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
