Chapter One
There were muffled sounds ricocheting down the darkened hallway like a hail of furry bullets.
“Ooh…mmm, deeper, yeahhh.” Her voice was seductive, low and definitely demanding.
“Damn—you’re a great piece of ass, baby.” The man’s voice was young, primal and breathless. “Oh, shit—I’m gonna blow. Hell, you’re so tight.”
“Yeah, smack that ass…” A loud slap echoed in the room. “God, I’m coming, too, again, hard, hard…”
It was like the soundtrack from a porn movie—the scene where a woman is used as a sexual entity and nothing more.
Steve silently opened the door and saw the young man arch backwards as he let out an almost painful groan. His eyes were squeezed shut and his mouth was open in a wide smile. The sweat on his muscles glistened in the light as his large hands squeezed hard on the woman’s pink ass cheeks.
The woman turned towards the door and stared. She licked her lips and rocked her ass, letting the man drain his seed inside her.
No words were needed, she just looked into Steve’s eyes—and he’d known his marriage was over.
~~~~~
Driving on autopilot, Steve Mitchell was now facing the consequences. He wasn’t sure where he was heading, simply pointing his car westward into the setting sun. It seemed as good a direction as any. Bev had taken everything from him except the clothes on his back. She’d even tried to get those. Their son was starting college now, thank God, so here he was, thirty-seven years old and starting over in his trailer. But he had nothing to begin with but his past.
Bev shouldn’t have gotten anything in the divorce settlement, since she’d done the cheating—several times. But Steve had let a jealous rage lead him into a rather unwise course of action. Who knew hitting that man with a baseball bat—autographed, too—would land him in jail and facing an assault charge? Finally, his plea-bargaining and a good lawyer had gotten him off the hook, but in a rotten twist of fate, the twenty-year-old, out-of-work stud was watching his forty-two-inch plasma television and living in his house.
The one bright spot of happiness in all this was that Steve was now free of everything and the punk was stuck with that good-for-nothing whore of an ex-wife.
It wasn’t so much the fact she cheated on him—although that had hurt—it was how she treated him afterwards. Her words were forever etched in his mind. “You sucked in bed. I don’t always just want to make love, sometimes I just want to fuck. That’s why I went to someone else. They satisfied me in ways you never could.”
It was the one ego-busting thought that all men dread—being an unsatisfactory lover and knowing someone else was having what they had believed was sacred.
The long road seemed as good a way as any to escape the pain of his past. Steve had his truck with the trailer hitched on behind, his clothes and seventy-five grand hidden away in his emergency fund. It was enough to see him over a couple of months while he wandered. He took a leave of absence from his job to find himself again. It was more a retreat to get as far away from home as possible and clear his head.
Hell, this was an emergency and it was about time he saw a sign of better things to come. Something positive.
The sleet fell more heavily, piling into slush on the road. This wasn’t the right kind of sign. He knew the storm would be hitting tonight since the chill of the air had made his knee sore again. Old football injuries never die, they just predict the weather.
Rounding the next bend in the road he noticed a stream of lights signaling what looked to be a truck stop with an all-night diner. He was hungry, tired and in need of a break. And he needed to piss like a racehorse.
~~~~~
There it was again.
That stupid rattle under the hood that had Melissa Henderson grinding her teeth in frustration. It wasn’t like she’d done the typical “woman” thing and ignored it. Nope, not her. She’d taken it to her garage, ordered the mechanic to figure out what it was and then fix it. Not a complicated request. Okay, demand.
She’d forked over five hundred dollars on the assurance that all was well in her car’s little piston-driven world. Apparently it wasn’t, because the fucking thing was back. And it couldn’t have picked a worse time, either.
Because Melissa Henderson was about to disappear.
She ignored it and drove on. This was going to be the day she shucked off just about every single boring, agonizingly normal thing in her life and became someone else. The person she knew she was supposed to have been. The rebel who lurked beneath the politely decorous surface.
The woman who hated neat suits, tidy blouses and lipstick. The woman who hated holding hands on a first date, glasses of white wine—house variety—and tradition.
Above all, tradition.
The one that said, “Get yourself settled, Melissa. Meet a nice man, Melissa. Marry and have children, Melissa.” Most often it said it in her mother’s voice, too.
She sighed as the road wound towards the setting sun, higher into the hills leading to…well, she actually had no idea. There were clouds building on one side, but she ignored those much like that aggravating pinging that was getting louder. In fact, she decided she’d ignore anything she didn’t like.
It was about time, too.
For Melissa had reached her limits. And she was about to pass them, leave them lying dead in the dust and become someone else.
Lissa.
A woman not afraid to take what she wanted—a woman who knew what she wanted. She’d spent too long suppressing those needs, playing the game, following the rules of the polite world in which she lived. The thought had crossed her mind she was slowly dying inside.
She knew a lot of it had to do with the fact she’d been raised under the shadow of the ancestor she so strongly resembled. Shameful Great-aunt Tilda had run a whorehouse in Texas, somewhere near the oil fields that had grown like weeds in the 1930s. Quite successfully, too, if one listened to the stories closely. Stories that were whispered behind hands, like some horrid blight on the family name.
And Melissa had listened. Behind doors, under open windows, she’d learned much of her look-alike great-aunt, and recognized a kindred spirit. Not just the almost-black hair and the unusually light blue eyes, although those were the features most commented on by relatives.
It was something in the soul that screamed out to be free—something Melissa knew was buried deep in her soul. And something her family had done its best to smother, fearing the stigma of another such character in their ranks.
Living quietly in suburbia, neither of her parents could have possibly imagined that their polite daughter seethed with emotions beneath her calm exterior. She tended to be a bit of an overachiever, but this was merely remarked upon as an example of her superior brain. College was a natural extension, but not one of the “fun” schools—Melissa was enrolled at a local community college and dutifully commuted every day.
Her dates were from the same mindset. Polite, cheerful, wanting little more than a decent job and eventually marriage. Sex arrived without much fanfare in the back of a Pontiac, fumbled and hurried, and leaving her frustrated with the whole experience. She knew, even then, there had to be more.
But she hadn’t found it. Wild monkey sex belonged to porn movies and “bad” girls, not “nice” girls like Melissa.
Fuck that shit.
She grinned to herself. Even her language was raw, but only in her mind. God forbid, she should swear in front of her family. They loved her, in their way, but they didn’t—couldn’t—possibly understand her. Nor did they try. They simply attempted to fit her into their mold.
And it had hurt. Because it was the wrong shape. The wrong size, the wrong type—it was just flat wrong.
So here she was, at the ripe age of twenty-nine, about to change her life completely. Her car held her essentials—a suitcase full of crazy clothes she’d been collecting for several months, and a couple of credit cards with little or no balance on them.
She was ready—as ready as she’d ever be. Lissa Henderson was about to bust loose. She was going to take the world by the balls and rattle it until it screamed for mercy. She was going to fuck her way through three states at least, try everything once, make men wild with lust and perhaps channel the spirit of her great-aunt Tilda.
Finally, she was going to be herself.
Her car apparently decided this was one event it didn’t want to share. It died.
“Fucking piece of mother-fucking crap.” Lissa’s temper flared as she coasted from the road into a small rest area and tried the ignition in a futile attempt to breathe life back into the engine.
No go. She sighed and got out, popping the hood open. Lissa gazed at the assorted intestines writhing within. “I should’ve shot you when I had the chance.”
The air was chilling rapidly now, small pellets of sleet adding to her discomfort. She glanced around, noticing she was miles from anywhere with darkness rapidly approaching. This was no fancy rest area with phones, toilets or a convenience store. This was simply a paved shoulder with a picnic table and an overflowing trash bin. And she had no cell phone signal, either. She had quietly switched carriers and taken a new number. No traces. This was the beginning of her new life, and she intended to relish it to the max without any annoyances from her old life interrupting every other minute. She would let her family know she was okay…well, when she was okay.
Which was certainly not at this moment. Her anger boiled up into her throat and her scream echoed emptily around the wooded road. “Fuuuuuck!”
The empty road was winding behind her and getting darker all the time as the sleet kept falling. There wasn’t a car in sight and she couldn’t remember the last time she saw one. Think, Lissa, think. Okay. A couple of miles back she’d seen lights. Hard to miss since there wasn’t a huge number of them in this godforsaken neck of the woods.
She sighed. It looked as though she was going to have to hoof it back there and call a garage or something. Not a walk she wanted in this weather, especially since she’d packed nothing more substantial than a nylon windbreaker. Who knew it was going to snow? Her sneakers would probably be soaked through by the time she made it, but there weren’t a huge number of options available at this point. If she stayed with her car, she might possibly freeze to death before help arrived, or—even worse—get eaten by bears or something.
Figuring that making a plan and following it through was better than providing a snack for hungry wildlife, Lissa locked up her car, pocketed the keys and made sure she had her valuables in her backpack. She’d grabbed her canister of pepper spray from the glove compartment and held it firmly in her hand. It was supposed to deter muggers, so it ought to work on hungry wildlife. Unless they liked a little pepper with their meal. Slinging her pack over her shoulder, she bravely took off down the deserted road, only to get a gust of wet and cold sleet in the face.
This sucks. Adventures were supposed to be fun, not cold.
An hour later, the munched-by-bear thing was starting to look attractive. Better to die quickly than linger on in a state of frozen misery. Her feet were tired, she was soaked through and visions of frostbite were starting to dance across her brain. It was with enormous pleasure that she finally saw the lights of the truck stop loom up beyond the last turn.
“Thank the good Lord for trucks, diners and probably hot coffee.” It was a prayer from her chilled soul.
Dragging her weary ass across the practically deserted parking lot, Lissa dredged up enough strength to shove open the door to the diner.
Aaahhh. Heat.