Second Chance Lane (Brockenridge #2) - Nicola Marsh Page 0,9
tattoo. That’s when it came flooding back and she groaned, flopping back onto the pillow. She’d popped in to The Watering Hole last night, met a trucker on his way through town and ended up in this motel room.
Shame crawled under her skin and she absentmindedly scratched her arm. Last night had been a mistake. She’d made many of those in her thirty years.
She’d let people wrongly believe the worst of her for too long. Allowing people to judge her for being too spoilt, too lazy, had started off as a game to annoy her mother, Gladys Jefferson, a doyen of the community. Jane didn’t have to work courtesy of the inheritance her dad had left her and in a town where most people were doing it tough and her mother practically ran everything, that had been a major black mark against her name.
So she sought validation elsewhere, flirting with guys to feel good about herself. She craved attention more than chocolate—and that was saying something.
A knock sounded at the door, way too loud, like a jackhammer to her head. She grimaced, tucked the top sheet around her and opened it a crack, wishing she hadn’t.
Her nemesis stood on the other side, staring at her with ill-concealed concern.
‘What do you want?’ Jane muttered, hating that Ruby Aston appeared radiant in a peacock blue sundress, her dark hair shiny, her make-up flawless and her eyes clear. Having Ruby discover her hung over and naked beneath a sheet in the motel attached to the roadhouse didn’t look good. Jane had been the gorgeous one once, the most popular girl in high school. She’d been a bitch to Ruby back then, doing many things she wasn’t proud of. But they’d called an uneasy truce when Ruby returned to Brockenridge.
‘I saw your car out the front and I wanted to make sure you’re all right. Fancy a cuppa?’
Jane’s stomach roiled at the thought of caffeine. ‘Got any peppermint?’
‘Sure. I’ll meet you in the roadhouse. Pop over when you’re ready.’
Jane’s chest tightened. Ruby didn’t owe her anything, especially considering Jane had virtually driven her out of town after implicating her in a theft on the day of their high school graduation, so her kindness in checking up on her made her want to cry.
‘Ruby?’
She glanced over her shoulder, one eyebrow raised. ‘Yeah?’
‘Thanks.’
Ruby’s compassionate smile left Jane feeling more inadequate than ever.
Thirty minutes later, after a hot shower and three glasses of water, Jane made her way to the roadhouse, wearing the same clothes as last night: a tight black dress that skimmed her knees and hooker heels, as her mum called anything above a sedate two inches. She hadn’t done a public walk of shame before. It wouldn’t have worried her in the past, strutting into a place wearing obvious night-out attire the next morning. She would’ve done anything over the years to get a reaction from her mum, to make up for the emptiness that plagued her ever since her beloved dad died and she’d discovered the unthinkable: her mum had been responsible for his death.
She’d wanted to punish her mum so she’d hit Gladys where she’d hurt the most: her precious polished façade. Gladys ran every charity event, presided over the popular book club, and organised endless fundraisers for everything from the high school to the library, so Jane deliberately did the opposite. She cultivated her spoilt brat image by not volunteering, though she did donate anonymously to a lot of local charities. Flirting with men led to rumours but Jane didn’t correct those. Anything to get a rise out of Gladys. And it seemed to work—Gladys hated Jane’s layabout image. Her mum had a hang-up when it came to presenting the perfect front. She’d gone to extremes to maintain the illusion of a privileged life, when nothing could be further from the truth. Not in monetary terms, because her dad had left them well off, but in every other way that counted, Gladys’s life was a sham. Only Jane knew her mum was far from the generous, caring woman everyone in town saw.
But what had Jane’s juvenile behaviour accomplished? Her mother would never change and all she’d achieved was loneliness, because nobody in this town knew the real her. This stupid, impulsive one-night stand was the final straw. She needed to revamp her life.
Giving her head a little shake to dislodge thoughts of her mother, Jane entered the roadhouse. Thankfully, the place was empty, apart from a family who must’ve hit the