Free Secret Santa: A Bluegrass Series Novella by Kathleen Brooks Page B

honks of
anger, but honks of greeting as they passed someone they knew, she
felt out of her element. Not for the first time, Kenna wondered how
she ended up here. Just a month ago, she was at the hottest
nightclub in New York City with her best friend Danielle,
celebrating her twenty-ninth birthday with all her friends from
Greendale, Thompson and Hitchem, the largest law firm in New York.
Kenna sighed wistfully as she thought about the six figure salary,
the hot clubs and a condo in the Upper East Side of Manhattan that
she had left behind in a hurry.
    With her eyes closed and her mind firmly set
in what might have been, Kenna thought about how she had dined with
professional athletes and actors at the best restaurants on the
company dime since they were clients. Standing only five foot four,
but blessed with what she called womanly curves, Kenna had not only
wined and dined famous people, but had dated and been pursued by
some as well. Kenna’s auburn hair, milky skin and dark green eyes
that hid an intelligence and sharp wit had made her sought after
inside and outside of the courtroom.
    Kenna continued her trip down memory lane by
giving herself a moment to gloat. She had just made junior partner,
one of the youngest associates to have ever done so and the only
woman to ever do so.
    She cringed as she remembered the night it
all changed. The night she fled from her six figure salary and left
her amazing condo. She had fled from New York City with her
ex-boyfriend hot in pursuit of her. Kenna fought a shiver as she
remembered Chad trying to find her to prevent her from leaving not
only the city but most likely her beautiful condo ever again. It
was in the early morning hours of the city that never sleeps that
Kenna found herself running for her life and looking for a place to
hide. She had sat in her car and thought about what always made her
feel better - chocolate. She had suffered a chocolate craving to
end all other chocolate cravings that night.
    Now sitting in her car in Keeneston, she
remembered the shivers of fear that had wracked her body and the
feel of the cold bite of the February wind. And all she wanted was
chocolate. That’s when the idea hit her, the perfect place to hide
and the perfect place to indulge in the mother of all chocolate
cravings. She had turned her car towards the interstate and headed
to Hershey, Pennsylvania.
    Kenna’s lips twitched. She had been right.
Since he had no idea where she was, she was left alone. And in
turn, Kenna was surrounded by chocolate for a month. The second
night she spent in Hershey, Kenna knew it was time to develop a
plan for the rest of her life, or at least for the next phase of
her life. Even though she was tempted to apply for the taster’s job
opening at the Hershey plant, she decided she couldn’t waste the
law degree her parents’ death had paid for. They died when a
drunken truck driver jackknifed his semi-truck on a patch of ice,
leaving no place for her parents' car to go. The trust they
established for Kenna was more than enough to pay for her
attendance at law school, and she even had a good part of it left
to be able to live off of if she wanted. However, after her
parents’ death, Kenna had lost the carefree ways that the life of
privilege provided and had gone to law school to learn how to put
away drunk drivers for the pain they caused innocent families.
    Kenna sat on her bed in the extend-a-stay
hotel with the smell of chocolate in the air and started looking
for a job. She started with Alabama and worked her way through the
states alphabetically, looking for places that were hiring. She
kept an eye out for cities that were small but not isolated, cities
that Chad the Bastard wouldn’t think of looking for her. But most
importantly, cites that were looking for prosecutors. One week
later Kenna pumped her fists in the air and jumped up and down on
the bed when she saw the opening for a prosecutor seventeen states
later. Not too big, not too