Summer Rental Read Online Free

Don Shackleford. The bruises would fade, she knew, but she doubted she would ever forget his icy rage, the way he’d so easily clamped a hand around her arm—squeezing until she’d cried out in agony, his expression never changing as he told her exactly what he’d do to her if he ever caught her snooping around in his private business again.
    “I’ll bury you,” he’d said, a strange light coming into his pale blue eyes. “Someplace where you’ll never be found. Nobody will even know you’re missing until it’s too late. Not Adam, not your mother, nobody will know what happened, where Maryn has gone.” He’d smiled at the thought of that. A moment later, he’d released her arm, but not before bending his head to her forearm and tenderly kissing the angry red welts he’d left there.
    By the time she heard his Escalade roar out of the driveway, she’d already started planning her escape.
    She locked the front door and ran to her bedroom. When she retrieved the money from the Ugg boots at the back of her closet, she was startled to discover that she’d amassed nearly six thousand dollars. Her seed money was twenty-seven hundred dollars in winnings from an April trip to Atlantic City, money she’d won at blackjack, and which she’d told Don she’d spent on clothes and shoes. Lying to him came easily to her and didn’t seem wrong. The rest of the money was added in spurts: a twenty picked up from the wad of bills Don tossed on his dresser at night, a hundred saved back from the money she told him she needed for a new jacket, five hundred dollars realized when she exchanged the ridiculously expensive (and ugly) watch he’d given her for her birthday for a more suitable model.
    Maryn couldn’t say why she’d been squirreling away those twenties and fifties. Was it really for that Hermès Kelly bag she’d been eyeing, or was it more the vague memory of her mother’s cynical advice, delivered with a cigarette dangling from colorless lips? “A woman always needs to have her own money. Always. Get-outta-town money.”
    Thank God for the one good piece of advice her mama had given her. The packing hadn’t taken long. Twenty minutes? She’d changed blouses, putting on a long-sleeved silk top to hide the bruises on her arm. So here she was, back on the road. Again.
    How long had she been driving? Her eyes burned with exhaustion, her arms and shoulders ached. She should stop soon. Stop for sleep. For food, although her stomach roiled at the thought of eating.
    She’d crossed the Virginia line, saw that she was in North Carolina now. The sun was coming up. She flipped the Dior sunglasses down over her eyes and squinted at a billboard advertising a place called The Buccaneer, a motel on Nags Head.
    Nags Head. Her parents had taken her to Nags Head the summer after her father was transferred to Fort Bragg, in Fayetteville, North Carolina. She’d been what, twelve? They’d stayed in a tiny motel, right on the beach, and her father took her fishing on the pier, just the two of them. The motel had a pool and a little coffee shop, and they’d eaten out every night, a real treat. One night they’d played putt-putt golf, another time they rode bumper cars in an amusement park.
    Had that been the last happy summer? The divorce came a year later. Just as she was settling into her new school. Not that she’d made many friends there. She’d been a goofy-looking kid, all knees and elbows, with hair the color of dirty dishwater and a head too big for her body. Maryn had been appalled when she became the first girl in her sixth-grade class to need a bra. Her mother, of course, had celebrated this fact by buying Maryn the tightest-fitting tank top she could find. “If you got it, flaunt it,” Mama told her. To avoid a fight, Maryn wore the tank, but topped it with abaggy shirt the minute she left the house for school.
    She’d just started cracking the social code of her new school when Mama loaded her into the faded