A Cunningham Christmas by Ember Casey Read Free Book Online Page A

now, and the wind has had plenty of time to blow away all signs of him. Still, I keep my eyes down, hunting for any clue that I’m heading the right direction. My whole face aches with cold, and my cheeks and ears are getting chapped by the wind. My nose won’t stop dripping. My fingers and toes are almost too stiff to move. My legs burn from having to trudge through knee-deep snow.
    But I keep walking. What else am I supposed to do? And then, just when I’m ready to give up and go back to the house, I hear something—frantic movements. Cursing.
    I try to run toward the sounds, but the snow’s too deep and I fall face-first to the ground. It takes all of my energy to drag myself to my feet.
    I’m going to kill him. I swear, I’m going to kill him.
    By the time I step into the maze’s center courtyard, I’m seething. I spot him immediately—he’s on his hands and knees again, searching frantically through the nearly two feet of snow beneath him. Once again, he doesn’t notice me approach.
    This time, I’m not playing nice.
    I reach down and grab a handful of snow. It’s hard to shape a snowball when your fingers are completely numb, but I manage. And then I march toward him and let it fly.
    It hits him on the side of the face. He jumps up in shock.
    “Are you going to run from me again?” I demand. I’m already forming a second snowball. “Or are you going to come back inside before you get frostbite?”
    I can see he’s going to make excuses, so I don’t wait to hear him speak. I throw the second snowball at him. This one hits him in the chest, and without his coat on this time, I know it soaks right through to his skin.
    “Lou, I—” He puts his arms up in the sign of surrender. “Look, I can explain.”
    I ready my next snowball. “Then explain. You have ten seconds.”
    He lowers his hands. “It was supposed to be a surprise.”
    “I promise you, I’m plenty surprised already. I wasn’t aware you were completely insane.”
    “I know, but… this was supposed to be special. You’ll understand when I—”
    I hurl the snowball at him, and it splatters against his stomach.
    “You’re just making more excuses!” I say. “I want the real answer. The whole truth.”
    “Lou, if you’ll just—”
    I charge him, tackling him with the same move he used on me earlier today during our snowball fight. We both go down onto the pillowy snow, but this time I’m on top of him. He tries to push me off of him—and he easily could, if he weren’t afraid of hurting me—but I hold on. I straddle him, keeping him down in the snow beneath me. His strong hands grip my waist.
    “Five seconds to explain,” I tell him. “Spill it.”
    He shakes his head. “Lou—”
    “Five.”
    “I’m not doing this like this,” he says.
    “Four.”
    “Lou,” he says, his fingers pressing a little harder into my waist. “If you’ll get up, I’ll—”
    “Three.”
    “You don’t understand,” he says. “Get up. Give me five minutes, and—”
    “Two.”
    “Lou.” His blue eyes bore into me, and even out here, surrounded by darkness and swirling white snow, I feel their power. But I shake my head.
    “One,” I say, my voice trembling slightly. I don’t know what happens when I hit zero. I haven’t planned that far. But before I can figure it out, his grip tightens and he rolls me off of him, flipping me onto my back in the snow. In another second, he’s completely reversed our positions, and now he’s straddling me.
    “Get off,” I say, pushing against his chest.
    “I will. But you have to agree to give me a few minutes to search before you tackle me again.”
    “I’ll give you all the time you want if you explain to me what’s so damn important that you’ll freeze your balls off to find it.”
    He’s not used to hearing me use even mildly vulgar language, and for a moment, I can tell I’ve startled him. I don’t wait for him to respond. I take the opportunity to push him again, and when he