Christmas Cowboy Duet
highlight_author
Marie Ferrarella
highlight_reads
15,5K
highlight_chapters
18
Prologue
She’d never learned how to swim.
Somehow, there never seemed to be the right time to sneak in lessons.
Since she was born and bred in Los Angeles, close to an ocean and many pools, everyone just assumed she knew how to swim. It was a given. There were all those beaches, all that tempting water seductively lapping against the shore during those glorious endless summers.
But Whitney Marlowe had never had the time nor the inclination to get swimming lessons. Something more pressing always snagged her attention.
For as long as Whitney could remember, she’d always had this little voice inside of her head urging her on, whispering about goals that had yet to be met.
Swimming was recreational. Swimming was associated with fun. Even growing up, Whitney never seemed to have time for fun, except maybe for a few minutes at a time. A child of divorce, she was far too involved in making a name for herself to dwell on recreation. Everyone in her family was driven and it seemed as if from the very first moment of her life, she had been embroiled in one competition or another.
Oh, she dearly loved her siblings, all five of them, but she loved them just a tiny bit more whenever she could best them at something. It didn’t matter what, as long as she could come out the winner.
Her father had promoted this spirit of competition, telling his children that it would better equip them when they went out into the world. He’d been a hard taskmaster.
But right now, all those goals, all those triumphant moments, none of them mattered. None of them meant anything because the sum total of all that wasn’t going to save her.
This was it, Whitney thought in frantic despair.
This was the place where she was going to die. Outside of a town that hadn’t even been much more than an imperceptible dot on her map. A stupid little town prophetically named Forever. Because her car—and most likely her body—were going to become one with this godforsaken place. She would become eternally part of Forever’s terrain and nobody was even going to realize it because she would live at the bottom of some body of water.
Forever.
Oh, why had she taken this so-called “shortcut”? she upbraided herself. Why hadn’t she just gone the long way to Laredo the way she’d initially intended? It wasn’t as if she was trying to outdo her brother in trying to land this new account for the family recording label. She was the only one who’d been dispatched to audition the new band The Lonely Wolves. Desperate for their big break, the band would have waited for her to come until hell froze over.
Unfortunately, it wasn’t hell freezing over that was about to be the cause of her demise; it was the torrential rains, all but unheard of in this part of the country at this time of year.
And yet, here it was, a downpour the likes of which she had never witnessed before. The kind that would have had Noah quickly boarding up the door of his ark and nervously setting sail.
The rains had fallen so fast and so heavily, the dry, parched ground—clay for the most part—couldn’t begin to absorb it. One minute, she was driving through a basin, her windshield wipers going so fast, she thought they were in danger of just flying off into the wind. The next, the rain was falling so hard that the poor windshield wipers had met their match and did absolutely no good at all.
Stunned, Whitney had done her best, struggling to keep her vehicle straight, all the while getting that sinking feeling that she was fighting a losing battle. Before she knew it, her tires were no longer touching solid ground.
The rains were filling up the basin, turning the cracked, dusty depression into what amounted to a giant container for all this displaced, swiftly accumulating water.
She gave up trying to steer because nothing short of a rudder would have any effect on regaining control of her vehicle. She’d been driving the sports car with the top down and when the rains hit, they came so fast and so heavy, she couldn’t get the top to go back up. Now her car swayed and bobbed as well as filled up with water. It didn’t take a genius to know what would happen next.
She would be thrown from her car into the swirling waters—which meant that her life was over. She would die flailing frantically in the waters of a miniscule, backwater town.
She wasn’t ready to die.
She wasn’t!
Whitney opened her mouth to yell for help as loudly as she could. But the second she did, her mouth was immediately filled with water.
Holding on to the sides of the vehicle to steady herself, she tried to yell again. But the car, now at the mercy of the floodwaters, was utterly unsteady. Water was sloshing everywhere. As it crashed against her car, tipping it, Whitney lost her grip.
And then, just like that, she was separated from the vehicle. The forward motion had her all but flying from the car. The next second, she found herself immersed in the dark, swirling waters—waters that hadn’t been there a few short heartbeats ago.
Whitney tried desperately to get a second grip on any part of her car, hoping to somehow stay afloat, but the car was sinking.
There was no help coming from anywhere. No one knew she’d taken this shortcut. No one back home really bothered to trace her route—that was partially because she had insisted years ago not to be treated like a child. She could make her own decisions, her own waves, as well. Certainly, at thirty, she was no longer an unsteady child.
So other than competing with her, her siblings—except for Wilson, the oldest—all stayed clear of her, making a point not to get in her way. After all, she was the second oldest in the family.
Tears filled Whitney’s eyes before the rains could lash at them. This wasn’t how she wanted to die. And certainly not the age she wanted to die, either.
As if she had a choice, the little voice in her head mocked.
Nevertheless, just before she went under, Whitney screamed the word Help! again, screamed it as loudly as she could.
She swallowed more water.
And then the waters swallowed her.
