Obsession by Traci Hunter Abramson Read Free Book Online

snow, wearing sandals. Remembering her grandfather’s insistence that she check in as soon as she got to Pinewood, she got back into the car to call him, deliberately omitting the fact that her car was stuck in the snow and that her only decent pair of shoes was still in California.
    With her cell phone still in hand, she circled to the back of the car once more. Realizing that she wasn’t going to want to make a second trip anytime soon, she set her phone down and consolidated the groceries she’d brought with her and the most essential clothing and overnight items into one suitcase. Then she slipped her purse over her shoulder, lifted her suitcase with one hand, and grabbed her guitar case with the other.
    * * *
    “How can you not know where she is?” Sterling Blake demanded. He hadn’t slept except in snatches on the long flight across the country. Then he had gotten off the plane only to find a message on his voice mail from Bruce Parsons telling him that Kendra had left her house before Bruce and Alan had arrived. He stood in the living room of his Malibu home and glared at the two men now. “You were sent to protect her.”
    “We talked to her manager,” Bruce said, his voice tense. “Apparently, after she spoke with you, she left him a note saying that she needed a few weeks to herself, and she left the house.”
    “You’ve got to have some way to track her.”
    “We’re trying,” Alan said hesitantly. He was a younger version of his father, with dark hair and serious eyes. “We know she withdrew several hundred dollars from an ATM machine near her house, and there was a charge on one of her credit cards outside of Riverside.”
    “Which car is she driving?”
    “The ’69 Mustang,” Bruce answered. “It doesn’t have GPS capability, and she left her phone at the house.”
    “She’s probably heading for the house in Palm Springs or her condo in Phoenix.” Sterling shook his head, mystified about why his daughter would run away like this. “Send someone to both places in case she shows up. I don’t want her unprotected.”
    Both men nodded and then quickly left the room.
    * * *
    Kendra’s feet were frozen, her back and shoulders aching as she trudged forward. The snow was still falling steadily and would have been beautiful to watch . . . had she been sitting inside, watching it through a window. Instead, she could feel the flakes accumulating on her head and shoulders, melting through her baseball cap and into her hair. Her body shivered, her teeth chattered, and she tried not to think about the pain shooting through her bare toes.
    The cabin was in view now, and Kendra smiled, or she would have smiled if she’d been able to feel her face. One painful step after another, she edged closer to the wooden structure. It was modest, she supposed, by her parents’ standards, a mere six bedrooms, instead of the ten that her father had originally planned. Her grandparents had convinced him to scale back on the size and the luxuries, opting instead to build a second, smaller cabin across the street for when all of the extended family visited at the same time.
    She could vaguely remember when the construction had begun on the big cabin the summer of her fourth birthday. The summer of her father’s first Oscar-winning performance.
    The security had started then—the constant presence of household staff and bodyguards. The big Hollywood star couldn’t take any chances with his family’s safety. Looking back now, she realized those early days hadn’t been all that bad. The security during her childhood hadn’t been anything compared to what had come in her teenage years.
    Kendra pushed aside the thoughts of her childhood home and how smothered she had felt there. Had it not been for her father’s demanding acting career and the stifling atmosphere of her home in Malibu, she doubted she would have spent so much time with her grandparents growing up. Without them, she might never have discovered the