Read A Family for Christmas for Free Online

done anything that was genuinely naughty. She’d just made it clear that
she wished Lydia wasn’t around.
    “I
got all the buttons but two,” Ellie said, opening the dressing room door.
    She
looked very pretty in the feminine dress, but it didn’t appear to be hanging
right.
    “Maybe
Miss Lydia can get the last two buttons for you,” Gabe said, straightening up.
    Ellie
frowned. “I thought she was Aunt Lydia now.”
    “Oh.
That’s right. You can call her whichever you’d like.”
    They’d
had a long conversation about what Ellie should call Lydia. It would feel wrong
to Lydia for Ellie to call her some version of “mom,” so she’d said she’d
rather they not suggest that to Ellie. Gabe flatly refused to let the girl call
her just “Lydia,” which would have been Lydia’s preference, since he didn’t
allow his daughter to call adults by just their first names. So they’d
compromised on Aunt Lydia, which was frankly a little weird but was the best
they could come up with.
    There
were all kinds of strange details to work out when planning for a marriage of
convenience.
    Ellie
was still frowning. “I want you to do the buttons.”
    “But
my fingers are too big to mess with little buttons like that.” Gabe caught the
girl’s eye in an expression Lydia was starting to recognize—the silent reminder
that she needed to be good.
    “Okay,”
Ellie said with a frown, turning around in front of Lydia.
    Lydia
saw what was wrong with the hang of the dress as the girl showed her the back.
She’d mis-buttoned a couple of the buttons, so the fabric wasn’t aligned
straight.
    Lydia
squatted down and gently undid two of the buttons and re-did them.
    “What
are you doing?” Ellie asked, looking back over her shoulder. “Those weren’t the
ones.”
    Lydia
wasn’t about to tell the girl she’d buttoned the dress wrong. With a smile, she
replied, “I like these little pearl buttons so much I was checking them out.
Here you go—you’re all buttoned now.”
    Ellie
peered at Lydia suspiciously, but then she got distracted by the dress.
    “It’s
beautiful,” Lydia said, praying that this was the last dress they needed to try
on. She’d never been big on shopping—even for herself.
    Ellie
peered at herself in the big mirror, turning around and inspecting the dress
from every angle.
    “I
really like it,” Gabe said. “I think that’s the one.” He hadn’t shown any of
the impatience that Lydia felt, but she was sure that shopping wasn’t at the top
of his list of things to do either.
    Ellie
didn’t say anything for a long time. Then she finally turned around and faced
her father. “This one is it.”
    Lydia
almost slumped with relief, and she felt Gabe relax too. “Excellent,” he said.
“Let Aunt Lydia unbutton it for you, and then you can change clothes so we can
go get something for lunch.”
    Lydia
didn’t like being “Aunt Lydia.” She also didn’t like being “Miss Lydia.” And it
would definitely be wrong for her to be called “Mom.”
    Whatever
she was to Ellie clearly didn’t have any sort of name.
    Pushing
the thought aside, she unbuttoned the dress quickly and stared at the bottom of
the dressing room door as Ellie changed clothes, recognizing every step of the
process by the inches she could see beneath the door.
    When
she glanced over, she saw that Gabe was watching her.
    She
had no idea what to make of his expression, so she just smiled.
    He
smiled back, but it didn’t reach his eyes. She wondered what he’d been thinking
about and if he was, for some reason, unhappy with her.
    She
didn’t want him to be unhappy. This marriage was the way to finally get what
she wanted. She needed to make sure she didn’t look impatient again.
    “We
can add a red satin sash to the dress for the wedding,” Lydia said brightly,
when Ellie emerged, dressed in her sweater and blue corduroy pants. “That’s
what Mia is going to wear with her dress.”
    Mia
was Lydia’s five-year-old