His Christmas Wish Read Online Free Page A

today let him know they’d gotten his voice mail. Maybe they had read all the letters he’d sent, too.
    He loved his parents—despite what they had done to him, or maybe because of it. Kicking him out had forced him to grow up, to quit playing at being a man and skating through life with his family’s money. Although if he had to be honest, there had been many times he wished he’d had that security.
    Scanning the parking lot as he parked his truck in an out of the way spot, he smiled faintly at all the balloons secured to antennas and the tops of open hoods, showcasing polished chrome head gaskets. On every vehicle parked on the strip of grass by the highway, windshields were covered with bright red and green lettering that proclaimed: ‘Great on Gas!!’, ‘Great Family Car!!’ or ‘Great Deal!!’.
    The trifecta of sales, according to Juan Morales: Exclamation points, car swag and the overuse of the word ‘great’.
    He allowed his grin to widen. Some things never changed.
    Then he noticed all the discount car tie-ins to his homecoming and his grin faded. Some things really never changed and his dad’s focus on the almighty dollar was one of those. This wasn’t a homecoming; it was a sales gimmick. One that had probably driven Charles Caswell to price matching and cursing the day the Morales family moved to Holland Springs.
    Out of the corner of his eye, he spotted his dad and turned.
    Juan cooked hotdogs and hamburgers on a huge stainless steel grill, complete with twenty foot flagpole and gas burners on each side. Old Glory waved in the constant breeze as families stood near fake Christmas trees eating and talking. Families that were in no way related to him, confirming what he knew to be true.
    What a fucking joke.
    Joaquin backed the truck up, then found the nearest exit and sped away. He hadn’t talked to his mom and dad in four years. What would another day hurt?
    All that mattered was getting Sage back in his life—permanently.
    ***
    Sage sat on the steps of her front porch, her head in her hands when he pulled in the drive.
    Joaquin cut off the engine and got out, slowly making his way to her. He shivered. In the last few minutes the weather had turned bitterly cold, so cold that he could see his breath.
    Sitting down beside her, he left just enough distance between them so she didn’t feel crowded and he didn’t fall off the step.
    “ I’m sorry,” he said and she looked up at him, red rimming her eyes.
    After wiping at her nose, she balled up the tissue and shoved it into her pocket, then gave a little sniff that shredded his heart. “What for—lying to me? Threatening to embarrass me? Leaving me four years ago, or for getting caught?”
    “ Everything, but the getting caught part only because I’d come to tell you in person what I’d done, but you’d already found out,” he admitted and rocked his neck from side to side, trying to relieve the tension that had been building up since is plane had landed. “What gave me away?”
    “ Your cousin.”
    That certainly narrowed things down. He had tons of cousins living around Holland Springs. “Which one?”
    “ Roberto let it slip about the dog while he was cutting my hair last week.”
    He should have seen that coming a mile away. Roberto was Joaquin’s mother’s favorite nephew and hairdresser. Roberto loved to gossip with his clients. Hell, Roberto loved to gossip with anyone who’d listen. Joaquin didn’t know how Roberto’s wife, Carmen, put up with him. The man never shut up about anything. “I swear to God, the next time I see him—”
    “ It’s not his fault or your mom’s. It’s yours,” Sage pointed out. “Besides, I’d begun to suspect it a couple of weeks earlier. Still…” She tucked and untucked a strand of auburn hair behind her ear, something she’d always done when she was nervous. “I’d always wondered why things seemed to flow so easily with us. It was like we were old friends who hadn’t seen each