Page 1 of New Girl in Town
Chapter One
Nothing ever stayed golden, and as exhilarating as it could be, life wasn’t always kind, or good, or fair. It was even less so to 37-year-old divorcees on the road to nowhere.
Okay, it wasn’t the middle of nowhere.
It was a mountain road on the way to my new home, which happened to be near my best friend. But I was still shit out of luck on the side of a snowy and busy mountain road with a flat tire and no winter gear to speak of.
“Bullshit,” I muttered, scowling out my windshield, and blew out a sigh at the blizzard raging outside.
There was no way around it. I had to get out and change the tire if I wanted to get my car on the move before it got buried under god knew how many feet of snow.
The sky was dark and grey, the snow falling so fast now that it was hard to see more than a few feet away. The bright headlights of passing cars as they flew by put a knot of unease in my stomach, but I fought it back and reached for the door handle.
“You’ve got this, Martínez,” I murmured, fingers tightening on the handle. “There’s nothing you can’t do. You’ve done the worst of it already.”
The worst of it was leaving my lying, cheating husband of the past five years. I seethed, thinking of Dylan Montgomery’s handsome face, the way he smirked at me, green eyes dancing like he knew something I didn’t as I signed the final copies of our divorce papers.
“You’ll be back,” he had murmured, not rising from his seat when I moved to leave the cushy leather chair in the posh office of our lawyers. I’d hated all of it, the sleek glass and chrome, the modern and tasteful touches in the room that I knew cost a fortune.
We could have handled all of it on our own, because I hadn’t wanted a thing from him.
But that hadn’t been good enough for Dylan, who needed a drawn-out power struggle. I had evidence of past and present abuse, court violations, et cetera, et cetera. I could have cleaned Dylan out, but I refrained because the one thing I wanted was my freedom.
Now I sat alone in my car with all my possessions packed inside, nothing more than a few boxes of books and clothes to my name. None of the bags of clothes had a thing in them for the cold, much less a blizzard.
You’ll be back.
The memory of those words made me jackknife up in my seat, refusing to pay mind to the flip flops I wore.
“The hell I will,” I swore, throwing open my car door.
The first gust of icy wind made me yelp in shock. The first step out of my car made me curse my flip flops, a pair of comfy hot pink sandals more suited to poolside than mountain road in the middle of a snowstorm. I wiggled my toes in the icy water and added new footwear to the growing list of things to accomplish in my new life as a Colorado woman.
The first and most pressing item was changing a tire, because I was never, upon pain of death, going back to Dylan.
He and his smug smirk were in my past. There was no use dwelling there any longer, so I walked forward, shoulders hunched against the wind whipping past, and did my best not to hate myself for the thin hoodie and shirt I wore.
It had all been appropriate when I’d left Utah that morning. I’d dressed for comfort, not sudden inclement weather. Not that my wardrobe, the product of nearly a decade in sunny Los Angeles, offered much to choose from.
I yanked the hood of my sweatshirt over my head and held up a hand, squinting into the almost whiteout conditions. I kept a hand on the car and felt my way toward the trunk. Once there, I bit my lip and worked to strategize my next step. This was, after all, my maiden voyage in the trade of tire changing.
Right. Tools.
I reached in and rummaged for the tire iron and what I thought was the jack. How hard could it be? I was an intelligent, capable woman, and I could do this.
“I can do this,” I said in an effort to gas myself up, and threw my shoulders back. I’d only taken a step before a passing car flung a tidal wave’s worth of icy water on me.
So much for a cheerful welcome to Colorado.
“I did not come this damn far to die on the side of the road,” I hollered, trying to blink snow out of my eyes.“Get your head in the game, Martínez. It’s go time,” I ordered myself and shoved my hair out of my face.
Come hell or high water, or snow, in this case, I was changing my tire and making it to my new home.
You’ll be back.
I gritted my teeth and dropped into a crouch beside the tire. My fingers were numb from the onslaught of cold and icy water, but spite was a hell of a thing, and it warmed me enough to keep working. I had just fitted the carjack into place when the bright headlights of a vehicle turned on me like a spotlight. I paused, raising a hand over my eyes, and squinted.
There were horror movies that started out like this.
