Jingle-Bell Baby
Linda Goodnight
MILLS & BOON
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Table of Contents
Winner of a RITA® Award for excellence in inspirational fiction, Linda Goodnight has also won the Booksellers’ Best, ACFW Book of the Year, and a Reviewers’ Choice Award from Romantic Times BOOKreviews magazine. Linda has appeared on the Christian bestseller list, and her romance novels have been translated into more than a dozen languages. Active in orphan ministry, this former nurse and teacher enjoys writing fiction that carries a message of hope and light in a sometimes dark world. She and husband Gene live in Oklahoma. Readers can write to her at [email protected]
CHAPTER ONE
LESSON NUMBER ONE in birthing class: never drive a car cross-country alone. Especially during the ninth month of pregnancy.
But Jenna Garwood had never taken a birthing class.
For the tenth time in as many minutes, she cast an anxious glance in the rearview mirror, relieved to see that no one had followed her when she’d exited the interstate some miles back.
Since her escape from the Carrington Estate, she’d zigged and zagged from the east toward the west, careful to cover her tracks. After three days, she shouldn’t be so worried. But the long arm of the Carrington family reached far and wide. And they didn’t give up easily.
When she’d heard the plans they had for her unborn child, Jenna had done the only thing that made sense. She’d run.
She had always been weak, but the little girl beneath her breast had given her strength. After the humiliation and sorrow of the last two years, the baby had given her a reason to try again.
A moan slipped past a bottom lip raw from constant gnawing. She bent forward over the steering wheel to stretch the kink in her back wishing she hadn’t spritzed the car’s interior with eau de parfum this morning. The stench of dirt and oil intermingled with the honeyed notes of orange blossom rose from the floorboard like an unwanted visitor. Saliva pooled in her mouth. As she tried to focus on the road, she swallowed, regretful, too, of the hamburger she’d eaten for breakfast.
Somewhere in this empty Texas landscape, there had to be a quiet little town where she could rest…and hide…until the ache in her back subsided.
“Only a little farther, darling,” she murmured to the hard ball around her middle. “Mommy’s tired, too.”
Tired was an understatement of monumental proportions.
Her back had hurt nonstop throughout the duration of her pregnancy but during the last twelve hours the discomfort had grown steadily worse. If it had been her belly instead of her back, she would have been scared.
In conjunction with long hours behind the wheel, stress was the likely culprit. She hadn’t relaxed once since leaving the estate. Even sleep was accomplished
