Pick Me Up. Samantha Hunter

      Pick Me Up

      Samantha Hunter

       www.millsandboon.co.uk

      “Silent gratitude isn’t much use to anyone.”

      —Gertrude Stein

      For this book, and for all the books past and

       future, thank you!

      Birgit Davis-Todd, Mike Fratto, Jeannie Watt,

       Sarah Mayberry, Brenda Chin, Emily Martin, Blake Morrow, Laura Barth, Julie Chivers, Sherie Possessorski, Amy Chen, Peter Cronsberry, Maureen Stead, Page Traynor, Dee Tonorio, Larissa Tchoumak, and Elizabeth Goncalves

      Contents

      Chapter 1

      Chapter 2

      Chapter 3

      Chapter 4

      Chapter 5

      Chapter 6

      Chapter 7

      Chapter 8

      Chapter 9

      Chapter 10

      Chapter 11

      Chapter 12

      Chapter 13

      1

      “ARE YOU SURE you know what you’re doing?”

      Lauren Baker watched the road before her with no small bit of fear. She was just south of Tucson, and to say the route curling down into the desert canyon was steep was an understatement. Raised in Connecticut, she’d never in her life encountered such death-trap roads as she was discovering in Arizona. It wasn’t exactly the time, and definitely not the place, to be distracted by the question her best friend, Becky Saunders, had asked her this morning when they’d spoken on the phone.

      Was she sure? Hell, no. That was the whole point.

      She was a week and a half into her no schedule, no destination, no obligations trip around the country. She had a map, two credit cards, her cell phone and what clothes and extras fit into the trunk of her Toyota Corolla. Everything else—not that there was a whole heck of a lot—she’d left with Becky for her to sell.

      Lauren inched around another excruciatingly sharp curve, ignoring the drop of several hundred feet to her right, fighting the impulse to shut her eyes. Roads like this would challenge any driver, but since acrophobia topped her long list of fears, not freaking out was her main challenge at the moment.

      “C’mon Lauren…buck up!” she told herself. “This is all part of your new, no-wimping-out life, remember?”

      An only child of parents who’d wanted a large family but didn’t end up having one, she’d grown up center stage. ‘Overprotected’ would be a mild description of her childhood. Not that it had been bad or anything, but it had led her down a certain path and now she was trying to carve a new one for herself.

      Her mom and dad didn’t shower her with love, they’d drowned her in it. Knowing so much of their happiness revolved around her, she’d grown up not wanting to do anything that would disappoint them.

      They’d supported her decision to divorce Wes. However, it hadn’t all been smooth sailing. They’d been very upset when she’d refused their offer to come back home after the split. They hadn’t understood how she needed to strike out on her own, after escaping Wes’s smothering possessiveness.

      She’d never had an argument with her parents—not one—because she’d never rebelled. At twenty-nine, it was long past due, though it still made her sad to have hurt them at all. She wanted to be her own woman, but in their eyes, she’d be their little girl forever. Thank God the same could not be said about being Wes’s wife.

      One of her father’s ace employees, Wes had been Lauren’s first lover, her husband and her first big mistake. She intended to learn from it.

      Wes had her parents’ stamp of approval, which she realized now was in part because they had figured marrying Wes would keep her close. Although they’d assumed he’d continue to work for Lauren’s father, they’d been very supportive when Wes had decided to break away and start his own business with Lauren. Equal partners, supposedly.

      Instead, it had been the beginning of her personal nightmare. Wes had never been physically abusive. He hadn’t even been verbally abusive in the technical sense—unless you counted him asking her to account for every minute of her day and his endless questions about her activities, friends and whereabouts. Eventually, explaining everything to him had become impossible, and she’d just stopped going out, which had been a big mistake.

      He’d won.

      Together they had operated a successful, and profitable, consulting business. Lauren’s specialty was as an efficiency expert—she would go into businesses and streamline their production methods and anything else that was causing losses within a company. As a sideline, she’d also started consulting on the home front—helping people with time management and organizing their space.

      Wes had put the kibosh on that just as she was building a substantial client list of her own. When she’d received flowers from a man she’d helped, an innocent thank you, Wes had made her life miserable until she had given up her home consulting.

      Little by little, he’d stopped scheduling her for outside appointments, hiring a new employee to take over her accounts, relegating her to the home office. In an attempt to save her marriage, she’d gone along. Stupid, stupid, stupid.

      By the time she’d recognized she had a serious problem, she had no friends, rarely saw her parents and almost never left the house. Deciding to take back some control, she’d called an old friend to go shopping. When Wes arrived home and discovered she wasn’t there, he’d flipped out. He forbade her to ever leave the house without his knowledge again. That week she’d moved in with Becky, and the next month served Wes with divorce papers. And so here she was, driving down these winding desert roads.

      Tears stung her eyes as she tried to focus on the road. Her parents would be happy once she figured out her life, even if they remained baffled in the meanwhile.

      Taking a deep breath, she applied slightly more pressure to the accelerator and worked her way more smoothly around the next curve. Smiling, she let out a whoop of success.

      No more letting anyone run her life but her, no more living in fear of what lay around the next corner. No more playing it safe. Playing it safe had only led her down the wrong roads, living her life for everyone except herself. There was so much she had to experience, and now was the time to do it.

      According to the map, there was a town called Soul Springs—nice name—at the bottom of this canyon. Maybe she’d stay awhile, who knows? No plans, no limits. That was her motto.

      She sang along with the music blaring from her radio, chasing away the crippling ghosts of the past. The clear blue desert sky spread out before her. Dizzying heights aside this was some of the most spectacular scenery she’d ever laid eyes on.

      “Whoa!” she yelled, sucking in a breath and hitting the brake, panic overcoming her when a motorcycle zoomed out from behind her, feeling as if it were going to rip off her hubcaps it skimmed so close. The loud rattle of the bike’s powerful engine deafened her momentarily, adding to the shock of its sudden appearance. In a flat second, the speeding cyclist was gone, literally leaving her in his dust.

      Pulling to the side on a small turnout, she put the car in Park and took several deep breaths, stilling her shaking hands and pounding pulse.

      “Jerk!” she spat belatedly along with a number of other choice words at the daredevil who’d almost scared her to death. Who drove these roads like that? It was irresponsible,