A Christmas Miracle for Daisy (Taming of the Sheenans Book 5) by Jane Porter Read Free Book Online Page B

else.
    “What is your biggest fear?” Cormac asked, breaking the silence. “What’s holding you back?”
    Whitney stared at the framed photo of April and Daisy on her desk. It was of Daisy’s first birthday. Whitney had snapped it just seconds before Daisy had put both her hands into the birthday cake.
    “I want to see Daisy,” she said quietly.
    “But?”
    Whitney exhaled slowly, buffeted by wildly conflicting emotions. “Seeing Daisy means I see you.” She forced herself to meet his gaze. “And our relationship is the difficult one. It’s not Daisy’s and mine. Daisy and I are fine. It’s you and me…that’s the mess. That’s the minefield. It’s the part I want to avoid. The part I don’t trust.”
    His eyes narrowed. He fell silent. For a moment her office was painfully quiet. Then he shifted his weight in the chair, extending his long legs, crossing his legs at the ankles. “Is there no way to make this work for Daisy’s sake? No way to try to be…friends?”
    Friends.
    Cormac Sheenan as her friend .
    She’d never been friends with him. She’d been everything but his friend. Could they be friends? But didn’t friendship require…trust?
    She eyed his dark suit and white button-down. He never wore a tie, his shirt open at the collar showing off a hint of his sun-bronzed skin and the upper plane of his muscular chest. He was built. He was still the hottest thing she’d ever seen. And smart.
    Sexy.
    Nothing in her viewed him as platonic. After their breakup she’d thought she’d rather not be in his world than relegated to the distant friend zone, and it probably was better to have no contact when trying to get over a broken heart; but that was years ago. Surely she could handle the past and memories now? He certainly was making good points about Daisy.
    Daisy needed them to get along.
    Daisy needed them to be cordial and amicable so she could have both of them in her life.
    “We could work on being more civil,” she said. “Maybe with time we could be…friendish.”
    The corner of his mouth lifted ever so slightly. “I’ve never heard of that word before. Friend ish .”
    “It’s new.” She struggled to keep her smile…friendly. “Kind of like us.”
    *
    Whitney flew to Bozeman on Monday, and picked up a rental car at the airport for the forty minute drive to Marietta.
    She arrived in Marietta late afternoon, and after dropping her luggage off at the Graff Hotel where she’d been booked for the next two month, she took a walk down Main Street. It took very little time to walk from the Graff to Main Street. Marietta was charming, and small , with the historic downtown maybe six blocks long by six blocks wide, and that is if you counted the mixed residential and commercial district between Main Street and Bramble Lane.
    She grabbed a coffee at the Java Café and then continued on another block to the Crookshank Building, the future headquarters for Sheenan Inc.
    The late afternoon sunlight gilded the one-hundred-and-sixteen-year-old building’s brick façade with warm gold light, and she’d understood immediately why Cormac bought this building. The aesthetics appealed to her. It was big, solid, and Montana rugged with warm weathered bricks and long plate glass windows, a testament to its original life as Marietta’s first women’s department store.
    She knew it’d been through dozens of owners since then, serving an equal number of purposes over the past century, but her heart felt as if she’d stepped through the front door yesterday afternoon. Inside it was dark and cluttered and chaotic and maybe it was the time of day, or maybe it was just the amount of noise, but as she peeked around the ground level, nodding hello to the carpenters and electricians, she’d felt overwhelmed and disappointed. The disappointment had kept her from proceeding to the second and third floors, not wanting to navigate the stairs, ladders, drop cloths and electric saws in the fading light.
    It was