A Merry Little Sellwood Christmas: A Sellwood Short

By Susan Lute

"Deck the halls with boughs of holly..."

It's time to put down roots, and all Victoria Cahil wants is to keep the promise she made to her eight-year-old niece, MacKenzie. They would spend Christmas Eve in their new Queen Anne colonial home. There was only one hitch in her plan. The house needs more work than she anticipated, and Chief Deputy Gavin Stevens has put the derelict house on his "dangerous buildings" list.

Okay with his bachelor status, Gavin hasn't given a second thought to finding a family of his own...or the love of a good woman. He's survived being orphaned at a young age, Marine boot camp, three tours in a war zone, and is not often taken by surprise. But when a fiesty house renovator calls him on the carpet for condemning the sow's ear she's determined to make into a silk purse, he begins to wonder. Can he survive the provocative Tori Cahil with his heart...and bachelorhood intact during a holiday season when Christmas miracles are practically the norm?

Heartwarming stories about family...community...and the journey home

• Language: English
• Publisher: Susan Lute
• Release date: Dec 13, 2015
• ISBN: 9780990960768

Book preview

A Merry Little Sellwood Christmas

A Merry Little Sellwood Christmas

A Sellwood Short

Susan Lute

Crazy Hair Publishing

Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

About the Author

Thank You!

Other Books by Susan Lute

Sneak Peek… Love Lessons

Chapter 1

A Merry Little Sellwood Christmas, A Sellwood Short

Copyright ｩ 2015, 2018 Susan Lute

Crazy Hair Publishing, Portland, OR

A Merry Little Sellwood Christmas: Electronic Publication December 2015

ISBN: 978-0-9909607-6-8

All rights reserved. Except for use in any review, the reproduction or utilization of this work in whole or in part in any form by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereinafter invented, including xerography, photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, is forbidden without the written permission of the publisher.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

Merry Christmas to all...

Chapter One

W hen will we get there ?

Soon, Tori told her niece.

Mackenzie wiggled in her seat, clutching the first doll Tori had ever made. Mac had been a baby back then, and Victoria Marie Cahil a happy college student studying clothing design. The replica Roaring Twenties Flapper Girl dolls started out as a hobby. And let's face it, a way to fly in the face of her mother's idea of how a proper daughter from one of the country's most prominent, and moneyed, families should behave.

That her little doll business, as Bella Land Cahil liked to refer to it, was ready to burst its seams into a full-time, profitable business wasn't a surprise.

As she parked in front of the abandoned house she'd bought after seeing pictures on the internet, Tori sneered at her mother's idea of how her daughters should spend their days. Anything a Cahil of the Savannah, Georgia Cahils touched turned to gold. All the Cahils, that was, except her older sister Elizabeth. Everything Beth touched turned into a disaster. The only thing her poor sister hadn't made a mess of was her daughter, Mac, and only because as soon as she was born Beth had begged Tori to take the baby girl.

Tori stared at the derelict. She'd gotten the Sellwood house, which wasn't wearing her age well, for a steal considering the square footage. There were no back taxes to pay, leaving her renovation budget intact—a good thing, since she lived on the fruits of her own labor and not her family money.

Twenty-five days to Christmas, the season was all joy and merry. But the old girl looked as tired as Tori felt after driving straight through, crossing icy mountain passes between Denver and Portland. Paint peeled from blue clapboards. Windows, eyes into the soul of a house, were boarded over. Frozen grass sloped down to the street while sections of steps leading to the listing, wrap-around porch crumbled in too many places.

A shadow separated itself from the darker recesses of the porch as a man with stiff military bearing came down the first set of steps. He adroitly avoided collapsing masonry. In the dim afternoon light he wore jeans, a suit jacket with the collar flipped up against the nip of late November, cowboy boots, and an air of authority he'd probably been swimming in before he was born.

Tori's experience had taught her, in the arena of restoring desperately needy houses, his confident cloak of control that looked official was never a good thing.

Her breath momentarily caught in appreciation of the man's good looks, before she forced it out with an irritated huff.

Stay here, she said to Mac, practically leaping from the Tahoe that had served as her office, and sometimes the roof over their heads when the situation warranted.

He saw her coming, stopped and frowned as he watched her jump from one barely-there step to the next. Tori gave up her headlong rush