Baby, It's You

Book 2: Rainbow Valley

by Jane Graves

Genres: Women's Fiction; Contemporary Romance

Synopsis

With only the wedding dress on her back and her honeymoon luggage in the car, Kari Worthington is running away. Determined to put her controlling father, her rigidly structured life, and the uptight groom she left at the altar in her rearview mirror, she escapes to the Texas Hill country . . . and lands on a tall, dark, and gorgeous winery owner's doorstep. All she needs is a job and a place to live until she can get back on her feet. So why is she fantasizing about losing herself in his powerful arms?

For Marc Cordero, freedom is so close he can taste it. He's devoted his life to managing the family business and being a single dad. Now with his daughter away at college and his brother taking over the winery, Marc is ready to hop on his Harley for parts unknown--until a runaway bride bursts onto the scene. Free-spirited and tantalizingly sexy, Kari excites him like no other woman has before. But when irresistible passion turns into something more, will Marc give up his future to take a chance on love?

Release date: May 27, 2014

Publisher: Grand Central Publishing

Print pages: 400

Sample

Chapter 1

When her nausea kicked up for the umpteenth time that day, Kari Worthington left the bride’s room, crossed the hall, and slipped into the bathroom. Locking the door behind her, she leaned against it for a moment to keep from throwing up. Then she stumbled across the room, kicked the train of her dress out of the way, hiked up her skirt, and sat down on the toilet lid. She buried her head in her hands as best she could with her veil in the way, wishing her stomach would quit churning and that horrible, breathless, gaspy feeling would go away.


A strand of bright auburn hair escaped the monstrous pile on her head and curled down her cheek. She tried to stuff it back, but it was hopeless. It had taken the stylist more than an hour that morning to gather her hair and incarcerate it at the crown of her head, and the woman had frowned the whole time. That was nothing new. Kari had spent her whole life with everybody around her trying to stuff parts of her back into place—both parts that showed and parts that didn’t.

She tried to tell herself it was just nerves, that every bride felt like this on her wedding day because marriage was such a big step. But was that really true? Did every bride really need a barf bag only half an hour before marrying the man of her dreams?

No. Assuming her groom really was the man of her dreams.


She thought about Greg. Handsome, intelligent, serious Greg, who had dropped by her office a year ago and asked her out. It wasn’t the first time a man at work had done that, but as time went on, they tended to lose interest in spite of her family connections. Something about her unusual outlook on life tended to make them slowly drift away, and pretty soon she’d be out there on that limb by herself all over again.

As it turned out, though, Greg endured her offbeat personality like a real trouper. But sometimes she thought he seemed too accommodating, as if she were an applecart he didn’t want to upset. After all, there were big advantages to being married to the boss’s daughter. Kinda made a guy fireproof. Not that Greg would ever get fired. He was a younger version of her father, right down to his designer suits and his iPhone tapping and his power lunches. Anytime she was around him, she felt as if she should be standing up straight even when she was lying flat on her back.


And speaking of lying flat on her back…

Sex with Greg had always been okay. Just…okay. Not that she’d ever had sex that was better than okay to compare it to, but she knew it had to be out there somewhere. Why else were all those odes and sonnets and love poems of yesteryear written, not to mention about a million love songs since the beginning of time? People were out there living and loving with all their hearts, and sometimes Kari lay awake at night, fervently wishing she was one of them.


She and Greg had dated for a year. Then came the ring. Then their engagement party. The minister who performed their premarital counseling pronounced them a match made in heaven. But Kari remembered thinking that the priest’s blessing had less to do with her compatibility with Greg and more to do with the fact that her father was extraordinarily wealthy and believed wholeheartedly in tithing.

Through it all, Kari had just let herself get swept along. There had always been a dress to try on, a caterer to consult, the wedding planner from hell to endure. One week passed, and then the next. Then came the Big Day, and what was she doing? Sitting on a toilet lid in her wedding dress feeling as if she was going to throw up. For all that Greg was nice and accommodating and unerringly patient, she saw the looks her father exchanged with him sometimes. I know she’s a handful, her father’s eyes would say, and Greg’s would say, Don’t worry, sir. I can handle her. You can count on me.


She heard a knock at the door. “Miss Worthington!”

Oh, God. Not Hilda. She couldn’t take one more moment of Hilda Baxter. Stuart Worthington had spared no expense for his only child’s wedding, including hiring the wedding planner to the rich and famous. Today she looked like a gigantic prune in her multilayered indigo dress, her face all puckered with irritation, and if she didn’t leave Kari alone, she was going to wrap her hands around the woman’s neck and squeeze until her eyes bugged out.


“Time’s running short!” Hilda shouted through the door, sounding more like a prison guard than a wedding planner. “You need to be walking down the aisle in exactly twenty-three minutes!”

Kari closed her eyes. Twenty-three minutes. In only twenty-three minutes she would be a married woman. Twenty-three minutes…twenty-three minutes…twenty-three minutes…


The words reverberated inside her head so maddeningly that she put her fingertips to her temples and rubbed hard, trying to drive them away. She’d just about succeeded when a new mantra took over.

Twenty-two minutes…twenty-two minutes…twenty-two minutes…


Kari jerked her head up, trying to shake that thought away. She had to do this. It wasn’t just Greg and her father and Hilda and all those guests. It was Jill, too, who was waiting in the bride’s room to join her on that trek up the aisle. Jill had been her best friend since they’d roomed together at Rice University, and now Jill was the only one Kari wanted standing next to her when she got married.

Kari imagined the look of disbelief that would spring to Jill’s face if she told her she was having second thoughts. After all, Jill thought Greg was the catch of the century. But that was mostly because she had a thing for the GQ type. She didn’t really know Greg.


Most of the time, Kari felt as if she didn’t, either.

Her second thoughts were nothing new. She’d been having them for some time now. She’d just thought that the happy, gushy bride thing would take over the closer the wedding got and she’d realize how silly she was being.

Now all she could think of was escaping.

She froze. Leave her own wedding? Could she do that?


She took a deep, shaky breath, trying to settle her nerves, but her stomach still felt as if it was tumbling around in a clothes dryer. She grabbed her tote bag she’d brought to the bathroom with her, fished out her car keys, and stared at them.

There it was. Her ticket out of there.

She dropped the keys to her lap. Good heavens—what was she thinking? She couldn’t just get into her car and drive away. What kind of a crazy person did something like that?


She put the keys back into her tote bag and rose from the toilet lid. Looking in the mirror, she straightened her veil as best she could, then opened the bathroom door. The door to the bride’s room was dead ahead. If she was going to marry Greg, it was now or never. And never wasn’t an option.

But all at once Kari imagined what it would be like when she went back inside. Jill would fluff the train of her dress, telling her one more time how lucky she was. Hilda would clap her hands and herd her toward the altar, where Greg would be waiting, eager for the last block of his perfectly structured life to fall into place. For one of the few times in his life, her father would be smiling, the weight of the world lifted from his shoulders as he married off his kooky daughter to a younger, more resilient version of himself. In exactly twenty-one minutes she would become—

No, no, no! I can’t do this!


The words rang so loudly inside Kari’s head that for a moment she wondered if she’d screamed them out loud. Suddenly her feet felt fused to the floor, as if her dainty wedding slippers were stuck inside concrete blocks. Then, out of the corner of her eye, half a dozen steps down the hall, she saw a sign that made her breath stick in her throat.

“EXIT.”

She stared at it, mesmerized by the glowing red neon. Suddenly she had the most irrational feeling that the only place where there was oxygen to breathe was outside this church, and if she didn’t leave right now, she’d fall over, turn purple, and die on the spot.

Maybe never was an option after all.


Without another thought, Kari pulled her keys out of her tote bag and hurried down the hall. She hit the bar on the security door and swept it open, running into the secluded side parking lot of the church. She clicked the remote to unlock the driver’s door of her Lexus, suddenly met with the challenge of the century: cramming her dress along with herself behind the wheel. Fortunately, a whole lot of motivation kicked in, and in a matter of seconds, she was stuffed in, strapped in, and ready to go.

With a shaky hand, she stabbed at the ignition with the key. She managed to insert it on her third try, feeling like a lifer going over the fence at Huntsville. She paused for a moment and glanced back, sure she would see people pouring out of the church to try to stop her, but no. They were all still inside, blissfully ignorant of the fact that everything was in place for the wedding of the year, except maybe a bride.

But in the end, would anybody be all that surprised? For once in Kari’s life, her history of rash, impulsive behavior was going to pay off. That’s Kari, they’d all say. Running away from her own wedding. Could we really expect anything else?


Kari knew that a more confident woman would be able to look her fiancé dead in the eye and tell him she didn’t want to marry him. But she knew if she did, Greg would try to talk her out of it. Then her father would get into the mix. Then Jill would tell her again what a catch Greg was and beg her to reconsider. Then Hilda would freak out and start throwing commands around like a third world dictator, and all hell would break loose. If Kari actually had a backbone, she could have endured all that, but right now it felt like wet spaghetti. In no time, they’d be shoving her up the aisle and she’d be saying those vows, and before she knew it, she’d be a miserable married woman for the rest of her life.

She took a deep, shaky breath. This was it. Her moment of truth. She could stay and continue living as she always had, with other people pushing her around, or she could take charge of her own life.

It was time to take charge.

She started the car and drove out of the parking lot to a side street behind the church, pretty sure nobody had seen her. Once on the main road, though, she realized she had no clue which direction to go. North to Dallas? Or west to Austin?

Austin. It was a weird city. Oddball people lived there. Since she’d always been one of those herself, she’d blend in better. And it was closer. She could drive there, get a room at a nice hotel like the Driskill or the InterContinental, order something large and chocolate from room service, and then sit back and figure out what to do next.

Then all at once she thought about Boo, her precious little terrier Jill was taking care of while she was on her honeymoon. Right now Kari had no plan. How long would she have to stay gone until the heat was off?

He’ll be okay. Jill will take care of him. Just go!


But as Kari pulled up to the next stoplight, guilt crept in. No matter how wrong this marriage would be, she couldn’t leave without saying something to somebody. She decided to text Greg, knowing he’d have his iPhone with him even as he was ready to walk up the aisle. On vibrate, of course, but with him nonetheless, because that was the kind of guy he was. And that—that right there—was part of the problem. Her ringtone was a frog croaking, which made her smile every time she heard it. How was she supposed to marry a man whose ringtone sounded like—of all things—a telephone ringing?


I’m so sorry, she punched in. I can’t marry you. It’s not you, it’s me. I’m just…sorry. I’ll be in touch later.


Then guilt raised its ugly head again. Greg didn’t deserve this. He didn’t deserve being left at the altar in front of three hundred people.

Then she thought about those looks between him and her father, the ones that said she wasn’t going to be so much Greg’s wife as she was a rock around his neck he was willing to endure. In a few decades, when Stuart Worthington died and went to that big boardroom in the sky, it would all be worth it to Greg. And it would be worth it to her father, too, to spend eternity knowing his flighty, flaky daughter was well in hand.

I didn’t pick him, Dad. You did.


And something about that made her guilt melt away.

Kari stared at the text message, trying to think of something else to say, but there really wasn’t anything, so she hit “send.”

Then the light turned green, and she hit the gas.

  

As Marc Cordero went down the elevator of San Jacinto Hall to get Angela’s last box from the car, he wondered where along the way he’d lost his mind. He should have insisted she go to a smaller school. Or maybe to junior college for a year or two. Hell, he should have locked her in her bedroom and thrown away the key so he’d never have to deal with any of this.

The University of Texas had sounded so safe and civilized when the college counselor at her high school had talked about it, and when he and Angela visited the campus, it had seemed relatively tame. Of course, that had been during the summer session, when only a fraction of the place was occupied.

Neither of those things had prepared Marc for the chaos of move-in day.

The madness had actually begun an hour ago, twenty miles outside Austin. Marc had followed Angela’s car with his truck, which he was using to help haul all her belongings to campus. They’d crept along the highway for what seemed like forever. Marc had sworn there had to be a five-car pileup ahead, but it turned out that it was just a traffic jam caused by students heading to UT.

Unbelievable.

The moment the campus came into view, Marc got a sick, sinking sensation in his stomach. Lack of control always did that to him. Dropping his daughter off at this place was making him feel more out of control than he had for the past eighteen years, and that was saying a lot. Angela, on the other hand, got out of her car, took one look at the campus, and her face lit up exactly the way it had when she was six years old and saw Magic Kingdom for the first time.

Six years old. Magic Kingdom. Where the hell had the time gone?

Marc grabbed the last box from his truck and headed back into the building, sidestepping one person after another, feeling as if he was navigating a sidewalk in Shanghai. A few minutes later, he got off the elevator and headed down the hall to the twelve-by-sixteen-foot space Angela was sharing with a girl from Lubbock who’d also taken potluck on a roommate. They seemed to get along well already, which he guessed was a good thing, except the girl had a tattoo of some Chinese symbol on her upper arm, a ring through her nose, and frizzy hair dyed death black.

Angela lifted her arms to put a framed photo onto the top shelf of her bookcase, hiking up her shirt. It was one of those midriff things she wore with jeans slung a few inches below her belly button, which was pierced with a silver ring. God in heaven—why had he given in on that?

Because she’d begged for weeks, driving him crazy until he’d finally told her she could pierce anything she could cover up later for a job interview. Then he’d read something in one of her magazines about labia piercing, and that was when he’d known for a fact that this parenthood thing had gotten totally out of control and he didn’t stand a chance anymore.

“Where do you want this?” Marc asked.

“On the dresser,” Angela said.

He set the box down and turned back, brushing his hands together, but before he could ask Angela if she needed any help unpacking or maybe hanging some stuff on the walls, she said, “I’ll walk you back downstairs.”

Marc wasn’t ready for this. He was even more not ready than he imagined he’d be. “Uh…okay.” He turned to Angela’s roommate. “It was nice to meet you.”

“Nice to meet you, too, Mr. Cordero,” the girl said with a smile, but her eyes said, Now go away.


Marc and Angela walked back to the elevator lobby. The elevator doors opened, and three boys got off. As they passed by, one of them eyed Angela with too much interest, a hulking jock type who looked as if he was itching for another notch on his bedpost.

“What are you looking at?” Marc growled.

The kid stopped. Swallowed hard. “Uh…nothing, sir.”

“That’s right. You’re looking at nothing. And nothing is over there. My daughter is over here, and she’s not nothing. So if you’re looking at nothing, you’re not looking at her. Are we clear on that?”


The kid’s eyes went big as searchlights. “Yes, sir.”

“Now, beat it,” Marc snapped.

As the kid hurried off with his buddies, Angela spun on Marc, looking horrified. “Dad! Why did you do that?”


“Nothing’s changed just because you’re here and I’m in Rainbow Valley,” he said, striding onto the elevator. “No dumb jock just looking to get laid is going to mess with you.”

“So what are you going to do?” Angela said, following him onto the elevator. “Drive an hour so you can kick his ass?”

“Don’t think I won’t.”

She stabbed the down button on the elevator panel. “I can’t believe you don’t trust me.”

“I trust you. It’s guys like him I don’t trust.”


“Could you embarrass me any more, Dad?” she said, throwing her arms into the air. “Huh? Is it even possible?”


Didn’t she get it by now? He just wanted her to be safe. That was all. But in this place…good God. He saw danger around every corner. Why didn’t she?

Right about then, their tiny town seemed like a 1950s sitcom set in comparison. Everybody knew everybody else in Rainbow Valley, so kids knew if they got out of line, word would eventually get back to somebody who would shove them back in. Marc had always been able to intimidate Angela’s boyfriends with a frown, a gruff voice, and a few subtle words of warning. In fact, there had been times when he swore he was smiling, but Angela told him he still looked pissed, which meant he scared her boyfriends to death. That was fine with him if it meant they kept their distance. But what was he supposed to do now? Could he make sure they didn’t mess with his daughter when he was an hour away in Rainbow Valley?

The problem was that he knew what teenage boys were like because he’d been one. Things could happen you never expected and certainly weren’t ready to deal with. It was funny how after all these years he could barely remember what Nicole looked like, only that he’d been crazy in love with her and teenage sex had seemed like a wondrous gift from God.

Then came Angela.

A month later, Nicole was gone. Couldn’t handle being a mother. As if Marc had been any more prepared to be a father.

In the years that followed, he’d felt as if he didn’t have a clue what he was doing. Angela’s childhood seemed like nothing but a blur in his mind right now. Then came the god-awful early teenage years, with hormones running rampant and all that shouting and door slamming, making him feel as if he was doing everything wrong and she’d be rolling her eyes at him for the rest of their lives.

But the older she got, the more things leveled out, until it looked as if the sleepless nights and the constant worry and the occasional heartache were giving way to the kind of warm, comfortable relationship he’d always wanted them to have. And as he looked at his daughter now, skimpy shirt and all, he thought maybe he’d done a pretty damned good job of raising her.

“You’re right,” Marc said as the elevator doors opened on the first floor. “I shouldn’t have embarrassed you. You’re not a kid anymore. I know you can take care of yourself.”

Those words came harder to him than anything else, because he wasn’t sure he believed them. He knew he’d better believe them, though, if he expected to get any sleep for the next four years.

Angela gave him a little shrug. “It’s okay. That guy looked like a jerk, anyway.”

That was Angela. So forgiving. Sometimes a little too forgiving. He wanted to shout at her, If you meet a guy who behaves badly, don’t you dare excuse it! But if she hadn’t learned that lesson already, was repeating it now going to make any difference?


As they walked to his truck, Marc dreaded every step he took more than the one before it. He clicked open his door with the remote, then turned back to Angela.

“Do you want me to stay for a while? Maybe take you and your new roommate to get a bite to eat?”

Angela looked back over her shoulder. “Uh…”

Marc held up his hand. “Never mind. You already have plans.”

“It’s just that Kim and I thought we’d walk around campus and check things out a little. Just to see what’s going on. You know.”

Silence.

“I don’t like missing harvest this year,” Angela said.

“You hate harvest.”

“Yeah, I know,” she said with a little shrug, folding her arms and staring down at her blue-frosted toenails. “But it’s all hands on deck, you know?”

Marc felt a stab of remembrance. That was what he’d told her from the time she was old enough to snip grapes off of vines. At this vineyard, everybody pulls his weight. And that goes double if your name is Cordero.


“Uncle Daniel is coming back,” Marc said. “We’ll get it done.”

She nodded, then smiled briefly. “Do you remember the time when I was six and I ate fifty-four Tempranillo grapes?”

That felt like a hundred years ago. Had it really been only twelve? “I was thrilled you could count that high.”

“Purple puke isn’t pretty, is it?”

“Not in the least.”

“Why didn’t you stop me?”

“Because experience is the best teacher.”

Angela looked over her shoulder at the sea of students, then back at Marc. “Then maybe I’d better go experience some stuff, huh?”

This is it. It’s time for you to go, old man. So go.


“Call me if you need anything,” he told Angela.

“I will.”

“Or even if you don’t.”

She nodded. For a few seconds, neither one of them spoke. Then Angela’s face crumpled. She took a step forward and wound her arms around his neck in a desperate hug. Suddenly she was six years old again, with her little hands holding on tightly because of a bad dream or a scraped knee, or sometimes just because he’d been twice as important to her because he was Dad and Mom all rolled into one. As he held her tightly, she whispered, “I love you, Dad,” into his ear, and he whispered that he loved her, too.

Finally she pulled away, sniffing a little. He opened the door to his truck and got inside. She took a few steps back from the curb and wiped tears from her eyes. As Marc started the car, he was pretty sure he was going to cry, too, and he hadn’t done that since he was seven years old.

No. Get yourself together. This is a good thing. For the first time in eighteen years, your life is your own.


He put the truck in gear. Angela waved good-bye, and he waved back. As he drove away, he glanced in his rearview mirror to see her turn around and walk away from him and into her new life.

It was time for him to do the same.

By the time he was heading back toward Rainbow Valley, he was ticking off all the reasons why this new chapter in his life was going to be a good thing. But before he could change his life completely, he had to get through harvest. Daniel would be there in a few weeks. That had been their agreement. As soon as Angela was in college, Daniel would come back to Cordero Vineyards to assume responsibility for the family business for the next three years, carrying on the tradition Marc had guarded all this time.

Once his brother took over, Marc intended to hop on his motorcycle and hit the open road. Where he’d go, he didn’t know. That was the most amazing feeling of all. He didn’t know. To have the next three years of his life ahead of him virtually unscripted was something he couldn’t have imagined when he’d changed his first diaper eighteen years ago. And once he was motoring down the open road and happened to meet a woman who was out for a good time, he was going for it. The only women he intended to have anything to do with were ones who wanted what he wanted—great sex with no strings attached. He couldn’t even imagine what that was going to be like, but he sure as hell intended to find out.


To kick things off, at eight o’clock tonight he intended to jump headfirst into the life of bachelorhood that becoming a father at seventeen had never allowed him to live. He was going to sit in his brand-new La-Z-Boy recliner in front of the sixt. . .