“Come in for a sec,” Holly said. “I’m not quite ready. Can I get you a drink?”

Blake stumbled in the door behind her. Where had she been hiding this figure? Those suits she wore to the office made her look like a box.

And where had this face come from? Her glasses had hidden the curve of that cheekbone, the pert line of her nose; they had diminished the astonishing color and depth of her hazel eyes.

She disappeared into a room at the back. Before she closed the door he caught a glimpse of a white lace bedspread that made his mouth go dry, it was so sensual and virginal at the same time.

What was wrong with him? Because she’d been transformed from a guppy to a goldfish to an angelfish before he had time to adjust to it?

She came out of the bedroom. She looked as tall and willowy as a model, but with legs as long and shapely as a chorus girl’s.

His tongue was as tied as if he were a schoolboy.

This was Holly.

Meet the Coltons—

a California dynasty with a legacy

of privilege and power.

Holly Lamb: Overnight Cinderella. She’s been in love with her gorgeous, serious-minded boss since the first day she started at the Hopechest Ranch, but Blake has never treated her with anything more than friendly respect. Until he invites her to a community-sponsored dance, and this virgin transforms herself into a sexy siren….

Blake Fallon: A hero for Holly. His undemanding assistant has loyally stood by his side throughout countless crises, but can he prove his mettle—and love—when Holly most needs his support?

Joe Colton: Town patriarch. Though he and his long-lost wife have opened their home to the townspeople during this crisis, this selfless man has more planned for the community that saw him through his long ordeal!

A Hasty Wedding
Cara Colter

www.millsandboon.co.uk

About the Author

CARA COLTER

Readers often tell author Cara Colter the only thing they don’t like about her books is that they end too soon! Cara was delighted to be asked to write for THE COLTONS series, especially since the longer format allowed her the opportunity to satisfy reader requests and develop her characters more deeply. Holly and Blake, the hero and heroine of A Hasty Wedding, are a dynamic couple who have transformed the early challenges of their lives into their greatest strengths. This is a theme that is profoundly and personally meaningful to Cara.

Cara lives in a remote area of British Columbia, and so the experience of working with other writers on THE COLTONS series was a delightful one for her. “I am absolutely in awe of the imagination, talent and intelligence of the women who wrote this series.”

To Jeff Shatzko

the son of my heart

Contents

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Epilogue

One

T he knife was sharp and cold, the tip of it pressed into the delicate flesh where her neck and her jawbone met.

Her afternoon had slipped from mundane to perilous in a single tick of the second hand on the old grandfather clock that sat in the corner of her office, and Holly Lamb waited for her life to flash before her eyes.

When it did not, she was amazed when her mind told her, with wry good humor that was totally inappropriate given the knife and the wild eyes of the young man who wielded it, that her life had really not been interesting enough first time around to take a repeat on it.

Ordinary if not particularly happy childhood, college, secretarial career. No wild passions or great loves, no untamed moments of youthful hijinks, no great accomplishments in the arts or sciences.

But even in light of that rather unexciting twenty-seven years, Holly could not persuade any regrets to come to mind. She did not suddenly wish she had accepted the invitation to bungee jump—naked—off the Prosperino Bridge. She had no regrets about not seeing the Sistine Chapel or climbing Mount Kilimanjaro.

Of course, she might have liked to know about sex.

Not “know” in a technical sense, as if movies and television hadn’t educated everyone quite enough in that area. Maybe know wasn’t quite the right word. Experience would be a better choice of words. While one part of her brain tried desperately to tell her that this was really not the time to be following this particular flow of thoughts, the other part continued blithely down the path, speculating what it would be like to feel so close to another human being, to have a man’s lips claim your lips, and his hands touch your body with tenderness and mastery…

It came to her then, where this path was leading.

What came to her in that moment with the blade pressed sharply, in uncomfortably close proximity to her jugular, was a startling clarity of thought.

What came to her was a stunning secret that she had kept from herself for eight months. A secret that filled her with a stunning sense of warmth, again, totally inappropriate to the situation she was in.

But she held the thought, and in it she found a great well of courage and calm inside of herself. She dipped into it.

“Why don’t you put the knife down?” she suggested, amazed at what was in her voice. Not just calm. But a compassion born of her new self-knowledge.

“You tell me where my sister is.” Her attacker’s voice was harsh, and his face was so close to hers she could feel the heat of his breath, smell his desperation.

“I don’t even know who your sister is,” she said evenly. She looked into his eyes. He was just a child, despite a faint stubble that darkened his cheeks. He might have been sixteen. His eyes were dark and wild. With fear.

Under different circumstances she might have thought he was a good-looking boy. She made herself look at him analytically. If she lived, she would have to tell the police.

His hair was dark and curly, his eyes a dark, velvety brown that reminded her of a deer caught in headlights. He was taller than her, but lithe, and wiry. His jeans and jacket were torn and dirty.

“You people,” he said furiously, “think because I’ve made a few mistakes, I don’t care about my sister? Don’t you understand nothin’?”

Her clarity was holding, because she felt from her moment of studying him, she understood everything, and realized it did not have a thing to do with filling out a police report. Her voice came out gentle, filled with the most amazing tenderness.

“I understand love.”

The statement amazed her, because she spoke it with such conviction.

And really, if there was a topic she had no understanding of, it was probably that one. The Lamb family were not the ones who had put the “fun” in the word dysfunctional. Her mother and father had divorced when she was a child, and she had harbored the secret belief it was probably her fault.

While others had tested the waters of passion and romance in college, Holly had studied.

And yet the words “I understand love” had come from some place so deep within her, she recognized it as her own soul, and she felt some subtle change in the boy, as the words, powerful in their authenticity, touched him.

The pressure of the blade on her neck faltered, eased, and then was gone. She had not even realized she had been holding her breath until she began to breathe again. She touched her neck and looked at her hand. No blood.

A deep awareness permeated her. Those words—“I understand love”—had saved her life.

The fight was gone from the boy. His thin shoulders sagged under the worn fabric of his denim jacket, and the fury of his expression melted into sad bewilderment.

“I’m so tired,” he whispered. “I’m so damned tired.”

“I know,” she said. It was true. She could see the gray lines of fatigue around his eyes and his mouth, in the sag of his young body.

“I’ve been trying to find her for three weeks. Me and her, we’re all we got, you know?”

She nodded, reached out tentatively and touched his arm. He stiffened, but didn’t pull away.

“I went to the foster home she was in before I got put in juvvie. She wasn’t there anymore. Nobody will tell me where she is. She’s just little and I promised her, I promised her I’d find her as soon as I could.”

Holly listened to his voice and watched his face. Suddenly, she recognized something in the wide, lovely set of his eyes. And his words sounded so familiar. She cast back in her mind, trying to get to a place before the children had been evacuated from the Hopechest Ranch.

“She’s got to have something to believe in,” he said, broken. “She’s got to be able to believe in me.”

It came to her. A little girl looking up at her, her eyes wide, her thumb pulled out of her mouth for only a moment. Has my brother come yet? He promised. Then furious sucking on that thumb, as if that pushed back the tears that she wanted to cry.

“Lucille,” Holly whispered.

The boy’s head flew up, and he looked at her with tortured eyes, eyes that were afraid to believe.

“You’re Tomas,” she said with soft realization. “You’re Lucille’s big brother.”

He looked back down swiftly, but not swiftly enough to hide the sudden moisture in his eyes, the twitch around his lips.

“She talks about you all the time,” Holly said gently. “She told me you were coming. I’ve been waiting for you.”

His mouth fell open, as if no one in the world, besides his little sister, had ever waited for him before.

Holly’s mind clicked over the file. Mother drug-addicted. Father dead. No one had ever waited for him before.

“I didn’t know how to find you,” she apologized softly. “Sometimes the records get mixed up. Especially the last couple months.” She didn’t want to think about the last couple months right now. “But Lucille told me not to worry. That you would come.”

He came to her like he was walking out of a dream, like a wounded warrior, his head hanging, his shoulders slumping, a great and pressing weariness in him. And ever so slowly he laid his cheek on her shoulder.

It was when she gathered him to her, like the hurt child he really was, when she put one arm around his waist and stroked the beautiful dark silk of his curls with the other, that he began to cry.

The knife clattered to the floor, and when she heard the door open behind Tomas, she nudged the fallen weapon gently under the corner of her desk with her toe.

Over the heaving jean-clad shoulder, she met the eyes of her boss, Blake Fallon, director of the Hopechest Ranch, where she had come to work eight months ago as his secretary.

Gray eyes, somber, deep, quiet. His eyes reminded her of a mountain lake reflecting storm clouds and rugged, soaring peaks. The strength and wisdom of those ancient peaks seemed to be at the heart of those astonishing eyes. Even the fabulous abundance of thick sooty lashes that framed those eyes, did not detract from the impression of strength.

It was an impression that repeated itself in his features over and over again. Rugged strength proclaimed itself in the slight bump of a once-straight nose, in the uncompromising line of his mouth, in the proud angles of his chin and his cheekbones.

The theme of strength continued in the hard line of an athletic build. Just over six feet tall, Blake Fallon was immensely broad across his shoulders, his stomach was hard and flat, his hips slim. His legs were long and tapered, the pressed jeans he was wearing clinging to the large muscle of his thigh.

Today, he was dressed casually, as he usually did when he would be spending the day in the Hopechest Ranch office. His blue plaid shirt open at the collar, tucked neatly into belted jeans, sneakers on his feet. His brown hair was short and neat, the kind of cut that policemen and Secret Service men and those who exercised authority on a regular basis seemed to gravitate to naturally.

Despite the casual dress, she knew after eight months as his secretary, there was not much casual about Blake Fallon. He had a mind as intimidating and as powerful as a steel trap. He ran the Hopechest Ranch with a seeming ease that didn’t come from graduating with his MBA at the top of his class.

Her best friend, Jennifer, had given her the low-down on Blake Fallon. He could have done anything. When he’d finished college the Fortune 500 companies had been knocking down his door. Flying him to interviews. Wining and dining him.

He’d turned his back on all that, for this.

To run a ranch for kids in trouble.

She saw him appraising the atmosphere in the room now, alert to the tension and emotion, ready, like a big jungle cat, to spring in whatever direction was needed.

“Hi, Holly. What’s going on?” His voice betrayed none of that alertness. It was deep and pleasant, relaxed. The kind of voice a cowboy used to tame a wild horse, the kind of voice that encouraged frightened things to trust, and lonely things to believe—

She stopped her mind from going there, much too close to the place of the secret that beat with delicate new life in her breast.

Besides, at the sound of Blake’s voice the boy reared back from her and pivoted on his heel. His eyes skittered around desperately for the knife, even as he wiped his face with the sleeve of his jacket.

“This is Lucille Watkins’s brother, Tomas,” she said smoothly. “Remember Lucille told us if we couldn’t find him, he’d find us?”

Blake smiled, but she saw he was gauging the boy, and that his muscles were coiled tight, ready to deal with all the anger and fear rolling off the boy.

“She said it about a hundred times a day,” Blake agreed, meeting the boy’s defiant gaze steadily. “Tomas, I’m Blake Fallon, director of the Hopechest Ranch.”

“I don’t care if you’re the director of Sing-Sing. Where’s my sister? I found out she was here, but this place is like a ghost town. All these empty buildings. It’s creepy.”

“We’ve had an incident here,” Blake said, and cast Holly a look.

It amazed her how often they did this. Communicated over kids’ heads with just a look. And how accurate they had become at reading each other.

His look asked what she had told the boy. Her look answered nothing. Handle with care. He’s fragile.

“What kind of incident?” Tomas asked, panicky.

“Lucille is fine. Our water was contaminated.”

The boy’s face went a deathly shade of pale. “Is she sick? Is she okay? If you’re lying to me—”

“I have no reason to lie to you.” The tone of Blake’s voice never altered from that calm, steady voice that Holly had come to hear in her dreams. “She was in the hospital for a few days back a couple of months ago. As you can see, we’ve moved the kids off the ranch. Though the water seems free of contamination now, we’re a little reluctant to bring them back just yet.”

Holly knew he didn’t want to tell the boy, who was upset enough already, the ugly truth. The ranch’s water had been poisoned—on purpose—by a toxic substance, DMBE.

Blake had been out this morning meeting with two old friends who were working on the investigation, Rafe James, a private investigator, and Rory Sinclair, a forensic scientist from the FBI. Rory wasn’t officially on the case anymore, but since he was now living in Prosperino and working out of the San Francisco FBI lab, he was keeping tabs on the case, and helping out when he could. Sergeant Kade Lummus of the Prosperino Police Department had also been at the meeting. Blake suspected they were narrowing in on a suspect, and had been doing so for some weeks.

Holly desperately wanted to know if there were any new developments. Ever since it had been discovered the water was contaminated with a substance that did not occur naturally, she was haunted by the horrid truth that someone had deliberately hurt these children—who had so rapidly become her children. It even worked its way into her dreams.

Terrible dreams, where a thing, a monster, poured a substance into the wellhead. The monster kept shifting shapes in her dreams, and so did the substance.

Then she would hear Blake’s voice calling her, soothing her, and she would wake, trembling, the sweat beading on her body, knowing the monster was real.

There was a monster in their midst. Someone who would poison the children she had come to love so much. Children who dropped by her office with trust held out to her in the palms of their fragile hands.

They came with small excuses. Could she mail this letter? Could she find that phone number? Could she check where a brother or sister was? But they stayed because she kept a jar of butterscotch hard candies on her desk, and a warm inviting fire going in the fireplace, and a stack of Archie comic books on the coffee table in front of the worn blue sofa.

They stayed because she never, ever pressured them to talk, but when they did, she always stopped whatever she was doing, joined them on the sofa and took the time to listen.

That was not in her job description, and neither was dispensing hugs to those who could handle them. And smiles to those who were not there yet.

Maybe it was the time with these children that had made that phrase come so confidently to her lips.

I understand love.

Her bond with them filled her in ways her life had not been filled before, and so she was eager to know what new developments Blake had managed to unearth in the ongoing investigation about the poisoning of their water system. She needed to know.

But if there was one thing her eight months on the job here had taught her, it was that the kids came first here.

Kids who had come last everywhere else came first here.

Blake had taught her that. And he had done it without saying a single word to her. He had done it by hanging up the phone on a powerful corporate sponsor when a tough-looking towheaded boy had burst into the office moaning over a scratch on his arm. He had done it by clearing his schedule of appointments to go shoot some one-on-one hoops with a boy who was getting ready for a court date or a girl who was getting ready to go home.

He had done it by accepting the badly knitted toque one of the hugely pregnant girls at Emily’s House had made for him, and wearing it with such pride. He had done it by laughing when the baseball broke the window of the dining hall. He had done it by going into the dorms at The Shack and the Homestead every single night without fail, to help tuck in, find teddy bears and read stories to the little kids and tell scary ones to the bigger kids.

He had taught her, with the expression in his eyes when he looked at these children, his children, that they came first.

And, somehow, before she knew it, they felt like her children, too.

But that thought—that they shared children—followed a little too swiftly on the heels of the secret that now lived inside of her, rising and falling with her every breath.

“Why don’t you run Tomas over to the Coltons?” she suggested softly.

“Is that where Lucy is?” Tomas asked, frantic.

Holly smiled reassuringly at him. “The children were evacuated there when we had the water crisis. We haven’t been able to bring them back yet. Lucille is going to be so excited to see you.”

She looked up from the boy, to see Blake’s somber gray eyes resting on her.

“Is everything okay?” he said, looking at her, one brow up and one down, the way it was when he was looking at a kid who was trying to get one past him. A lie about school. A joint in the backpack.

“Of course,” she said, flashing him a quick smile.

He didn’t look fooled, any more than he would have by one of the kids. “Are you sure? You look…strange.”

Tomas shot her a quick, apologetic look and waited for her to tell on him, his shoulders hunched as if waiting for a blow.

“Strange?” she said lightly. “Blake Fallon, you sure know how to make a girl’s day.”

“I didn’t know you were a girl,” he teased, and gestured for Tomas to come with him. As the boy passed, he clapped a hand lightly on his shoulder. The door whispered shut behind them, and Holly went behind her desk and collapsed into her chair.

It seemed to her the secret that had come to her like a flash of blinding light when that knife had been pressed to her throat was now shining in her eyes, trembling on her lips, waiting for the whole world to see it.

Waiting for Blake Fallon to see it.

Who, in all honesty, really probably hadn’t even noticed she was a girl.

To him, she was just part of the furniture. An efficient and indispensable secretary. Someone he liked and respected. But thought of in that way?

The you-girl-me-boy way?

She laughed shakily, tried to get her focus back on something safe. Letters that needed to be typed. Transfer documents for a couple of kids. The funding proposal that still had to go out…

It wasn’t working.

Impatient with herself, she got up and tended the fire. She caught a glimpse of her reflection in the oval mirror that hung inside an ornate gilt frame on one side of the fireplace.

No wonder he hadn’t noticed she was a girl.

She looked every inch the old spinster secretary who had made herself indispensable, but was about as alluring as that stout old grandfather clock in the corner. Not that she was stout. She knew she had a lovely figure—that she had gone to great and very professional lengths not to draw attention to.

Today she was wearing a below-the-knee navy skirt and matching jacket, a white silk blouse done up primly to the very place on her throat where the knife had rested only moments ago. Her pumps were sensible and added no height to her five-foot-seven frame. Her hair was light brown, virginally untouched by dyes or highlights, and kept in a no-nonsense bun. Her glasses, which she did not really need, covered her face, brow to cheekbone, and did nothing at all to show off the delicate shades of eyes so truly hazel that they appeared blue when she wore blue, brown when she wore brown, and green when she wore green.

The portrait she presented was the one she had worked to present: the world’s most efficient secretary.

Growing up in the shadow of her socialite mother, who had made glamour her goddess, Holly had rejected using appearances to gain power. She wanted to be respected for what she was, not for how she looked.

What she was was hardworking, honest, reliable, well-grounded, competent and mature beyond her years.

Not at all the kind of person love happened to.

If she was honest—and now that she had her moment of clarity, there was no going back to lying to herself—it had happened the first time she had seen Blake.

The look in his eyes, the set of his shoulders, the tilt of his chin, the smile that had lit his face when little Dorothy Andrews had brought him a rock she had painstakingly painted. It had happened right then.

Determined not to be ruled by her newfound realization, nor to be terrified by it, Holly turned from the mirror, added a few logs to the fire that was sputtering and marched back to her chair.

She looked at her agenda, flicked open the computer file for transfer documents, and typed in the first name on her list.

Her heart felt like it was going to explode inside her chest, and her face felt like it was on fire.

She squinted at what she had typed.

Dismayed, she read the very thought that had come to her with such startling clarity when a knife held at her throat had made her face her deepest secret and her strongest yearning, her soul telling her what would make her life complete.

Instead of the name Clifford Drier, she had typed, I am in love with my boss.

She stared at it. She highlighted it to erase with her delete button, and instead managed to put it in bold print.

I am in love with my boss.

Ridiculous, that she, a paragon of responsible secretarial behavior, would write such a thing, nurse such a childish and unprofessional crush. Ridiculous that she would believe she had loved him from their first meeting. As if love could happen that fast!

Everybody loved him. The kids loved him. The staff loved him. The benefactors, especially Joe Colton and his beautiful wife, Meredith, loved him. She’d have to get in line to love Blake Fallon!

She went to insert a bold not in between “am” and “in.”

The line magically deleted, as if it had never been.

Two

B lake climbed in his ranch vehicle, a brand-new silver-gray Nissan Pathfinder that had been donated to the ranch recently by Springer Petroleum. A surprising donation, authorized by Todd Lamb, who had replaced David Corbett as vice president of Springer after Corbett had been arrested for poisoning the water.

A premature arrest as it turned out, to the surprise of no one who knew Corbett. Blake, whose skills at judging people had been honed to razor fineness because of a childhood that required a number of interesting survival skills, including the ability to read people quickly and accurately, had suspected they had the wrong man.

But he had been wrong many times, too, most notably when Joe Colton had come to his rescue, after a judge had decided that was one motorcycle too many that Blake had helped himself to. An angry young teen at the time, Blake had nearly been bitter enough to not listen to the voice deep within him that had told him, loud and clear, this man you can trust.

Joe just had never given up on him. Ever.

Since then, Blake had learned to listen a little better to that voice that whispered within him. It helped, especially, in dealing with these kids. Kids who had learned to lie and cheat and steal when most kids were learning their alphabet. Blake could tell in a glance if a child was lying—and why. There were so many motivations, and few of them had anything to do with the kid being bad. Self-preservation and fear were the two that usually headed the list.

He could also tell if it was a tortured, unexpressed sadness that had motivated an act of vandalism, or a need for attention, or just plain old garden-variety belligerence.

So, when he’d first heard David Corbett had been arrested, he’d told his pal Rafe James his thoughts on the subject. Short and sweet. No way it was Corbett.

Rafe came from the mean streets, too. He read people as well as Blake did, maybe better. The happy ending to David’s tragic false accusation was that Rafe was a changed man—the quintessential lone wolf’s heart had been warmed by David’s fiery daughter, Libby.

The thing that struck Blake as odd about Todd Lamb having Springer donate the vehicle to the ranch was that it was the type of thing David Corbett might have instigated, but not Todd. David, on the few social occasions when they had met, had always impressed Blake as being open, generous, authentically kind. It had been such a relief when David’s name had been cleared and he’d been let out of jail. Always a man determined to find reason in all the events of his life, David said the whole incident had propelled him toward doing what he really wanted to do with his life. He’d retired. Still, if the culprit was not David it did mean that a very dangerous individual, one capable of harming children, one who had tossed the dice with human lives, was still on the loose out there.

Todd Lamb, on the other hand, whom Blake had also met at the odd ranch fund-raiser or at Colton social functions, seemed to be cold, ruthless and ambitious. Not the kind of man who would give away a vehicle without a string attached.

The vehicle had come with the official explanation that Springer knew what an incredible inconvenience the residents and staff had been put to because of the ranch being evacuated. The official letter said that though they claimed no responsibility even though the chemical found in the water, DMBE, was used by them, as a responsible corporate citizen they hoped to be of assistance by offering extra and reliable transportation while kids were still being ferried around the countryside as a result of the contaminated water.

Blake’s first conclusion had been that Holly must have gone to Todd, her father, and asked him to help out. She’d had to put a lot of miles on the old ranch vehicle, a minivan that had probably been the prototype for minivans, but when he’d asked her, Holly had looked as surprised as he by her father’s generosity.

It seemed incongruous that she could have sprung from the same tree as Todd Lamb. Though Blake detected a slight physical resemblance between the father and daughter, that seemed to be where all similarity ended. Holly had qualities of warmth and gentleness and integrity that shone right through those convent-approved suits she wore.

In just eight months, Blake was amazed how absolutely indispensable she had become to him. How her presence had changed the whole office.

Her predecessor, Mrs. Bartholomew, had been a battleship in pink polyester. Efficient, yes. Pleasant, no. The kids had been terrified of her. She called it respect. He might have been a little terrified of her himself, though he’d done his best never to let it show—another trick of an old street fighter.

Certainly the whole ranch staff seemed to have sighed a big sigh of relief when she had announced her retirement.

And then Holly had come. His office was in a lovely old white clapboard ranch house that had been converted. He had a simple apartment upstairs, which the downstairs served as office space for the Hopechest Ranch.

Holly had loved the house on sight.

“Oh,” she’d said dreamily, of the outer office, “this used to be the front parlor of this house.”

He’d seen a certain gleam in her eye when she investigated the old river rock fireplace that seemed so out of place among filing cabinets and her desk, and the government office reject chairs lined up against the walls for kids who were in the office having paperwork done or were waiting to see him.

Soon she had a fire crackling away in that hearth every single day. The kids loved it, and the older ones lined up for the opportunity to chop and haul wood for her.

Then her desk had been pushed back into a corner, and the ugly metal frame green and orange vinyl chairs had disappeared. From somewhere she’d found an old blue sofa that she’d put a bright plaid throw over, and several wingback chairs which she had grouped around the fireplace.

An old trunk served as a coffee table, and it always had a heap of comic books, coloring books and crayons on it. She had hung lace valances on the tall old windows, and their wide casings held an assortment of plants that the children clamored to water.

A huge round fishbowl with four residents of various colors and fin shapes had a place on top of her filing cabinet. Standing on a chair to sprinkle feed for the fish seemed to be a special honor reserved for newcomers who arrived confused, frightened and tearstained.

Often the quiet murmur of voices drew him out of his office and he would find her, work stopped, having a quick snuggle on the couch with a needy child.

With something approaching reverence she took the artwork the children had made, and while they watched, she would pop it into a cheap frame and hang it on a bare spot on the wall. One whole wall, floor to ceiling, was nearly completely covered with these bright testaments to the resiliency of the human spirit.

The only pictures that had hung on the walls before were the worker’s compensation posters that Mrs. Bartholomew had put up religiously. As if she was in any danger of falling off a ladder, or being backed over by a truck. Pretty hard to miss something that big in that shade of pink. But if someone had hit her with a truck, he had the uncharitable thought it was the truck that would have needed repairing, not Mrs. B., as she had reluctantly permitted herself to be called.

“What are you going to do when you run out of walls?” he’d teased Holly one day.

“Run out of walls?” she’d said, astounded. “We have a whole ranch.”

Somehow having every wall on the whole ranch hung with the kids’ colorful drawings appealed to him very much.

“Where are you getting the frames from? You’re not buying them yourself, are you?”

She’d shrugged.

He’d quietly arranged for the downtown hardware store to donate a hundred frames. When that box arrived, she’d oohed and aahed like it was Christmas morning and he had given her diamonds.

The truth is he probably would have kept Holly even if not a lick of the office work got done. She attracted the kids, and she was good with them. She had, seemingly effortlessly, turned the dull space of her office into an area of good cheer and happiness, a place that it felt good to spend time in.

He even found himself wandering out there to get a handful of those little butterscotch candies she kept, and to sit on the couch in front of the fire and visit with whatever kid was on her sofa for the afternoon.

But, amazingly, she still got the office work done with incredible accuracy and efficiency. Her mind was exceedingly quick, not rigid and slow moving as her predecessor’s had been.

It was Holly who had first mentioned the water as a possible source when a terrifying number of kids had first started getting sick at Hopechest. And then everybody was sick. Her mind had sorted through information to the common denominator with breathtaking quickness. He credited her with the fact that the situation had never been allowed the opportunity to deteriorate into a terrible tragedy.

And though Holly Lamb was nothing to look at, she was a huge step up from Mrs. Bartholomew. She always looked presentable and professional and to Blake’s abject relief she had yet to wear pink. And every now and then he would notice her eyes behind those huge glasses, and try and figure out what color they were.

Some days he would be convinced they were blue. And the next day he would decide they were brown.

His office had changed in the most subtle and pleasant ways since her arrival, and he was already keeping his fingers crossed that she would never, ever quit.

Hard, though, to think of her as Todd Lamb’s daughter. He wondered what her mother was like.

And then he remembered the expression on Holly’s face when he had first come through the office door today.

It had troubled him then and it troubled him again now. When he had asked her what was wrong, she’d laughed it off and tried to turn it into a joke, but the expression on her face had been downright strange.

He shot a look at the boy sitting sullenly beside him in the passenger seat. He knew that look anywhere. Guilt. His instinct told him the boy could tell him all about that look on Holly’s face if he was approached in the right way.

“So,” Blake said, looking straight ahead at the road, “where are you coming from?” Out of the corner of his eye he caught the slight hunching of thin shoulders.

The boy hesitated, and then muttered the name of a juvenile detention facility.

“Oh, yeah,” Blake said. “I saw the inside of that one once or twice myself when I was your age.”

Startled surprise, quickly masked. “Sure.”

“No kidding.”

“What for?”

“I took motorcycles that didn’t belong to me.”

“Cool.”

Blake decided to let that pass, and he knew better than to pry about what the kid had done. He could find out later if it interested him.

“When did you get out?”

“A couple of weeks ago. I tried to find my sister. I promised.”

“Yeah. She told us.”

“I was supposed to go to a foster home when I got out, but I’ll be sixteen in a few weeks, so I figured I’d take a miss.”

Under the nonchalant expression, Blake heard the question. Am I in trouble?

“I’ll find out for you,” he said, just as if the question had been asked out loud.

The boy gave him a surprised look.

“How come my secretary looked so strange when I walked in?” There. He’d given him something, now he wanted something back.

The boy took a sudden interest in his sneakers, then his fingernails, then the scenery outside the windows.

“I dunno.” His eyes were skittering around like crazy.

A lie. Blake gave him the look that said he knew it was a lie, and the boy tried to do a turtle and pull his head inside his own jacket.

A long silence ensued, which Blake did nothing to break.

“I was really mad. And scared. And tired. It was a dumb thing to do.” The voice was coming from somewhere inside the jean jacket.

“What was a dumb thing to do?”

“Pulling the blade on her.”

Blake, who prided himself on being unshockable, on keeping his cool in any circumstance, swerved the vehicle onto the shoulder and braked to a halt so fast that the boy’s head popped out of his jacket.

“You did what?” It registered, somewhere in him, that this was not him, the unflappable Blake Fallon. But the thought of someone scaring his sweet secretary filled him with a quiet and protective rage that did not bode well for the boy sitting next to him.

Tomas shrank back against the door. His hand moved stealthily for the handle. “Don’t hit me,” he whispered.

And Blake snapped back to reality. He took a deep breath and tried not to think of Holly on the end of a knife.

“I don’t hit kids,” he said quietly. “Nobody here hits kids.” Given the paleness of the boy’s face, he decided to skip the lecture on the possible consequences of pulling a knife on someone. If it had been his old secretary, that boy would be in cuffs already, on his way back to where he’d just come from.

But instead of that making him appreciate her more, Blake suddenly felt furious with Holly for putting him in this situation. He’d asked her what was going on, and she’d lied to him. Maybe, he admitted, he felt furious with her because for a moment pure emotion ruled him.

“I didn’t see a knife when I arrived at the office,” he said, putting the vehicle back in gear and pulling back onto the highway.

“She kicked it under the desk when you came in.”

Great. He felt his ire rising again. Not only had she lied to him, she’d deliberately misled him.

“Do you have any more weapons on you?”

“No.”

“Do I have to check?”

“No.”

He glanced at Tomas, and saw truth there. He arrived at Hacienda de Alegria, Joe and Meredith Colton’s lavish ranch, and shook his head. There were kids everywhere, spilling across the lawns and out of the big sprawling house that dominated the scene.

Meredith Colton, who really should have been enjoying her retirement, was running frantically with a homemade kite, kids on all sides of her, running and laughing, their faces lifted to the sun.

Joe had a little fat pony saddled and a small girl had a death grip on the saddle horn and a huge smile on her face as Joe led her around the yard. Another dozen or so kids were hopping along on either side of them, excited to have a turn.

Blake shook his head. He’d been worried about imposing on his foster parents when they had offered to take the kids from Hopechest. But when the logistics of keeping the ranch open by bringing in water and supplying bottled water for drinking had proved impossible, he had accepted their gracious offer.

He realized now he had never seen two people look less imposed upon. The pair of them looked like they were in all their glory.

“What is this place?” Tomas asked, his eyes wide, his nose pressed to the window.

“It’s a temporary home for the kids who were displaced from the ranch.”

“No kidding?” he breathed. “I kind of imagined heaven looking like this.”

“That’s kind of how I felt when I first saw it, too,” Blake confessed. Tomas was way ahead of where Blake had been, though, if he could admit something like that. Blake, at that age, would have considered such an admission soft.

A half hour later Tomas had been reunited with his sister, and Joe, with his knack for trusting those who had never been trusted, had put Tomas in charge of pony rides.

“What’s his story?” Joe asked quietly, as he and Blake sat on comfortable cushions on the bent willow chairs in the deep shade of the porch.

“I don’t know yet,” Blake said, taking a sip of his iced tea. Just the way he liked it. Tea and lemon, no sugar. Trust Meredith to be watching the sugar intake of all these kids. “I just found out from him he pulled a knife on my secretary.”

“Really?” Joe said mildly. “Surprised he has any teeth left.”

“I don’t hit kids.”

“Well, none of them ever pulled a knife on Holly before. Meredith and I are very taken with that girl.”

Holly was making several trips a week between Hacienda de Alegria and the Hopechest Ranch with paperwork. But Blake suspected many of her trips were just because she missed the kids so much.

He did, too.

He noticed a twinkle in Joe Colton’s eye that seemed to encourage a confession that Blake, too, was quite taken with his new secretary.

Blake had a desperate need to deny it. “I would have been ticked if it happened to anybody, and not enough to be smashing heads, either.”

“Well, maybe you wouldn’t have been that ticked if it had happened to Mrs. Bartholomew,” Joe guessed.

Blake had to chuckle. “Okay, maybe not her. Joe, I don’t have any kind of interest in Holly Lamb, aside from the fact she’s the most wonderful secretary I’ve ever had.”

Joe looked skeptical.

“For God’s sake, it would be totally unprofessional.”

“I don’t recall saying a word about your relationship with Holly, professional or otherwise. But let an old man share some wisdom with you.”

“Do you have to?”

“Yes. She’s the kind of girl men pass up. She doesn’t catch the eye, like a piece of tinfoil in the gutter. She’s more like gold. Gold doesn’t shine much when you first find it. You have to look hard for it.”

“I’m not involved with my secretary. And I don’t plan to be. Joe, I have an example to set. My behavior has to be exemplary in every way.”

“Who are you trying to convince you’re perfect—the rest of the world or yourself? You’ve got to quit lining up those paper clips in neat rows and live a little.”

An annoying statement, uncomfortably close to the one Rory had made recently. Something insulting about him polishing his stapler.

Of course, Rory was all buoyance and light and unpolished staplers now that Cupid’s arrow had found him.

Joe could still make Blake feel like an awkward kid, still ask all the right questions.

He also knew precisely when to drop something.

“Look, Meredith and I have set our party for a week from Saturday. We think its about time to have some fun.”

Blake looked at the three-ring circus happening around him and wondered glumly how much more fun it could get.

“This whole thing has been terrible on the morale of the whole town. We’re going to have a good old-fashioned barn dance. Get people laughing again, give these kids a chance to see there are wholesome ways to have fun. Can I count on you to come?”

“Oh, yeah, like you need me to have fun.” Blake had an independent nature that did not lend itself well to social functions, which he detested. His job required him to attend some, but he rarely attended any voluntarily.

“I don’t need you, but I sure like it when you’re around, Blake. You know Meredith and I consider you as much our son as Rand and Drake. Meredith wants you to come, too. Plus, of course, it would be setting a good example to your staff, showing them it’s time for a change in mood, time to move forward.”

“I’d feel better about doing that when whoever is behind the contamination of the water system is found.”

“Maybe he’ll never be found,” Joe said. “It’s important to move forward now, past the fear and tensions of the last couple of months. You can poison kids like these without ever touching their water.”

“He’ll be found,” Blake said. “I won’t rest until he’s found. Sinclair from the FBI, and Rafe feel the same way.”

Joe nodded. “Well, since we’ve got the three of you on it, the rest of us might as well start relaxing, hmm?”

Blake grinned. “Okay, I get your point.”

“Good. Are you going to come?”

“Okay. I’ll come,” he agreed reluctantly.

“Feel free to bring somebody with you.”

Blake squinted at Joe suspiciously, but there was not a flicker in the older man’s face to suggest he thought that someone should be Holly Lamb. As if.

“Can Tomas stay here for a day or two? Until I find out where he’s supposed to be, and if he needs to go back?”

“Oh, sure,” Joe said easily as if one more kid was a joy.

That was what Blake had felt here, for the very first time in his life. That his presence in this universe was a joy to someone, instead of a burden.

“Well, don’t forget he pulled the knife.”

“Blake, look at him. He hasn’t let go of his little sister’s hand since he arrived. He’s been helping snotty-nosed kids on and off that pony for the better part of half an hour. I like the cut of his jib.”

“Well, you always see it first, Joe.”

“Don’t I?” Joe said happily. “Go home and make sure that secretary of yours is okay. Though she looks to me like the kind of girl who would know just how to handle a scrawny, scared kid with a knife.”

Blake thought of coming into the office, Tomas weeping against Holly’s slender shoulder, and he sighed heavily.

“I suppose you like the cut of her jib, too.”

“You said it first, not me.”

Three

H olly knew, as soon as she heard the crunch of the Pathfinder’s tires on the gravel outside the office door that, in some part of her that she would much rather not acknowledge, she had been listening for it to return, waiting for the moment Blake would stride back through the door, smile at her, maybe stop to talk for a few minutes about his day and the developments in the water contamination case.

The vehicle door closed quietly, not like their old vehicle that had required a good hard slam. The Pathfinder itself still troubled her. The gesture seemed so unlike her father. It was not that he wasn’t generous—she’d received dozens of expensive gifts from him. Or at least the cards were signed by him.

The gifts themselves had his secretary, Hannah’s demure personality written all over them. Holly suspected her birthday was penciled right on Hannah’s calendar, not her father’s. Which was probably why she felt odd about the gift of the Pathfinder.

Todd Lamb was not thoughtful. Or sensitive. He was not even particularly astute about the good public relations move. He had been reprimanded more than once for making anti Native American remarks.

He was a man who had risen to a high position in Springer because he was smart, tough and ambitious. Her father had told her once, with great pride, that he was the kind of man every company wanted. He could turn one dollar into ten, and he didn’t care whom he ran over to do it. Why would a man who took pride in turning one dollar into ten, insist on repainting the nearly new Springer vehicle from perfectly acceptable white to silver gray?

Not knowing why, Holly shuddered, then put the whole thing out of her mind. She busied herself with the typing, when the door swung open.

She glanced up at just the right moment, and smiled cordially at Blake when he came through the door. The smile hid more than it revealed.

For instance, you would think, after you had seen a man a certain number of times, the novelty of him would wear off.

That you would no longer notice the color of his eyes, the little Dennis-the-Menace rooster tail in his hair, the powerful shape of his shoulders, the easy and effortless ripple of his arm muscles.

You would think, after a while, that the loose, graceful swing of his walk wouldn’t make butterflies take off in your stomach, and that you would be able to look at his lips without wondering what they tasted like and what they would feel like, and if you were ever, ever going to know.

She realized she had been having these thoughts for a long, long time. The crush on the boss wasn’t new, just her admission of it.

He was so handsome. She loved his eyes. She felt like she could look at him forever. She had the awful thought her newly discovered feelings were going to be in her face, that she would stumble over her tongue now, turn red whenever he spoke to her.

Diligently, she looked back at her work, began to type furious nonsense, which she hoped at least wouldn’t say she was in love with her boss.

When he neither greeted her nor went by her into his own office, she glanced up, to see him perched on the corner of her desk, one leg swinging, the other anchored to the floor. He looked at her thoughtfully, his brow furrowed. His normal smile, the one that put the sun to shame, was nowhere in sight.

He looked distinctly…crabby.

“Anything you want to tell me about?” he asked.

She swallowed. No. Even he wasn’t that intuitive, though he was dangerously alert to undercurrents and unspoken things going on all around him.

He shocked the kids with this uncanny ability to look into their hearts.

Ralph, you got something in that pocket I should know about?

Shirley, anything happen last night you care to share with me?

Polly, do you need to talk to me?

And as it turned out Ralph had a joint in his pocket, and Shirley tearfully admitted to escaping from her second-floor dorm window and running across the roof to peek in the boys’ dorm, and Polly had been keeping a kitten under her bed that had turned seriously ill.

But Holly didn’t have any secrets of that nature. Secrets that had witnesses or hard evidence.

How much could he read into a blush, a stammer, a quick lowering of eyes, after all?

“Something to tell you?” she said, pleased with how smooth her voice sounded, just as if she was the same person as she had been when she arrived at work this morning, when in fact she was changed in some way that was so fundamental she knew she could never change back.

“You know. Some interesting detail about your day.” His you-can-confide-in-me voice invited trust, showed genuine interest.

She stared at him, flabbergasted, and resisted the urge to pinch herself. Was he actually showing interest in her personally? It seemed too much to hope for, following so closely on her discovery of the feelings she was harboring in the far and secret reaches of her heart.

Her golden opportunity. To make him smile. To make him see her. All she had to do was think of something clever, or funny, or interesting to share with him about her day.

Not one single thing came to her mind.

She had always performed terribly under pressure. She knew if she was ever chosen to play Wheel of Fortune, she would be one of those people who asked for a letter that had already been used.

“Well?” he said silkily, leaning toward her, something glinting gravely in his eyes.

“Willie died,” she blurted out.

“Willie?”

“The guppie.”

“A fish?” He looked stunned, like he didn’t have a clue what she was talking about, and why should he?

A golden opportunity, blown. She said miserably, “The one named after the whale. As in Free Willie.”

He said nothing.

“I’ll go get another one tomorrow,” she babbled. “Little Flo Henderson was very attached to him.”

“Anything else you want to tell me about? Aside from the unfortunate demise of Willie?”

It occurred to her there was something pointed about his question. That he wasn’t expressing a nice generic kind of interest in her. He was probing for something specific.

Annoyed at herself for hoping too much, and at him for not even being in the same ball park as her, she said crisply, “If there’s something specific you want to know, you’ll have to tell me. I don’t do well at twenty questions.”

“How’s this for specific—”

It occurred to her the glint in his eye that she had mistaken for interest was actually anger. Blake was angry at her.

“—what does it feel like to have the blade of a knife pressed against your pretty little throat?”

“Oh,” she said, deflated, “that.” She wondered if it counted at all that Blake Fallon thought her throat was pretty.

“Oh, that. Hardly worth mentioning.”

“To be quite frank, I’d forgotten about it already.”

“It seems to me I asked you if something was wrong as soon as I stepped into this office and saw you with Tomas. It doesn’t seem to me as if I got a straight answer.”

“The whole thing was already long over by the time you got here.”

“Oh? The way I heard it, the knife was being shoved under the desk by your big toe just as I came in the door. Is it still there, or did Miss Efficient file it already?”

Miss Efficient? “Actually, I did file it already. It’s in the trash. Outside.”

“Not inside, where I might see it.”

She was beginning to feel really angry. This was what his interest in her was about? The first strong emotion he had ever shown to her was annoyance? Anger? She realized she had not totally forgiven him yet for that teasing but still slightly stinging remark he had made earlier.

I didn’t know you were a girl.

And now the brief interest that had lit in his eyes was about this? Even his remark about her neck had been accompanied by that cynical tone of voice.

“I had no interest in hiding the knife from you,” she said stiffly. “I put it in the outside garbage so I didn’t have to see it every time I disposed of a piece of paper.”

“Meaning the episode did leave some impression on you.”

“Some,” she agreed reluctantly.

He leaned very close to her. “In the future, if you are attacked by someone with a knife, do you think it would be asking too much to let me know?”

“I explained to you, it was already over. And it was nothing. I never really felt threatened. I never even really felt frightened.”

“And you didn’t want to get him in trouble,” he guessed softly.

“Now that you mention it, I didn’t want to get him into trouble.”

“Your first loyalty belongs to me, Miss Lamb.”

Now she was really angry. “No, it does not, Mr. Fallon. It belongs to me. You seem quite satisfied with my heart telling me what to do with these kids so far. Tomas wasn’t a dangerous boy, he was a frightened one.”

“And if you had a few years experience with these kids, instead of a few months, you would know that was the most dangerous kind of all.”

She could see he was angry, too. Really angry for the first time since she had been employed by him. She had never even seen him get irritated with the children, but now his voice had a dangerous edge to it, and his eyes were snapping with sparks that had not the slightest thing to do with passion.

She sighed inwardly, but not out loud. Wasn’t that just her luck? Discover the humiliating secret that you were madly in love with a man who was never even going to give you a second look, and then end up in his doghouse on the very same day!

“If that’s all, Mr. Fallon,” she said, looking at her watch, “I really should have gone home half an hour ago.”

Her voice was perfect. Reprimand accepted. Except then she went and spoiled it all. Her lip trembled just a little bit. She ducked her head, but not quickly enough.

The silence filled the room. She refused to look at him.

His hand found her chin and lifted it, and she was forced to look at him. She saw the immediate remorse flash through the gray depths of his eyes.

“I’ve hurt your feelings.”

“Not at all,” she said. Her voice was trembling now, too. It would have been so much better if he didn’t touch her, if his hand was not resting on her chin, his fingertips leathery and tough. Yet his touch was not tough at all. It was everything she had known it would be.

Electric. Strong. Tender.

“Here you are, working extra time, as always, and I come in and blast you.”

His cold, hard anger was much, much easier to handle.

“You were absolutely right, I should have told you about the knife. I just didn’t even think. It won’t—”

“Holly, I think what I should have said was that it scared me. When Tomas told me what had happened, I could imagine you at the end of that knife and it scared the living daylights right out of me.”

She stared at him. He was not a man who looked like anything would scare him. She had seen him face tough, angry kids, big kids, without even a flicker of fear. So what did that mean, that he had been scared for her?

“I’m sorry it happened to you,” he said in a low voice.

Don’t read too much into it, she warned herself. He would have been sorry it happened to anybody. He ran a tight ship. An incident had occurred out of the far reaches of his control. His fear for her had not been personal.

“I guess what I wanted to say was that I don’t want you siding with the kids against me,” he continued. “I need to know what’s going on, and I need to know you trust me.”

“Oh.”

Now that he was being nice, she felt more like crying than ever.

“Maybe,” she whispered, “I need to know you trust me, too.”

“Oh.”

He let go of her chin, thankfully, though her skin felt like it burned where he had touched it. He leaned back and ran his hand through his hair. The rooster tail sprang right back up the instant his hand passed over it.

“You know what?” he said.

She shook her head mutely. Too much to hope that he was going to say, I just realized I’m madly in love with you.

“We’ve been working too hard,” he said instead. “The whole water thing has put an incredible amount of stress on the ranch, and you and I have been carrying the majority of the load. I know you’ve been putting in more time in the front lines than anyone could have asked of you.”

This was looking hopeful. You and I, as in a partnership.

“Joe Colton was right. He told me he thinks it’s time to move on.”

“That would be a whole lot easier if the culprit had been caught.”

“That’s what I said. When I spoke to Kade Lummus today, he said they have a firm suspect. That’s very confidential.”

She knew it was his way of telling her he did trust her. “But he didn’t tell you who?”

“No. I took Rory out for lunch after, but I’m afraid I couldn’t even use our old college friendship to get that out of him. Not even for the secret fraternity handshake.”

His quick sense of humor was coming through again. It was almost as if nothing happened. They slipped so naturally back into the easy give-and-take that had become a hallmark of their relationship.

After they had discussed the water a little further, she told him she had pulled Lucille’s file and put it on his desk, as she thought he might need it to figure out what to do about the sudden and probably totally unauthorized arrival of her brother, Tomas.

“He’s going to stay with Joe and Meredith for now,” Blake told her. “I’ll have to do some checking and see what kind of trouble he’s in, but really I think—knife aside—he just wants to be with his sister. I’ll see what I can do for him.”

“You don’t believe he’s dangerous, either.”

“Let’s not go there again.”

She grinned, relieved that the old tone seemed to be back between them, realizing how much she looked forward to her communication with this man, how much a part of her life he had become.

In fact, the Hopechest Ranch now seemed to be her whole life, much to her father’s disgust.

“Your brains and your skills and you’re working as a secretary? For a pittance?” Todd Lamb never passed up an opportunity to belittle her efforts.

Well, maybe she was kidding herself, but somehow she felt like more than a secretary. She felt like she mattered, and that these kids needed her. For the first time in her life, someone needed her.

Her relief at the old tone being back between her and Blake was pitifully short-lived.

“Joe told me he and Meredith are going to host a barn dance a week from Saturday to try and lighten the mood in the community, bring people together again. He’s got this funny idea that people are more good than bad, given a chance, and that the folks of Prosperino need to be brought back to that wholesome truth.”

She ignored Blake’s slightly cynical tone. “What a charming idea. Honestly, Joe and Meredith Colton are such a lovely couple.” The kind of couple she envied so much. The kind of couple who had found it. That thing that everyone searched for.

Love.

Found it and let it sustain them, but more, had not just kept it as sustenance for themselves and their family, but had given it away over and over again.

To the community, to their foster children.

And in that giving, they lived a truth that the whole world needed to know: that love given away, multiplied itself and came back.

Holly suddenly felt so lonely she thought she might cry, after all. She’d never had that in her own family. Her mother was totally self-involved in her looks and her shape and her clubs, and her father was totally self-involved in his career and his power plays. They were two people with no time for each other, and in the end, no time for their daughter, who had needed things from them so desperately.

“Holly?”

She looked up, forced herself to smile. “Hmm?”

“You looked so sad for a second there.”

“Oh,” she said. “I think you were right. Too many things have happened. It’s been very stressful. You may have even been right about the incident with the knife. It may have made more of an impression than I thought.”

“You’re in need of some diversion.”

“I have a great book at home.” She wished she could snatch that back the moment it slipped out of her mouth. Good grief, she sounded like a pathetic old maid. It was a good thing she hadn’t mentioned her cat, as well.

“I had something else in mind,” Blake said. “Why don’t you allow me to take you to the dance? As a way of thanking you for all the extra work you do, and apologizing for being such a boor right now.”

She understood then that their relationship could never go back to what it had been before. Not now that she was carrying the secret. If she didn’t love him, it wouldn’t have mattered that he had only asked her out as a way of saying thank-you. Or apologizing. Or because he felt sorry for her.

Even with her new secret knowledge, or maybe because of it, she had some pride.

Her handsome boss fully expected his plain-Jane secretary to fall all over herself with gratitude because he had asked her out.

Methodically, not meeting his eyes, she turned off her computer and neatly covered it with the dust cover. She placed her paperwork in a neat stack, and when she was totally composed she gave him a steady look and a frosty smile.

“Let me think about it,” she said, and was rewarded with the stunned look that appeared on his features.

She suspected no one had ever said no to Blake Fallon before. Oh, she’d seen how all the beautiful women of Prosperino fawned over him.

Well, it certainly wouldn’t hurt him to feel what the rest of the world felt for once.

She took her pocketbook out of the bottom drawer of her desk and shrugged back into her neat navy jacket, then stood up.

“Excuse me,” she said coolly.

He couldn’t get off the edge of her desk fast enough. She suspected he was still watching her, his mouth open, as she went out the door.

But she didn’t give him the satisfaction of looking back, even though she suspected he stood in the office doorway, watching her as she walked all the way home.

Home was only a few hundred yards from the office, a lovely little cabin that had once served as a bunkhouse on the ranch.

Her mother and father, had they taken the time to visit her here, would have been mortified by her humble lodgings. She was a long way from the palatial home outside of Prosperino that her mother and father had once shared and that she had grown-up in.

But as she walked up her creaking steps, she felt a wonderful sense of homecoming. The cat, Mr. Rogers, woke up from his favored position on the rocking chair on the front porch and came to greet her, rubbing himself against her legs until the static crackled.

“So it’s you who’s responsible for the hair I always have on the seat of my pants,” she greeted him. She realized if anyone was watching, talking to her cat would make her seem even more the pathetic old-maid secretary.

So she bent down to pet him, taking a quick glance back over her shoulder at the office. She had been wrong. The door was firmly shut, and Blake was not watching her.

As if.

She opened the door to her cabin and went in, and the troubles of the day seemed to fall away.

She loved this space she had made for herself. Some of her favorite drawings from the children were on the rustic log walls, pictures of the children themselves crowded her mantel. The rough wood floors that demanded slippers at all times were covered in bright throw rugs.

Her simple furniture—two red plaid armchairs and a yellow love seat—were shaped in a semicircle around the fireplace. The same stonemason must have done all the ranch fireplaces, because they were all equally beautiful.

A ball of wool attached to two needles, which a sweater had been taking shape out of for the last six months, was heaped on one of the chairs.

There was a stack of romance novels under the coffee table—a new addiction, one she now could see was quite related to her feelings for her boss. It was a safe way to explore her feelings without making a fool of herself.

The way she would have if she had said yes to his invitation to accompany him to the dance.

She wandered through to her bright but small kitchen, put her purse on the table and traded her shoes for her slippers.

Of course, she reminded herself, she hadn’t exactly said no, either.

She had said she would think about it, and true to her word that’s exactly what she was doing.

The lovely feeling of homecoming dissipated, and it occurred to her that of course she was going to say yes. Eventually.

With a moan of something approaching terror, she went into her bedroom. It was another room that gave her great pleasure, a peaceful feeling. Her big four-poster bed with the white eyelet lace cover and pillows provided such a beautiful contrast to the rough-hewn gray logs of the walls. It was a room that would have looked in place a hundred years ago. It was a restful space.

And that restfulness was completely lost on her.

She threw open her closet door and began to sort frantically through the meager items hanging there. After realizing she had not one suitable thing to wear to a barn dance or any other kind of dance, she went into her tiny bathroom and looked in the mirror.

She took off her glasses and studied her eyes. Hesitating, she reached for a small pot of makeup.

An hour later she stared at herself, aghast. She looked precisely like Bobo the Clown.

She found herself making the call she never thought she would make.

“Mom? I need you.”

Four

B lake lay awake and restless in his bed until he could stand it no more. He hadn’t had a decent night’s sleep in weeks. He would lie down, and the horror of all those people getting sick would start to replay in his mind. Especially the kids. The fear in their eyes. The paleness of their skin. Running the first ones to the hospital in the old van. Then the old yellow school bus. And then the ambulances coming, one after another.

Rationally he knew it wasn’t his fault.

Irrationally, he believed it was his job to look after them, and that he had failed, just like everyone else most of these kids had ever placed their trust in.

The helpless fury came then. Who would hurt children? Especially ones like these, who had already been hurt so damned much by life?

After punching the pillow a few more times, and getting his legs tangled up in the covers, he finally got up. The room had a distinct chill in it, so he pulled on his jeans, then flipped on the light. His bedroom, like his office, was free of clutter, and had about as much character as a barracks. Metal frame bed, gray blankets, white sheets. Clothes folded neatly on the chair underneath the window. Somehow those rooms had been vastly preferable to the constant bickering of his mother and father when they had been together. After they had split, his home life had deteriorated even more. He knew with that razor-edged intuition of children, that neither of his parents wanted him. He put a cramp in his mother’s manhunt, his father was cold and indifferent. Blake came to wear the label worn by so many children in pain: incorrigible.

These were the kind of rooms he had come to manhood in. Plain, no frills foster home bedrooms and detention center dorms.

Then he’d arrived at the Coltons’. Meredith had delighted in making a room just for him, asking him subtle questions about his favorite colors and his favorite sports, leading him up the stairs one day and throwing open the door of a room he had never seen before.

“This is for you,” she’d said.

Just for him, a bedroom that had been every boy’s dream. She’d tactfully overlooked his interest in motorcycles, which had been the cause of most of his grief, and decorated in a baseball motif. The walls were covered in baseball posters, and there were matching blue, red and white curtains and quilt. She had found him a signed Joe DiMaggio ball and put it in a glass case. The bat, which had hit a winning run in a California Angels game that Joe Colton had taken him to, was signed by the team and mounted on one wall. There had been a desk and a computer and a stereo and a study lamp.

But the truth was, he’d been sixteen when the Coltons took him in, and his tastes were already formed. He felt at home with a certain monkish austerity, or maybe deep inside himself he did not believe he deserved all the fuss, did not quite believe he would ever be the kind of wholesome all-American boy who would fit in a room like that one.

Brushing aside the memories, Blake went out to his kitchen and flipped on a light. There was paperwork all over the table that he had wanted to get to tonight, but even though he couldn’t sleep he didn’t want to do it now.

His decorating theme of no-personality repeated itself in this room. It looked like a kitchen in an empty apartment. Except for the papers on the Formica table, it was a barren landscape. No canisters on the counters, no magnets on the fridge, one little soup stain on the stove the only evidence someone actually lived here.

Out his window, he could see the ranch and all its buildings. Emily’s House for the young unwed mothers, the Homestead that lodged temporary residents, kids waiting for fostering or adoption or to go home, and the Shack, a halfway house for juvenile delinquents. There was a school and a gymnasium and an art studio. In the center of the buildings was a green area and baseball diamond, and on the outer rim of the ranch were barns and corrals and fields and pastures.

He might have allowed himself a moment’s pride, since much of this had been his doing, but the ranch seemed unbearably uninhabited, like a ghost town. Even the livestock had been moved because it would have been far too expensive to start trucking in water for cattle and horses.

His eyes were drawn across the roadway to Holly’s little cabin. In the window boxes her red geraniums were gilded silver by moonlight. The cat was enjoying the rocking chair on the porch. It looked like the kind of homey scene someone with some artistic talent might want to capture. Cat in a Rocking Chair at Midnight.

He looked for any shadow of movement, the ranch grounds bathed in the soft orange of the yard lights they had installed just last week, in case whoever poisoned the water came back to finish the job they had started.

He shook his head, not wanting to get back on the merry-go-round of fury and helplessness.

He gazed instead at the darkened windows of her cabin and bet her kitchen didn’t look like this.

Come to think of it, he didn’t really want to think about her either.

He opened his fridge and inspected the contents. One carton of milk of dubious age. One package of cheese which had not been that shade of green and blue when he had originally purchased it. Mustard and ketchup, neither of which he thought would make a very appetizing sandwich on its own. In the crisper were two withered apples and a package of slime that he deduced had once contained lettuce.

He glanced out the window again and told his mind firmly not to go there.

It went anyway, right into her fridge, where there would be neat rows of delicious and healthy things to eat. Fresh milk, cream for her coffee, oranges and apples and pineapple spears, maybe a neatly packaged leftover chicken potpie or tuna casserole. She probably had chocolate chips to make cookies, and lard to make pies.

“Or maybe her fridge looks exactly like this one,” he told himself.

This preoccupation with food was a brand-new one. When the kids were in residence the camp cook fed him along with everyone else and didn’t mind him scrounging through the fridge for leftovers in the middle of the night. He loved Dagwood sandwiches, and seeing how many things he could squish between two slices of bread. Whole pickles, thick slices of beef, jalapeño peppers, tomatoes.

His mouth watering, he opened his freezer compartment. The Häagen-Dazs was at the very center of a frigid cave of thick, wavy ice.

“There is a God,” he muttered, and took it out. He lifted the lid, and inspected the intricate and frosty crystals that had formed on the surface. He knew trying it was the act of a desperate man, but he got a spoon, and hazarded chipping into the ice cream. He tasted, paused, smiled.

He wandered into his living room and sat on the sofa. It was expensive black leather, not particularly comfortable. Tonight it felt cold to lean his bare back against it. He had a chrome and glass coffee table, which he put his feet up on.

“Decorations by Harley,” he decided, looking around critically. Maybe he hadn’t ever really put his penchant for motorcycles behind him. This was what being tired did—made a man’s mind go places it didn’t generally go.

And tonight his apartment seemed to him a lonely place. Without personality and without soul.

Not to mention cold.

Abruptly, he got up, feeling as if he was being pulled by a magnet. He went down the narrow stairs to the office below. There was only ash left from Holly’s fire, so he carefully rebuilt it, enjoying the ritual of shaving kindling, lighting the match, blowing the embers to life, feeding in progressively larger wood. He liked his fires man-sized, not like those little piddly things she lit.

By the time he had the fire roaring, his ice cream was nearly melted, but he settled himself on her sofa, the afghan over it warming his bare back, and sighed with something that dangerously approached contentment. It was cozy down here.

But difficult as hell not to think about her when it was all her little touches that made this room so much nicer than the one directly above it.

The truth was he couldn’t believe Holly Lamb had told him she’d think about allowing him to escort her to the Coltons’ dance. That was almost a no.

From her. Miss Mousey.

What had he expected? The truth? He’d expected her to fall all over herself saying yes, because that’s what women, in his experience, did.

Women with a hell of a lot more on the go than her. Looks. Sophistication. Polish. Great bodies.

He did not look at this assessment in the light of being conceited, it was just his experience of reality. He asked women out, they said yes. Women liked him. Beautiful women liked him. It had driven his roommates in college crazy, before they’d begun to twist it to their advantage.

“Invite Fallon along. He’s a babe magnet. Great leftovers.”

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