Chance Encounter (Take a Chance: Prequel)

by Nancy Warren

Jack wondered when he was ever going to stop picking up strays. Hurt kittens and starving dogs and girls with big eyes and sad stories.

  Daphne looked like a privileged daughter who’d always had a warm home, good food, decent clothes, respectability. Everything money could buy.

  Everything he’d never had.

  His hardscrabble life had made him tough though. This poor girl looked like one of those flowers he’d seen as a landscaper. Had to be cultivated in a green house. One whiff of strong wind or a few drops of rain and that delicate bloom would wither and die.

  Her hair was long and as blond as a California beach. Her skin was tanned and when she smiled, she looked like that model who was forever in Sports Illustrated. Christie Brinkley.

  But for the shadows in her eyes.

  “So,” he said, “What’s a nice girl like you doing on a bus like this?”

  She turned a little in her seat, so she faced him. Tucked her hair behind her ears. “You really want to know?”

  “I do.”

  She seemed to be searching for a place to begin. Finally she said, “I started college last year. It was my first time living away from home.”

  Her story was a tragedy in the way that every girl who gets taken advantage of by an older man who oversteps the bounds of honor and decency is a tragedy. Jack had heard way too many stories like it.

  When the professor who knocked her up found out she was pregnant, he had freaked. Admitted he had a family. Cried. Told her he’d pay for the abortion.

  A familiar anger at the injustice of the system clenched at him. When he was older, when he had some money and some authority, he was going to change things in some small way. He wasn’t a politician or a crusader, but he believed in trying to make a difference. “Did you report him to the university? Call his wife? Go to the cops? Tell me you did something?”

  She rubbed her forehead. “I followed him home one day so I knew where he lived. I started staking out the place because I wanted to confront his wife when he wasn’t around. I planned to tell her everything.” She played absently with her hair and he watched the way the light spilled through the honey and gold and silver threads.

  “His wife finding out was the thing he’d seemed most afraid of. So naturally, that’s how I decided to hurt him back.” Daphne paused. He wished there was a drinking fountain on the bus. She seemed like she could use some water.

  “One day, she came out of the house. His wife looked like a nice woman. She had two little boys with her.” She squinched up her eyes as though the memory stabbed at her. “She was heavily pregnant.”

  “That prick.”

  “Oh, yeah. Maybe I’m a coward, but I didn’t want to ruin that woman’s life.”

  “So what did you do?”

  He could almost see her spine stiffen. “I finished the school year. Even though I was sick as a dog with morning sickness, I went to classes and I finished my papers and wrote every exam.”

  “Even his?”

  “You bet. I sat in his classes and I made him sweat. I sat farther back and I stopped asking questions, but I was there. He’d get nervous and stumble over his lectures. Then he started getting grad students to teach his classes for him, claimed he was busy with his book.”

  Jack began to realize that this girl wasn’t the hothouse flower he’d taken her for. She had guts. And integrity.

  She was also alone on a bus headed north.

  “What about your parents?”

  She grabbed the pen and started doodling mindlessly on the open page of her notebook, right under the words, The Beginning. “They didn’t take the news well. Not well at all.”

  “They kick you out?”

  “No. But it’s hard to live with constant disapproval.” She was sketching rapidly and a tree, like something out of an enchanted forest, took form under her pen. “So I called my great aunt.”

  “Your great aunt?”

  “Yes. She’s the black sheep of the family and I love her to bits. She’s completely unconventional. Never married but had countless lovers. She was a journalist and probably a communist. Now she lives on this property in Oregon and she invited me to come and live with her.”

  “What kind of property?”

  “I don’t know. I’ve never been there. It’s rural, that’s all I know. She says I’ll work harder than I’ve ever worked in my life, but the air’s clean, she grows most of her own food and she says she’ll help me when the baby comes.”

  He picked up one of her smooth hands. Turned it over and ran one of his leather-tough fingertips over the soft skin. He doubted that palm had ever held a broom. “You up for hard work?”

  She sent him a glare as steely as he imagined she knew how. “Do I have a choice?”

  She took her hand back and he was surprised how much he missed the feel of it. “Okay,” she said. “Your turn. Your story.”

  “One hard luck story’s enough for one day.”

  “I disagree. Besides, the same is true for you. I’m a stranger on a bus. You can tell me anything.”

  He turned his head and met her gaze. “Short version. Drugs ruined my folks. I got taken away. Bounced around from foster home to foster home. A couple were good places, one family even wanted to adopt me.” He tried to keep the sourness out of his tone. “My mom wouldn’t let them have me. Maybe she thought she’d clean up some day. She never did and well, there are good foster homes and not so good ones.”

  Her face softened with sympathy but she kept her mouth shut. “I ran away from the last place when I was fifteen. Been on my own ever since.” He held up the paperback. “Got my education from books and the school of hard knocks.”

  She waited but he was done. The details weren’t pretty and this girl needed pretty in her life.

  “So, where are you headed?”

  “I’m heading to Eugene. There’s a guy there can get me a job tree planting. Money’s good and it keeps me outside. I like being outside.”

  “Eugene. That’s about three stops before me.” She dug into her bag and pulled out two granola bars. Handed him one.

  “You got enough?” he asked before accepting. Where he’d come from, enough was never guaranteed.

  She smiled. Nodded.

  He leaned right across the aisle and grabbed the army surplus pack that contained all his worldly goods. And it wasn’t half full. Dug around and pulled out a pack of well-used playing cards.

  “What do you want to play?”

  “I don’t know any card games.”

  He taught her to play double solitaire and they beguiled an hour or so that way.

  When she leaned toward him and her Farrah Fawcett blond hair swung, he caught her scent. Sweet and sexy at the same time.

  After they tired of cards, he settled back with his book and she dragged out a novel called Ordinary People. She caught him glancing over her shoulder. She said, “We’ll swap books when we’re both done.”

  “Deal.”

  They settled comfortably side by side as the bus lumbered on.

  Chapter Three