LOVE FINDS YOU ON
CHRISTMAS
MORNING
(`Tis the Season)
When personal chef Nikki Tronnier moves
back home to Cary, North Carolina, she plans to fulfill a lifelong dream and buy
back the family home built by her great-grandfather for his bride. But before
she is able to make an offer, someone else buys the house. Just as she prepares
for a fight, she learns that the very person who stole her dream is the man who
has also stolen her heart. Unaware, handsome new owner, Drew Cornell, seeks
Nikki's help in restoring the home to its historic beauty in time for
Christmas.
Award-winning
novelist Trish Perry has written nine inspirational romances for Harvest House
Publishers, Summerside Press, and Barbour Publishing, and she has co-authored
two devotionals. She has served as a columnist and as a newsletter editor over
the years, as well as a 1980s stockbroker and a board member of the Capital
Christian Writers organization in Washington, D.C. She holds a degree in
Psychology.
Trish's latest novel,
Love Finds You on Christmas Morning, written with Debby Mayne, released
November 2011.
Excerpt from `Tis the
Season:
Do Not Reproduce without
permission.
CHAPTER ONE
"Have I ever told you why
I stole you away from Armand, Nikki?"
Nicole Tronnier dusted flour off the tip of her nose and gave old Mr.
Fennicle a smile. "Of course you have, Harvey. I amazed you with my culinary
prowess and sparkling personality."
She placed a basket of warm rosemary biscuits near his
plate. The pumpkin-potato puree and veggie medley looked perfect next to his
rack of lamb. The rich winter colors were almost as important to her as the
fragrance and taste of the food she served. "If anyone deserves the very best
personal chef in North Carolina, it's an absolutely spoiled multimillionaire
like you."
She saw him fight against the twitch of a smile.
"I resent your insinuation about me, young
lady."
"I call 'em as I see 'em, Harvey."
"I'm an absolutely spoiled billionaire, at the
very least. And that's not why I lured you away. I've always been very fond of
Armand and his fine restaurant. It's one of the reasons I opened a plant in
Charlotte, so I could visit him and still make money. Pilfering his star chef
gave me no pleasure, and I could have found an equally gifted chef elsewhere,
I'm certain."
"But?" She crossed her arms. She adored this old man, and
it had taken so little time to settle into fond banter with him once she joined
the staff of his spacious Cary, North Carolina, mansion almost a year ago.
"But I saw you do something that put you over the top, in
my book. Do you remember that odd fellow who made off with a dish full of food
the day I met you?"
She frowned. "Odd fellow. No. What do you mean he made
off with—oh, you mean the homeless guy in the fake waiter suit."
"I was outside in my limo when that happened. I was on
the phone with one of my more boring advisors. I saw that fellow rush out of the
restaurant, glancing back, forth, and behind. He was protecting that plate of
food as if eagles would swoop down and carry it off."
"Poor guy," Nikki said. "I think he just wandered in off
the street to beg—from our customers or from the restaurant. But he was in that
old black suit, and a customer handed her dish to him to bring it back to the
kitchen for reheating or something. She thought he was a waiter. And he thought
he hit the jackpot."
Harvey laughed. "When you stormed out the front door
after him and nearly tripped over him, sitting there—"
"You never told me you saw all that, Harvey!"
"I did indeed."
"Yeah, I remember it now. It was just like you said. He
was so hungry he didn't even run beyond the front stoop. Broke my heart. I had
to redo the customer's order anyway. No sense in wasting food. And that's
why you hired me?"
He focused on cutting his lamb. "Says a lot about a
person, the things they'll do when they think no one else is watching. If I'm
going to have someone join my live-in staff, I want to make sure she's made of
the right stuff, not just able to make the right stuff."
"Yep." She nodded. "I'm pretty special, all
right."
Nikki rested her hand on Harvey's shoulder. "Okay, I'll
leave you to it, then. Do you need anything else?"
"Only the fountain of youth, dear."
She squeezed his shoulder and almost gave him a kiss on
his feathery-haired head. "I'll check on you in a little while. I have something
special for your dessert."
She returned to the kitchen and started tidying up.
Harvey's panna cotta was ready in the refrigerator. She only needed to drizzle
the rose syrup over it before she served it to him. He loved trying new flavors,
and this would be exactly that. Her old boss, Armand Gaudet, had introduced her
to Italian rose syrup while she apprenticed under him in Charlotte.
Not for the first time, Nikki felt the tiniest twinge of
guilt about leaving Armand, even though he had been completely gracious when
Harvey offered her this job. There had simply been too many "God things"
involved for her to ignore the opportunity.
Although she had moved away from Cary years ago in order
to attend college and then train under Armand, she was definitely a family girl.
She loved the city but missed her hometown. So for the location alone, she gave
Harvey's offer serious consideration as soon as he made it.
But there was another reason she couldn't refuse the
offer to work as personal chef to the eccentric Harvey Fennicle. He had doubled
her income with a stroke of his pen on her employment contract. Nikki wasn't
money-hungry, but as long as she could remember, she had saved for a specific
goal in mind.
Her family's old home here in Cary—the home her
great-grandfather William Tronnier and his brothers built for William and his
new bride, Lillian—had been on the market for a year or more. Neither her
parents nor her grandparents had maintained ownership of the Tronnier home.
But Nikki's fondest early childhood memories were wrapped
up in that home. As a little girl, she'd thought Granny Lillian, Grampa William,
and the entire family would spend every holiday, especially Christmas morning,
celebrating in their home. She wanted to bring those memories back into her
family's lives and futures.
The house was still beautiful but needed considerable
refurbishing. Until Harvey Fennicle came into her life, Nikki had little hope of
saving enough to purchase and remodel the home. Now she was close to having
saved a sizable down payment. It wouldn't be long before she could make an offer
to the current owner. The house had been vacant for quite a while. Nikki had
confidence in her chances.
She couldn't think of anything or anyone that would stand
in her way now.
~ Trish Perry ~
True Love. Real Laughs. Pure Fiction.
Buy Love Finds You on
Christmas Morning at fine bookstores or online at www.amazon.com, www.barnesandnoble.com, or www.christianbook.com
Excerpt copyright
2011
* * *
* * *
Armed
By Jeff
Gerke
"And…I've…gotcha."
My glove turned bright orange as I grasped the glowing
chunk of ore. Funny how it twisted in a my wrist a bit as I plucked it from its
eternal tumble through weightlessness. Almost as if a billion years of perpetual
motion gave it a bit more inertia than its mass would suggest.
The nebula was spectacular here. All purple and teal laid
like a semitransparent layer over the endless stars beyond. I tucked the ore
into my pouch and then just hung there, drifting in a slow cartwheel. Depending
upon where you were viewing it from, the Butterfly Nebula resembled a crescent
wafer, a dented basin, or some long-extinct insect that had evidently had wide
wings.
For me, it was just a gold mine of free-floating
armalcolite ore.
I let my own motion spin me away from the nebula. The
respiration system on my suit gave its quiet squew every time I took a
breath, sounding like a leisurely laser battle far away. My samples pouch was
full, but if I happened to spot any other chunks of ore floating around nearby,
I'd snag them. Who knew how long this would be my own private cache?
The stars around me were mostly galaxies, I knew. I loved
the variety in their form. Some were white, while others were yellow or orange
or blue or pink. Some seemed like glowing orbs, while others were dots or
spirals or dyads or crosses or lines with a bulging middle like pregnant uikke
worms. Then there were the clusters, smash-ups of three or five types merged by
a trick of distance. In one blink, I took in ten thousand galaxies, which
translated to more habitable planets than I could fathom.
I sighed, suddenly melancholy.
My eyes caught a flash of something big. I thought at
first it might be a gleaming boulder of armalcolite, but then I saw it was just
the Hector. Wallop, I'd drifted off a long way.
I extended my legs and hit the goose-jets. The tubes
circling the soles of my boots shot a burst of my expelled carbon dioxide out
the bottom, propelling me toward my ship. The jets always felt like someone
smacking the bottoms of my feet with a crossbeam, but I had at least learned a
position to get into so the burst didn't send me into another vomit-inducing
tumble across the heavens.
Slowly, the Hector grew in my vision. The green
numbers displayed on my faceplate spun down through the kilometers as I
approached the cruiser. I gave the jets another burp and then shut them down. I
could go faster, but then I'd spend too much time and CO2 slowing so I didn't
hit the ship like a meteor. I wasn't confident enough yet to try that. Better to
just go slow and enjoy the ride.
Squew. Squew. Squew.
The Hector was a beautiful ship. More ship than I
deserved, actually. It was white and sleek. Refined. Curved sinuously like the
hip of a beautiful woman.
Instantly, heat flared in my suit and a yellow warning
corona glowed at the edges of my faceplate display. Overheating. Too funny. I
needed to find a place with some women my age, if only for pleasant
conversation. Space could be a very lonely place.
Red and yellow lights blinked periodically off the ship's
bow, aft, top, and bottom. Its twin Gexule-Hyath rockets swam in my vision as
the plasmanites encircled them, itching to push the ship wherever I needed it to
go.
The long slope of the cockpit Emul-glas reflected the
aquamarine of the nebula. Even from this distance, I could see the amber of the
dash panel displays bathing the interior. It almost looked as if the embers of a
relaxing campfire smoldered within. The observation panels along the side of the
ship stood like black trapezoids against the white hull. The ship had lots of
room. More than enough for a companion.
Time to decelerate. I did the tuck-and-flex move I'd
figured out over the last several weeks, deftly flipping until my feet pointed
down at the Hector as if I were going to land on it. Now the ship was my
"down." When I got old, would my brain still be fluid enough to handle
hemispheric changes like that?
With a last pfft of the goose-jets, I touched down
on the hull right at the side egress panel. I pressed the button on my right
forearm, and the panel slid open.
Thirty seconds later, I was safely inside the ship,
breathing without my helmet, and enjoying the d-com spray. Uncle Wyatt had
somehow given the spray a fragrance—something called mint—that always
made me feel invigorated.
I peeled out of the suit and stuffed all the pieces into
the netting against the bulkhead. In my grey flightsuit I floated into the
interior of the ship, pushing the bag of ore before me. As I entered the main
cabin, the lighting blossomed from all around, giving the empty space its
customary shadowless illumination. The central stripe light along the ceiling
hissed when it came on, like it was booing me. Or about to burn out.
Either way, it didn't bode well.
I pushed off the engineering pod and stopped at the
science table. A press of a button, and the bag of armalcolite adhered to the
white tabletop as if under gravity. It was some combination of magnetics and
resonance differentials—Wyatt had tried to explain it once—but all I cared about
was that it held stuff down even in zero-g.
I had twenty-six pieces, all emanating a vaguely orange
luminescence. They ranged in size from one twice as big as the last one I'd
grabbed all the way down to one barely bigger than the tip of my pinky. I stared
at them feverishly.
I was rich.
I planted my feet on the wall and launched myself
headlong toward the cockpit, laughing like a lunatic. Finally, something I'd
done myself! I grabbed the bulkhead over the instrument board and hooked my feet
through the restraining belt. As I hovered over the keyboard, I called up the
interface to stake my mining claim on this sector of space.
The combination of conditions in this quadrant—the
mathematical formula I had devised and bet my last peptoles to test—had, in
fact, resulted in a find so rich that ore was just floating around to be picked
up by hand. And if the thermal emission spectrometer could be believed, I would
be picking it up for a long time to come.
My mind spun even as I logged the coordinates for my
claim and submitted the application for approval. I would need to hire miners to
come here to harvest everything. Then it would have to be transported for sale.
Or should it be refined first? Where was the best place to sell the stuff? But I
couldn't hang around here to oversee this find. The formula worked! I had to be
out using it to find other undiscovered sectors and staking those
claims.
But the formula—I had to hide it. Bury it. It was an
industrial secret that corporations would resort to anything to obtain. Whom to
trust?
Ah, the possibilities! I could hire people to do all of
this for me. I could retire before I'd even really had a job. It was too
much.
And surely some beautiful woman would be enticed by a
young man of wealth and good looks. Or at least wealth. Security, she'll
call it when explaining to her mother why she's marrying someone like me.
I drifted back toward the ore I'd plucked
from the ether, floating like a dust mote toward my source of wealth. Something
about its warm glow, almost as if it were not entirely of this universe, sent my
mind to a place I rarely went anymore.
Um, God, it's me. Reedophilus Graaber. Most people call
me Reed. You can too, I guess. I just, you know, want to thank you. For…for
letting me be smart. And for how Uncle Wyatt helped me. Oh, if you see him— I
mean, of course you see him. Wait…would you? Aw, I don't know that stuff.
Anyway, if you see him, tell him thanks. Tell him I did good with his stuff
and…and…I'll try to walk tall and keep my nose clean and stuff. Aw, that's no
good. I should quit. But…bye. For now.
I found myself staring out the ob-portal at the Butterfly
Nebula. From here it looked like a blue and green splash thrown up by a comet
slamming into the edge of space. Fiery and violent and beautiful.
I had my future to seize now. Time to go.
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