The Thanksgiving Virgin , livre ebook

iUniverse - Charles Haas

Découvre YouScribe en t'inscrivant gratuitement

Je m'inscris

Obtenez un accès à la bibliothèque pour le consulter en ligne
En savoir plus

276 pages

English

Vous pourrez modifier la taille du texte de cet ouvrage

Obtenez un accès à la bibliothèque pour le consulter en ligne
En savoir plus

A propos
Informations
Extrait

Description

later

Lives collide on a cold night where one world ends and another begins.

Sujets

Fiction

Informations

Publié par	iUniverse
Date de parution	18 mars 2008
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9780595912575
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0200€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

THE THANKSGIVING VIRGIN

A Novel

Charles Haas

iUniverse, Inc.
New York Lincoln Shanghai

The Thanksgiving Virgin

Copyright © 2008 by Charles R. Haas

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
iUniverse books may be ordered through booksellers or by contacting:

iUniverse 2021 Pine Lake Road, Suite 100 Lincoln, NE 68512 www.iuniverse.com 1-800-Authors (1-800-288-4677)

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any Web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid.

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, names, incidents, organizations, and dialogue in this novel are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

ISBN: 978-0-595-46973-4 (pbk) ISBN: 978-0-595-71119-2 (cloth) ISBN: 978-0-595-91257-5 (ebk)

Contents
C H A P T E R 1
C H A P T E R 2
C H A P T E R 3
C H A P T E R 4
C H A P T E R 5
C H A P T E R 6
C H A P T E R 7
C H A P T E R 8
C H A P T E R 9
C H A P T E R 10
C H A P T E R 11
C H A P T E R 12
C H A P T E R 13
C H A P T E R 14
C H A P T E R 15
C H A P T E R 16
C H A P T E R 17
C H A P T E R 18
C H A P T E R 19
C H A P T E R 20
C H A P T E R 21
C H A P T E R 22
C H A P T E R 23
C H A P T E R 24
C H A P T E R 25
C H A P T E R 26
C H A P T E R 27
C H A P T E R 28
C H A P T E R 29
C H A P T E R 30
C H A P T E R 31
C H A P T E R 32
C H A P T E R 33
C H A P T E R 34
C H A P T E R 35
C H A P T E R 36
C H A P T E R 37
C H A P T E R 38
C H A P T E R 39
C H A P T E R 40
C H A P T E R 41

To all our dear, departed mothers.

“And what becomes of lost opportunities? Perhaps our guardian angel gathers them up and will give them back when we’ve grown wiser—and will used them rightly.”

—Helen Keller
C H A P T E R 1
OUT OF THE CITY
New York City was creeping up on her and she needed to get back out. As much as she loved it, the feeling she got every day of being a vital part of the busiest human engine in the world, she felt the shadows of the city pressing heavy on her shoulders. Six straight weeks spent in the belly, she thought. She realized her attitude had suffered at the office that week, however quietly.
She strode the broad sidewalk of 42 nd , stretching her lean legs like a dancer warming down yet keeping steady pace through the crowd with the rest. 6:30 on a Friday evening in spring, and the tourist wave was washing through central Manhattan making it a chore to glide her mobile office uptown at the same pace as the others. She labored sometimes through the moderate walk to her Central Park home when her batteries were low but she liked the exercise. Waiting at the end was a warm bath and maybe a chilled glass of Pino. She loved the park view and wouldn’t quickly live elsewhere but she looked forward to running away to her next assignment, itching to get back into the country. Southern Missouri would be a nice change and offered the most intriguing project in a long time. It would be desired turnabout from steel drums and chaotic beaches of the Caribbean spa she just completed. The next job was just what the witchdoctor ordered, a grand lake resort in a mountain range she had never visited. Her research brought her mind into the folds of the Ozarks and she was anxious to check it out.
Tonight it was a few phone calls, something mindless on television, then the weekend. She had no plans, a more frequent occurrence than she liked. Her friends were “increasingly busy” with work and family, or drifting through a new fiancé. She was long single now, and still no one really knew her schedule. It was incumbent on her to get in touch with friends when back in town, but she grew distant from most. Such was the cost of being an executive in real estate development, a shareholder in her firm, and an architect as well. Angela traded the tedious, client-chasing society life of her friends for her own fulfillment it appeared more and more. She maintained a wonderful living space but only spent six months there in measured increments. She would walk into people’s lives for a little while in Florida, Hawaii, Colorado or California, run a project, and then disappear, returning a year later to check it up and say hello to the owners in charge. Few adjustments would be needed, most times. Her life had been a series of bonding together teams of people for months and then moving onto other projects, and she had friends from Fiji to Nova Scotia. But now she had a change of venue possibly more isolated than some islands she had seen. She would go in cold, but had done so in strange places before, and alone.
Angela had her arrangements set for a one-stop trip that she nicely anticipated. It took off from LaGuardia and touched down in Indiana, continuing to Kansas City. She would take a charter plane to Springfield Monday morning to meet a guide and video crew for the drive down to the site, and she knew none of them.
After a comfortable Friday evening splashdown, she would be ready to go having packed days before. Her next assignment would take her into a new world for the next few months, and she welcomed it as a well-timed adventure taken far from urban compression and leading straight into the mystic, low heartland. She arrived at her greystone a bit winded, just wanting to rest and to have her mind off anything in particular. After a little winding down and a long, hot bath, she thought more about her trip. Much more than a weekend in the Hamptons, she would tour an immensely more expansive wilderness, finding the location to build a new fantastic hotel on the lake called Taneycomo in Taney County, Missouri.
With maps covering her large dining table she sat trying to envision the place when she closed her eyes. It was never the same when she got there, many times much more beautiful, but her imagination persisted. She enjoyed that gift and applied it to every project, coupling it with her design instincts. That, a Penn engineering degree and a Wharton MBA prepared her to develop the experience and train her eyes on integrating a new building or campus with a natural environment, and this one would present unique challenges. A golf course would be woven into the elevated northwest edge of the lake which threaded the lining of the Ozark range. She heard of places in those mountains, mysterious and remote, where no man had ever stepped. She followed the notes on her map to the point where she would stand in just a few days.
She slid open her door and moved onto the balcony overlooking the park, greening up now from ample rain the week past. Rain must be different there, she thought. Pure, welcoming, cleansing. She visualized the thick, lush forests around Tablerock Lake and Bull Shoals near the Arkansas border. What they must be like, she thought. Branson had been a well-established attraction for most of the nineties, and the time was right for a new development an hour east of there. But this place would be much different. Twisting waterways, sharp spines, calm, settled coves and inlets sat below cliffs spiking the natural, rolling country. The map looked like a whimsical painting, a rich garden full of life, and safely undisturbed. The federal government had protected a great portion of it, preserving the Mark Twain National Forest to near perfection. It was a hot area on the national real estate scale, and she was getting a valuable, early entry on new grand resort development.
But on this night she ached to be transported almost anywhere, much less a virtual Eden. Somewhere without the taxis and garbage trucks, the constant banging and gnashing of the city’s jaws. Her spirits were a bit faded from swimming with a million people living on top of one another in single neighborhoods. Hell’s Kitchen down the street was aptly named, she thought, and it seemed its population was ever increasing. Heaven’s Garden was what she needed and she opened her doors, breathed deeply, her head pointed skyward, arms stretched wide releasing tension from a day hovering at the easel over plans. To think of what others here went through, those who didn’t have immediate access to a park or even a view. People measured precious green space around here, a term not likely used where she was going. Not in rural Missouri.
Angela Provencher grew up in the similar surroundings of western Virginia rolling through her parents’ farm near the Shenandoah’s never with the notion that she would leave it forever. She loved the memories of being by herself or hiking through the foothills accompanied only by a college boyfriend or a horse from her family’s stable. It was operated by a couple of her brothers now, just an inviting Christmas if she could swing it. She usually could. But life in New York now was like having another job to manage sometimes, and she was a country girl at heart. She was glad to start a project in the deep woods of nowhere.
She had a daughter at Southern Methodist, and Jennifer was the light of her life. Still, Angela hadn’t given up the possibility of connecting with a man he