Come on, Rachel. Be honest, at least with yourself.
She’d fought about as hard as a poker player fought against ending up with a Royal Flush.
He’d kissed her.
And after a token kind of resistance she’d kissed him back.
That was the awful truth.
He was every miserable thing a man could be. Too rich, too good-looking, too egotistical to tolerate. Dammit, he was a man, and that was enough.
Until he’d kissed her and her brain had turned to mush.
How could such a thing have happened?
Yes, he was good-looking. Hell, what he was, was sexy.
But she wasn’t into sexy.
She wasn’t into sex.
She wasn’t into anything that might interfere with the life she wanted, the life she’d been planning ever since she woke up in a lumpy bed in a cheap room in Pocatello, Idaho, the morning of her seventeenth birthday. Sixteen-year-old Suki had been asleep next to her, mouth hanging open, each exhalation stinking of beer.
“Mama?” Rachel remembered saying, with a kind of awful premonition.
She’d sat up, pushed away the thin blanket—and had seen the birthday card propped on the table near the bed. A big, garish thing with purple and yellow balloons drawn all over it.
Happy Birthday! it said.
Inside were two crisp twenty dollar bills. And a note.
Gone for a little vacation with Lou! You girls be good until I send for you!
Luv you!
Lou had been Mama’s latest “beau.” That was what she always called her men-friends. She’d gone on “little vacations” before. A weekend. A few days. One scary time, when Rachel was ten and Suki was nine, she’d gone off for an entire week.
That morning in Pocatello Rachel had told herself that Mama would be back.
It never happened.
After three weeks she’d found a night job at Walmart but it hadn’t been enough to pay for their miserable room and put food in their bellies.
So she’d quit school.
One more year until she’d have had her diploma. It had killed her to walk away, but what choice had there been? She’d had to work to support herself and her sister.
“You stay in school, Suk