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
