Read Online Christmas Steele by Vanessa Gray Bartal - Free Book Online

even if her
mother hadn’t intended them to. Handsome and charming, Lacy had
always secretly felt that Robert was out of her league. She who was
quiet and reserved, who enjoyed staying in to read a book on a
Saturday night as much as he had enjoyed going out. When they were
together, he had lovingly said it was their differences that made
them work. She had kept him steady, and he had kept her fun. He
hadn’t exactly said it in those terms—his words had been much
smoother and more honeyed—but the gist had been the same. Lacy had
credited herself for having so much substance that she had
attracted someone everyone else wanted. Robert had bypassed all the
pretty and fluffy blonds, zeroing in on her from her very first day
at their firm. And then her own sister had been his downfall. How
humiliating.
    All her old insecurities rushed up to meet
her. With her red hair and hourglass figure, she was a throwback to
a different time. Men today wanted tall, stick-thin blonds, didn’t
they? She was too quiet and reserved with her emotions. She had
never been a game player, never mastered the art of flirting or
dating. Basically, she was all wrong.
    She rolled to her side, feeling very sorry
for herself, when her eyes landed on the locket propped on her
bedside. Someone, somewhere loves me, she thought. Feeling
oddly comforted by the thought of her secret admirer, she finally
fell asleep.

Chapter 8
     
    Due to Lacy’s pity-induced insomnia, she
slept late the following morning. Two notes were waiting for her on
the kitchen table. One was from her parents, informing her they
were spending the day with some high school friends. The other was
from her grandmother, telling her that she and her grandfather were
spending the day Christmas shopping.
    “Alone again, naturally,” Lacy said, her
self-pity quickly rising to the surface once again. With effort,
she tamped it back down. She would not wallow today; she would not
spend the day on the couch, wearing her pajamas, eating prune cake
and Christmas cookies. “The tree,” she said out loud. If she forced
herself to go up in the attic and drag it down, then maybe the
family could decorate it together once everyone arrived home. Maybe
it would be a bonding experience for her mother and her
grandfather. And maybe magical elves might spring from the
fireplace and fill the stockings. No, she wouldn’t hope for the
impossible; she would simply concentrate on the practical. Bringing
the Christmas tree from the attic was definitely practical.
    She shuddered as she ate her cereal and
stared at the attic opening. She had been afraid of her
grandmother’s attic ever since she was a little girl. Her
grandfather had always been the one to go up and retrieve anything
that was needed. Lacy had stood at the bottom of the ladder,
inhaling the scent of moth balls and mildew, shivering from the
cool blast of air that always accompanied a winter trek to the
storage space. Far from being curious about what might be up there,
she had instead always harbored a secret phobia that she would
somehow get locked inside. Since a ladder was needed to climb
inside, the fear wasn’t reasonable, but then little girl fears
never were.
    Now she was a grown woman who realized there
was nothing to fear in the attic other than spiders, and she had
plenty of fear of those. But Christmas was almost here, and the
house was lonely without a tree. Today no spider could stop her,
not even the furry kind that looked like a baby tarantula.
    After breakfast, she dressed in an old pair
of sweats and tied her hair back, tucking it in a bun so no spiders
could use it as a conveyance of getting to her body. She had
probably imbued spiders with more menace and intelligence than they
actually possessed, but just in case they were looking for ways to
get to her, she wasn’t going to give them any openings. In that
vein, she tucked her socks over her pants and pulled her sleeves
low so they covered half her hands.
    She retrieved