A Fortune's Children's Christmas Read Online Free PDF Page B

crackled brightly.
    She and Angela were alone. Chase was out looking for the missing livestock.
    Leaning against the counter, she took a good hard look at the place. The house was decorated sparsely with an eclectic array of used furniture that somehow jelled together to give an authentic mountain-cabin feel to the place. The couch had once been deep forest green and was now worn and lumpy. A sleeping bag was thrown over one overstuffed arm and had sufficed as Chase’s bed. An old leather chair sat near the fire, and a drop-leaf table separated the living area from the kitchen. Four chairs surrounded the oval table, none of which matched another.
    She’d asked enough questions to learn that most of the furniture had come with the place, and she supposed he was a man who traveled light, didn’t collect a lot of possessions or dust, and was used to moving from one place to another.
    In the kitchen she poured coffee from a thermos and stared through the frost-covered windows to the barn, where snow was piled high on the roof and icicles dangled, sparkling in the pale winter sun.
    Livestock, black Angus and white-faced Hereford cattle, chewed their cuds under a pole structure or milled in the snow that had been trampled.
    She was sipping from her cup when the house seemed to shudder. The motor of the refrigerator began to hum. Lamps were suddenly lit.
    Electricity! Finally. She snapped on the televisionset and saw the familiar characters of a soap opera. “Good.” Lesley’s spirits lifted instantly. “Back to the twentieth century!” She hitched her way across the room to the wall phone and nearly shouted out loud when she held the receiver to her ear and heard an honest-to-goodness dial tone for the first time in half a week.
    Her heart hammered, and she couldn’t wipe the smile off her face. There were so many people to call to tell them about Angela.
    First on the list were her parents. She dialed their home in Seattle and waited impatiently, her fingers tapping anxiously on the counter.
    One ring. Two. Three.
    “Come on. Be home.”
    “Hello?”
    At the sound of her mother’s voice, tears filled Lesley’s eyes. “Hi, Grandma,” she said.
    There was a stunned silence and then her mother shrieked. “Lesley? You had the baby? Frank! Frank! Get on the extension, it’s Lesley! She had the baby! Where are you? What happened? Oh, my God, we were so worried!”
    There was a click and she heard her father’s voice. “Les?”
    “Hi, Daddy.” Tears of relief spilled down her cheeks. “Mom’s right. You’re a grandpa now. Angela Noel Chastina Bastian was born on Christmas Eve and she’s beautiful.”
    “Well, I’ll be—” her father whispered.
    Her mother began to sniff, and Lesley couldn’t helpbut giggle through her tears. They were all a bunch of romantic softies deep at heart. “As I said, we were so worried,” her mom repeated. “We couldn’t get hold of you, not even through the police and…and the television reports said the storm there was the worst ever.” Her voice cracked. “There were pictures of stranded cars and frozen cattle and, oh, I just thank God that you and the baby are safe.”
    “Me, too.”
    “Are you at home?”
    “No. At the neighbor’s. If it hadn’t been for Chase coming along…” She couldn’t imagine what would have happened. Quickly she recounted the past few days, leaving out only those parts that would upset her parents and lingering on the birth and Angela. “I was lucky I guess.”
    “Very,” her mother agreed, then promised to visit as soon as the weather allowed.
    “She’ll be there if she has to walk through another blizzard,” her father said, chuckling. They’d been waiting to become grandparents for years, but Lesley’s sister, Janie, wasn’t interested in becoming a mother. A lawyer, married to another attorney in the same firm, Janie lived in San Francisco and enjoyed an urban professional life uncluttered by children.
    “So this Chase