A California Christmas by Brenda Novak

Author:Brenda Novak
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: MIRA Books
Published: 2020-07-29T15:25:44+00:00

* * *

No one was around when Emery got home. In the winter, the store closed early on Sundays, even through the holidays, so it was only six-thirty. She figured Dallas, Aiyana and the others were still at Cal’s, getting ready for the wedding.

She considered going over to see if they needed another pair of hands. She hadn’t been able to do much before work. But she was becoming infatuated with Dallas and thought it might be wise to take a step back. Now that she was capable of leaving her room and being seen in public, she was going to meet an old friend, Cain Brennan, for dinner, who was in town for the holidays and recognized her when he’d come into the store earlier.

After a shower so that she would no longer smell like fresh-baked cookies, she got ready and hurried out of the house. She didn’t have to meet Cain for an hour yet, but she wanted to be gone before Aiyana and her family could return. Otherwise, she was afraid she’d cancel her dinner with Cain. She was far more interested in seeing Dallas, hadn’t been able to quit thinking about him all day.

She drove slowly but still arrived far too early to go in. She sat in the parking lot and called her mother, who immediately asked if she’d spoken to her father and started to complain about the mess she was in.

Emery hung up as soon as possible so that she could call her father. She’d been putting it off. She felt fragile enough without having what would, no doubt, be an upsetting conversation with the man she’d believed she could always rely on, but who had let her down right when she needed him most.

Even after she sent the call, she checked her watch, hoping for an excuse to hang up and continue to procrastinate this conversation. But she still had thirty minutes before Cain was due to arrive. Considering the brevity of her conversations with her father these days, that would be more than enough time.

You can’t cry. That was the only caveat. If she was going to meet an old friend who may have heard of her humiliation, she was at least going to do it with some dignity and not walk into the restaurant with swollen eyes, a red, splotchy face and smudged mascara.

“Hello?”

The second she heard her father’s voice she tightened her grip on the phone. He felt like a stranger to her. That was something she could never have imagined growing up. “Dad?”

“Emery, what’s going on?”

He asked that question so casually it was hard to believe he’d been paying the slightest attention to the catastrophe that had destroyed everything she’d built.

Or he no longer cared. That was the possibility that really hurt.

“Nothing,” she said. Why bother telling him, yet again, that she’d been deeply wronged and had no idea how to cope with the embarrassment and humiliation? That she’d lost her job and wasn’t likely to find another one, at least in TV, not with such a scandal on her record.

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