been helping you. Playtime,” he informed the woman’s photograph just before closing the file and putting it into his folder, “is over. It’s time for you to pay the piper.”
Smiling grimly, Josh left the office.
Thanks to the special trust fund her late father had set up for her, unlike many people her age, thirty-one-year-old Leonor Colton didn’t need to work. She wanted to work. Wanted to put her art degree to use and do something that made her feel as if she was contributing in some small way to society. That was why she had initially taken that unpaid internship at the Austin Art Museum. While others might have floated along, especially since they weren’t getting paid, Leonor worked exceptionally hard. She put in long hours, coming in early and staying late, long after the museum had been closed to the public.
All this hard work managed to impress Adam Sheffield, the director who was in charge of the museum, so much so that once her internship was over, he offered her the job of assistant curator. She took it gladly and worked her way up to her current position of curator.
For a while, Leonor thought, looking back now, things had seemed as if they were going quite well for her. Better than well. She had managed to hold her head high, despite the devastating scandal that had all but ripped her family apart. Because of her mother’s arrest and subsequent conviction—something that neither she nor any of her siblings saw coming—they had gone from being at the pinnacle of Shadow Creek’s community to being objects of everyone else’s contempt.
Leonor had risen above the gossip and mean-spirited talk, ignoring it and going on with her life. She’d gotten her education—a degree in the arts—and a job she loved in her chosen field. Even her love life had taken a much-needed turn for the better.
Or so she had thought.
Up until that point, the redheaded, green-eyed Leonor had only dated sporadically and she had never had a serious relationship—possibly because of the love ’em and leave ’em example that her mother had set for all of them.
And then David Marshall had come along.
Handsome, charming and oh-so-smooth, David had completely swept her off her feet in what amounted to record time. Looking back, Leonor couldn’t believe how quickly she’d surrendered to him, taking down her barriers and opening up her heart. She must have been crazy. But from the bottom of that isolated heart, she had honestly believed that David Marshall was the man she was meant to marry.
Desperately needing to have someone to talk to and trust, in a short amount of time Leonor had completely opened herself up to him and told David not just who she was, but also made him privy to all of her family’s numerous and heretofore well-kept secrets.
It felt so wonderful to finally open up to someone, to have someone she could really talk to without being afraid of any sort of censorship or being looked down upon judgmentally.
She should have been afraid, Leonor thought ruefully now. Considering everything she had been through with her mother’s arrest, she should have been leery, not trusting.
Water under the bridge, she thought regretfully.
A few months ago, after things seemed to be going so well, she woke up one morning to find that David was not only gone from her bed, but gone, it soon became apparent, from her life, as well. And not long after that she found out that he had not only stolen her heart, but he’d taken a very large chunk of her money with him as well. No note, no explanation, not even an argument to serve as a foreshadowing of things to come.
He had just vanished without any warning.
It wasn’t the money she missed. Because of the way the trust fund had been set up, there was more than enough money left, money that David hadn’t been able to get his hands on. But she wasn’t angry about that. She was angry, hurt and confused because he had left her for no good reason.
Or so she thought.
But everything fell into place when one day she’d opened up her computer, logged onto the internet and saw that her family’s story was splashed all over the home page of Everything’s Blogger in Texas, a local gossip site.
Reading the first installment—she couldn’t pull her eyes away—Leonor felt like such a fool.
She still felt that way. All those things David had said to her—he had just been playing her, lying to her so that she would trust him and learn to confide in him, telling him all of her family’s secrets. Secrets he then turned around and sold to the blog.
Leonor felt incredibly stupid and used. And horribly crushed.
In its own way, this was as devastating to her as her mother’s arrest had been that awful, awful day over ten years ago when the law enforcement officers had descended on the sprawling mansion that she and her brothers and sisters called home.
At first, after David’s disappearance and bitter betrayal, she had sought refuge in her position at the museum. But it didn’t help her keep her mind off what a fool she had been. So she’d gone to her boss and asked Sheffield for a leave of absence in the hopes that if she went somewhere else, she’d be able to somehow pull herself together.
“I’m not losing you, am I, Leonor?” Adam Sheffield had asked, concerned as he sat with her in his office, looking at her across his cluttered desk. “Because, I don’t mind telling you, in all my years here, you’re the best curator I’ve ever had.” He’d leaned forward, lowering his voice and creating an air of privacy. “If it’s a matter of more money—”
She’d been quick to shoot that supposition down. “No, it’s not that, Mr. Sheffield. I don’t want more money.”
“Shorter hours, then,” he proposed, guessing at the reason behind her unanticipated request. “I know I’ve been relying on you a great deal—maybe too much—but you’re so damn good at this that—”
She’d stopped the director mid-sentence again. “Thank you, sir, but it’s not the hours, either, Mr. Sheffield.” Leonor went on to appeal to his kinder side. “I just need to get away for a while, pull myself together. I haven’t seen my family for a long time and I think it might be time to go back home for a little while.”
“But not permanently.” It was more of a request than a question. He’d looked at her nervously, obviously afraid of the answer he might get.
“No, not permanently,” Leonor replied.
In all honesty, she didn’t know if she wouldn’t just turn around and return to Austin after a few days in Shadow Creek. She didn’t know how welcome—or unwelcome—she’d be turning up in Shadow Creek after all this time and in the wake of that lurid blog exposé.
Oh, she knew that she could stay at Mac’s ranch, perhaps even indefinitely. Her former stepfather, Joseph Mackenzie, her mother’s former ranch foreman as well as the father of her half brother, Thorne, had made that perfectly clear, even before she had used some of her money to help him bail out his ranch a few years ago.
Mac had always had a special relationship with all of her mother’s children, not just with her or with his own son. Mac was a kind, decent person and the kind of man she would have really loved to have for a father, even temporarily, as was her
