The Bachelor’s Christmas Bride by Victoria Pade Page B

sales guy lied, it’s all pink.”
    Dag just laughed again. “Hey, I like this shirt.”
    Shannon did, too, but she didn’t tell him that. Or that Wes could never have worn it or been able to look the way Dag did in it.
    â€œAnd the Dag-gets-a-dress-for-Christmas?” she prompted only because she was curious about his brother’s earlier comment. And because she was enjoying giving Dag a hard time. “That was me being a brat as a kid,” he answered, referring to her remark that afternoon about herself. “The Christmas I was eight I asked for a fancy dump truck. It had all the bells and whistles—lights that lit up, a switch that made the bed of the truck rise on its own, it even beeped when it backed up. It was great!”
    â€œUh-huh,” Shannon said indulgently.
    â€œI’d been asking for that truck since Thanksgiving and two days before Christmas, Tucker started saying he wanted it, too.”
    â€œAnd you were afraid he would get it and you wouldn’t?”
    Dag pointed a long, thick index finger at her. “Exactly! My mother was always making me hand something over to Tucker when he asked for it because he was The Baby . I figured the truck could be another one of those things, only she’d just give it to him herself.”
    â€œYou didn’t believe in Santa Claus and that Santa would come up with two of them?”
    â€œI was on the fence about Santa by then—you know, hoping he was real, but skeptical. And with the dump truck, I didn’t think I could take any chances. It was just that cool,” he continued to gush, making Shannon smile as she finished her crème brûlée.
    â€œSo what did you do?” she asked, inviting a confession.
    Dag had finished his first brûlée, too, and he replaced it with the second, pointing to it with his spoon before he answered her or dug in. “Want to share?”
    It was tempting. But Shannon shook her head. “It’s so rich—I don’t know how you can eat two of them.”
    â€œNothin’ to it,” he assured.
    Then, after cracking the sugar shell to begin his second helping, he went on with his story. “Here’s how Christmas was done—presents from Santa weren’t wrapped, they were set up and waiting for us. Presents from our parents and other relatives were wrapped. But the presents from our parents never had tags on them. So when we came out in the morning there was a pile for each of us, some with tags from the relatives letting us know which pile was ours.”
    â€œAnd in each pile there were some untagged gifts—I think I’m getting the picture,” Shannon said.
    â€œSo I snuck out of bed before dawn Christmas morning that year, before any of the other kids, hoping the truck would be set out like a Santa present. But no luck— Tucker and I both had some building blocks and a couple of puzzles—I think—from Santa. Then I checked out all the wrapped packages for Tucker and for me but I couldn’t tell what was what—”
    â€œNo two were the same?”
    â€œHey, I was eight, there was no logic to this. Anyway, I found a package in Tucker’s pile that I was convinced was the truck. So I took it. Then, in my pea-sized eight-year-old brain, I got the brilliant idea that if I mixed up a few more packages, no one would know I was the one who did it. So I did some of that, never paying any attention to what I was putting where or if I was only switching girls to girls, boys to boys—”
    â€œOh what a tangled web we weave…” Shannon said with yet another laugh.
    â€œRight.”
    â€œAnd somewhere along the way you ended up with a dress,” Shannon concluded, laughing yet again.
    Dag made a face. “I think it was called a jumper—it was kind of like a plaid apron with a frilly blouse thatwent underneath it. Logan encouraged the folks to make me wear it but luckily my dad