Christmas, Actually: The Christmas Gift / The Christmas Wish / The Christmas Date
Discover the magic of Christmas Town, Maine! Jack Banning promised to support the mother of his unborn child… But she doesn't need money, she only needs him.Callie Banning's student has declared war on Christmas, so it's up to her to help the little girl–and her widowed father–believe again.Gina Vernay is about to meet her online mystery date…and she's in for the surprise of a lifetime!
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Discover the magic of Christmas Town, Maine!
Jack Banning promised to support the mother of his unborn child… But she doesn’t need money, she only needs him.
Callie Banning’s student has declared war on Christmas, so it’s up to her to help the little girl—and her widowed father—believe again.
Gina Vernay is about to meet her online mystery date…and she’s in for the surprise of a lifetime!
ANNA ADAMS wrote her first romance on the beach in wet sand with a stick. These days she uses pens, software, or napkins and a crayon to write the kinds of stories she loves best—romance that involves everyone in the family, and often the whole community. Love, like a stone tossed into a lake, causes ripples to spread and contract, bringing conflict and well-meaning “help” from the people who care most.
ANNA J. STEWART is a born and bred California girl. Raised in San Francisco, she discovered romances early in her parochial high school education and from then on knew what she was meant to be: a romance author. An English graduate of California State University of Sacramento, she’s held a variety of jobs and, for the past seven years, she’s been honored to work as New York Times bestselling author Brenda Novak’s personal assistant, helping run her annual online auction for diabetes research. In ten years, the auction has raised over $2.3 million. Anna lives in Northern California with an overly attentive and affectionate cat named Snickers.
MELINDA CURTIS lives in California’s arid central valley with her husband—her basketball-playing college sweetheart—who has a man-crush on Duke basketball legend Coach K (admit it, your man does, too!). Their three kids are all in college, and the only grandbabies they have are of the four-legged variety. Melinda loves cross-stitch, needlepoint and quilting, although since she started writing she hasn’t completed a single project. She writes sweet contemporary romances as Melinda Curtis and red-hot reads as Mel Curtis.
Christmas, Actually
The Christmas Gift
Anna Adams
The Christmas Wish
Anna J. Stewart
The Christmas Date
Melinda Wooten
Table of Contents
Anna Adams
Sophie Palmer is confused when the pregnancy test comes back positive, but one thing she knows for sure—she already loves her unborn child. She doesn’t expect former army surgeon Jack Banning to break all contact, though. He’s promised financial support, but he wants no other involvement with her or their coming child.
He must have a reason. She’s known him and loved him for two years. At Christmas, she follows him to Maine to tell him she’s putting his name on the birth certificate.
She’ll never let their daughter believe she can expect more than her father’s name. Still, Sophie can’t forget the soldier who has lived by the code of Leave No Man Behind, the doctor who has cared more for his patients than himself, the man who shouldn’t know how to be dishonorable.
Fatherless herself, Sophie doesn’t care about the financials. She’ll take care of her own. She wants only to understand why Jack has become an impossible-to-love stranger.
I hope you’ll be as moved by Jack and Sophie’s story as I am.
Wishing you warm and loving holidays,
Anna
To Steve, for always being at my back. To Karen Whiddon and Debby Giusti, for reading so much. To Melinda Curtis and Anna J. Stewart for spending this holiday with me, and to Victoria Curran and Dana Grimaldi for working so hard to make this a Christmas Gift.
SNOWFLAKES HIT THE windshield and splayed into star shapes while Bing Crosby crooned his dreams of a white Christmas. Sophie Palmer tried to sing along, but her mind was already racing up the icy interstate to Christmas Town, Maine, where the father of her unborn child now lived.
That Charlie Brown Christmas song came next, with talk of happiness and cheer and families drawing near. Sophie stared at the road, as frozen as the world she was driving into. The closer to Christmas Town she got, the more humiliated she felt.
But she wasn’t going to ask Jack Banning to love her again. He’d rejected her and their child—love wasn’t a possibility.
She dropped one hand to her slightly rounded belly. “You deserve better. You deserve the chance to have a father, if he can remember he’s a decent man.”
Overhead, a sign warned that the exit for Christmas Town was a quarter mile ahead. Time to embark on possibly the most foolish fool’s errand of all time.
She veered off at the exit, pausing to yield, and then turned onto a two-lane road bounded by primeval forest.
