Read Online A Holiday to Remember by Lynnette Kent - Free Book Online

herself at Haley and took her down into the snow, wrestling, punching and kicking. In an instant the rest of the girls circled around, calling encouragement to their favorite. Arguments started between opposing fans, leading to shoving and yelling. Chris headed down to break up the fight.
    The loudest whistle he’d ever heard brought him up short. Total silence followed, and total stillness. Even the wind stopped, and the birds stayed quiet as he and the girls stared at the source of that sound—Jayne Thomas herself.
    She stared at each of her students in their turn. “Inside,” she said, her voice stiff, cold, implacable. “Now.”
    Turning, she marched up the hill without looking back. A single line of girls followed in her footsteps, silently, without arguing, around the side of the manor to the door Chris had used last night to check the generator. Jayne held the door open and the girls filed in.
    “Jackets, hats, boots and gloves in the storeroom,” she ordered. “Then sit in the library, on the floor near the fire.”
    Chris came last, putting a hand on the door to allow her to go in ahead of him. “Quite a show of power, there. Why are they so afraid of you?”
    “Don’t I look scary?” She huffed a laugh as she pulled off her green wool cap, and her ponytail came loose with it. Mahogany curls fell over her shoulders and across her eyes. Pushing the hair off her face, she frowned. “Maybe I do right now. But they’re not afraid of me. Hawkridge is their last chance and they know it. They either graduate or go to jail.”
    Chris fisted his hands against the urge to help smooth her messy, shining hair. “I guess that’s not a hard choice.”
    “More so for some than others.” Still combing her fingers through the tangles, she marched toward the storeroom doorway. “Come on, girls. You don’t want this to take all day.”
    Chris stayed in the hallway for the next twenty minutes, leaning against the wall and listening to the proceedings without interrupting. Jayne delivered her lecture in a crisp voice unlike the soft drawl he’d heard so far. She talked about responsibility, self-discipline and respect for others and self, following up with expectations, goals and consequences. By the end, Chris was examining his own conscience—a rare event.
    Since first recognizing Jayne Thomas as Juliet Radcliffe, down in Ridgeville, he’d been obsessed with finding out why she’d disappeared, leaving him all these years to think she was dead. He hadn’t cared if he scared her, showing up unannounced at the school. And he’d bullied her, or tried to—she was hard to intimidate. Chris had wanted the truth and was prepared to do whatever might be required.
    Did he have the truth yet? Nothing he’d done or said so far had convinced Jayne to admit her story about growing up with her grandmother in a town across the mountains was just that—fiction. He could almost believe she didn’t remember anything at all about Ridgeville, or about him.
    So which option was worse? That she didn’t remember their time together? That she didn’t want to acknowledge a relationship with him? Or that she’d died on that long ago Christmas Eve?
    Chris was beginning to think he’d hurt less if he could go on believing Juliet was dead. The old pain was almost comfortable, compared to the idea that Juliet didn’t want him in her life. And how in the world could she simply forget their time together? Their love?
    She hadn’t forgotten; she’d put a whole set of childhoodmemories in place of the ones they’d made together. Her family’s house fire, for example. Where had that idea come from? Why make that choice? Why fabricate a childhood at all?
    Inside the library, Jayne issued instructions for a quiet morning—books, puzzles, solitary card games. After lunch, they’d all go out to the snow bowl, as she’d promised, if— if, she repeated—peace reigned through lunch.
    Chris straightened up from the wall, having modified