hair, and she was unable to touch a morsel.

She had tried not to stare at him—others were not succeeding quite so well!—but he was hard to miss. He was the tallest man in the room, and the most elegant—and whoever had invented the suit would have been delighted to see it worn by Nick Cunningham.

He stood talking to his father for most of the time, but their conversation was interrupted time and time again by a constant stream of young women, eager to meet him.

And then the last dance was announced. Couples began drifting on to the dance-floor. Lara knew that at least four girls refused offers in the hope that he would be the one to ask them. Feeling gloomy, she started to move towards the lemon squash.

There was a tap on her shoulder, and a deep voice was saying, ‘Would you like to dance?’ and she had found herself looking up into the most handsome face she had ever seen outside the movies.

Was she dreaming? She blinked to find him still looking down at her expectantly.

‘I—I’d love to,’ she stammered.

The disc jockey put on ‘I’m Dreaming of a White Christmas’ by Bing Crosby, and he took her into his arms.

It defied all description. She would nurse the memory for years, like a special friend, reliving it time and time again. Recalling dreamily the light touch of his hands on her waist. The elusive, wonderful masculine scent of him. The smiling way he had bent to talk to her.

In the few minutes it took for the famous crooner to croon out the most famous Christmas song in the world, he managed to coax a hesitant life-story out of her. That she lived with her parents in Stonebridge, that she had an older brother who was hoping to go to university.

‘And what do you want to do, when. . .’ There was a slight pause.

She was sure that he had been going to say ‘when you grow up’, but instead he said ‘when you leave school’.

She frowned. ‘Oh—be a nurse. Or a teacher—I’m not sure.’

His eyes twinkled. ‘Be a nurse,’ he said. ‘You’ve got a beautiful smile. You’d be a good nurse!’

Had he really said that?

The dance ended, he excused himself, and Lara wandered out to the washroom in a happy daze, her cheeks flushed, her blue eyes sparkling.

She heard only the tail-end of the conversation.

‘Fancy dancing with fat Lara King!’

‘Did you see her dress? She must have used two pairs of curtains to make it!’

‘Thank goodness she didn’t step on the poor man’s foot—she’d have broken it!’

Their giggles drowned out the sound of her retreating footsteps. She found her shawl and her friend Joan MacCormack, and they walked home, Lara strangely silently.

But she never forgot Nick Cunningham, or the dance, or the things those girls had said, and the following morning she had refused sugar in her coffee, and a second slice of toast, and the sweet shop missed seeing her cheery face on the way home from school every day.

She did a year’s nannying in between leaving school and starting her nurse training. She also lost three stones in weight. Her parents retired and moved up north, but Stonebridge was her home, and last year, after her hospital staffing experience, she had come back to Stonebridge to work for old Dr Cunningham.

She had answered the advertisement in the Nursing Times, not really thinking about who the GP asking for a practice nurse might be. After all, Stonebridge was a medium-sized town with nearly eighteen thousand patients—and there were more than eight doctors practising there.

None the less, Lara was surprised and delighted to find that Dr Cunningham was the doctor in question—even more so when she got the job. And if she was perfectly honest with herself, she knew that part of her delight lay in the possibility of seeing Nick again, wondering what he would think of the young woman who was no longer a fat, gauche schoolgirl, but a qualified nurse who was slim, fit and confident.

But her girlish hopes quickly faded, and her memory of Nick grew tarnished, when she realised with a pang that he had little time for his father. His visits were few, and fleeting—apparently—for he had never once called at the surgery in the year she’d worked there. . .

Her blue eyes clouded over at the thought, as she neatly folded up the empty cardboard box.

Dr Cunningham looked at her fondly. ‘A penny for them, my dear? You looked miles away—and why so pensive?’

Lara liked and respected her boss immensely. It simply didn’t occur to her not to say the first thing which came into her head.

‘I was thinking that Nick doesn’t come to see you very often.’

Dr Cunningham signed the last of the prescriptions she had placed before him with a flourish. ‘Oh—Nick’s far too busy a young man to spend all his time trotting to Stonebridge and back. He’s doing surgery, you know! Busy men, surgeons!’

She knew that all right. She also knew that Dr Cunningham’s own dreams lived on vicariously through his son.

John Cunningham had himself cherished hopes of becoming a surgeon. At school he had excelled, winning the prestigious Forman science cup. There were great hopes for the tall young man with the slight stoop.

And then a man named Adolf Hitler had invaded Poland, and, along with the lives destroyed in the second great war which followed, lay the dreams of John Cunningham.

By the time he returned from fighting, his burning ambition had left him. He was older, wiser, and a great deal sadder. He took up his deferred place at medical school, but the many years of training needed for surgery now seemed an insurmountable obstacle, and instead he opted for general practice.

Eventually he married, and his son Nick instead proved to be his finest achievement, especially when his mother succumbed to and died from influenza when he was still a boy.

It was no wonder, thought Lara as she ticked the last box of ampoules off on the pharmacy list, that he was so proud of his son’s achievements. It was just a pity the son couldn’t spend a little more time at home.

It was a busy morning. Dr Cunningham was a single-handed practitioner and Lara wasn’t just his practice nurse, but his receptionist and his secretary all rolled into one!

In the morning she booked patients in for the first surgery of the day, answered the phone, and took requests for repeat prescriptions. After surgery, on some days she gave injections, or took blood-pressure readings. Then she—rather slowly—typed up the hospital referrals. She’d started going to night-school to improve her typing, and since then it had progressed from the faltering two-fingered variety to something fast approaching forty words a minute!

The trouble with a doctor’s surgery, she had thought more than once, was that there were always interruptions—which meant that inevitably you never had as much time as you thought you did.

Lara had returned from visiting a mother with her new baby at home, and was collecting together the cards for the afternoon surgery when the phone rang. Dr Cunningham was out on an emergency visit, and he was due to start surgery in ten minutes, and, what was more, Mrs Morgan was bound to complain loudly and bitterly if she was kept waiting!

Please don’t let it be a visit, she prayed, as she picked up the phone.

‘Hello?’

She almost dropped the receiver. She hadn’t heard the voice for seven years, and it had only spoken a few words to her, but those words were engraved on her memory as boldly as if they had been written in letters of fire—and just as memorable was the voice that had spoken them.

‘Hello?’ The voice repeated, sounding puzzled. ‘Is that Dr Cunningham’s surgery?’

‘Y-yes,’ stammered Lara, making a huge effort to pull herself together. ‘This is Dr Cunningham’s surgery—how may I help you?’

‘Who’s that?’ The voice sounded interested.

‘This is Lara.’ She drew in a deep breath. ‘Lara King—the practice nurse and receptionist. Who’s speaking, please?’ She felt such a fraud as she asked the question, but imagine his horror if she’d suddenly said, ‘Hello, Nick.’

‘This is Nick—Dr Cunningham’s son. Is he there?’

‘I’m sorry, no. I’m afraid he’s out on a visit. Can I ask him to ring you?’

There was a pause. ‘No, I’ve got to go out now. Will you give him a message for me?’

‘Certainly.’

‘Just tell him that I’ll be home, would you? I’ll be home for Christmas.’

It was a pity that a whooping cough epidemic should coincide with the return of the prodigal son, thought Lara, a touch bitterly, as she pushed the wire trolley round the brightly lit supermarket. And poor Dr Cunningham had been rushed off his feet—it wasn’t good at his age. So what alternative did she have but to offer to do the shopping for him?

She put a packet of figs into the already loaded trolley and added one of dates for good measure. Dr Cunningham had invited her to join them for Christmas lunch—and then promptly asked if she’d mind cooking it!

‘Would you mind, my dear?’ he had asked tentatively. ‘He’s worked for so many Christmases, and so have I. I’d like to make this one to remember.’

Lara would have found the request difficult to resist anyway, but, coupled with the fact that she still had a ridiculously strong schoolgirlish crush on the man in question. . . Her smile was huge as she nodded her agreement.

Days began to be ticked off on the calendar.

On the twentieth of December, a baby almost died from the whooping cough and had to be admitted to the hospital as an emergency.

‘Baby Rawlins is touch and go,’ said Dr Cunningham, his face grave.

Mrs Rawlins’ husband was being flown home from his RAF base the following morning.

‘I’ll go and sit with his wife at the hospital,’ promised Lara.

Dr Cunningham’s eyes shone. ‘You’re a good girl, Lara,’ he said.

‘Nonsense,’ she said briskly, and began to button up her gabardine.

On the twenty-first, young Alicia le Saux was rushed to hospital with appendicitis and Mrs Donaldson discovered that she was pregnant. Lara was in surgery with Dr Cunningham when he announced the result of the urine test.

‘It’s positive,’ he said gruffly. ‘You’re going to have a baby.’

Lara had to provide wads of tissues for the woman to dry her eyes and blow her nose. At the end of surgery Dr Cunningham found a bottle of port waiting for him on the reception desk. The Donaldsons had been trying for a baby for over ten years.

On the twenty-second, a woman of twenty-four was recalled because her cervical smear showed that there had been pre-cancerous changes.

On the twenty-third there was a succession of sore throats, and so many parents who were anxious about the whooping cough brought their children in with non-existent ‘sniffles’ that Lara thought she would scream.

On the twenty-fourth, old Mr Parker finally died, after a long and debilitating illness. And Nick Cunningham arrived.

He had not been expected so early. Surgery had finished at midday, and Lara had offered to help make the house presentable. Dr Cunningham had a cleaner, but it was the little touches which made a house home, especially at Christmas, and Lara bustled around hanging holly, buying a tree to decorate with all the baubles which they’d fished out of the attic. She could see that Dr Cunningham was getting quite unusually excited.

She was standing on a chair, positioning the voileclad fairy on the top of the tree, when she heard the distant peal of a doorbell. She imagined it to be a patient, or a neighbour, but then she heard exclamations of obvious joy, and she knew that it was Nick.

It was not how she had planned it to be, their reunion. She had spent the afternoon in the kitchen, preparing a beef Wellington and making batch after batch of mince pies. Consequently, the heavy golden hair was drawn back in a severe ponytail, her un-made-up face was pink and shiny, and there was a smear of pastry on one cheek. Her jeans were faded and old, and a button of the old shirt she wore had come undone near the waist, showing a glimpse of summer-brown midriff.

She turned round just as he walked into the room, a few large flakes of snow glittering on the coalblack wavy hair, just as they had all those years ago. He was less tall than she remembered, but still a head above his father, and the hair now had the odd streak of silver-grey at the temples. The face too, was older, but even more handsome, if that were possible—the lines around the blue-grey eyes showed a new maturity.

He stood, framed in the oak doorway, staring at her, an unsure expression flitting across the craggy features.

And then he smiled, and it was like the sun coming out. ‘Hello,’ he said. ‘You must be. . .’

Her welcoming expression froze for a split second. ‘I’m Lara King,’ she replied calmly. ‘Your father’s nurse. We spoke on the phone.’

The smile widened. ‘Yes, of course. Pleased to meet you, Lara.’

She climbed down from the chair, moving a piece of tinsel away from the back of it, hoping that he wouldn’t notice her high colour.

Of course he wouldn’t remember her—why the hell should he? They hadn’t even been introduced, had they? And everyone said she didn’t look like the same girl any more. A three-minute dance with a fat and blushing schoolgirl nearly seven years ago hardly merited the description of something he would never forget, now did it?

Her smile had about a quarter of its usual radiance, but she managed a pretty fair imitation of it, and was about to speak when there was some commotion just behind him.

In came Dr Cunningham, and behind him a woman.

The woman moved elegantly into the room, taking in the scene of the young girl by the Christmas tree standing gazing wide-eyed at the dark doctor on whose arm she now laid an authoritative beige kid glove.

To Lara, she seemed the palest woman she had ever seen. Pale blonde hair and pale pink lips and nails. Pale grey eyes. Even her clothes were pale. A beige coat of the softest leather, with cuffs and collar in some pale fur. Lara chewed on her lip just a little—fancy having the nerve to wear fur in this day and age!

The woman was speaking now; she had a low, American drawl. ‘Cat got your tongue, Nick? Aren’t you going to introduce me?’

For the briefest moment he actually looked uncertain, something which somehow surprised Lara, then came that smile again.

‘This is Lara King, my father’s nurse. Lara, this is Annabel Hummerstone—my fiancée.’

CHAPTER TWO

THIS wasn’t how it was supposed to happen at all, thought Lara, as she moved forward automatically to shake the immaculately manicured hand, from which the glove had now been removed to reveal a huge, sparkling diamond solitaire ring.

She made polite small talk, but as soon as she could she excused herself and left, heading off home on her rusty old bicycle, refusing all offers of a lift from both Cunningham doctors, and sure she saw a smile of relief on the face of the stunningly beautiful Annabel.

She spent Christmas Eve in the pub, with some Mends she’d known since schooldays, and they piled out at midnight, singing and laughing and jostling as the bells from the church in the square began to chime. Lara slipped in quietly at the back for midnight mass and offered up a prayer that she wouldn’t be so selfish as to spend the festive season wishing above all else that Nick Cunningham hadn’t come home with a fiancée.

On the twenty-fifth, she arrived at Dr Cunningham’s house to find herself greeted by Nick, and her cheeks went pink.

‘Where is everyone?’ she asked.

‘Annabel’s still in bed.’ Lara tried very hard not to wince. ‘And my father’s taken the dogs out. You’re nice and early.’

‘I’m cooking lunch,’ she said defensively.

He grinned. ‘Not yet, you’re not! Come and have a glass of champagne.’

‘Isn’t it too early?’ she protested, not sure if she wanted to spend any more time alone with him than was absolutely necessary.

‘Nonsense! It’s Christmas. And, what’s more, you’re not cooking the lunch like some Dickensian character—you’re going to get some help!’

They drank some champagne but Dr Cunningham still didn’t come back from walking the dogs and Annabel didn’t emerge from upstairs, and when eventually she did she didn’t look best pleased to find Lara chopping up sage for the stuffing and Nick companionably making a festive cross in each of the Brussels sprouts.

She raised a quizzical eyebrow and flopped into the nearest chair. ‘Someone get me some black coffee, quick!’ she groaned. ‘I’m hopeless in the mornings.’

But not too hopeless to make your face up immaculately, thought Lara as she filled up the kettle, and immediately felt ashamed of the thought.

Annabel was clearly someone who was used to people doing things for her. She also giggled a lot. Lara found herself wondering what on earth Nick saw in her, and then silently told herself not to be so naive. It was perfectly obvious what he saw in her. The combination of a mane of blonde hair down her back, legs up to her armpits, and a perfectly featured face. What man wouldn’t like her?

Dr Cunningham returned, and they all adjourned to the sitting-room for a drink. ‘Let’s hope things will be quiet enough so that at least we can eat our lunch in peace.’ He smiled. ‘Still, the patients don’t usually bother me unnecessarily on Christmas Day.’

Annabel threw up her hands in horror. ‘Don’t tell me you’re actually working?’ she asked.

Lara thought that she made it sound like an infectious disease!

‘Dad’s very old-fashioned,’ explained Nick. ‘He doesn’t trust anyone else to take care of his patients—though if it were me I’d join on to a rota system with the health centre here in town. That way you’d only be on call every fourth night and weekend, instead of every night.’

‘Every night?’ squeaked Annabel.

‘It isn’t as bad as it sounds,’ remonstrated Dr Cunningham gently. ‘If you educate your patients properly, then they learn to only call you in the case of a real emergency. It’s when they don’t get any degree of continuity that they feel nervous and stop trusting their doctors—and that’s when they call you out for niggling sore throats.’

‘It needn’t be like that, Dad—being on a rota doesn’t preclude educating your patients, you know!’ Nick looked at his father affectionately.