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- Herausgeber: Cora Buhlert
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
When her car breaks down after midnight on Christmas Eve, Laura thinks she’ll never make it home for the holidays.
But then fate sends Laura her very own Christmas angel in the form of hunky truck driver Jonas…
This is a short and sweet holiday romance of 8400 words or approximately 30 print pages.
Das E-Book können Sie in Legimi-Apps oder einer beliebigen App lesen, die das folgende Format unterstützen:
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020
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Driving Home for Christmas
by Cora Buhlert
Bremen, Germany
Copyright © 2020 by Cora Buhlert
All rights reserved.
Cover image © Zzayko, Dreamstime
Cover design by Cora Buhlert
Pegasus Pulp Publications
Mittelstraße 12
28816 Stuhr
Germany
www.pegasus-pulp.com
Driving Home for Christmas
The engine died shortly before Bremen.
Her ancient Volkswagen Golf had been acting up ever since Laura had left Münster two hours before. At an exit called Groß something or other (there were a lot of Groß something or others along this stretch of the Autobahn A1, an area where absolutely nothing deserved a name that started with “Great”), the car suddenly refused to go faster than sixty kilometres per hour, so that even the trucks and the pensioners with their camping trailers passed her by, honking their displeasure.
Laura had just about made it to the next exit, “Driving Home for Christmas” blaring from the radio, when her car decided that even sixty kilometres per hour was still too fast and that it would rather go thirty. So she’d swerved onto the exit lane, cursing all the way, while passing trucks and trailers and campervans honked at her.
The car laboured up the exit ramp and then rolled down a four lane road towards some kind of retail park. The first snow flake landed on her windshield. Unbidden, Laura began to cry.
It was Christmas Eve, shortly after midnight, and all Laura wanted was to get home, back to Hamburg, back to her parents and her younger sister Nina and her childhood dog Bucky who was getting on in years by now.
The day had been hellish. Last minute errands, a sadistic professor who thought that it was totally acceptable to hold a class on December 23 and then handing out mugs of mulled wine and eggnog on the Münster Christmas market to entitled last minute shoppers and drunken jerks who thought it was totally okay to cop a feel, when she collected the abandoned mugs from the tables around the stall.
The ten PM news were on the radio, when Laura finally got into her car, shivering because the heating always took fifteen minutes to kick in. At first, she thought the stutter of the engine and the problems she had changing gears were just due to the cold. But even after she was on the Autobahn and the heater finally kicked in, the engine still stuttered. And then it got steadily worse.
Was it too much to ask that just one thing would go right this Christmas? As if uni and working the Christmas market on the day before Christmas Eve and only setting out on the almost four hour plus journey home at ten PM wasn’t bad enough, now her car had to give out, too. And the repairs would probably cost more than she had and then she’d have to ask Mom and Dad for money and…
Tears blurred her vision, as the Golf rolled down the road towards the darkened retail park. She didn’t even know where she was. Just outside Bremen, yes, or maybe even inside Bremen, though she hadn’t seen a sign. But she didn’t even know the name of the exit. She never had, even though she’d driven past here lots of times. Privately, she called it the IKEA exit for the huge triangular IKEA sign next to the Autobahn.
She was rolling past the IKEA store that went with the sign right now. The store was shuttered and dark, just an enormous dark blue box, barely enlivened by giant posters advertising pillow cases for nine ninety-nine and baked potatoes and schnitzel for four ninety-nine. And wasn’t it typical that the only thing that was lit on the whole bloody store were the posters?
On the other side of the road, there was a DIY store, also dark and shuttered. But up ahead, she spotted lights. A gas station and was that a McDonald’s?
Laura pressed down her foot on the accelerator, trying to coax the car to make it go a little faster than the twenty kilometres per hour it was going now. And the car — bastard that it was — decided to die for good at just that moment.
She couldn’t possibly stop here, on a four lane road, even if there was almost no traffic at this time of night. And so she used the last bit of juice the engine had to pull into the next exit. The car rolled, puffed and came to a stop in the middle of a giant parking lot surrounded by shuttered shops. And no matter how often Laura turned the key or pressed the accelerator, nothing she did would make the engine come alive again.
