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  Snowbound Halloween

  Snowbound Series Book Twelve

  By

  Veronica Tower

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Snowbound Halloween By Veronica Tower

  Red Rose™ Publishing

  Publishing with a touch of Class! ™

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  Copyright© 2012 Veronica Tower

  ISBN: 978-1-4543-0224-7

  Cover Artist: Shirley Burnett

  Editor: Zena Gainer

  Line Editor: Bernadette Smith

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced electronically or in print without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in reviews. Due to copyright laws you cannot trade, sell or give any ebooks away.

  This is a work of fiction. All references to real places, people, or events are coincidental, and if not coincidental, are used fictitiously. All trademarks, service marks, registered trademarks, and registered service marks are the property of their respective owners and are used herein for identification purposes only.

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  Snowbound Halloween

  Snowbound Series Book Twelve

  By

  Veronica Tower

  Chapter One

  Thea Clarke watched the two pink lines appear on the pregnancy test with a feeling of dread hardening in her stomach. How could it be positive? She’d only missed her pill a couple of times this month. How could the test be positive?

  Her knees felt weak so she let herself sink down onto the toilet seat, still staring at the two pink lines on the little stick. What was she going to do? She and her boyfriend, Nick Morrow, weren’t even living with each other yet.

  They’d been dating less than a year and she really didn’t know how he was going to react to this. Even if her substantially younger boyfriend didn’t panic… Even if he somehow crazily decided he wanted Thea to move in with him and maybe get married, what was she going to do about Mom? The old woman would lose her house without Thea taking care of the ungrateful thing. Mom hated Nick because he owned and operated a bar and she was completely opposed to the consumption of any alcoholic beverages. At least she didn’t seem to have a problem with Nick being white.

  What was she going to do? She couldn’t even count on her sister, Becka, to help. Becka had spent most of the last year guilt-tripping Thea into staying with their mother because she was far too selfish to take care of the old woman herself.

  “Oh, God, Mom!” she whispered, fear screeching cacophonously inside her head. How was she ever going to tell Mom? It was going to be even worse than telling Nick. He might be scared off, but at least he wasn’t going to yell at her over this or make her feel like a whore who’d been selling herself on street corners. She’d been a thirty-eight year old virgin when she’d started going out with Nick after meeting him at his New Year’s Eve party last year. How could she have been so damn careless? What was she going to do with a child?

  As if the devil could hear Thea’s concerns, her mother chose that moment to knock on the bathroom door. “Thea, you’ve been in there an awfully long time. Is everything all right?”

  No, it’s not all right! Thea wanted to scream at her. I’m pregnant, damn it, and I’m not ready for a child. But confessing to her mother right now was guaranteed to make everything worse.

  She tried to buy herself some time to pull herself together with a little lie. “Yes, Mom, I’m okay. I’m just having a little stomach trouble. I’ll be out in a couple of minutes.”

  “All right then,” her mother said in a voice that sounded highly skeptical to Thea. What the hell did the old woman think she was doing in here? Masturbating? Like Mom had ever given her enough privacy to engage in something like that.

  Thea forced herself to get moving and protect herself. She gathered up the pieces of evidence—the stick, the plastic wrapper, and the instruction sheet—and stuck them back in the pregnancy test box. All the while, her mind kept spinning, trying to figure out what she was going to do.

  She’d been against abortion her entire life but for a horrifying moment she considered getting one. She’d been making a lot of extra money at Nick’s bar, especially now that she could bartend as well as waitress at The Church Key. She could probably afford the procedure, but deep in her heart she knew abortion wasn’t an acceptable answer for her. Not only did she firmly believe it was wrong, but she was thirty-eight years old. She may not be ready to have a child right now, but neither did she want to give up what might be her only chance at motherhood. There was no way to tell if she would ever get another chance.

  But if she kept the child, what was she going to do? How was she going to raise a baby on her own?

  Thea needed to talk to someone—figure out her options and decide what she was going to tell Nick! But whom could she trust with a secret like this? Her sister, Becka, certainly wasn’t an option. When God was making babies and handing out portions of good stuff like sympathy and compassion, Becka had skipped out of line to get a double helping of nasty. There was no way Thea could confide in her over this sort of problem. First she’d yell at her and then she’d go right to Mom.

  But if she couldn’t tell her sister, who could she trust to listen and help her figure all of this out?

  Thea had three cousins whom she’d been getting closer to in the past few months. Liz was a lawyer who should have known how to keep secrets, but she was also a tease and a gossip. Thea couldn’t count on her to keep a personal confidence. Ruth was cut from the same ugly mode as Thea’s sister, Becka. But Kara? Normally Thea would think Kara could keep a secret, but could she trust her not to confide this news to her fiancé? Ron was a close friend of Nick’s. Kara and Ron had actually introduced the two of them. Thea didn’t know if she could trust her cousin under these sorts of circumstances?

  “Thea!” her mother rapped on the door again. “How long are you going to be in there?”

  Thea lost her patience with the older woman. “What does it matter? We have two bathrooms! Go downstairs!”

  “I don’t have to use the bathroom,” her mother snapped back. “I want to know what could possibly occupy my daughter so long in the one room of the house she can lock!”

  Rage burst out of Thea. She shoved the box with the pregnancy test into her back pocket, flushed the toilet and yanked open the bathroom door. “What is your problem?” she shouted. “We’ve talked about this! While I’m paying your bills you’re supposed to back off! Treat me with respect! And give me some privacy when I want it!”

  “And what exactly do you need privacy for?” her mother shouted back.

  Thea threw up her hands and stormed past her.

  “Don’t you walk away from me!” her mother screamed.

  Thea ignored her, rushed down the stairs, and out of the house to her car.

  Tears hit Thea as she pulled her little second hand Ford Escort out of the driveway.

  Of all the insufferable nonsense that she had to deal with, her mother’s childish temper tantrums were the worse. She should have moved back out and gotten an apartment years ago and let Becka and Dwayne worry about Mom for a change. But Becka had been a slow motion train wreck for a lot of years. First her marr
iage had been falling apart and then she’d been going through her divorce and now that she was putting her life back together she still didn’t have time for anyone but herself. Their brother, Dwayne, was even worse. Not only was he back in prison but let’s be honest, he’d never given a rat’s ass about what happened to Mom anyway. The only thing he’d ever wanted from their parents was more money to support his habits.

  So Thea, who had given up her own place to move back home to take care of their sick Dad, had stayed on with her mother after her father died, playing the good daughter instead of taking back her own life. She’d let the old woman and Becka browbeat her into staying at home even after Nick and she had started dating. She’d stayed even though it meant continuing to hide her birth control pills from her mother, even after the old woman had rooted around in her drawers and uncovered them early last year. It hadn’t mattered to Mom that Thea was thirty-eight years old and certainly mature enough to have a sexual relationship. The endless rants on sin and disrespect had forced Thea to hide the pills in the glove compartment of her car, which probably explained why she wasn’t always perfect about taking them.

  Now she was pregnant and a burden and Nick was probably going to be scared away because there was a huge difference between inviting the girlfriend who’s more than ten years older than you to come over to your apartment and play sex games than there is in taking on responsibility for a pregnant woman who’s freaking out because she’s going to have a baby and she’s not married yet.

  Keeping her tear-blurred eyes only on half on the road, Thea fumbled about in her purse until she found her cell phone. She simply had to speak with someone about this and Kara was the only one she could think of who might keep the secret for her. Besides, not only had Kara introduced her to Nick, but Thea’s older cousin was engaged to a white man just as young as Nick. She really should have a good perspective on everything: older woman/younger man, interracial relationship, the marriage question…

  Thea hit her cousin’s number on the speed dial. They’d become a lot closer in the months since Kara and Ron had introduced Nick and Thea on New Year’s Eve. Ron was pretty good friends with Nick within the limits Nick’s work ethic permitted him to be friends with anyone.

  Nick worked literally all the time and what kind of life would that be for a newborn anyway? Could Mom have been right? You couldn’t even bring a baby into a bar. What kind of business was it where it was illegal to let your kids come to the office? Even if Nick didn’t run away was he going to have any time to raise a family with her? She used to think his drive to make his dream come true was a good thing. She’d been raised to respect a man for working hard at his job. But thinking about the implications for her coming baby, Thea wasn’t so certain any longer.

  “Thea?” Kara’s voice came over the cell phone. “How are you? Ron and I are really looking forward to tonight!”

  The words made absolutely no sense to Thea. “Tonight?”

  Kara kept talking without any sense that something was wrong at Thea’s end of the conversation. “You know I wasn’t too happy about this idea of yours when you first told me about it, but Ron has won me over with the costumes he picked out. I can’t believe I’m saying this but I’m actually excited about tonight!”

  Thea’s head was so mired in her fears and her anxiety that it took a moment for Kara’s words to fully penetrate her brain, but when they did it made everything she was worried about seem a thousand times worse. “Oh my God, the costume party is tonight! It’s Halloween!”

  “Don’t tell me you forgot about your own party!” Kara laughed.

  Thea felt dazed and confused by the sudden recollection that Nick had his biggest event of the year tonight at his bar and it was all her fault. How the hell was she supposed to tell him he was about to be a father when he was already going crazy trying to get ready for his first annual Halloween Costume Party at The Church Key tonight?

  “Of course I didn’t forget,” Thea lied. She didn’t sound convincing, even to herself. “I’m getting off early from my job with Dr. Bartlett even though it’s Halloween and I’m usually the one who gives out the candy when the little trick-or-treaters start coming around.”

  “Wait a minute,” Kara said. “You work for a dentist, don’t you? What is he doing giving away candy on Halloween?”

  Reminiscing about past Halloweens on the job was a pleasant distraction from Thea’s current problems and she almost smiled. “When I first started working for Dr. Bartlett, he didn’t give anything away. You can imagine how unpleasant that was when all the little trick-or-treaters showed up in their costumes. So I spent the whole next year convincing him we had to show the kids what a healthier treat was. So now we give them boxes of raisins or sugar free gum.”

  Kara had an easier time laughing than Thea did today. “That isn’t much better than giving them nothing. I hope you did better convincing Nick to pull out all the stops tonight.”

  “There will be bowls of fattening, teeth-rotting candy everywhere,” Thea assured her. “Plus the truly important thing—a dollar off of every drink for everyone who comes in costume. I don’t know if this will be a money maker for Nick tonight, but everyone should enjoy the party.”

  These last words deflated Thea’s spirits again. How could she have a good time at the party? She was pregnant and she didn’t know how her boyfriend was going to respond to the news. She couldn’t even get drunk to avoid her problems—not that she did that sort of thing anyway—especially not living with Mom. But if there was ever a time you ought to be able to get drunk to forget your problems, finding out you were pregnant when you weren’t married ought to be it. Yet she knew she couldn’t take the chance and risk causing birth defects to the child growing inside of her.

  Kara finally figured out that something was wrong on Thea’s end of the line. First she went silent, and then she very quietly asked, “Are you all right, Thea?”

  Thea barely succeeded in holding her sobs inside. It had been a mistake to call Kara. This really wasn’t the sort of problem she could confide in anyone. She had to figure out what to do on her own. “What could be wrong?”

  Kara kept her voice very quiet and asked the sort of questions that an older sister should have asked, but then, Thea’s older cousin had always been a better sister than Becka, hadn’t she? “I don’t know. Are you having a problem with Nick?”

  Not yet I’m not, Thea thought, but give me a couple of hours and we’ll have a doozy. “No, Nick’s great,” Thea said. Her voice sounded robotic and flat to her own ears.

  “You didn’t have a fight, did you?” Kara asked. Perhaps because of her role in introducing them, Kara had always evidenced a sense of responsibility for Thea’s relationship with Nick.

  Not yet, we haven’t, Thea wanted to tell her.

  A sob almost escaped from her, and suddenly Thea was absolutely certain she couldn’t tell Kara about her pregnancy. “Look, I’ve got to go,” she told her with a lot more energy than she’d answered Kara’s questions about Nick. “I’ll see you tonight, okay.”

  “Thea, you can tell-” Kara started to say, but Thea disconnected the call without letting her finish the thought.

  She refused to even look at the caller ID as she drove around for the next hour crying and waiting for it to be time to report to Dr. Bartlett’s office.

  Chapter Two

  “Here she is now, Nick,” Jo Taylor said into the telephone as Thea walked into Dr. Bartlett’s office. She was a cute little African-American woman with darker skin than Thea’s who’d work as an oral hygienist for Dr. Bartlett for about five years now. She smiled as she handed Thea the phone. “It’s your boyfriend. He says your cell must be off because he’s been trying to call for an hour. Hey, are you all right?”

  Thea had tried to clean her face up with hand wipes in the car before reapplying her makeup, but evidently she hadn’t done as good a job as she’d wanted to. She put on her professional face and smiled at Jo. “Of course, I’m all right. W
hat could be wrong? It’s Halloween, after all.”

  Jo grinned. “And rumor has it there’s quite a party tonight. Are you sure there’s going to be a lot of eligible bachelors there?”

  Thea kept the professional mask up and nodded her assurance. Ever since she’d started dating Nick, Jo had been after her to get Nick to help Jo find somebody. Thea didn’t think it was the interracial thing attracting Jo—just an avid desire to be in a relationship with a halfway decent guy. It was sad, when you stopped to think about it. Thea knew a lot of women looking to meet that special someone—any special someone. And working in the bar, she’d met a lot of guys in exactly the same position. Why was it so hard to hook two of them together so they could try and forge a connection?

  Jo waved the phone at her and Thea reluctantly accepted it. “Hi, Nick.”

  Nick didn’t waste any time in expressing his concern. “Are you all right? Kara called me about an hour ago asking if we’d had a fight. I tried to call you but you weren’t picking up your phone.”

  There was no way Thea was going to tell Nick what was on her mind over the telephone—especially not with Jo standing next to her listening in to her side of the conversation. “It’s out of charge,” she lied. “It cut out on me while I was talking to Kara.”

  Nick was no fool and he was not convinced by her excuse. “And you couldn’t just plug it in or call me back on your land line?”

  Thea really wished Jo wasn’t rudely standing next to her just now. It made lying more difficult but she kept spinning her yarn just the same. “I wasn’t home. I decided to pick up some more candy for tonight’s party.”

  Nick still didn’t completely believe her. He knew something was up and from the expression on her face, so did Jo. “We have plenty! You don’t need to…”

  Nick’s voice trailed off as he evidently realized he was sounding ungrateful. His belated remembrance of proper manners just served to heighten Thea’s irritation with him.