by Jane Graves
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A Preview of Cowboy Take Me Away
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To Stephanie Rostan. Thanks a million for your
excellent advice, your unwavering support, and for
always giving it to me straight. You’re the kind
of agent every writer wishes they had.
Chapter 1
When her nausea kicked up for the umpteenth time that day, Kari Worthington left the bride’s room, crossed the hall, and slipped into the bathroom. Locking the door behind her, she leaned against it for a moment to keep from throwing up. Then she stumbled across the room, kicked the train of her dress out of the way, hiked up her skirt, and sat down on the toilet lid. She buried her head in her hands as best she could with her veil in the way, wishing her stomach would quit churning and that horrible, breathless, gaspy feeling would go away.
A strand of bright auburn hair escaped the monstrous pile on her head and curled down her cheek. She tried to stuff it back, but it was hopeless. It had taken the stylist more than an hour that morning to gather her hair and incarcerate it at the crown of her head, and the woman had frowned the whole time. That was nothing new. Kari had spent her whole life with everybody around her trying to stuff parts of her back into place—both parts that showed and parts that didn’t.
She tried to tell herself it was just nerves, that every bride felt like this on her wedding day because marriage was such a big step. But was that really true? Did every bride really need a barf bag only half an hour before marrying the man of her dreams?
No. Assuming her groom really was the man of her dreams.
She thought about Greg. Handsome, intelligent, serious Greg, who had dropped by her office a year ago and asked her out. It wasn’t the first time a man at work had done that, but as time went on, they tended to lose interest in spite of her family connections. Something about her unusual outlook on life tended to make them slowly drift away, and pretty soon she’d be out there on that limb by herself all over again.
As it turned out, though, Greg endured her offbeat personality like a real trouper. But sometimes she thought he seemed too accommodating, as if she were an applecart he didn’t want to upset. After all, there were big advantages to being married to the boss’s daughter. Kinda made a guy fireproof. Not that Greg would ever get fired. He was a younger version of her father, right down to his designer suits and his iPhone tapping and his power lunches. Anytime she was around him, she felt as if she should be standing up straight even when she was lying flat on her back.
And speaking of lying flat on her back…
Sex with Greg had always been okay. Just…okay. Not that she’d ever had sex that was better than okay to compare it to, but she knew it had to be out there somewhere. Why else were all those odes and sonnets and love poems of yesteryear written, not to mention about a million love songs since the beginning of time? People were out there living and loving with all their hearts, and sometimes Kari lay awake at night, fervently wishing she was one of them.
She and Greg had dated for a year. Then came the ring. Then their engagement party. The minister who performed their premarital counseling pronounced them a match made in heaven. But Kari remembered thinking that the priest’s blessing had less to do with her compatibility with Greg and more to do with the fact that her father was extraordinarily wealthy and believed wholeheartedly in tithing.
Through it all, Kari had just let herself get swept along. There had always been a dress to try on, a caterer to consult, the wedding planner from hell to endure. One week passed, and then the next. Then came the Big Day, and what was she doing? Sitting on a toilet lid in her wedding dress feeling as if she was going to throw up. For all that Greg was nice and accommodating and unerringly patient, she saw the looks her father exchanged with him sometimes. I know she’s a handful, her father’s eyes would say, and Greg’s would say, Don’t worry, sir. I can handle her. You can count on me.
She heard a knock at the door. “Miss Worthington!”
Oh, God. Not Hilda. She couldn’t take one more moment of Hilda Baxter. Stuart Worthington had spared no expense for his only child’s wedding, including hiring the wedding planner to the rich and famous. Today she looked like a gigantic prune in her multilayered indigo dress, her face all puckered with irritation, and if she didn’t leave Kari alone, she was going to wrap her hands around the woman’s neck and squeeze until her eyes bugged out.
“Time’s running short!” Hilda shouted through the door, sounding more like a prison guard than a wedding planner. “You need to be walking down the aisle in exactly twenty-three minutes!”
Kari closed her eyes. Twenty-three minutes. In only twenty-three minutes she would be a married woman. Twenty-three minutes…twenty-three minutes…twenty-three minutes…
The words reverberated inside her head so maddeningly that she put her fingertips to her temples and rubbed hard, trying to drive them away. She’d just about succeeded when a new mantra took over.
Twenty-two minutes…twenty-two minutes…twenty-two minutes…
Kari jerked her head up, trying to shake that thought away. She had to do this. It wasn’t just Greg and her father and Hilda and all those guests. It was Jill, too, who was waiting in the bride’s room to join her on that trek up the aisle. Jill had been her best friend since they’d roomed together at Rice University, and now Jill was the only one Kari wanted standing next to her when she got married.
Kari imagined the look of disbelief that would spring to Jill’s face if she told her she was having second thoughts. After all, Jill thought Greg was the catch of the century. But that was mostly because she had a thing for the GQ type. She didn’t really know Greg.
Most of the time, Kari felt as if she didn’t, either.
Her second thoughts were nothing new. She’d been having them for some time now. She’d just thought that the happy, gushy bride thing would take over the closer the wedding got and she’d realize how silly she was being.
Now all she could think of was escaping.
She froze. Leave her own wedding? Could she do that?
She took a deep, shaky breath, trying to settle her nerves, but her stomach still felt as if it was tumbling around in a clothes dryer. She grabbed her tote bag she’d brought to the bathroom with her, fished out her car keys, and stared at them.
There it was. Her ticket out of there.
She dropped the keys to her lap. Good heavens—what was she thinking? She couldn’t just get into her car and drive away. What kind of a crazy person did something like that?
She put the keys back into her tote bag and rose from the toilet lid. Looking in the mirror, she straightened her veil as best she could, then opened the bathroom door. The door to the bride’s room was dead ahead. If she was going to marry Greg, it was now or never. And never wasn’t an option.
But all at once Kari imagined what it would be like when she went back inside. Jill would fluff the train of her dress, telling her one more time how lucky she was. Hilda would clap her hands and herd her toward the altar, where Greg would be waiting, eager for the last block of his perfectly structured life to fall into
place. For one of the few times in his life, her father would be smiling, the weight of the world lifted from his shoulders as he married off his kooky daughter to a younger, more resilient version of himself. In exactly twenty-one minutes she would become—
No, no, no! I can’t do this!
The words rang so loudly inside Kari’s head that for a moment she wondered if she’d screamed them out loud. Suddenly her feet felt fused to the floor, as if her dainty wedding slippers were stuck inside concrete blocks. Then, out of the corner of her eye, half a dozen steps down the hall, she saw a sign that made her breath stick in her throat.
“EXIT.”
She stared at it, mesmerized by the glowing red neon. Suddenly she had the most irrational feeling that the only place where there was oxygen to breathe was outside this church, and if she didn’t leave right now, she’d fall over, turn purple, and die on the spot.
Maybe never was an option after all.
Without another thought, Kari pulled her keys out of her tote bag and hurried down the hall. She hit the bar on the security door and swept it open, running into the secluded side parking lot of the church. She clicked the remote to unlock the driver’s door of her Lexus, suddenly met with the challenge of the century: cramming her dress along with herself behind the wheel. Fortunately, a whole lot of motivation kicked in, and in a matter of seconds, she was stuffed in, strapped in, and ready to go.
With a shaky hand, she stabbed at the ignition with the key. She managed to insert it on her third try, feeling like a lifer going over the fence at Huntsville. She paused for a moment and glanced back, sure she would see people pouring out of the church to try to stop her, but no. They were all still inside, blissfully ignorant of the fact that everything was in place for the wedding of the year, except maybe a bride.
But in the end, would anybody be all that surprised? For once in Kari’s life, her history of rash, impulsive behavior was going to pay off. That’s Kari, they’d all say. Running away from her own wedding. Could we really expect anything else?
Kari knew that a more confident woman would be able to look her fiancé dead in the eye and tell him she didn’t want to marry him. But she knew if she did, Greg would try to talk her out of it. Then her father would get into the mix. Then Jill would tell her again what a catch Greg was and beg her to reconsider. Then Hilda would freak out and start throwing commands around like a third world dictator, and all hell would break loose. If Kari actually had a backbone, she could have endured all that, but right now it felt like wet spaghetti. In no time, they’d be shoving her up the aisle and she’d be saying those vows, and before she knew it, she’d be a miserable married woman for the rest of her life.
She took a deep, shaky breath. This was it. Her moment of truth. She could stay and continue living as she always had, with other people pushing her around, or she could take charge of her own life.
It was time to take charge.
She started the car and drove out of the parking lot to a side street behind the church, pretty sure nobody had seen her. Once on the main road, though, she realized she had no clue which direction to go. North to Dallas? Or west to Austin?
Austin. It was a weird city. Oddball people lived there. Since she’d always been one of those herself, she’d blend in better. And it was closer. She could drive there, get a room at a nice hotel like the Driskill or the InterContinental, order something large and chocolate from room service, and then sit back and figure out what to do next.
Then all at once she thought about Boo, her precious little terrier Jill was taking care of while she was on her honeymoon. Right now Kari had no plan. How long would she have to stay gone until the heat was off?
He’ll be okay. Jill will take care of him. Just go!
But as Kari pulled up to the next stoplight, guilt crept in. No matter how wrong this marriage would be, she couldn’t leave without saying something to somebody. She decided to text Greg, knowing he’d have his iPhone with him even as he was ready to walk up the aisle. On vibrate, of course, but with him nonetheless, because that was the kind of guy he was. And that—that right there—was part of the problem. Her ringtone was a frog croaking, which made her smile every time she heard it. How was she supposed to marry a man whose ringtone sounded like—of all things—a telephone ringing?
I’m so sorry, she punched in. I can’t marry you. It’s not you, it’s me. I’m just…sorry. I’ll be in touch later.
Then guilt raised its ugly head again. Greg didn’t deserve this. He didn’t deserve being left at the altar in front of three hundred people.
Then she thought about those looks between him and her father, the ones that said she wasn’t going to be so much Greg’s wife as she was a rock around his neck he was willing to endure. In a few decades, when Stuart Worthington died and went to that big boardroom in the sky, it would all be worth it to Greg. And it would be worth it to her father, too, to spend eternity knowing his flighty, flaky daughter was well in hand.
I didn’t pick him, Dad. You did.
And something about that made her guilt melt away.
Kari stared at the text message, trying to think of something else to say, but there really wasn’t anything, so she hit “send.”
Then the light turned green, and she hit the gas.
As Marc Cordero went down the elevator of San Jacinto Hall to get Angela’s last box from the car, he wondered where along the way he’d lost his mind. He should have insisted she go to a smaller school. Or maybe to junior college for a year or two. Hell, he should have locked her in her bedroom and thrown away the key so he’d never have to deal with any of this.
The University of Texas had sounded so safe and civilized when the college counselor at her high school had talked about it, and when he and Angela visited the campus, it had seemed relatively tame. Of course, that had been during the summer session, when only a fraction of the place was occupied.
Neither of those things had prepared Marc for the chaos of move-in day.
The madness had actually begun an hour ago, twenty miles outside Austin. Marc had followed Angela’s car with his truck, which he was using to help haul all her belongings to campus. They’d crept along the highway for what seemed like forever. Marc had sworn there had to be a five-car pileup ahead, but it turned out that it was just a traffic jam caused by students heading to UT.
Unbelievable.
The moment the campus came into view, Marc got a sick, sinking sensation in his stomach. Lack of control always did that to him. Dropping his daughter off at this place was making him feel more out of control than he had for the past eighteen years, and that was saying a lot. Angela, on the other hand, got out of her car, took one look at the campus, and her face lit up exactly the way it had when she was six years old and saw Magic Kingdom for the first time.
Six years old. Magic Kingdom. Where the hell had the time gone?
Marc grabbed the last box from his truck and headed back into the building, sidestepping one person after another, feeling as if he was navigating a sidewalk in Shanghai. A few minutes later, he got off the elevator and headed down the hall to the twelve-by-sixteen-foot space Angela was sharing with a girl from Lubbock who’d also taken potluck on a roommate. They seemed to get along well already, which he guessed was a good thing, except the girl had a tattoo of some Chinese symbol on her upper arm, a ring through her nose, and frizzy hair dyed death black.
Angela lifted her arms to put a framed photo onto the top shelf of her bookcase, hiking up her shirt. It was one of those midriff things she wore with jeans slung a few inches below her belly button, which was pierced with a silver ring. God in heaven—why had he given in on that?
Because she’d begged for weeks, driving him crazy until he’d finally told her she could pierce anything she could cover up later for a job interview. Then he’d read something in one of her magazines about labia piercing, and that was when he’d known for a fact that this parenthood thing had gotten totally out of control and he didn’t s
tand a chance anymore.
“Where do you want this?” Marc asked.
“On the dresser,” Angela said.
He set the box down and turned back, brushing his hands together, but before he could ask Angela if she needed any help unpacking or maybe hanging some stuff on the walls, she said, “I’ll walk you back downstairs.”
Marc wasn’t ready for this. He was even more not ready than he imagined he’d be. “Uh…okay.” He turned to Angela’s roommate. “It was nice to meet you.”
“Nice to meet you, too, Mr. Cordero,” the girl said with a smile, but her eyes said, Now go away.
Marc and Angela walked back to the elevator lobby. The elevator doors opened, and three boys got off. As they passed by, one of them eyed Angela with too much interest, a hulking jock type who looked as if he was itching for another notch on his bedpost.
“What are you looking at?” Marc growled.
The kid stopped. Swallowed hard. “Uh…nothing, sir.”
“That’s right. You’re looking at nothing. And nothing is over there. My daughter is over here, and she’s not nothing. So if you’re looking at nothing, you’re not looking at her. Are we clear on that?”
The kid’s eyes went big as searchlights. “Yes, sir.”
“Now, beat it,” Marc snapped.
As the kid hurried off with his buddies, Angela spun on Marc, looking horrified. “Dad! Why did you do that?”
“Nothing’s changed just because you’re here and I’m in Rainbow Valley,” he said, striding onto the elevator. “No dumb jock just looking to get laid is going to mess with you.”
“So what are you going to do?” Angela said, following him onto the elevator. “Drive an hour so you can kick his ass?”
“Don’t think I won’t.”
She stabbed the down button on the elevator panel. “I can’t believe you don’t trust me.”
“I trust you. It’s guys like him I don’t trust.”
“Could you embarrass me any more, Dad?” she said, throwing her arms into the air. “Huh? Is it even possible?”