Page 45 of Ugly Duckling
I just blubbered like a baby, so I tried to stay away from the huge crowd so I didn’t draw any attention to myself.
I didn’t want anything to be about me.
But my heart was still literally devastated when I thought about all that Gunner had lost.
“Okay, gotta go.” I leaned in for one more hug.
“Love you.” She squeezed me tight.
“Love you more,” I replied. “Don’t forget you’re meeting Daddy at the doctor’s office in twenty minutes. You need to go.”
She hopped away from my car with a curse. “Dammit. I forgot. I can’t believe I actually got him to go, too. Gotta go. Love you! Be careful!”
With that parting yell across the yard, she hopped into her car that was parked at the curb and took off with a screech of tires.
I couldn’t help the shake of my head as I watched her drive away.
Heading to my brand-new vehicle that I’d bought literally yesterday, I got in and started the SUV up.
The dings instantly grated on my nerves, and I quickly hit the auto-stop button to off so the damn thing wouldn’t shut off.
That would be my first order of business once I got to Dallas—finding someone who could jailbreak my car so that it wouldn’t ding at me when I had my seat belt off, and it wouldn’t turn off at stop lights.
I was all for saving the environment, but the auto-stop thing was absolutely ridiculous.
After I was situated in my seat with my eighteen points of contact with the seat so that it wouldn’t tell me that I was not strapped in right—or whatever the hell it was dinging at me for—I started off.
I sent a text to Gunner with about an hour left of my drive using my voice-to-text feature, which I had to admit was nice.
“Hey, I’m on my way.”
He replied almost instantly, and my robotic car read it back to me, then so helpfully asked if I wanted to navigate to that address.
Gunner:
At this address. Feel free to come by and we can go grab some lunch.
I chose to let it guide me there, my nerves picking up speed the closer we got.
“Whoa,” I said as I took in the school. “This is something else.”
Schools in Dallas weren’t quite like the schools back home.
This place was the size of a small city.
And it was only an elementary school?
Wow.
Just wow.
I took in the huge three-story building with two massive one-hundred-foot flagpoles proudly waving both the Texas flag and the American flag.
I took in the perfectly manicured landscaping with the hundreds of rose bushes and colorful flowers.
But my gaze came to a stop on the sexy man who had his arms over his chest as a woman much smaller than him all but pointed in his face.
I pulled to a stop in the visitor parking spaces and got out, heading directly to the man who was holding on to his patience like a damn saint.
