by Jane Graves
Didn’t she get it by now? He just wanted her to be safe. That was all. But in this place…good God. He saw danger around every corner. Why didn’t she?
Right about then, their tiny town seemed like a 1950s sitcom set in comparison. Everybody knew everybody else in Rainbow Valley, so kids knew if they got out of line, word would eventually get back to somebody who would shove them back in. Marc had always been able to intimidate Angela’s boyfriends with a frown, a gruff voice, and a few subtle words of warning. In fact, there had been times when he swore he was smiling, but Angela told him he still looked pissed, which meant he scared her boyfriends to death. That was fine with him if it meant they kept their distance. But what was he supposed to do now? Could he make sure they didn’t mess with his daughter when he was an hour away in Rainbow Valley?
The problem was that he knew what teenage boys were like because he’d been one. Things could happen you never expected and certainly weren’t ready to deal with. It was funny how after all these years he could barely remember what Nicole looked like, only that he’d been crazy in love with her and teenage sex had seemed like a wondrous gift from God.
Then came Angela.
A month later, Nicole was gone. Couldn’t handle being a mother. As if Marc had been any more prepared to be a father.
In the years that followed, he’d felt as if he didn’t have a clue what he was doing. Angela’s childhood seemed like nothing but a blur in his mind right now. Then came the god-awful early teenage years, with hormones running rampant and all that shouting and door slamming, making him feel as if he was doing everything wrong and she’d be rolling her eyes at him for the rest of their lives.
But the older she got, the more things leveled out, until it looked as if the sleepless nights and the constant worry and the occasional heartache were giving way to the kind of warm, comfortable relationship he’d always wanted them to have. And as he looked at his daughter now, skimpy shirt and all, he thought maybe he’d done a pretty damned good job of raising her.
“You’re right,” Marc said as the elevator doors opened on the first floor. “I shouldn’t have embarrassed you. You’re not a kid anymore. I know you can take care of yourself.”
Those words came harder to him than anything else, because he wasn’t sure he believed them. He knew he’d better believe them, though, if he expected to get any sleep for the next four years.
Angela gave him a little shrug. “It’s okay. That guy looked like a jerk, anyway.”
That was Angela. So forgiving. Sometimes a little too forgiving. He wanted to shout at her, If you meet a guy who behaves badly, don’t you dare excuse it! But if she hadn’t learned that lesson already, was repeating it now going to make any difference?
As they walked to his truck, Marc dreaded every step he took more than the one before it. He clicked open his door with the remote, then turned back to Angela.
“Do you want me to stay for a while? Maybe take you and your new roommate to get a bite to eat?”
Angela looked back over her shoulder. “Uh…”
Marc held up his hand. “Never mind. You already have plans.”
“It’s just that Kim and I thought we’d walk around campus and check things out a little. Just to see what’s going on. You know.”
Silence.
“I don’t like missing harvest this year,” Angela said.
“You hate harvest.”
“Yeah, I know,” she said with a little shrug, folding her arms and staring down at her blue-frosted toenails. “But it’s all hands on deck, you know?”
Marc felt a stab of remembrance. That was what he’d told her from the time she was old enough to snip grapes off of vines. At this vineyard, everybody pulls his weight. And that goes double if your name is Cordero.
“Uncle Daniel is coming back,” Marc said. “We’ll get it done.”
She nodded, then smiled briefly. “Do you remember the time when I was six and I ate fifty-four Tempranillo grapes?”
That felt like a hundred years ago. Had it really been only twelve? “I was thrilled you could count that high.”
“Purple puke isn’t pretty, is it?”
“Not in the least.”
“Why didn’t you stop me?”
“Because experience is the best teacher.”
Angela looked over her shoulder at the sea of students, then back at Marc. “Then maybe I’d better go experience some stuff, huh?”
This is it. It’s time for you to go, old man. So go.
“Call me if you need anything,” he told Angela.
“I will.”
“Or even if you don’t.”
She nodded. For a few seconds, neither one of them spoke. Then Angela’s face crumpled. She took a step forward and wound her arms around his neck in a desperate hug. Suddenly she was six years old again, with her little hands holding on tightly because of a bad dream or a scraped knee, or sometimes just because he’d been twice as important to her because he was Dad and Mom all rolled into one. As he held her tightly, she whispered, “I love you, Dad,” into his ear, and he whispered that he loved her, too.
Finally she pulled away, sniffing a little. He opened the door to his truck and got inside. She took a few steps back from the curb and wiped tears from her eyes. As Marc started the car, he was pretty sure he was going to cry, too, and he hadn’t done that since he was seven years old.
No. Get yourself together. This is a good thing. For the first time in eighteen years, your life is your own.
He put the truck in gear. Angela waved good-bye, and he waved back. As he drove away, he glanced in his rearview mirror to see her turn around and walk away from him and into her new life.
It was time for him to do the same.
By the time he was heading back toward Rainbow Valley, he was ticking off all the reasons why this new chapter in his life was going to be a good thing. But before he could change his life completely, he had to get through harvest. Daniel would be there in a few weeks. That had been their agreement. As soon as Angela was in college, Daniel would come back to Cordero Vineyards to assume responsibility for the family business for the next three years, carrying on the tradition Marc had guarded all this time.
Once his brother took over, Marc intended to hop on his motorcycle and hit the open road. Where he’d go, he didn’t know. That was the most amazing feeling of all. He didn’t know. To have the next three years of his life ahead of him virtually unscripted was something he couldn’t have imagined when he’d changed his first diaper eighteen years ago. And once he was motoring down the open road and happened to meet a woman who was out for a good time, he was going for it. The only women he intended to have anything to do with were ones who wanted what he wanted—great sex with no strings attached. He couldn’t even imagine what that was going to be like, but he sure as hell intended to find out.
To kick things off, at eight o’clock tonight he intended to jump headfirst into the life of bachelorhood that becoming a father at seventeen had never allowed him to live. He was going to sit in his brand-new La-Z-Boy recliner in front of the sixty-inch LED TV he’d bought last weekend and watch a preseason football game. But first he was going to stop at the Pic ’N Go and buy as much junk food as he could get his hands on, crap he rarely kept in the house because parents who put sugar and trans fats in front of their kids these days were evidently going to hell. But if he chose to get a little diabetes and heart disease himself, that was his business.
It wasn’t as if he hadn’t watched a ball game in the past eighteen years, but tonight was different. He didn’t have to worry that Angela was out with friends and she hadn’t come home yet, or that he’d turn around to see an army of teenagers traipsing through his house, or that he needed to put a decent dinner on the table for his kid so the food police didn’t come after him. Tonight it was just him alone in the house with no responsibility for anyone but himself, with nothing to do except cheer on the Cowboys and clog his arteries. And he was going to make t
he most of it.
Then he thought about Angela and felt a flicker of worry, along with an empty spot inside him that came from missing her already. He thought about calling her, then thought again. You taught her right. Now let her live her own life, and you live yours.
He checked his watch. It was still a few hours until kickoff. He looked at the horizon, where dark clouds churned against an iron-gray sky. Even though a heavy rainstorm was predicted, he’d be home before it hit. In his recliner. In front of his television. Living it up. He felt a moment of worry about the grapes, then brushed it off. Harvest was weeks away, with plenty of time for them to recover from a heavy rainstorm. Rain or no rain, nothing was going to screw up his good mood tonight.
Absolutely nothing.
He was only thirty-five years old. He’d paid his dues. Now it was his turn. As of tonight, he was starting a whole new life.
Three hours later, Kari drove along a dark, deserted country road somewhere in the Texas Hill Country, gripping the steering wheel so tightly her fingers ached. Rain fell in such a deluge against her windshield that her wipers could barely sweep it away. The road beneath her tires was growing slicker by the minute. Worst of all, her gas gauge was in the red, which meant if she didn’t find a station soon, she’d be stuck by the side of the road in the middle of nowhere.
She’d intended to get a hotel room in Austin. What she hadn’t counted on was a gazillion people swarming the city for move-in day at the University of Texas. They’d sucked up every decent hotel room for miles around, so she decided to head for San Antonio.
Then came the rain.
Pretty soon the bad weather led to an accident on the freeway, and she’d gotten stuck in the snarl of traffic. Her engine had idled for over an hour until she had less than a fourth of a tank of gas left. She finally got the chance to exit the freeway to search for a gas station, only to end up on a road completely devoid of everything. No cars, no people, no buildings, no nothing. It was as if she was driving through a black hole, except there was rain and thunder and lightning. The longer she drove, the more the road wound around until she had no clue which direction she was going.
She’d yanked off her veil and tossed it into the backseat about a hundred miles ago, but she was still stuck in her wedding dress. It was compressing her ribs so much that she couldn’t breathe, and if she didn’t get out of it soon, she was going to keel over and die. Why hadn’t she stopped at a McDonald’s and changed? She could have changed clothes, grabbed a Big Mac, and been back on the road in ten minutes, which meant that right now she’d be comfortable and full. Instead, she was incarcerated inside a wedding dress, starving, with no clue where on earth she was. She’d just been so hell-bent on getting to Austin that she hadn’t wanted to stop.
Then she saw it. Up ahead. Or were her eyes playing tricks on her?
No. It was real. Light glimmered faintly through the falling rain.
Maybe it was a service station. Maybe one of those deluxe service stations where she could get a cup of coffee and a sub sandwich and a brownie for dessert and wait out the worst of the storm. Then she could ask directions, gas up, and eventually she’d get back to the freeway, then to whatever luxury hotel she could find. She would hand her keys to the valet, get a room, ditch this dress, soak in the Jacuzzi tub for about an hour, and then—
All at once, something darted in front of her. Her mind barely registered deer before she wheeled the car hard to the right to miss it. As the startled animal scrambled away, Kari felt the bump and grind of the gravelly shoulder of the road beneath her tires. She tried to turn back, but her car slid sideways down a shallow embankment and smacked into a tree. The force of the impact slung her sideways, whipping her neck hard to one side and banging her head. The windshield shattered, and pellets of safety glass rained into the car like a shower of diamonds.
And then everything went still.
Strangely, the car was still running, but when she turned to see the tree trunk embedded into the passenger door, she realized she wasn’t going anywhere. She turned off the ignition, her hand shaking so hard she could barely hold onto the key. The engine died, leaving only the sound of the rain pounding against the car and her pulse throbbing inside her skull. With the windshield gone, rain hit the dashboard, bounced off, and splatted against her face.
In a surge of frustration, she pounded the steering wheel and shouted a few curse words at the top of her lungs. When that didn’t unsmash her car and put it back up on the road, she clutched the steering wheel and dragged in a deep, ragged breath.
Get a grip. Where’s your cell phone?
She felt around on the dripping-wet seat, then on the floorboard beneath her feet, before she finally found it. She’d turned it off earlier to avoid the deluge of phone calls and texts she knew she’d get. When she turned it on now, she felt marginally better when it lit up and the car wasn’t completely dark.
And she couldn’t get a signal.
She tossed it to the seat beside her, wondering what in the world she was supposed to do now. She had yet to see anybody else on this godforsaken road. It was dark and cold and wet and her head hurt, and she was starting to get just a tiny bit scared. If she’d only stayed in Houston, she’d be at her reception right now. Clean and dry and eating and drinking and dancing and…
And married.
Then she saw it again in the distance. The light she’d seen right before going off the road. Where there was light, there was help, right? Unfortunately, it wasn’t coming to her. She had to go to it. But walk in this horrible storm?
Then again, what was her alternative? She had no windshield so she was already drenched anyway. She might as well try to find help. And if she didn’t get out of this dress soon, it was going to squash the last breath right out of her.
She grabbed her tote bag and stuffed her cell phone inside it. With a deep breath, she shoved as much dress as she could out of the way, then followed it out of the car, wincing at the pain in her wrenched neck and across her shoulder where the seat belt had dug in. As she climbed the incline to the road, rain hammered her mercilessly, her dress dragging through the mud behind her.
When she reached the road, she felt a little woozy. Maybe she should have eaten something today besides half of the granola bar Jill had shoved at her, but she’d been so sick at the thought of becoming a married woman that she hadn’t been able to eat anything else. And dragging layer after layer of mud-caked Duchess satin and Chantilly lace behind her was just about to wear her out.
And the rain still came down.
It’s not a disaster, it’s an adventure…
She kept saying that to herself, over and over, because they said repetition was the key to making yourself believe something. She liked adventures. She lived her life looking for them. But she generally preferred being dry and alive to enjoy them.
As she drew closer to the light, a jagged bolt of lightning sizzled to earth, exploding in a loud burst of electricity and momentarily illuminating a sign just up the highway. She slogged through the mud for another few minutes until she reached it. It was a painted wooden sign with grapes and wine bottles and the words Cordero Vineyards in white cursive letters shadowed in bright crimson. Now she realized the light she’d seen was coming from a structure on that property. Closer now, it looked like a farmhouse. Unfortunately, it was at the end of a very long driveway, and she was about to faint from exhaustion.
Kari imagined the person she hoped would answer the door—a grandmotherly woman who would invite her in, fix her a cup of tea, then cluck sweetly over her until the storm let up and she could figure out what to do next.
Then another bolt of lightning exploded so close it made even Kari’s wet arm hairs stand on end. Get out of this rain, or you’re going to be a barbecued bride.
With a deep breath, she turned onto the property, focused on the light, and kept on walking.
Marc checked his watch. It was almost eight. He poured the jar of gooey, fake cheese crap he�
�d microwaved over the tortilla chips, then threw a handful of jalapeño slices on top. Ah. Food of the gods. For tonight and hereafter, to hell with healthy. His new motto: “Live fast, die young.”
He liked the way that sounded, smooth and careless, throwing caution to the wind. Then his brain veered off on a Dad tangent: Yes. That’s an excellent plan. Just make sure your life insurance is paid up first.
Crap. Responsibility was going to be a hard habit to kick. He needed to think bachelor thoughts.
He stuck a package of Double Stuf Oreos under one arm, then picked up the nachos and a beer and headed to his living room. He put the food on the end table and collapsed in his recliner, tipping it back to maximum comfort level with his feet up and his head on the pillowy backrest. Then he reached for the remote and turned on the game.
Outside the rain came down in buckets. Thunder boomed. Lightning crashed. And Marc couldn’t have cared less, because he was inside this house where it was warm and dry, and tonight, right there in his living room, the Cowboys were going to beat the daylights out of the Steelers.
To complete the picture of total decadence, Brandy lay on the rug at his feet. He’d felt generous tonight and had given her way too many of her favorite dog treats. Now she was lying upside down, asleep and snoring, her bushy golden retriever tail flicking back and forth as she dreamed of chasing rabbits through the vineyard. Marc took a long drink of beer and let out a satisfied sigh. Life didn’t get any better than this.
The Cowboys won the toss and lined up to receive the kickoff. The Steelers kicker took off toward the ball.
And there was a knock at his door.
Marc whipped around. Somebody at his door? In this storm?
Brandy leaped up and started barking. Marc grabbed the remote, hit the “pause” button, and went to the entry hall. He opened the door. He blinked. Blinked again. And he still couldn’t believe what he saw.
A woman stood on his porch. Her hair was hanging in a dripping wad on one side of her head, and rain trickled off her nose. Raindrops clung to her eyelashes, shimmering in the dim porch light. Considering the storm, all that made sense. But what was that monstrosity she was wearing? She looked like Glinda the Good Witch after a bout of mud wrestling.
