The Snowmaiden, A Bride for Krampus - Jeanette Lynn Page 0,3

Mom wasn’t a witch like wifey number two, never had been. It was like he’d picked someone the polar opposite of our mother.

That weird depressed feeling that nagged at me whenever the holidays rolled around had me taking a few deep breaths. If I got emotional, he’d think it was for him. At this point, he could kiss my rump right along with the rest of the jerks I was done dealing with.

“Sweetie, you know I’d love to see you,” Dad spluttered.

“But your wife won’t let you?” I quipped. “Right.” I bit out the word. Shaking my head, I turned on my blinker and got back on the road. “I drove how far to get to this bullshit shindig, and am in fact just pulling into this rinky dink town, and you think to call me now to change plans, because Witchany can’t handle being called out on her crap? And you can’t handle knowing your wife is a bitch to your other children. You remember us? Your other kids? You have a baseball team of demonic grandchildren from the other one?”

“Bethy is pregnant again,” Dad blurted.

I swerved a little, my arm jerking the wheel. “I’m sorry, what?” In my late thirties, I was big sister to three children under ten, and soon another. Dad was pushing seventy. Bethany was ten years older than me. I had no words.

“And you didn’t want your older children mucking up the dynamic you have going?” I began to argue.

“I just want some damn peace for once, without your idiot brother trying to “borrow” more money from me or your looks of disapproval. I know exactly how she is,” he barked with that same tone he’d gotten from me. Quieter, he repeated. “I see it, Lume. I see her. She asked this of me, and I’m going to give her this.”

My lips pursed. Swallowing thickly, my face screwed up. I’d told myself this for years, since I’d sat in the crowd at their gaudy wedding thinking of my mom and watched him pledge to love another woman, one who liked to smirk and make snide remarks about everything, I hadn’t just buried Mom a few short years prior. The father I thought I’d known had been put to ground with her.

When silence greeted him from across the line, he rushed in to add, his voice that soft, cajoling tone he thought was apologetic but struck me as condescending, “You won’t find anywhere for the night right now. Everything is booked up,” meaning he’d checked, “but the cabin is.”

Quietly taking a few deep breaths, I closed my eyes. That big but was hanging there in the air. I already knew. “Where are the keys, Dad?” My voice was flat, as dead as the part of me that was still holding onto that last bit of hope that he’d just decimated.

“At the other cabin,” he admitted, “with Bethany.”

Something in the way he said that had me asking, “And where are you?”

At the uncomfortable laugh that left him, I had my answer.

Fuck.

“Where’s the cabin your family is at?” I asked woodenly.

As if my words didn’t hurt to say, my admission that they were his family, something I never would have said unless I was referring to all of us and he knew it, wasn’t clearly hinted enough at, he immediately perked up. “I’ll drop you a pin. Dougie showed me how.”

“Alright.” Clearing my throat, I swiped at the wetness quietly leaking from my burning eyes.

“That kid is something else, I tell you. Smart, you know? He’s turning nine next month, does more than I can with phones. It’s a wonder,” he said as if I didn’t know how old my own little brother was or that his phone had practically babysat him since birth. I’d never felt more like a stranger within my own family in my life.

With a noncommittal noise in my throat he thought nothing of, he went on.

Unlike Queen B thought, I knew my siblings as well as I knew not to leave anything sharp near Beau’s eldest, Beau Jr., who worried me, frankly, or leave my heels out of my suitcase when Max was in a dress up kind of mood. Dougie, dad’s eldest of his brood with the second wife, was phone smart but couldn’t be bothered with much else, unless it was green and hulked out or some bloody videogame. He was failing in school and may just repeat another grade.

I knew them, contrary to their apparent popular belief I was