Twist of Fate (Taking Chances #2) - Tia Louise Page 0,1

up and shook hard. I hated that feeling. It sucked. I never wanted to feel it again.

J.R. and I were left with my dad to figure out what the hell to do with ourselves, so we did what we knew—football. Dad threw himself into work, only noticing us when we were in the backyard drilling, and when J.R. and I became superstars.

Then I was cast in a few school plays, and I discovered I could be somebody else. I learned all that anger and pain disappeared on the stage. People liked watching me, and when I made them laugh or gasp or cry, I felt like I’d done something huge.

I’ve only ever told one person that story, a girl in glasses I discovered at a junkyard, and she didn’t misunderstand. She wanted to know more.

Daisy

Fear was my earliest memory.

I can still see my mom looking out the kitchen window at the horizon, her body rigid and her mind far away. Even then, she was planning her escape, and it scared me.

I’d go to her and tug on her shirt, but she wouldn’t pick me up. She’d exhale a noise of resignation and go back to hand-washing the dishes. Sometimes she’d break one.

Sometimes, when she was sitting in her chair, tearing the pages in one of dad’s old books, she’d tell me to forget about trying to be pretty.

“Smart is the only thing that matters,” she’d say. “No matter how pretty you are, it’s our fate to be alone.”

I didn’t know what she meant. I thought she was pretty. I can still see her hair shimmering like turned maple in the sunshine, rare and beautiful, and I was here.

She left us in late May. I don’t know what finally made her do it.

I was a junior in high school, listening to boy bands and wishing my stick-straight blonde hair would have the slightest bend. I had a crush on the cute boy in my Algebra 2 class, but he turned out to be a real dickhead.

“Don’t ever expect a man to put your dreams ahead of his.” Fear knotted my throat as I watched her slamming her clothes into the open suitcase. “Men are selfish, self-centered… You have to look out for yourself. Men won’t make you happy.”

What about me? The question pressed against the insides of my temples. Daisy means happy. She’d told me a thousand times. The daisy is the happiest flower. I could make her happy.

I followed her to the door, unable to make my voice work, and she paused one last time. “I’ll send for you as soon as I’m settled.”

But she never did.

She wasn’t the person I thought, either. She threw us away like old trash. Then one day, standing in a junkyard, someone magical found me...

One

Daisy

It’s a giant cock.

Shoving a curl behind my ear, I wrap my arms around the oversized metal rooster, doing my best to lift it out of the back of my light blue Ford Bronco without destroying the paint.

Last time I scavenged Owen Pepper’s junkyard was senior year with my cousin Joselyn, who we all call Sly. Scout was there with his brother J.R. helping us move the heavier scrap.

I can still see him, golden brown hair flopping over his forehead attractively, golden skin and lean muscles flexing as he worked. His shirt lifted, revealing his luscious, lined torso, the V that disappeared into his jeans…

He caught me looking. Then he smiled and asked me to homecoming. Then he kissed me.

That was years ago, before I left for college, before I got my degree in interior design with a focus on antiquities. Before I offered to help my aunt transform her late husband’s family home in Fireside into a bed and breakfast.

“Where the hell did you find that thing?” Spencer Carrollton scowls down at me, snapping me from my trip down memory lane.

He stands at the top of the red-brick steps leading to the front porch of Aunt Regina’s massive colonial. I offered to fix it up for her if she’d let me use it to build my résumé.

“I found it in Owen Pepper’s junkyard.” Where I find all my treasures. Pausing on the sidewalk, I squint up at him. “Don’t give me a hand or anything.”

My hopefully future coworker is dressed in navy pants and a tan blazer over a light blue tee. His dark hair is cut short and slicked back from his face. With that square jaw, he’s totally Tom Ellis, prepared for a three-martini lunch, not helping