Page 1 of Hard Wood Daddy

Chapter 1

Tess

It’s not the first time I’ve spent half the night curled up on the cracked vinyl back seat of a bus.

My mom’s a tumbleweed. In all my eighteen years, she never grew roots, and riding buses to nowhere was kind of my entire childhood.

But this time it’s different.

It’s not my mom trying to escape some crappy job, or an even crappier boyfriend. It’s me escaping my own boyfriend.

I guess he’s a boyfriend. I sort of just…fellinto him. Literally.

The name on his driver’s license is Eldon Patron, but you’ll call him Don if you don’t wanna catch a right hook. And don’t think he’s one of those ‘you never hit a woman’ sort of guys either. His right hooks know no prejudice.

But he has this slick exterior that hid some of the inner ick factor. At least for a while. I was charmed for a minute. I mean, my life was less than zero for the most part, so any interest felt…good. As sad as that sounds.

He found me scrubbing dishes at Moe’s 24-hour diner across from the boarded-up old hardware store, an old Irish bar and the strip club that had taken over an old movie theater.

I was soaked with sweat, my day-old oversized clothes were drenched, my hair was rebelling from its braids, but Don saw something special. That’s what he said exactly: “You’re special, girly.”

Looking back, the creep factor was high from the jump, but my need for distraction and some attention blinded me. I’d never gotten roses before. Let alone three dozen. I felt special, even if the man making me feel that way gave my skin that same crawly feeling I always got around the worst of my mom’s boyfriends.

It was when one of those boyfriends tried to put hands on me a week ago that tipped me over the edge. I told my mom that it was me or him, and, well, she chose him. Told me to get out and take my kitten with me. Which is when I moved in with Don, and he seemed so happy to have me, which I should have realized was a bad idea by the shudder that passed right through me.

And then icky turned to scary.

The kind of scary where I found myself jumping out of a window in the middle of the night, clutching my kitten and my backpack, which I’d never quite gotten around to unpacking. Now, I’m three and a half hours into a bus ride where the only other passenger was a guy whose three major food groups must be chili, burritos and rotten eggs.

He got off two stops ago, but his aura still lingers.

And now I’m alone. On this bus and in life. And I know I have to run.

The hard part is knowing when to stop.

But that time has gotta be coming soon. I’ve been on this bus for ages, and Frida is getting to be a problem.

Right now, my gray fuzzy best friend is tumbling around inside my backpack, sticking her claws out the cloth, and making little kitten sounds. If the driver realizes I’ve brought a kitten onthe bus, the decision is getting made for me, and it’s not long until she uses my backpack as a litterbox.

“Just a little longer,” I whisper through the zipper.

“Next stop, end of the line,” announces the bus driver like a period at the end of a sentence.

Well, I guess that’s the decision.

As ready as I am to get off this bus, my adrenaline climbs when I look outside. The “end of the line” is in a forest in the foothills of looming mountains. A big huge wall of trees that nearly blocks out the mid-morning sun entirely. I’mnotoutdoorsy—like, at all—but new things, new life, new adventures, right?

This is the furthest I can get away from Don for now, so it has to be good enough.

The bus stutters to a stop, the air brakes squealing as a puff of diesel rises outside the windows, fogging the line of pines across the two-lane blacktop road. I smuggle Frida off the bus the same way I smuggled her on, tossing a tight smile to the gray-haired bus driver who is more interested in my double-F breasts than the wiggly, mewling creature in my backpack.

I step out of the stale bus air into a fresh morning springtime breeze, the crisp scent of leaves washing away the exhaust, and into a whole new life.

I’m not Tessa Monroe, high school dropout, right now. I’m sort of no one out here in the middle of nowhere. A blank slate. I’m not sure what I am yet, but…something new.

I scoop Frida gently out of the backpack, her fuzzy legs reaching through my fingers as I snuggle her against my chest where she clings like a mini spider monkey. Then I sling my backpack over my shoulder and feel her start to purr.

“Here’s our new life, kitten,” I say as the bus leaves us behind with a spray of gravel.

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