Daddy's Little Liar - Maren Smith

Chapter One

“Oh, no. No, no, not here!” Georgia’s hands tightened on the steering wheel as the dash dinged, and the temperature light hit the red line on her engine gauge. A gust of smoke erupted from under her Camaro’s Pull-Me-Over-Red hood, only to pour back into the cab through the air vents.

It was definitely happening here.

“Crap!” She yanked the car over onto the shoulder of the road—a dirt and gravel road because she’d been stupid enough to take the first highway exit she’d come to about five miles back. Supposedly, this in-the-middle-of-nowhere road led to a town with services, but all she’d seen were seemingly endless fields of sorghum plants just blooming.

Shutting off the engine, she watched the billowing smoke, listened to the hiss of the radiator spewing fluid all over her engine block, and prayed whatever was going wrong hadn’t just irrevocably killed her car.

Or her chance at the job interview tomorrow morning. If only she could get there.

She smacked the steering wheel, then flopped her head back against the seat rest and briefly closed her eyes. Digging her phone out of the cup holder, she checked the black screen. Nope. Still dead because someone had forgotten to grab the charger as she shot out the door like a crazy woman at the start of this whole adventure.

Scrubbing fingers through her hair, she looked out the window. Nope. Still in the middle of nowhere, still surrounded by fields of sorghum. Someone somewhere was fertilizing. Everything that didn’t smell like blown-up overheating car and chemicals reeked of liquid cow pie.

Now, instead of breezing past it all in search of this mythical town called Solstice Springs, where there might at least be a gas station with hot coffee and hopefully, a mechanic to quickly fix what had—back on the highway—been little more than a mildly concerning temperature fluctuation. Now, she would have to walk. In high heels, no less, on an unpaved dirt road and in her best business skirt—tube, naturally—guaranteeing she’d be mincing rather than walking the whole cussed way.

Great.

She could already see her new job and new life waving a sad farewell to her from Santa Fe. She absolutely would not make it there tonight.

Go to college, everyone said. Get a degree, they said. Do you really want to spend the rest of your life waiting tables? Well, the cosmic joke was on her. It had taken six years of college to finally gain her master's, and the only job she’d been able to find so far was as a waitress at Red Robin.

I’m going to spend the rest of my life taking fry orders and drowning in student loans.

Mouth flattening, she glared out at the road ahead. No, not if she could help it.

Fishing her purse out from under the passenger seat, she made sure she had her wallet, keys, her useless cellphone—dead or not, a girl and her phone should never be parted, and in this neck of the world, she might need to clock a cow with it—and got out. She locked the door—just in case there was something out here other than pecans, pintos, and the cicada she could hear buzzing in the fields—and finally started walking.

Dirt roads and high heels were not a good combination. Why hadn’t she brought a different pair of shoes? She’d been excited because this was the first serious job offer she’d had since graduating, and damn it, working at Red Robin, its excellent bottomless-fries benefits package notwithstanding, did not repay student loans well or fast. She needed a real job. Her wallet needed it—her self-esteem needed it more. When she got the call last night that her cousin’s husband had pulled some strings, she’d tallied the mileage, dressed for success, and jumped in the car. Literally, nothing else had mattered.

She’d been a good hundred miles down the highway on her way from Oregon to New Mexico before she even thought to call her cousin to make sure she’d have a couch to bunk on for the night.

What she should have had was enough money to rent a car.

Hopefully, whatever was wrong could be fixed quickly. She still had sixty miles left to go. Heels or no heels, that was more than she could walk, and the sun was going down.

Ugh.

Her spiked heel came down wrong on a small rock, tearing pain shot up through her leg as her ankle twisted out from under her, and Georgia almost fell. A quick hop kept her on her feet, but only until she