A Bride for Jericho Bravo. Christine Rimmer

after all, was still a great big mess. But somehow, she felt better about it.

      It wasn’t even forty-eight hours since the breakup, but she was already beginning to see that her relationship with Mark really hadn’t been that good for her. In the years they were together, she had slowly relinquished her life to him, until she lived in his shadow.

      His friends became her friends. His world, hers. He had a big trust fund set up for him by his dad. And he also made a lot more money than she ever would. It had seemed like a good idea at the time, to just stop working, to let him support her. After all, her jobs never brought in much anyway.

      Without Mark to pay the bills, she had almost nothing to call her own.

      But there was a bright side. All of a sudden, she was nobody’s shadow. She’d stepped into the light. She could see her life clearly now. Too bad what she saw wasn’t all that great.

      Mark had offered her money “to hold her over,” when he told her they were through. She had proudly refused him, which had seemed really noble at the time—but was actually kind of stupid, when you got right down to it. Bottom line, she was on her own with five hundred dollars in her checking account. She had two years of junior college and a hodgepodge of subsistence-level work experience to recommend her to a prospective employer.

      But she could get crazy all over again if she started dwelling on her chances of finding a decent job with her minimal skills in a not-so-great economy. She closed her eyes and let her body float in the cooling bathwater and tried to turn her wayward mind to soothing things.

      For some reason, her thoughts drifted to Jericho. She could see him now, behind the dark screen of her shuttered eyelids, in the hard glare of the Mercedes’ headlights, when he caught up with her on his bike.

      He’d held out his arms to her.

      It was the last thing she’d expected him to do.

      But he had done it.

      And somehow, that moment—when his big, tattooed arms closed around her—that was the turning point. That was when she knew: in time, she was going to be all right.

      The world had simple kindness in it after all. How strange that a big, scary biker guy like Jericho Bravo had ended up being the one to make her see that.