He grabbed her arm and whirled her around. Three other guys were standing behind him. She recognized Clark’s cousin, Mason Hardy, but didn’t know the other two. Savannah refused to panic. These jerks were just trying to scare her and admittedly doing an excellent job.
“Let me go.” The words were a demand but she inwardly winced at how shaky and uncertain she sounded.
“I don’t think so. It’s about time you Wilde bitches learned a lesson. You ain’t no better than anyone else.”
“We never said we were. You—” She stopped abruptly. Getting into a verbal shouting match would accomplish nothing. She needed to get away and quick.
Her head twisted so she faced the school building, she pretended she saw someone and called out, “Hey, guys, I’m over here!”
Clark twisted around, giving Savannah the opportunity to jump away from him and run. She took three steps forward before one of the boys she didn’t know stood a few feet in front of her. He began walking toward her, leaving Savannah no choice but to back up. She slammed into an unmovable object—Clark Dayton. Beer-scented breath whispered in her ear, “We’re going to have us some fun.”
He backed away, leaving Savannah to turn slowly around and assess her situation—it wasn’t good. She had somehow been corralled into a dark area of the parking lot. Four drunken young men surrounded her and there was no help in sight.
One of them thrust a bottle toward her. “Take a long, deep swallow … it’ll get you in the mood.”
Having no other choice, Savannah opened her mouth, took a deep breath, and screamed at the top of her lungs.
CHAPTER
TWO
Zach Tanner rubbed his tired, gritty eyes and yawned widely as he steered his car toward home. A twelve-hour workday would’ve been bad enough, but he’d had to get up a couple of hours earlier this morning to study. Taking online college courses was a lifesaver since he couldn’t afford to drive to the University of South Alabama campus every day, but it sure cut down on his sleeping time. The psychology test was at noon tomorrow and he was determined to ace it.
This was his last test for the quarter. The better he did on this exam, the better his record would look. It’d taken a lot of work to overcome his rep as a no-good kid. When he’d signed up for the army a couple of months back, he had been warned to keep his nose clean. Telling the recruiter he was following in his dad’s footsteps had helped, but still the recruiter hadn’t liked the black marks on Zach’s records, no matter how unfounded they were. He had told him to keep a low profile in town and to stay out of trouble. Zach had done his best to comply. No way in hell was he going to jeopardize his chances. He’d dreamed too long and worked too hard to let anything get in the way. Come August, he was out of Midnight for good and on to a new life.
His family responsibilities were finally ending. After being the sole provider for more years than he liked to remember, he was finally free. His salvation had come by way of Leonard Easley, a widowed bank president from Pascagoula, Mississippi. He’d taken one look at Zach’s mom and fallen head over heels. After all of Francine’s machinations to find a man to take care of her, she’d ended up finding him on the side of the road when she’d run out of gas and Leonard had stopped to help.
It’d taken a few months before Zach was convinced that Leonard was really serious. His mother wasn’t known for good judgment in her selection of men. Nor was she known for her self-control. If Leonard had wanted to, he could easily have kept a casual sexual relationship and Francine would have hung on for as long as she could. Instead, much to everyone’s surprise, Leonard didn’t want casual, he wanted forever.
The day after Leonard proposed, Zach had gone to the army recruiting office in Mobile and signed up. The U.S. Army was not only his ticket out of town, but also the chance to do something worthwhile. He had never known his dad; James Tanner had been killed in a brief conflict in Egypt when Zach was a baby. The stories his mother had told him made him want to be the kind of man his father had been—strong, courageous, and honorable.