Snowbound Halloween

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

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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

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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 marriage 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.