Read Online The Christmas Thief by Julie Carobini - Free Book Online

lady, making sure that she was enjoying the coupons. She hadn’t actually used any yet.
    Another from her mom, wanting to know if she would make it home for New Year’s.
    And one from ... her former coworker, Aly. She simultaneously pursed her lips and wrinkled her brow. It appeared that Roger ... had disappeared.

 
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
    CHAPTER NINE
     
     
    Some of us think he’s become a prodigal again, while others ... well, it’s not comfortable to have to ask you this, Tasha, but just between us—has Roger gone to live with you?
    Tasha pulled into the spot on the street in front of her cabin, Aly’s email continuing to occupy her mind. Roger had disappeared. She wagged her head, jostling her curls. After Roger’s desertion, the women in her office had all given her pity pouts. Plenty of “there, there” side hugs and sad frowns, but no one on staff had become openly outraged for her. She’d received only two office-related calls after Roger broke her heart: one from Roger’s mother Syd, asking if she needed help returning gifts, and another from Carrie, a disgruntled ex-employee who offered to aim a line drive straight at Roger’s mini-mansion, the one abutting the country club golf course.
    She’d almost taken her up on it.
    Tasha leaned back against her car’s head rest, expelling a breath. So much had changed since that infamous day that it almost felt like Rog’s abandonment never really happened. The revelation startled her. When she’d bought this place, she was livid, blind with anger toward a man who had led her on for years. Then as the number of days to escrow closing shrank, she found herself sad, partially about Roger, but also sad that she allowed their relationship to meander along direction-less for so long. It shamed her to think this, but maybe marrying the boss’s son meant more to her than she had ever admitted.
    And yet ... did he need her now? Maybe their break up had hit him harder than he had anticipated. She closed her eyes and tried to picture how she would react ... how she would feel ... if Roger showed up here in Cottage Grove right now ...
    Someone knocked on her driver’s side window. She jerked forward, nearly strangling herself with her seat belt.
    “You okay in there?” Marc’s face peered at her through the window, cracked open at the top.
    She scowled at him. Unlocking her seat belt, she threw it to the side, opened the car door, and stepped out.
    Marc stood by, a quizzical smile on his face, his hat fitted to his head. “Did I startle you?”
    “You think?”
    He chortled. “Sorry.”
    She shook her locks and drew in a breath. “No big. Did you want something? Otherwise I’ve got to”—she turned toward her cabin and noticed a crew of five, six, maybe seven guys in various stages of work on Marc’s property. “So,” she said, pushing the contents of that email from her mind, “I see you’ve been busy.”
    He nodded and they began to walk toward the narrow path between their lots. “We managed to smooth out the lot again and re-dig everything properly.”
    “Any clue to what happened?”
    “Maybe.”
    This surprised her. How could he possibly know what happened when nobody had been around to see it? “Well? Go on.”
    “For one thing, the tires were much narrower than I’d first thought. Of course, when I first caught sight of the damage, I couldn’t see it very well since I was wearing my Sunday best ...”
    “Don’t remind me.”
    “Sorry. Anyway, initially, I didn’t take that close of a look, but we also noticed that it was more than tires that made the grooves in the soil.”
    “Oh?”
    “Blades. Or possibly some kind of knives. Thick ones. Even a few nicks in the pine.”
    Tasha swung a look at the gentle giant of a tree that had captured her heart the first day she’d seen her own cabin. The thought of even minor damage to its trunk brought an unexpected ache to her heart—and a foreboding about the