Christmas at Holiday House - RaeAnne Thayne Page 0,2
enough. I still can’t believe you agreed to drop everything to help out Winnie. You’re going to love her, too, I promise.”
Abby shrugged. “The timing was right. My last day at the hospital was Saturday and we were only going to spend the month kicking around Phoenix before the move to Austin.”
The past twenty-four hours were a blur, really, from the moment Lucy had called her, frantic, to tell her that her beloved grandmother had sustained a serious fall. She was in the hospital with a broken wrist, sprained ankle and bruised ribs. She needed home care in order to stay in her house, and did Abby have any friends from nursing school in Colorado who might be looking for work?
She wasn’t sure if Lucy had asked her to come out or if Abby had offered. It didn’t matter, she supposed. By the end of the phone call, she had agreed to travel to Colorado for a few weeks to help Winifred, until Lucy could finish her school term and make it home to Silver Bells herself.
It would be a lovely adventure for her and Christopher, she told herself again, as she had repeated about as often as Jingles and Christopher had needed bathroom breaks.
She wanted to give her son the best Christmas ever and couldn’t imagine a better place to do that than Silver Bells, a beautiful historic winter resort town tucked into the Rocky Mountains. They weren’t staying the entire month and expected to be back in Phoenix for Christmas itself. Two weeks should be enough to enjoy the holiday spirit in this beautiful town.
“You know I love your grandmother,” she said to Lucy. “We’ll all be fine.”
Lucy hesitated. “There is one tiny complication I should probably mention.”
Her friend was going to offer a complication now, when Abby was a hundred feet from her grandmother’s door? “Please don’t tell me I just spent eight hours in the car with a five-year-old and a dyspeptic cat for nothing.”
“No. Not for nothing. But...” Lucy paused again. “I may have misled you about how desperate the situation was. Not on purpose, I promise. I was only going on the information I had.”
“Misled me how?”
“When Winnie called to tell me about her accident and asked me to find a home nurse, she led me to think she was in dire straits. She told me Ethan, my brother, was insisting she go into a rehab facility.”
“That’s often the best place for older patients after a fall, so they can receive supported care.”
“She absolutely refuses. Winnie wants to be home and I’ll admit, I don’t blame her. She loves Holiday House, especially this time of year.”
It was not hard to see why, Abby thought, looking at the grand house on display in front of her.
“Where is the part where you misled me?”
“She led me to believe that if I didn’t find a nurse, Ethan would have her carted straight from the hospital to a rehab center.”
“Have things changed?”
“Not really. But kind of.” Lucy looked apologetic. “I thought Ethan was going to be out of town until next week, and by the time he got back you would be there and it would be a done deal. I had arranged with Winnie’s friends to get her home from the hospital and for someone to stay with her until you could get there. Unbeknownst to me, my brother rearranged his schedule and ended up flying back to town this morning instead of next week. I had no idea he would be there, I swear.”
Okay. So she would have Lucy’s brother to deal with, too. No big deal. She had been a nurse for years, with plenty of experience dealing with arrogant doctors and demanding family members. How hard could Ethan Lancaster be?
Unless he had already arranged for Winnie to go to assisted living, in which case she had just traveled eight hours in a car with a five-year-old boy and said dyspeptic cat for nothing. “So do you need my help or don’t you?”
“We do. Definitely. Winnie and I need you more than ever. She really can’t be alone at the house, especially now with a broken wrist. If you’re not there, Ethan is sure to move her out of her house.”
“If she is in her right mind, he can’t make her go.”
As much as Abby adored Lucy, her friend’s brother sounded like a jerk. During the two years she and Lucy had been roommates at Arizona State University, before she graduated and married Kevin and