Home for Christmas: New Adult Holiday Dark Suspense Romance
Read Home for Christmas: New Adult Holiday Dark Suspense Romance Online
Authors: Emme Rollins
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Forced from her home and holding the key to a horrible secret, Ginny is haunted by her memories and pursued by a man who will stop at nothing to regain his control over her.
The appearance of a mysterious man in her time of greatest need forces Ginny to decide whether she will take the chance to trust this handsome stranger.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
A police siren howled in the early morning haze. Ginny woke with a start, stifling a scream and cowering in the cold, dark vestibule. She drew a shaky breath, the images of her dream lingering. She found it difficult to differentiate between memory and imagination—everything felt like a threat. Pulling her coat around her, she sought warmth and comfort and found neither. Instead, her mind flooded with the memory of his bruising grip, the push and pull that inevitably led to more pain.
This was the only place she felt even remotely safe. She didn’t know how they stayed in business anymore—everyone downloaded their movies and people who did still rent them never returned movies after midnight. It was a gamble but so far her assessment had been accurate. The local family video store’s little cubbyhole was dark and, though it wasn’t heated, it was at least twenty degrees warmer than outside. Best of all, it was great protection from the wind.
It was the perfect place to curl up and sleep, tucked into the corner of the vestibule between the two doors. The glassed-in area served as the perfect nook, a six by six square of relative warmth and safety. The store couldn’t lock the outer door because, to return movies, customers had to access the flip-top slot located inside the little foyer. Luckily for Ginny, the “Return Movies Here” bin never saw any action until people were on their way to work in the morning, and by then, she was already up and looking for breakfast.
If it were a big chain store like Blockbuster used to be, she would’ve been worried about security cameras or even guards patrolling. This, though, was just a little mom-and-pop operation, a family video store where the kids’ movies were always free and they gave away popcorn with every rental. Anything to try and stay in business. In a small little town like this, there were still plenty of people who couldn’t afford to trade in their VHS collected for DVDs, let alone Blue Rays.
She always set her watch alarm and forced herself to make it out the door while it was still dark and she could slip behind the strip mall unnoticed. The world was a different place at five in the morning. It was something she had never known on those school days before her older sister, Maggie, had left them. After that, it was just Ginny and their stepfather, Brody, alone together in a very small space.
The morning was still and empty. Each eerily haloed streetlight became both a beacon and an announcement. She found herself stepping around the orange-tinged circles, as if crossing that barrier would set off an ominous warning, some universal alarm.
She discovered a veritable smorgasbord behind the strip mall, where there was a Chinese carryout restaurant and a Dunkin’ Donuts. Donut holes were prone to going stale and she could often find enough of those to stave off the gnawing hole in her belly. She’d been afraid to eat the leftovers from the Chinese restaurant, but had found little stapled wax paper packages of egg rolls on several occasions that had been a real treat.
Then she discovered the houses behind the alleyway. Most of them put their trash out on Tuesdays, and she had found a myriad of treasures—a pair of gloves with a hole in one thumb, several mismatched pairs of socks, and some old, scratched up Matchbox cars for her nephews. She’d been fortunate at the house behind the alleyway of the video store, and she wasn’t disappointed this morning. In a box next to the trash was a lucky find—an unopened jar of Jif peanut butter, a small bottle of apple juice and a Scrunchie ponytail holder. Her stomach lurched at the sight of peanut butter!
She shoved the bottle of apple juice in her coat pocket and slipped the Scrunchie over her wrist. She unscrewed the lid of the peanut butter and peeled back the foil, breaking the creamy, smooth surface with her index finger. She licked it off, sucking hard to get it all. Pure peanuty heaven! Her stomach growled and she satisfied it as fast as she could without a spoon, fingering as much as she could into her mouth at a time. It was like buttery velvet melting on her tongue. She wasn’t even aware she was making little mewling noises, like a starving kitten settling in to nurse, or that she had wandered under the light of a streetlamp.
That’s when she saw him out of the corner of her eye, standing less than ten feet away to her right. She took an immediate step back, thinking fast enough to put the lid back on her peanut butter and slip it into her other coat pocket. Beyond him was the shortest route to open space and freedom. Behind her was a very long alleyway that didn’t break out into a clearing for the length of a football field.
She couldn’t make out his features in the shadows, just that he was big, very big, even taller than her stepfather and wider across the shoulders by far. He looked like he had run the length of several football fields in his time, and she guessed he could run down the stretch of the alleyway after her without breaking a sweat.
Ginny took a step back, then another, her instincts moving her of their own volition. He didn’t move toward her, just stood there in the darkness, watching. That’s when she noticed the white plastic bag he was holding by his left side. Her heart hammered faster as she realized he must live in the house where she rummaged almost daily through the trash can. He was just taking out the garbage.
She tried to think of something to say, maybe apologize, explain, but instead she turned and ran. The pavement was slippery—last night’s sleet had left a sheen of ice over the blacktop. She didn’t care, she just ran, skidding once into the dumpster behind Dunkin’ Donuts, where she would’ve normally stopped to look for confections. She didn’t dare look back. She thought she heard him call out to her, “Hey! Come back!” but she wasn’t sure. It might have been her imagination or just her heart pounding in her ears.
She wondered how she could even dare to go back to her spot at the video store. Lamenting the possible loss of her hiding place, Ginny shoved her hands into her pockets, put her head down against the wind, and began to walk the three blocks to the 7-Eleven. The convenience store clerk was a young kid who worked there on weekdays. He watched her walk to the back to use the bathroom like she did every other morning. This bathroom was perfect, very clean, one toilet, a sink and a door that locked behind her. The one she used at the Shell station across the street wasn’t as nice and didn’t have the hand dryer, which she had found invaluable.
Ginny shrugged her backpack off and peeled back layers of clothing. Her long heavy jacket, wool outside and padded inside, was blessedly warm. It had been her mother’s. It was followed by a sweater, a turtleneck, a sports bra, heavy hiking boots, a pair of jeans over two pairs of leggings and two pairs of socks.
She stood in front of the cracked mirror, shivering in her panties, and turned on the water to let it get warm while she rummaged in her backpack for the case that held her soap, toothbrush and toothpaste.
Something small and square fell out of the bag and clattered against the tile. She gasped, snatching it back up and holding it close to her chest. It seemed impossible something so small could be her only hope of safety. The memory card was no bigger than a stamp. It had once been in a camcorder and it bore no label, nothing to reveal the horror it contained. She tucked it back into her bag, burying it deep, like a treasure, then turned her attention back to her morning routine.
Sometimes, she could hear people in the store, customers or the clerk, talking to one another, but no one had ever come knocking on the door during her morning ritual. Her panties came off, and she peed, her bladder near bursting, then she washed her panties in the sink using her ever-dwindling bar of soap. She was going to have to figure out how to get another. Both bathrooms only had the liquid kind.
It was a lesson in acrobatics trying to wash at the sink. Leaning over, she washed her face, then her white-blonde hair, which she did every other day, but never on days when it was below freezing. She scrubbed her upper body, her ribs prominent, belly concave. She managed to clean the light blonde thatch of pubic hair by straddling the sink, scooping water with her hands to rinse.
After drying off with paper towels, she wrung out the water from her hair as well as she could, and then bent over in front of the hand dryer in an attempt to dry her hair. She brushed her teeth, sad to lose the taste of peanut butter in her mouth, but smiling at the thought of the rest of the jar in her pocket. She used the newly found Scrunchie to pull her hair back. That was her second favorite find this morning, something she hadn’t thought to throw in her backpack when she left. She was going to really appreciate it on her daily walks, when the wind whipped her long hair against her face so hard it made her gasp.
When her hair was mostly dry, it was time to get re-dressed. She put on a clean pair of underwear and did a quick smell-test on the clothing closest to her body—leggings, turtleneck, socks. Then, she began the process of pulling it all on again, layer after layer. She struggled to zip up her jeans over the two pairs of leggings, and put her foot up on the toilet lid so she could lace her hiking boots.
Dressed and warm again, she dried the washed panties under the dryer and stuffed them into her backpack. She tried to take a less obvious way out of the store, edging along the dairy cooler and past the magazine rack. She didn’t know if they cared if she used the bathroom, or even if they noticed, but she didn’t want to find out.
It was already warming up outside, although her watch said it was only 6:15 a.m. She’d been lucky so far. Michigan winters could be brutal, but they were also unpredictable. It could be forty degrees in December, like it felt today might be, or it could be close to zero—below that with the wind chill. She didn’t know how well the video store was going to protect her from the elements at night if they started hitting the single digits. She was going to have to scout out some other possibilities, and soon, but not today. It would take her an hour to walk to the shelter to see Maggie. She had promised to visit on Tuesday and she hated disappointing her nephews.
* * * *
Thankfully, the boys were waiting for her when she arrived, because she dreaded going into the shelter. She kept praying the women’s shelter’s claims to Maggie were true—that they were invisible, anonymous, unable to be found, even by law enforcement—not only for Maggie and the boys’ sakes, but her own as well. If Brody managed to find them, she was dead.
Her chest constricted, remembering The Mission Shelter in downtown Millsberg, her little hometown. She’d been there in the soup line, something to ease the ache in her belly, but she’d looked up and seen Brody, a paragon of virtue and civic duty, doling out food to the less fortunate.
She’d thought she could slip out unnoticed, but he’d seen her, his eyes darkening, mouth twisting into a fast snarl as he pursued her through the kitchen and past the dumpsters. She knew he sometimes volunteered, but had this been a coincidence or was he looking for her? She lost him at the last moment, ducking into an unlocked warehouse and huddling in the bathroom until dark. In that moment, she realized how much danger she was really in, that just her presence meant serious trouble for Maggie and the boys.
Even all the way over here in Lewisonville.
“Aunt Ginny! Let’s go, let’s go, let’s go!” The boys chanted, jumping around her like they were on pogo sticks. She laughed and, putting one hand on Sean’s mop of red hair and the other on Michael’s fine blonde curls, she turned them back toward the building.
“Go get your mom,” she instructed. “You guys meet me over there at the park and I’ll push you on the swings. Ready? Go!”
They tore off running, coats unzipped and flying out behind them. She watched them jostle for position at the door. Sean looked more like Brody every time she saw him, and his reed-like figure next to Michael’s substantial bulk made them look less like brothers than any two boys she’d seen. They had the same stark blue eyes and Maggie’s upturned nose, but that was as far as any similarities went.
When they burst out of the door again only a few minutes later, Maggie followed, shrugging on her coat and calling after them to slow down. They hit Ginny from behind with the force of two small whirling tornadoes, knocking the wind out of her. She gasped, picked up Michael, swung him onto her hip and held him there with one hand, while she took Sean’s hand with the other. Maggie fell in line next to them, breathless from trying to catch up to the boys.
“I’m on kitchen duty today. Sorry I wasn’t out here. I know you hate going in,” she apologized, reaching to tug a twig out of Sean’s hood.
Ginny shrugged, whispering nonsense into Michael’s ear and making him giggle and pull away.
“I didn’t have to go in. The monster patrol was out here waiting for me, weren’t ya?” Ginny tousled Sean’s irresistible mop again. He ducked and rolled his eyes, sticking out his tongue at her.
“They were? Sean and Michael, I told you to stay inside those doors, didn’t I?” Maggie admonished.
The boys pretended they hadn’t heard her, Michael wiggling to get down when Sean challenged, “Let’s race to the swings!” and off they went.
“I’ll be glad to start that temp job next week.” Maggie tucked her hands into her coat pockets. “They need more structure than this place. They’ll have preschool in the morning and the shelter helped me find daycare for the afternoons. Now if we could only find our own place...”
“What happened to that little apartment on Fourth Street?”
They sat on the park bench, watching the boys struggle to get their bottoms onto the big-boy swings, their legs dangling uselessly. Ginny knew it was only moments before they were going to call out to her, “Swing me, swing me, do underdog!” She waited, wanting to hear what her sister had to say.