Holding Holly (Love and Football Series) by Julie Brannagh Read Free Book Online Page B

window over the sink. The storm hadn’t let up at all.
    Damn.
    A kitchen table and four chairs sat in an alcove a few feet away. He strolled over, pulled a chair out and parked it while he drank his water.
    The table was covered with mail. Letters stamped and ready to mail sat in a small pile on his left. He glanced at the return address:
    Santa Claus
    North Pole
    “What the hell?” he muttered to himself.
    Unopened letters sat in a stack on the other side of the table. Directly in front of him a letter with no return address, written on notebook paper, rested on the table next to a spiral notebook. He knew he shouldn’t be snooping in someone else’s private business, but he read the letter. It was from a kid asking for presents for his little sister and brother and a job for his mom for Christmas, just like the letter Holly had been crying over yesterday.
    Two minutes later, he dug beneath the letter to discover a plain envelope addressed to “Santa Claus, North Pole” in the same messy printing. He was going to find this Michael kid and his family if it was the last thing he ever did.
    Somebody in this house was playing Santa Claus, and he wanted in on the action.

Chapter Six
    H OLLY’S ALARM WENT off much too early the next morning, and she let out a quiet groan in her darkened bedroom. She could hear the wind, still howling outside. She forced herself to sit up against the headboard as she grabbed her cell phone off of the nightstand. She stared at the blinking message light for a few seconds. Unless she was seeing things, someone had tried to call her last night. She hit the voicemail button on the phone, and she pulled the blankets around herself a bit more when she heard her boss’s voice.
    “Holly, the power’s out on Main Street. We can’t open until it’s back on, and the power company can’t fix it until the storm lets up a little.” She heard him sigh. “Get some extra sleep, and I’ll call you later.”
    The good news: She didn’t have to crawl out of bed right now. The bad news: Missing the hours was money out of her pocket. The other bad news: the Noel Merchants’ Association was having a holiday gathering tonight, and Holly was one of the servers for the caterer doing the event. If things didn’t improve on the weather front, she’d be out an entire day’s pay.
    She shoved the phone onto her nightstand, flopped into her pillows, and yanked the blankets over her head. She didn’t want to be freaking out over money at 4:06 AM . She wanted to be thinking about the fact that the guy she’d had a crush on for two years now was (hopefully) asleep on her grandma’s family room couch.
    Maybe she should go and check on him, if she had nothing better to do than lie there and flip out over things she couldn’t change. She shoved herself out of the blankets and grabbed the less-than-stylish, worn bathrobe she’d left at the foot of her bed the night before. Grandma’s iron stove might be out of fuel too. She turned the thermostat way down at night to save money. Derrick was going to freeze his butt off if she didn’t make sure the stove was still heating the house.
    Holly wrapped the robe around herself as she dashed across the hall to make a pit stop. She twisted her long hair into a coil of sorts and pulled it off of her neck with a banana clip. If she took a shower, did something with her hair, and put on a little makeup, she’d wake up everyone in the house. She could only hope that if Derrick saw her like this he didn’t scream and run.
    She padded down the hallway and into the family room. Someone had left the kitchen light on during the night; she could at least see where she was going as a result.
    Grandma’s family room was a rectangle shape. Between the couch and chair and Derrick, there wasn’t a lot of room to maneuver. He’d shoved the coffee table that usually sat in front of the couch against the far wall to give himself a bit more room.
    Derrick was sprawled out on the