Red Dawn Rising (Red Returning Trilogy) Read Online Free PDF Page A

“Time for you to go, isn’t it?” She punched him lightly in the stomach. “Your well-heeled customers will be lined up on the sidewalk wondering why the Winslow in Winslow Designer Shoes hasn’t opened up yet.”
    “Ah yes. All the needy feet.” He scratched his head and yawned slightly. “You do remember, however, that being the last of the Winslows, and the first to hand off the reins to a store manager, I can come and go as I please. A lousy work ethic, I’m afraid. But when it comes to selling shoes, I ascribe to the Peggy Lee anthem. ‘Is that all there is?’”
    Cass considered him thoughtfully. “For you? No. And someday you’ll find the rest of it.”
    She patted him playfully on the back, urging him toward the door, then stopped and looked up at him, mustering her courage. “So, what happened to your date?”
    “Canceled it.”
    “You did or she did?”
    A mischievous grin slid across his face. “Well, you know, you just can’t rely on an eighty-year-old woman to wait up all night for her grandson to come unclog the kitchen sink. I’ll take care of it tomorrow.”
    Cass tried to mask the trickle of relief running over her.
    After he left, reminding her to latch and bolt all the hardware on her door, she slipped into a plain flannel nightgown, turned off the lights, and climbed to the stars. Suspended from the ceiling at the ends of barely detectable wires, a sprawling constellation of tiny lights hovered over her each night as if they might watch out for her, protect her. She had assigned those powers to them—an illusion, their thin currents of energy wholly impotent. Mere decoration. She knew this. But what else was there?
    She slid under the covers and pulled them nearly over her head, trying to eclipse the rest of the world. But nothing would shut out that one place, that one searing face.

Chapter 6
    T he next night, Jordan knocked at Cass’s door promptly at seven. Soon, the Honda pulled from the parking garage and headed northeast. The January sky flung bits of ice again.
    “Comfy?” Jordan asked, pulling the collar up on his jacket and issuing a whole-body shiver.
    Cass curled inward against her down coat, her mittened hands balled up in her pockets. Preoccupied with her mother’s state of upheaval, she didn’t answer.
    “They’ve been married how long now?” he asked, undeterred.
    She looked sideways at him, strangely comforted that he, unlike most, could glimpse her thoughts. “Three years.”
    Jordan didn’t take his eyes off the snarled, early-evening traffic. It was more boisterous than usual tonight, or was Cass more sensitive to its intrusion?
    “And how did they meet?”
    Cass had heard only one story about that, her mother’s. “They dated during high school in the Bronx. Then my grandfather moved the family to Manhattan when he got a seat on the New York Stock Exchange, and my mom left all her Bronx friends behind, including Hans. Soon after that, she met my dad. My grandfather brought him home for dinner one night . He was about six years older than she and already wealthy. His family in Greece sent him here to run this end of their shipping empire.”
    Jordan glanced her way. “You don’t look Greek.”
    “Neither does Mom.” In her mind, Cass flipped through portfolio images of her glamorous mother asserting herself on the covers of haute couture magazines through the late sixties and seventies. The stunning, strong-jawed face; the alabaster complexion; the naturally platinum hair pulled taut against the rouged, dominating cheekbones. It was her look from the teens on, and the New York ad agencies had paid handsomely for it. Even after delivering her only child, with certainly no need to augment her husband’s bulging wealth, Jillian Rodino continued her modeling career.
    “So you look like your mom?” Jordan asked.
    Why had she never taken Jordan to meet her mother? “In some ways,” she answered.
    Though much shorter than her willowy mother, Cass had