O Little Town of Bethlehem, page 1
Praise for O Little Town of Bethlehem
"Elizabeth Boyle has always had a rare gift for giving us people to care about, but she’s put her whole heart into this beautiful, magical story that caught my heart completely in its spell. Absolutely enchanting!"
~ SUSANNA KEARSLEY
Author of The King’s Messenger and The Vanished Days
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“Every so often, a book arrives just when you need it. O Little Town of Bethlehem by Elizabeth Boyle is perfect for those yearning for a tale of friendship and a sense of hope, set in a quirky small town held together with a bit of magic and a lot of love.”
~KATE MACINTOSH
Author of The Champagne Letters
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“Boyle’s story of placemaking and letting go of the past is sure to enchant readers."
~ Kirkus Reviews
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“The magic of Bethlehem is impossible to resist. This captivating tale pulls you right into the feisty heart of the town alongside Madeline, and you never want to leave.”
~CJ HUNT
Author of the Rivers End romance series
O Little Town Of Bethlehem
Elizabeth Boyle
Also by Elizabeth Boyle
The Rhymes with Love series
Along Came a Duke
And the Miss Ran Away with the Rake
If Wishes Were Earls
The Viscount Who Lived Down the Lane
The Knave of Hearts
Six Impossible Things
Have You Any Rogues?
The Bachelor Chronicles series
Something About Emmaline
This Rake of Mine
Love Letters from a Duke
Confessions of a Little Black Gown
Memoirs of a Scandalous Red Dress
How I Met My Countess
Mad About the Duke
Lord Langley is Back in Town
Mad About the Major
The Marlowe series
His Mistress by Morning
Tempted by the Night
* * *
The Danvers series
One Night of Passion
Stealing the Bride
Once Tempted
It Takes a Hero
Hero, Come Back
The Brazen Series
Brazen Angel
Brazen Heiress
Brazen Temptress
* * *
OTHER TITLES
No Marriage of Convenience
Cynders & Ashe
Chessy’s Wedding
O Little Town of Bethlehem. Copyright © 2024 by Elizabeth Boyle.
All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the author, except as permitted by U.S. copyright law. For permission requests, contact Elizabeth Boyle, P.O. Box 47252, Seattle, WA 98146.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents portrayed in this production are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons (living or deceased), events, places, buildings, organizations, locales, or products is entirely coincidental.
Cover design by 100Covers.com
First edition 2024
Publisher's Cataloging-in-Publication
(Provided by Cassidy Cataloguing Services, Inc.).
To Terry
For everything. Always.
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Chapter 1
Thanksgiving eve,
Present day
* * *
It was supposed to be a night filled with magic.
“When will I learn?” Madeline Drake muttered as she stood at the end of the driveway in near-blinding snow. Stomping her feet and shivering, she tried to get some feeling back in her toes. She’d stood here for nearly thirty minutes, her luggage looking like the parts of a toppled snowman.
She dug out her cell phone. Again. The service was spotty at best, but the last text she’d gotten from her assistant, Mindy, said she’d managed to get her a ride to the airport and a plane to pick her up.
Behind her, the twinkling lights of Emerson’s “mountain modern” monstrosity, his Jackson Hole retreat where he liked to “rough it,” sparked with warmth, but she stubbornly held her ground. She wasn’t going back inside.
Dumped. Out. Humiliated.
The news banners that had scrolled onto her screen earlier this morning and sent her hightailing it to Jackson to confront Emerson offered a hint of what awaited her back in LA. At least this time the disaster hadn’t been her fault.
Not that anyone would listen.
Then again, if her ride didn’t show up quickly, she’d most likely freeze to death right here in this snowbank. If there was any comfort in that scenario, it was that she wouldn’t have to face the landslide of mortifying opinions that were already being bandied about by pundits and social media trolls.
One would think that, after all these years in the spotlight, Madeline would be used to weathering the comments and slurs and ugly suppositions that came with the very public dissection of every aspect of her life.
But this time it weighed too much, and she felt herself slumping toward the ground until she heard her grandmother Gigi’s sharp tones. Straighten up. You’re a Drake, for Christ’s sake. Gigi had hammered that canon into her. Thus reminded, she sucked in a deep breath and dashed her nearly frozen fingers at the tears threatening to fall.
“I’m Madeline Drake,” she reminded herself.
Whatever that meant.
As if in answer to her prayer, she heard a heavy wheeze. Out of the swirl of flakes and bitter wind, a pair of headlights bounced up the lonely road.
An old pickup truck, all patched and rusted, pulled up the drive, until the headlights left her all but blinded. They flipped off even as the truck grated and ground to a shuddering stop. The driver, a mere silhouette inside, leaned over and shoved open the passenger door. “I’m guessing you’re her.”
This was her car service? Mindy had never let her down before, but this must be what she had meant by “it’s the best I can do.”
The wind blew the door shut, the clank snapping her back to attention. Even if there had been a way to call for someone else, it was freezing cold and snowing hard, so she went to open the door—but it stuck.
The irony did not escape her.
“Got to jiggle it a bit and then give it a good tug,” the voice inside encouraged.
After a few attempts, the door finally opened. No, this certainly wasn’t her usual ride.
“You Maddie?” A small, thin man bundled up in an old sheepherder’s jacket sat hunched behind the steering wheel, looking her up and down with no small measure of skepticism. As if there were half a dozen other people clamoring for a ride.
“Yes, I’m Madeline Drake,” she corrected. She glanced down at her phone. His name is Shandy. “You are . . . ?”
“Shandy,” he confirmed, grinning at her. “Get in. I’m freezing to death.” He was already shifting the groaning engine back into gear.
“My bags,” she said with a nod toward the lumps in the snow.
“Best get them in the back,” he told her, jerking his thumb toward the rear of the truck. “I left bingo at the VFW for this.”
He left bingo . . . Madeline bit back a sharp retort only because she wasn’t convinced he wouldn’t drive off without her.
She hefted in one bag then the other, carefully setting them well away from the empty beer bottles, a sandbag, an old cooler, and the rusty shovel decorating the truck bed. The only things missing were duct tape, rope, and a tarp to make this the perfect opening to an episode of Forensic Files.
When she opened the door this time, she realized her seat was otherwise occupied.
Rather a metaphor for the day, since she’d arrived in Jackson to find Emerson occupied with someone else.
The interloper this time was a large dog, of sorts, as scruffy as the driver and sporting the same mismatched patches of color as the truck. The mutt had the nerve to stretch out a paw, if only to take up more space.
“Um—” she began, not sure how to proceed.
“Don’t mind him. Picked him up on the way out here. Poor fella. Abandoned on Thanksgiving.” He paused and tugged an old-fashioned pocket watch from his coat. “Yep, after midnight, so it’s Thanksgiving. Can you imagine being that mean?”
She could. Still, she hardly wanted to start a club. “Is he safe?”
“The better question is, does he have fleas?” the man chuckled, wrapping his hand around the dog’s middle and pulling it over to make some room. “I’m pretty sure he does, but I can hardly put him in the back, now, can I? He’s near-frozen as it is.”
A gust of wind blew through her thin coat, leaving Madeline scurrying toward the meager warmth of the cab. “Does he have tags or a collar?” she asked, casting a suspicious glance at her seatmates. Both of them.
“Nope.”
The heater blew warm then cold in errant gusts as the driver shifted into gear and the truck groaned and heaved into motion.
“Best hang on,” he advised.
She scrambled to find a seat belt, a handhold, anything. He gunned the engine and the truck shot forward, the rear end fishtailing on the snowy road. She had no choice but to take a breath and shove her fingers into the grimy depths of the seat in search of a seat belt. She freed a buckle from its hiding spot as they blew through a stop sign and went roaring down the road.
Finding the rest of her seatbelt took on new urgency. Madeline reached over her shoulder and, after a couple of pulls, released the strap so she could click it into place. To her relief, it seemed to hold.
Clearly, it was the only thing about this truck that actually worked.
He turned again, this time onto the road that led to the highway, and Madeline tried to settle in, but her thoughts returned to the hours before.
You can’t cut me. Not now. Not for her.
Babe, you gotta understand, it’s all business. . .
She shivered.
“Should have waited in the house,” the driver pointed out. “‘Specially in that getup.”
“I’m not used to winter. I’m from LA.” She glanced out the window and tried to see anything in the darkness and snow.
“LA.” He snorted. “You one of those fancy-pants actors who comes here and drives up all the prices? Builds them big houses”—he jerked a nod back toward Emerson’s place—“then leaves them empty most of the year?”
“That house belongs to my—” She nearly said boyfriend. “Former business partner.”
“What sort of business?”
Madeline drew a deep breath. “Movie,” she replied. “We were supposed to be making a movie.”
“So fancy-pants actors,” he repeated, as if he’d won the argument.
“I was going to co-produce and star in it,” she corrected. A quake rattled inside her. Star in it. A light flickered out on all the possibilities that this film might have opened.
“Was?”
“Yes. He’s decided to go in a different direction,” she said, thinking of when she’d arrived and found him and Gemma in a definitely different direction.
“That why you’re in such an all-fire hurry to leave, on Thanksgiving and all? Want to get back to your glamorous life?”
Great. She’d gotten the nosiest driver in all of Wyoming. “I don’t have a lot to be thankful for tonight.” She wanted to tell him that this glamorous life of hers was a giant, lonely lie. A façade of smiles and spotlights. “And I don’t know about the glamorous part,” she told him. “You aren’t catching me on my best day.”
He coughed out a bit of a laugh. “I rarely catch people on their best day.”
Meanwhile, the dog had inched closer, settling his head on her lap. She wasn’t too sure what to do, so she patted it awkwardly, her fingers brushing over his ears. The dog sighed and laid his head in her hand, trusting that she wouldn’t abandon him. Something inside her thawed just enough to let all those roiling emotions spill out.
“Have you ever wanted something so badly that you’d do anything to get it? A chance to do something beyond anything you’ve ever been offered?” She took a breath. “To be someone?”
There it was. The admission that had clawed its way forward. She wouldn’t be in Emerson’s biopic of Amelia Earhart, the sort of movie the Academy loved. Months of reading, flying lessons, watching old newsreels, doing everything and anything to slide into the elusive flyer’s character and finally charm all the naysayers, all the critics. “I’ve lost everything today. I don’t even know who I am.”
“Have you tried being yourself?”
“That’s rather hard when you’re an actor.”
“How’s that?”
“When you slip into a role, one you play for a long time, that character becomes a part of you. The longer you play it, the more they seem to take over your life.”
Even now, one of the lines she’d recited earlier that day haunted her.
Time is a river. A river with currents that run so fast they will sweep you away, drown you.
If only it would. Just sweep her away.
“You say ‘slip.’ I say it sounds like you use them roles to escape.”
Right now she wanted to escape this ride. Escape tomorrow and the day after that. Everything was in the toilet. She’d even argued with Nate when she’d left the Star Bright set earlier, her hair on fire and more than ready to murder Emerson given the news that he’d cut her out of Earhart.
This time, maybe Nate would make good on his threat to fire her. Tears welled in her eyes as she thought of him—her best friend. He’d written the starring role in his series just for her, given her a chance when no one would hire her. And how had she repaid him?
“Actor, huh? Done anything good?” Her driver glanced at her, but his expression showed no sign of recognition.
After a day of insults, this was the final straw. “I’m on a series,” she supplied, dashing away the tears still threatening to spill over. “A show, The Star Bright. I play the saloon owner, Calliope Corfield. Before that I played Casey Jones in a detective show for kids . . .”
This earned her a noncommittal shrug.
“You haven’t heard of The Star Bright?” It was actually rare when someone hadn’t. It streamed all over the world. And Casey Jones, Girl Detective? She doubted the reruns would ever end—as her mother, Dahlia, gleefully reminded her twice a year when the residuals were tallied up and she got her stage mother’s share.
“Nope, can’t say that I have. Then again, never had a TV.”
Of course not. He barely had a truck. She’d be surprised if they made it to the airport.
Speaking of the airport, Madeline tried to figure out where they were. Except for the tunnels of shifting, flickering light from the headlights, darkness surrounded them.
“What’s yer show about?”
His question dragged her out of her reverie. “My what?”
“This show yer in. What’s it about?”
“A small town. Here in Wyoming, as a matter of fact.”
“Which one?”
A flicker of a smile warmed her as she thought of the set. “Bethlehem. Though it’s not real.”
He chuckled. “You sure?”
“Yeah, I’m sure. My friend Nate writes and produces the show—so he makes it all up.” Nate’s beautiful lines had given her a leg up, but when she’d tried to branch out between seasons, she’d found herself boxed in once more. First Casey, now Calliope.
