Taken by Surprise Read Free

would continue to beat herself up over him.
    "Everything's okay with Lucas, isn't it?" Nancy waved her brush in front of her face, coughing at the cloud of ozone-destroying vapors she let loose in the air while effectively gluing her gray-speckled brown hair in place.
    Rhonda bit back a grin, remembering how she used to watch her grandmother do the same thing. At fifty-eight, Nancy wasn't quite old enough to be her grandmother, but that didn't stop the resemblance or hamper Rhonda's love for her dear friend.
    "Lucas is fine," Rhonda answered and let the smile come as she said her boy's name aloud. She missed him, too, and wouldn't feel an ounce of guilt for that one. "He sent me a message a few hours ago telling me all about his night."
    "A message." Nancy tsked. "What would you young people do these days if you actually had to talk to each other? I tell you, girl, that Internet is ruining kids. And all that Facebook and tweety stuff…"
    "Twitter." Rhonda giggled. "I think you mean Twitter."
    Nancy waved the brush dismissively before turning back to the dresser. She exchanged the brush for a tube of mascara and began applying a generous amount to her lashes. "Young people these days would rather spend all their time posting and texting than having a real conversation. I tell you it's not good, girl."
    "I'll agree it can do real damage to some people. I certainly can't say it helped my marriage any." If anything, it made Preston more distant, lazier, and unresponsive to her and Lucas. Not a good thing to happen to a relationship already knocking on the doors of divorce court.
    Nancy turned again, this time waving the mascara wand at Rhonda like a director's stick. "Honey, even I can't blame the Internet for that. You didn't have a marriage to begin with."
    "True." Her nine-year marriage to Preston Ramsey ended a long time before the date on the divorce decree from a year and a half ago. She stayed with him for convenience, out of the trepidation of making it alone, and for Lucas. She ignored his negativity, put up with his lack of goals, and dealt with the lashes to her own self esteem until she simply couldn't do it any longer.
    "And you're happier now because you're finally out of that mess." One of Nancy's gray-speckled brows winged up as if she expected Rhonda to argue.
    Rhonda couldn't. "True again." She didn't remember being this happy, not in her pre-Preston days and certainly never with him. Even in the early days when she loved him, he never made her as happy as she found herself these last months.
    Nancy frowned, and Rhonda chuckled again. "But if that Facebook stuff is what finally gave you the courage to get the hell out of that mess, then I guess I can't say the Internet is all bad after all."
    Rhonda's courage had come from finally realizing what she deserved rather than what she forced herself to endure, but she didn't bother to explain that to her friend.
    "It's done a lot for my career, too," she pointed out. "Without the Internet, I probably wouldn't be a published author." Or so very close to being able to quit the restaurant and say good-bye to waitressing forever. She had found her niche writing erotic romances, and, with the growing popularity of e-books, her career had begun to soar. "And without sites like Facebook and Twitter, promotion would be a real pain. They're great for reaching readers." She scooted to the edge of the bed, sitting on her knees, and turning her BlackBerry toward Nancy so her friend could see the screen. "Look at the thread on my fan page about where I am right now. My readers are busting a gut laughing at one another as they try to figure it out."
    Nancy gave the cell phone a cursory glance. Her lips twitched. "Keep them guessing, girl."
    "I intend to." Rhonda settled back on the bed again, scanned her readers' posts. They put her everywhere in the galaxy from the swamps of Louisiana to the sparkling beaches of Jamaica to the never before explored Pluto. "Hmm, I wonder what