An Amish Country Christmas

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Charlotte Hubbard
Naomi King

ZEBRA BOOKS

KENSINGTON PUBLISHING CORP.

All copyrighted material within is Attributor Protected.

Table of Contents

Dear Reader,

 

When my editor, Alicia Condon, suggested this Christmas anthology, where the characters
from both of my Amish series get to mix and mingle, I was so tickled! What a fun way
to celebrate my favorite holiday with characters I love, but who won’t take center
stage in my regular series books.

 

I have a confession, however: if you have followed the placement clues in my previous
books, you might realize that my imaginary Missouri towns, Cedar Creek and Willow
Ridge, are too far apart geographically to make a sleigh ride or a buggy trip feasible.
So in the spirit of the one-horse open sleigh fantasy so many of us crave, I’m asking
you to hop in, wrap up in a cuddly blanket, and ride along with me and my characters
anyway! Let the fun and love and the jingle of sleigh bells carry you away. In this
festive season, and in these holiday tales, reality can take a back seat for a while!

 

And because I have been blessed to have a book in each of my series coming out around
the same time as this holiday anthology, here is the chronological order for these
stories: AMANDA WEDS A GOOD MAN: ONE BIG HAPPY FAMILY by Naomi King, WINTER OF WISHES
by Charlotte Hubbard, and then this book, AN AMISH COUNTRY CHRISTMAS. This order will
make sense, especially for Preacher Tom and Vernon Gingerich as they court the Hooley
sisters and prepare to get married.

 

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!
Charlotte and Naomi

 

 

 

 

 

The Christmas Visitors

Naomi King

Chapter One

“Easy, Clyde. Back up, fella.” Nate Kanagy stood aside as his Clydesdale came backwards
out of the horse trailer, sensing Clyde was every bit as excited as he was on this
fine December twenty-third. The horse whickered and shook his massive head, then waited
patiently beside his brother’s bay gelding while Bram shut the trailer gates. Nate
stepped up to pay the driver who had brought them here from Willow Ridge this morning.
“Thanks again, Gregg. And a merry Christmas to you.”

“Merry Christmas to you boys and your family, too,” Gregg replied as he started his
van. “Enjoy your new sleigh and courting buggy!”

“
Jah
, we intend to!” Nate’s brother, Bram, piped up from behind them. “If you can’t have
fun drivin’ a new rig, what’s the point of gettin’ one?”

The two of them waved as Gregg headed back onto the county blacktop, hauling their
empty trailer behind him. Then Nate gazed around the little town of Cedar Creek, Missouri.
From where they stood in the parking lot of Graber’s Custom Carriages, the countryside
rolled gently beneath a fresh blanket of snow, dotted with tall white homes, silos,
and barns. Deep green cedar trees followed the creek at the bottom of the hill, where
cardinals called to each other. Across the snow-packed blacktop, Treva’s Greenhouse
sported a sign that said
CLOSED FOR CHRISTMAS,
but beside it the Cedar Creek Mercantile bustled with buggies and cars alike. “We’ll
get our fill of Aunt Beulah Mae’s homemade goodies tonight—”

“Along with a hefty helping of her nosy questions and Uncle Abe’s looooong stories,”
Bram added.

“—but a special occasion like this calls for some serious junk food.”

“
Jah
, let’s hit the merc.” Bram hitched their two horses to the railing on the side of
the carriage shop. “No tellin’ what else we might find there. Looks to be a place
that stocks everything under the sun, including stuff you never knew you needed.”

To Nate, Cedar Creek seemed a lot like most Plain communities, in that the businesses
were scattered along the roadside, on the farms where their owners lived. Back home
in Willow Ridge they didn’t have a carriage maker, so this trip was indeed a treat:
their parents had given them their choice of new vehicles with the understanding that
he and his younger brother wouldn’t go running the roads in cars like a lot of Amish
fellows did during their
rumspringa
years. At eighteen, Bram had chosen a buggy so he’d be ready for that day when a
special girl tempted him to court and marry her.

Nate, however, had a hankering for a sleigh. Nothing else felt so grand on a winter’s
day as skimming across the snow-covered hills—and what could be more glorious than
such a ride on a moonlit night? After they ate their snack, he couldn’t wait to hitch
Clyde to his new rig and take off. He’d been engaged to a special girl last Christmas,
only to learn she’d been seeing other fellows, so at twenty, Nate wasn’t out to impress
anybody. These days, he was pleasing himself.

When they entered the mercantile, he felt right at home. The scent of bulk grass seed,
stored in wooden bins along the wall, filled the warm air and a wide wooden staircase
led to an open second level where work boots and clothing were sold. A banner on the
railing said
ABBY’S STITCH IN TIME,
and a young woman—Abby, most likely—smiled down at him from her treadle sewing machine.
Mesh bags of oranges and locally grown apples and potatoes were displayed by the check-out
counter. Nate exchanged greetings with the gray-bearded fellow who was ringing up
an order and then followed Bram toward the aisles of bulk snacks that had been bagged
and labeled here in the store.

“Here’s those chocolate coconut haystacks you like,” Bram said, “not to mention trail
mix and sweet potato chips and saltwater taffy and—”

But Nate wasn’t listening. Down the aisle a ways, where they sold livestock supplies,
a girl was hefting a mineral block into her pull cart. Her auburn hair glimmered beneath
her white kapp, and as she straightened to her full height, she caught his gaze. Held
it for a few moments. Then she leaned down again.

It seemed only polite to see if she needed help.

As Nate headed her way, he wasn’t surprised to hear the tattoo of Bram’s boots on
the plank floor behind him. “How about if I get that for you?” he asked as the redhead
wrapped her arms around a fifty-pound sack of horse feed.

“
Jah
, how many of those do you need?” Bram chimed in. “No sense in strainin’ yourself
when we toss this stuff around all the time.”

Nate had always heard that blue eyes could twinkle, but now he was seeing it for himself.
The young woman looked from him to his brother as though she hid a secret behind her
smile. “Not from around here, are you?”

He blinked. Had he sprouted a second head? Did he sound so very different from the
Amish fellows here in Cedar Creek? Or was it Bram’s lovestruck grin that made her
say that? “Just got here from Willow Ridge, truth be told,” Nate replied. “I’m fetching
the sleigh James Graber’s built for me—”

“And he’s got a courtin’ buggy with my name on it,” his younger brother added.

“Well, you couldn’t ask for a better rig, then,” she remarked. “James has even built
special carriages for Disney World and the likes of Miss America, you see.”

Nate didn’t know a thing about Miss America, but she surely couldn’t hold a candle
to this girl. Her ivory skin glowed, with just a few freckles on the bridge of her
nose—tiny ones, that he had to lean closer to see. And then there was the way her
eyes widened as she gazed back at him. He caught himself and grabbed the bag of feed
she’d been lifting. “So how many of these bags do you need?”

“Four, please. And what’d you say your name was?”

Bram laughed as he, too, hefted a sack of the oats mixture. “Last name’s Kanagy. I’m
Bram—the cute one,” he teased, “and Mr. Shy here is my brother Nate. He got burnt
by a girl he was engaged to, so now he mostly keeps to his horses.”

Nate closed his eyes against a wave of irritation as he placed a third sack of the
rations in her wooden cart. “If you believe everything my kid brother says, well—but
you look to be way ahead of him. And your name would be—?”

The redhead looked him over yet again. “Martha. Coblentz.” She pointed to the shelf
where the mineral blocks were. “A couple more of those and I’ve got to get on home.
Denki
ever so much for your help, fellas. Have a
gut
time with your new rigs.”

It was on the tip of his tongue to invite her for a sleigh ride, yet Nate hesitated.
After all, they were only spending the night with their aunt and uncle before returning
to Willow Ridge tomorrow, in time to celebrate Christmas Eve and Christmas Day with
their family. As though she suddenly needed to be someplace else, Martha strode down
the aisle toward the check-out counter, pulling her sturdy wagon behind her.

“Well, you blew that one,” Bram muttered.

“And you, little brother, have a mouth bigger than your brain,” Nate replied under
his breath. “We’ll have to work on that.”

 

 

“
Jah
, Mary?” Martha murmured into her cell phone. She looked behind her as she walked
down the road, with the wind whipping at her black coat and bonnet. “You’ve got to
come see these two fellas who’re heading over to James’s carriage shop! I just now
met them in the mercantile and, well—you can gawk at both of them all you want, but
I’ve already decided to go for Nate.”

“Puh! What makes you think you get first pick?” her twin retorted.

“First come, first served. Be there or be square,” Martha quipped. She loved the way
her breath came out in a frosty vapor on this brisk December morning. Truth be told,
she was enjoying this day a lot more now that she’d met the two Kanagy boys in the
mercantile. “Better get a move on, though, or you might miss them. They’re here to
fetch a sleigh and a courting buggy James built for them, and they might head right
on home afterward—unless we give them a
gut
reason to hang around, you know.”

“Well, I can’t get there any too fast if I’m on the phone with
you
now, can I?”
Click.

Martha tucked her cell into her coat pocket and continued down the snow-covered road
as fast as her heavy pull cart would allow. What with her
dat
and her older brother Owen out working on a house today, the barn chores fell to
her, as they often did. It was just as well, because she preferred working outdoors
while Mary was happier helping their
mamm
get ready for today’s meals as well as Christmas dinner. Martha was perfectly capable
of placing those heavy sacks of feeds in their covered bins and then setting out the
new mineral blocks for the horses, but wasn’t it a fine thing that two
gut
-looking fellows had come to help her in the mercantile? The boys around Cedar Creek
seemed to think she was part of the landscape . . . always there, so mostly invisible.
Apparently not worth a second look.

By the time Martha was within sight of the house, here came Mary up the road. Oh,
but she had a glint of mischief in her eyes, too! “So what’s in that sack, Sister?”

Mary laughed. “That’s
my
beeswax, ain’t so?”

“Now don’t go thinking you can have those fellas all to yourself,” Martha protested,
playfully blocking her sister’s path. “I was nice enough to tell you about them—”

“And Mamma’s already got her suspicions about me taking out of the house so sudden-like,
too. This better be worth my time, Sister!” Mary declared. “After all, it was
your
dinner—your favorite oatmeal bread and goodies I was baking when you called.”

“Puh! If you don’t think the walk’s worth your while, then I’ll just have some fun
with those fellas myself. Not a problem!”

“We’ll see about that, won’t we?”

Martha hurried on down the snowy lane to the barn with her cart, which was harder
to pull on the clumpy gravel. No doubt her sister would know a fine opportunity when
she saw one, so it was best to put these supplies away and feed the animals in short
order. The Kanagy boys didn’t know it yet, but as thanks for helping her, they were
about to receive a Christmas gift they hadn’t counted on.