Second Chance Romance (Southern Nights) Completed

Chapter 1

“Second Chance Romance”

2011 © All Rights Reserved

Chapter 1

 Jade didn’t want to open her eyes.  It couldn't have been no more than an hour ago since she had last gone to sleep after staying up with her four year old daughter, Libby, for most of the night.  Libby had unfortunately contracted one of those nasty twenty four hour viruses from pre-school and the poor thing couldn’t hold down a thing, not even ginger ale.  

Jade held her small, sweat dampened body until she finally  fell asleep.  After tucking Libby into her Princess toddler bed and making sure that she was down for the count she silently tip toed out of her room.  Yawning widely and seriously sleep deprived herself, she headed for her own bed hoping for just a few blissful hours of sleep before Libby woke up again.

 Evidently, someone else had different ideas.  The phone on her nightstand started to ring.  She tried to ignore it hoping that whomever it was would get the picture but five minutes later it rang again and then again, Someone was awfully determined to rouse her from her restless sleep.

 “Damn,” she muttered the un-lady like curse and rolled on to her side. She glanced over at the alarm clock and groaned when she saw that is was only four thirty in the morning.  One hour.  She had only been asleep for one hour before being so rudely awakened by a phone call of all things.

 Reaching out she grabbed for the phone and frowned at the unrecognizable number on the caller ID.  The area code was familiar to her though but not the number itself.  (336) was a North Carolina area code, but it had been years since she last talked to anyone in North Carolina, especially in Hillsborough, the small town that she spent her first eighteen years of her life.

 Last she had heard, her father still lived there in the small town but it had been almost four years since she had last talked to Jed Sampson and that phone call did not end well at all. 

Jade was an only child and her mother had died from pancreatic cancer before she could even talk.  Being raised by her father wasn’t easy for her and the two of them had a very tumultuous relationship from the time that she first hit puberty.

 Growing up Jed had been a stern father. He had no patience for Jade’s many wild exploits when she was growing up.   He was a Southern Baptist Preacher and held tight to his values.  Day after day he tried to drill those same values into his young rebellious daughter until eventually she just upped and left town without even bothering to say good bye.

 What her father was unaware of was Jade’s initial reason for leaving in the first place.  Although he was a cankerous old man, he was not the reason for her taking off in such a ruthless fashion.  That honor belonged to an arrogant sexed up eighteen year old who so callously broke her tender heart. 

 She had given Austin Giles everything she had; her heart, her soul, her entire being and none of that was good enough.  The day that she had walked in on him and that two bit whore, Tina Mells, getting it on, she had surmised that she would never be enough for Austin and made her mind up right then to leave town.

 There was no way that she could live in the same town as Austin, much less county or state. Bumping into him at the local grocer and seeing him with other girls hanging all over him would have been just too much for her to handle.  And there would have been other girls, plenty of them.  

So she did the only thing that she felt she could do, leave.

 Jade went home and packed that very same day.  She packed the bare essentials and got in her candy red 1979 Camaro.  She started the ignition, jerked the car in gear and pulled out of Hillsborough, never once looking back.