Chapter 1

I was driving home from college for Christmas break. My sophomore year had been, so far, pretty boring. I had broken up with my girlfriend from freshman year shortly after summer break had begun, because I caught her cheating with her old high-school flame. I worked hard all summer, trying to save up enough money to pay some of my tuition and costs for my sophomore year, so I had pretty much had no life over the summer.

When I had gotten back to campus at the end of August, I applied myself very hard to my studies, and really didn’t socialize much. I made no time in my schedule to pursue a campus romance, partially because I had been hurt so deeply by my experience the previous year. I had really only tried to approach one girl, a sophomore who came from the city only a few miles from my home town. She had pledged the snooty rich girl’s sorority.

Tara was polite enough to me at first, until she found out that I had worked as a mechanic at a small garage in my home town for a year between high school and college to save enough money to go to college. She learned that I was the only son of a dirt-poor family, while her mother was chief of neurosurgery at a well-known research hospital and her father was senior partner in a powerful corporate law practice. Both parents came from old money, so Tara had been raised in the lap of luxury.

Basically, she was a spoiled brat who never had, and probably never would, understand hard work and hard times. She was beautiful, 5’6”, blonde, slender, with what I guessed were C-cup tits, a tight little ass, and a come-fuck-me smile. She had initially seemed attracted to me, until she found out about my pedigree. Then she would only talk to me in the one class we shared. Another dream shattered.

It started to snow as I was packing for my hundred-mile trip home. I wasn’t really that worried, since I knew that my old rust-bucket Chevy 4X4 pickup was mechanically sound and I had mounted four good used snow tires on it before I had left for school in August. Even when the radio station I was listening to announced that the main highway I was planning to use for part of my trip had been closed due to a massive pile-up, I figured I would be OK, since I knew the back roads I could use to get home. I settled in for a long, slow drive.

After about an hour of crawling along in what was turning into near-blizzard conditions, I saw a car ahead of me. The emergency flashers were on. I quickly realized that the car had skidded off the road and had crashed into a large tree. There was a lot of front-end damage. I put on my own four-way flashers and parked behind it. I zipped up my insulated hunter coveralls and put on my warm hunting cap and got out of the truck. As I approached the car, a new BMW coupe, I could see the driver was still inside. I walked up to the driver’s window and knocked on it. The driver opened the window an inch or two. It was Tara.