The Manger House Read online

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to locations, events, or people (living or dead) is purely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2021 Elizabeth Bromke

  All rights reserved.

  Cover design by Red Leaf Cover Design

  The reproduction or distribution of this book without permission is a theft. If you would like to share this book or any part thereof (reviews excepted), please contact us through our website: elizabethbromke.com

  THE MANGER HOUSE

  Publishing in the Pines

  White Mountains, Arizona

  Contents

  About This Book

  Chapter 1—Tatum

  Chapter 2—Cadence

  Chapter 3—Darla

  Chapter 4—Tatum

  Chapter 5—Cadence

  Chapter 6—Darla

  Chapter 7—Tatum

  Chapter 8—Cadence

  Chapter 9—Darla

  Chapter 10—Tatum

  Chapter 11—Cadence

  Chapter 12—Darla

  Chapter 13—Tatum

  Chapter 14—Cadence

  Chapter 15—Darla

  Chapter 16—Cadence

  Chapter 17—Tatum

  Chapter 18—Darla

  Chapter 19—Tatum

  Chapter 20—Tatum

  Chapter 21—Cadence

  Chapter 22—Tatum

  Chapter 23—Darla

  Chapter 24—Tatum

  Chapter 25—Cadence

  Chapter 26—Darla

  Chapter 27—Tatum

  Chapter 28—Cadence

  Chapter 29—Darla

  Chapter 30—Tatum

  Epilogue

  Also by Elizabeth Bromke

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  About This Book

  Holiday romance, second chances, and new beginnings… The Manger House is a heartwarming, romantic women’s fiction about the true meaning of Christmas.

  Tatum Sageberry always wanted to open an animal shelter. Now she’s got the property but not a clue where to begin.

  Enter local bachelor Rip Van Dam, a family friend who’s been looking for a chance to spend time with the pretty new islander. What’s more? He’s a pet-lover, too. But Tatum has only one thing on her mind, and it has nothing to do with meeting under the mistletoe.

  Meanwhile, Tatum’s sisters are in the thick of their own fresh starts. Cadence is opening her own business: an all-inclusive events venue. And just in time for the holiday season. But with property management, the new business, and her return to the classroom—it’s too much, and she’s about to lose her grip for good.

  Darla’s life has been turned upside down, and she is second-guessing everything, not the least of which is the only anchor she has: teaching. Work was always a safe haven for the sensible thirtysomething, but now a new romance is drifting in like softly falling snow, her sisters are starting new businesses, and Darla is going through the biggest change of her life. If things don’t settle down fast, Darla can’t imagine sticking around Heirloom Island for much longer.

  This Christmas could be the best ever—complete with the sisters’ famous gooseberry pie, decked halls, and hot cocoa by the fire. But only if they can find their holiday spirit together, amid all the madness of the yuletide season.

  Head to Heirloom Island in this heartwarming series about three sisters and the charming small town they’ve come to call home. With enemies-to-lovers romance, sister drama, and small-town charm, The Manger House is the perfect Christmas story.

  You can read these books in order for extra enjoyment.

  Book 1: The Boardwalk House

  Book 2: The Manger House

  Book 3: The Abbey House

  Chapter 1—Tatum

  Tatum Sageberry sat in her little red truck at the bottom of a snowy drive. Pine trees flecked either side of the white path that wound its way faintly from where her engine idled all the way up fifty yards to a farmhouse, red to match her truck. Tatum considered the coincidence in color to be a good omen.

  Asleep on the back seat were her dogs, Angus, Marley, and Serena, huddled in a furry heap atop a woven wool blanket. Back home, in the house on the boardwalk, awaited her cat, Charm.

  The windshield wipers swept like a pair of squeaky pendulums, clearing away a slowly building layer of flurries. Tatum rested her chin on the steering wheel and stared with wonder.

  “Good things come to those who rush in,” she murmured to herself, only mildly aware that she’d butchered two expressions and spliced them into one untruth. She glanced in the rearview at her snoring children. They deserved this, those pups. Even Charm, that obnoxious pill of a feline, deserved this. They deserved room to roam and a snowy woodland to get lost in. A big house with lots of rugs and a fireplace and a mudroom just for them.

  Yes. Her pets deserved this.

  But did Tatum?

  What had she done in life? Not much. Still, she’d managed to get herself, her sister, and her animals here to Heirloom Island in one piece. Give or take. She’d managed to find a property for sale, then beg, borrow, and steal her way into purchasing it. And here she was, with her own set of keys, on Thanksgiving Eve, ready to do a private walk-through. Size everything up without the influence of Darla and Cadence, who meant well, but who seemed to see the bad in everything.

  “Well. What are we waiting for?” Tatum asked the motley crew in back.

  Tails started thumping, tongues wagging. The furbabies were awake.

  Tatum couldn’t help it. She let a silly grin take over her face as she rolled her finger around the radio dial until “Jingle Bells” spilled out of the speakers. Everything was perfect. The setting. The company. And even the song. The truck tires crunched over freshly fallen snow, and Tatum daydreamed about turning the farm into her dream: Heirloom Island’s own animal rescue. And maybe, one day, a place that would rescue Tatum, too. Not from abuse or homelessness, but from a life of moorlessness. A life of nothing.

  Chapter 2—Cadence

  Cadence Van Dam closed the teacher edition math textbook just as her last student left the classroom. She checked her watch, an anniversary gift from Hendrik and one of many special treasures he’d left her. It was the day before Thanksgiving, and the afternoon could not be crazier. At four, Darla had a scan at the OBGYN in Birch Harbor, and Cadence would drive her. After that, they really needed to shop for last-minute essentials for the next day. Before bed, Cadence planned to undertake a full house-cleaning, with Mila’s help. Then, she needed to frame out how she was going to make her proposition the next day.

  Sure, over the past few months, things had been going well enough. With her sisters renting the house next door and paying a fair amount, Cadence was more than making ends meet, which was nice. But since Lotte and Fay had moved, and since Mila was planning to move, Cadence had begun to wonder if the housing arrangements really made sense. Especially with Darla’s due date right around the corner.

  Wouldn’t it be better if the three sisters all roomed? Then Darla would have help, and Tatum would have their good influences, and Cadence…well, Cadence would have company.

  In fact, Mila’s impending move had caused her a fresh wave of anxiety, a distraction just in time for Darla’s big excitement to take place. Cadence was very likely even more excited than Darla for the baby’s arrival. She hadn’t admitted this, but it was probably evident in her shopping habits—she handled all the selecting and purchasing of baby basics—and in her nonstop baby chat. Why didn’t Darla want to learn the child’s sex? What first names did she have in mind? Would she give the little one Hunter’s surname—no, thank goodness—or the Sageberry family n
ame?

  But Darla, despite her big talk about bucket lists and baby fever and dreams come true, had changed in her pregnancy. Maybe it was the fact that she was in a new town, or maybe it was the fact that she’d be starting a family without a partner. Cadence had not, however, stopped to consider that Darla’s turn inward could be a direct result of Cadence’s badgering. She hadn’t considered this because Cadence needed this baby. She needed this baby—and the presence of her sisters—in order to fill the void that for a year now had been growing to the size of a black hole. The void that Hendrik had left in his wake. The one that one year of grieving did nothing to diminish, especially as they came up on the holidays.

  She closed and locked her classroom door and started down the hall toward the family room, where Darla held her last class of the day: Dramatic Literature. It was the only way she could figure to teach language arts to the adolescent set—through the use of the works she’d produced when she was a stage manager in the Wayne State theater program—but it worked. Especially now, as “O Holy Night” reverberated down the hall and Cadence remembered that the holiday season was just too much for the poor kids to languish in Hamlet. Darla had seamlessly—and with the full support of the headmaster and Father Richard—transitioned into using most of her students to put up the Nativity play that Christmas. Come spring, it’d be Simon Peter. She was all in—even despite her impending life change. And this worried Cadence. It worried her to the bone. It worried her so much that she had begun to wonder what her role would really become now that Darla and the baby and Tatum and her animals were under her charge. Cadence had begun to wonder, in fact, if she might have made the wrong choice in trying to start her new business and rejoining St. Mary’s.

  Maybe she was meant to do the thing that she knew how to do best: put others first. Maybe putting herself first, for once, was the wrong play. Maybe pushing ahead and forging her own path had been the wrong decision all along—back when she first moved to the island and took a risk on loving an older man. And again now, as she tried to overhaul her life and create the financial freedom she’d so enjoyed in her marriage.

  Maybe Cadence was doing it all wrong.

  Chapter 3—Darla

  Darla cupped one hand beneath her protruding belly and pointed the other downstage. “Okay, we’ve got five minutes. Let’s run through Joseph’s and Mary’s lines at the manger.”

  The eighth-grade pair, giddy with the idea that they were a couple—even though Mary was a virgin—stood awkwardly next to each other. Mary collected the prop Baby Jesus, complete in his swaddling gown, from the wooden bed and cradled him in her arms.

  “Too brusque!” Darla called.

  “What does brusque mean?” the girl called back. The enthusiasm for the play wasn’t quite there yet, and they had exactly three weeks to go before dress rehearsals.

  “Mary”—Darla believed in using their character names even if they were only blocking it out—“you’ve just given birth to the Savior. You’re a young girl. You’re scared. You’re staying in a barn, but you’re a mother now.” Darla moved closer to downstage center. “Yes, you might be uncomfortable. Yes, you’re probably in pain and confused, but you’re not going to be rough with God’s Only Son.”

  The girl studied the plastic doll. “Maybe we need a real baby, then.”

  Darla didn’t disagree, but her due date fell on the week of dress rehearsals, and the plan was to have the baby, take a week off, and return to school in time for opening night. She’d need one of her sisters to step in and oversee things—the appointed assistant director and stage manager were hanger-on seventh graders without vision, after all. But, it could be done. As long as due dates could be trusted.

  As a new mother, all Darla had to go on was trust: trust in the nine-month incubation period, trust in her sisters to help, and trust in herself to manage it all. And if Darla couldn’t manage it all, then what? Would she crawl back to Detroit and beg Hunter to give her another chance? Of course not. Darla had only one option: to make this work. Yes. She’d continue teaching, she’d raise her baby, she’d nurture her rekindled bond with Cadence and help Tatum with her own fledgling bucket-list dream.

  She’d do it all. Somehow.

  “Ready?” Cadence’s voice interrupted the set, and Darla swiveled to wave her sister off.

  “I just need five minutes.”

  “Ms. Sageberry, you said that five minutes ago,” Joseph complained.

  Darla gave him a pointed look. “We could have been done five minutes ago if you’d get your blocking right. One more time, you two. Exit and reenter. Mary,” Darla directed the girl, “this time, pretend the doll is the real thing.”

  As the two kids trudged up and behind the curtain, then walked back through the scene, Cadence joined Darla at what was supposed to be the apron of the stage, but what was actually just the tape she’d put down to indicate such. “Are you going to cast the baby as Jesus?”

  “What baby?” Darla asked distractedly.

  Cadence scoffed. “Your baby.”

  “Timing’ll be all wrong. If I had him or her, like, today, maybe. That would put us at nearly four weeks, and I think it could work. But according to my due date—”

  “I was joking. And anyway, according to your due date,” Cadence cut in, “you should be on bedrest by now. Not on your feet directing a play. Wrap it up, and let’s go. We’re going to miss the ferry.”

  “The ferry?” Darla dismissed her students, reminding them quickly that rehearsals resumed Monday after school. She packed her school tote and followed Cadence, who walked with purpose down the hall and toward the teacher parking lot. “I thought we were taking the boat?”

  Earlier that year, Mason Acton had connected Cadence with a good boat mechanic on the island. Turned out Hendrik had used the guy before, but there wasn’t any familiarity or friendliness between them, and Cadence, apparently, had just as soon lost the man’s phone number. She reported that by the time she looked for it again, winter was descending on Heirloom Island, and Cadence had figured there wouldn’t be much boating. She hadn’t thought about all of Darla’s appointments.

  And she certainly hadn’t thought of getting her sister to the mainland on the big day.

  But now her boat was acting up again, and for today, at least, they’d have to take the ferry. Darla hated this, but what choice did they have?

  “Sorry, I thought you knew. The boat won’t start.”

  Darla groaned. They made it to Cadence’s car, the frigid air sweeping them inside where Cadence started the engine and blasted the heat.

  “We need to get it fixed,” Darla pointed out on their way to the ferry. “Or we need to get a new boat.”

  “A new boat is a big expense.” But surely Cadence agreed that the boat needed fixing. Darla wondered if the real reason she hadn’t fixed it had less to do with money and more to do with hard feelings. It’d be uncomfortable to drive one’s deceased husband’s craft. After all, it was named for his previous wife, Katarina. One would have thought Hendrik would have renamed a boat.

  Tentatively, Darla asked about this. “Could you rename her? The boat, I mean?”

  Cadence threw her a sharp look. “Renaming a boat is bad luck.”

  Surely, though, people rename boats, Darla thought. In fact, she was fairly positive that you could rename a boat if you did it right—by removing all traces of the original name. She said to her sister, “All you’d have to do is paint on a new name, right? The real Katarina has passed anyway.”

  Cadence didn’t reply to that, and Darla figured it was too long of a shot to suggest she just sell the Katarina and buy a new one and name it Cadence. Something maybe Hendrik ought to have done.

  It was almost as if, Darla wondered for her sister, Hendrik had never actually moved on. As if Katarina weren’t dead. At least, not really.

  Chapter 4—Tatum

  Tatum had spent the night at the farm, which was a silly thing to have done. She hadn’t been prepared—not enou
gh blankets, no pillows. Only her dogs for warmth. But once she’d gotten there, she’d been seized by a need to test things out.

  Of course, Tatum wasn’t going to live on the farm. The entirety of the property would be dedicated to the shelter and outbuildings-turned-dog-runs. Even so, how could Tatum know if the animals would be safe there overnight if she herself wasn’t comfortable with it?

  So, she’d slept on the spare wool blankets she kept for the dogs in the back seat of the truck. They’d cuddled together and waited for the sun to bleed down past the little kitchen window. This was part of what had called Tatum to the place: that it had been a house first. A home, actually. Somebody’s home, and definitely even somebody with dogs and cats and horses and goats and cows and chickens of their own. From all that Tatum had read about her new place on Pine Beach Way, it had been a working farm. A real working farm, complete with cows for milking, sheep for shearing, and horses for riding—and even some light gardens at the far inland edge. That was another thing Tatum loved about Pine Beach Farm—how it could be a place of sustainable living. Everything Tatum would ever—could ever—need, she could have right there, on her very own farm and in her very own little animal house. She could grow vegetables and maybe, one day, bring over an alpaca or something exotic from which she’d shave fleece—did alpacas have fleece, or what was it called?