Free A Cinderella Christmas Carol (Suddenly Cinderella) by Hope Tarr Page A

door closed behind him. He wasn’t ordinarily home by five p.m., but then this had been a special day.
    No answer came, not that he’d really expected one, but the backpack dumped by the door told him that Samantha was home. Still, the place was so quiet an ice cube cracking would have sounded like a siren. Ice wasn’t far from the truth, either. His daughter was dishing out the classic cold shoulder treatment—and he was definitely being served.
    He dropped his keys on the marble-top foyer table and headed down the beige-carpeted hallway to her bedroom, the scene of his latest parental crime cop bust. Her door was closed—no big surprise there. His fourth knuckle-bruising knock finally brought her to answer it.
    She opened it a crack, just enough for him to make out one watery eye and a sliver of pink-rimmed nose. Shit, she’d been crying. Call me Father of the Year—not! “What do you want now?”
    Taking a breath, he reminded himself he was the adult in this situation. “You and I have some talking to do.”
    The door widened another notch, revealing a ribbon of stiffened upper lip and a sliver of white wire from her iPod headphones. “I don’t feel like it.”
    “Feel like it or not, we’re going to settle this thing once and for all. Be in my study in five minutes or you’re grounded for the week.”
    She backed up and drew the door closed on what skirted a slam.
    So much for starting fresh.
    Feeling as exhausted as if he’d just butted heads with Rita Mae Brown, Ross turned and headed down the hall to his study, his sanctuary in an apartment that otherwise felt too super-sized, too sleekly trendy, and entirely too beige to ever really suit him. That’s what came of hiring an interior designer, he supposed. At least he’d stuck to his guns and kept her out of his study. The room’s mission-style furnishings, terra cotta colors, and Navaho woven rug were purely him…as were his books, leather-bound editions of American literary classics from Nathaniel Hawthorne to Mark Twain to Arthur Miller, all of which he’d had shipped from his ranch back in Texas. After six months in the city, the study still smelled slightly of…home.
    A stab of homesickness struck. Determined to ignore it, he stepped behind the desk, took out his computer, and hit the power button. Logging on and scrolling through his e-mail inbox, he promised himself that unlike the magazine mishap that morning, which he’d bungled badly, he wouldn’t lose his head. If the kid was angry, then let her be angry. Any emotion, even rage, was preferable to the smoldering silence she dished out most days.
    A huff drew his gaze to the door. Sam stood on the threshold, one bare foot braced out in the hallway as though she was already planning her exit strategy, her escape.
    In a single glance, he took in her mousse-spiked hair, belly-baring T-shirt, and low-rise jeans and felt his parental self-esteem sinking like the Titanic . His baby girl, where had she gone, and who was this sullen, slouching stranger? Heavy black liner rimmed angry blue eyes, taking him back to the month before when she’d shown up in the lobby of his Watergate condominium post midnight, a backpack slung over one bony shoulder and rivulets of mascara running like muddy rivers down her cheeks.
    “I’m not going back to Mom’s, and you can’t make me,” were the first words out of her mouth, her chin—shaped just like her mother’s—pointed due north.
    He hadn’t been sure what to do first: shake the shit out of her for talking to him like that or hug her because she was, after all, safe and not lying dead in a Dumpster. He’d opted for the hug, squared things with the doorman, and then hurried her upstairs to his apartment. As soon as he’d closed the door behind them, her tough-girl exterior crumbled like a cookie.
    “Oh, Daddy…” she cried in that little girl voice he remembered so well, the voice that not only pulled on his heartstrings but threatened to snap