Baby, It's You Read Free Page B

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 the 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