Coming Back To You Read Free

Thanksgiving and Christmas. But
this year she didn’t have much to smile about, and young Culkin may
as well have been Scrooge for all the good he did.
    This was a time of year meant for snuggling
under blankets and making love in front of fireplaces. A time to
cuddle on the couch with that special someone and stare at the
lighted Christmas tree. A time for playful snowball fights that led
to heated sex after stripping out of cold, wet clothes.
    Funny how she’d never thought about those
things in the past. Until this year, holiday season was for
sweaters, football, and snow. But now, the romantic side of winter
was all she could think about.
    And it was because of him . Mark
Strong. The sexiest, most incredible man she had ever met.
    She saw his face in her mind. Heard his
voice. Felt his touch. Their relationship had been over for three
months, but he still gripped her mind. Still held her heart.
    Wasn’t it time she moved on? That was what
her friends and her dad wanted. Especially her dad. He was fed up
with watching Karma suffer, as he had made perfectly clear on
Thanksgiving.
    “You need to get over that boy ,
Karma,” he had said as she snuggled with her cat, Spookie, on her
parents’ couch.
    Before she could protest, he’d held up his
palm and cut her off. “I told you it would end this way. That he
would only hurt you. But you didn’t listen to me.” He scowled and
shook his head. “And now look at you. I hardly recognize you.
You’ve been a ghost for weeks.”
    The muscles along Karma’s jaw and the back of
her neck tensed, as did her shoulders. She was as much angry as she
was sad. Angry at herself, her dad, even Mark. “You can’t blame
Mark for this, Dad. He did nothing wrong.” Except leave me
behind when he returned to Chicago.
    But Mark had made it clear before she got
involved with him last spring that he wasn’t looking for anything
long term and that he would leave when his job at Solar ended. At
the time, that hadn’t mattered. She’d just wanted to spend time
with him, even if he would leave and their relationship had to
remain a secret.
    Except her dad had found out about him,
anyway. And once he learned Mark was the consultant working at her
company, he accused Mark of taking advantage of his position so he
could use her. For the rest of the summer, her dad hadn’t wasted
any opportunity to criticize Mark.
    Seeing her so miserable had to be bittersweet
vindication for her dad.
    The kicker was, she felt bad for hurting him.
Before Mark, her dad had been her entire world. The yardstick she
measured all men by. Now, Mark was her yardstick. In a way, he had
replaced her dad, and that riddled her with guilt, which fueled
both her anger and her sadness even more. Because, really, wasn’t
she the only one here who had any right to be angry and sad? The
only one who’d truly lost something—some one —special?
    In the end, her dad got what he wanted, which
was for her to see a therapist who could help her return to the
land of the emotionally balanced. Karma simply couldn’t stomach the
way he’d looked at her with such pity…as if she were fragile. As if
she were a victim . She didn’t want to be a victim, least of
all Mark’s.
    So, the Monday after Thanksgiving, Karma had
contacted a therapist named Jan Krakowski and set up an
appointment.
    Which brought her to the reason for her cry
fest this evening.
    She wiped tears off her cheeks then rested
her fingers back on the keyboard of her laptop. Her new blog waited
for her to create a name and fill its pages with every rambling
thought about Mark that tiptoed—or whirled like the Tasmanian
Devil—through her mind.
    But there was something about rehashing her
relationship with Mark in written form that brought everything back
to the surface so that it stung harder. Talking about Mark in
sessions every week was bad enough, but to write about him was like
pulling out a magnifying glass. Like observing snowflakes under
magnification,