she said. “Great, really. All eight contestants were at the cocktail party, and everyone was pumped up for the road trip.” While most of their crew had just gone into the small local town half an hour from the ranch, Angela had driven into Palm Desert. While there, she’d stopped by the hotel that had a contract with Family Secrets for contestant accommodation.
“The bus is confirmed for a nine a.m. pickup, which will have everyone here by eleven. We can give them the abbreviated tour of the ranch and have them on stage inspecting their kitchens by noon. The bus will be bringing the catered lunch. We should be filming segments by twelve thirty and have them out of here no later than two, which will have them back to the hotel around four, giving them a full evening to enjoy Palm Desert.”
They’d made it a condition of the show that contestants’ flights back home had to be Sunday, not Saturday evening as sometimes happened when they filmed in the Palm Desert studio.
They talked a bit more about the logistics of the next day’s events. About the interviews Natasha planned to do that would be a bit different from every other show’s because she wanted to tie the unique ranch setting in to something personal for every contestant. Something to convince viewers to root for each one. That was her job. To draw in the viewers who continued, after five years of watching four five-week segments a year, to make the show such an unexpected success.
Mostly she was talking to keep Angela awake, to keep her company, while she made the seemingly endless trek back across the desert.
She was talking so she didn’t think about being a city girl. About a rancher who didn’t like city girls. About two little motherless kids who’d loved her chocolate chip cookies. About the glob of peanut butter she’d cleaned up off the floor of the stage, and the smears off the counter, when she’d done her final walk-through just before dinner that evening.
Her mind wandered through all of those thoughts, though, as Angela ran through lists they’d both been over already for the first official event in their very first show on the road. Angela listed which crew members would be staying behind at the ranch Saturday night to clean up and ready the set for the first competition the next week.
“You’ve got dinner with Chandler Grey tomorrow night,” her assistant reminded her when they’d exhausted the next day’s details.
She’d shockingly forgotten about the business meal back home in Palm Desert with one of their cable network’s executives.
Her mind appeared to have taken a long trek away from home, out here on the ranch.
“I’m looking forward to it,” she said with real enthusiasm. She’d been away only for a couple of days, but it seemed like weeks. She missed the city. Missed her condominium.
Missed her usual unflappable calm.
“I think he has the hots for you,” Angela was saying now.
“He’s married.”
“Separated. I hear his wife was unfaithful.”
She still wasn’t interested.
“You haven’t been on a date in months.” Angela was really digging deep for conversation now.
While her assistant wasn’t in a committed relationship, either, she went out several times a week. Mostly with the same guy. Natasha’s theory was that if he asked Angela to be exclusive, she would be. If he asked her to marry him, she’d do that, too—not that she volunteered either theory to Angela.
“I’m not the marrying kind, and men my age are looking for commitment.” That wasn’t entirely true. There were plenty of men who were willing just to have fun, but she wasn’t interested in their kind of fun.
The show was her life. It fulfilled her. And made her so happy she didn’t ever even question her personal choices.
She knew what drove her. Knew her goals. She knew who she was. And knew what she could and could not let others expect from her. She knew what promises she could and could not make.
“I know Johnny hurt you, Natasha, but it’s been almost a year...”
Johnny Campbell. Her “Stan.” The man she’d thought would be her companion for life. They were best friends. Good together. Neither of them were interested in cohabitating or giving up their autonomy.
He was a stockbroker, a mover and shaker who worked unending hours. He’d been her stockbroker. Until she found out he’d been stealing from her. Telling her he was investing her money when what he’d been doing was gambling with it.
Thankfully she’d found out during one of his winning streaks and hadn’t lost as much as she might have.
“I’m not still hurting over Johnny,” she said now, a bit surprised to feel how completely true those words were. “I’m open to dating on occasion. I just haven’t met anyone who tempts me to spend time with him more than the show tempts me to spend time with it.”
Also true.
She was thirty-one, not twenty, and knew that her chances of finding a companionship as open-ended as the one she’d shared with Johnny were dwindling.
She just didn’t dwell on the fact. She wasn’t going to let panic or fear for her future change her mind about what she knew she needed in her present.
Like her mother, she was too bossy, too impatient, too strong and independent to be good in a commitment like marriage.
As she sat there, talking Angela all the way back to the ranch, she found peace with her day. Her mother’s breakup with Stan...it was okay. Because her mother was truly okay with it. She’d made the choice that was best for her, the one she could live with, be good at, be happy with. Which made it the right choice.
Whew.
Getting ready for bed an hour later, Natasha was humming to herself. The day had been rough. Touch and go for a second or two there. But she’d made it through.
And was ready to embrace her world in the morning.
* * *
SPENCER WAS UP before dawn. He checked on Ellie. Had a meeting with Bryant to ensure that he had no immediate problems on the ranch. The ranch hands were handling several tasks that day—fixing a fence that was showing wear, checking a couple of cows from the stock herd who were close to calving, seeing to a bull that had been seen limping on one of the camera monitors, receiving a large load of hay that was being shipped...
And Spencer was packing a lunch of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches on wheat bread with potato chips and apple slices. As soon as the twins were up, they were heading out for a day of four-wheeling. Spencer driving and the twins strapped in beside him. Far enough away from the compound that Justin couldn’t somehow create havoc among the ranch visitors that day.
He had the TV filming schedule. And though his kids were tired, he kept them off-roading, laughing over dips in hills and taking small mountains like pros, until well after the tour bus had been scheduled to roll off his property with all Family Secrets contestants on board.
Making a mental note to give Bryant the rundown on the state of more fence lines he’d inspected that day, he fed the kids an early dinner and left them with Betsy while
