attended her court-ordered AA meetings. Although her name change hadn’t been sanctioned by the judge, she was Samantha Weston only in Colum County. For personal reasons. All her business transactions bore the corporation name she’d established three months ago. A holdover reflex from her former life. Perhaps this bit of hedging meant she hadn’t really disowned her past. She was glad Percy wasn’t around to give her that soul-searching llama look.
“Garrett McQuire. Rory’s dad.” The sheriff held out his hand. He was tall and fit. Muscles were evident beneath a well-pressed uniform. Not much else showed, though. His facial features were well concealed beneath a Stetson and behind aviator sunglasses. Stereotypical, sure. But arresting.
“Samantha Weston.” She tried not to be tentative in her handshake. “I run this place.”
“She says I can work the summer.” Rory still looked pleased, but a note of defensiveness had crept into his voice. Did the sheriff run his family the way he ran his department? “Maybe I could fill in other vacations, too, if Mom knows I’d be making money.”
“You’ll have to work that out with your mother, son. And Ms. Weston, of course.”
Samantha didn’t want to get into the middle of a custody mess. “Let’s see how the next few days work out,” she said. “You may change your mind. The work I need done isn’t particularly glamorous.”
“But the llamas are cool, Dad. You gotta meet ’em.”
“Another time, okay? Now I’m due at the courthouse. I’ll be late tonight, too. Geneva will have your supper ready for you. She can stay if you want to play cards or video games.”
“I don’t need a babysitter,” Rory mumbled.
“I know you don’t. But you might want company.” He turned to Samantha. All business. “Good to meet you. And welcome to Applegate.”
Rory seemed relieved when it was just the two of them again. “What should I do first?”
“Let’s go meet Mr. Harris. He used to own this land, and now lives in the bunkhouse. Although he doesn’t work anymore, he still supervises.”
Rory grinned. “Gotcha. Kinda like Geneva. She doesn’t babysit. She supervises.”
Red Harris, crafting fishing lures, was sitting in a rocking chair on the bunkhouse porch as they climbed the steep and rocky hill. “This here the new help?”
“You don’t miss much,” Samantha replied. “Mr. Harris, this is Rory McQuire.”
Rory stuck out his hand.
The old man took it and hung on. “Now’s a good time to get something straight.” He looked directly at Samantha. “I’m not Mr. Harris. I’m Red. And since you, missy, are young enough to be my granddaughter, and you, kid, could be my great-grandson, I sure would appreciate it if we all stuck to first names. Red, Sam and Rory okay with you two?”
Both Samantha and Rory, a little taken aback, nodded as Red shook Rory’s hand forcefully. “You any good makin’ lures?”
“Mr. Harris…Red.” Samantha felt the need for a preemptive strike. “I hired Rory to do cleanup around the property. Maybe minor repairs. To help with the tack and equipment—”
“Just kiddin’,” Red cut in with a wink to Rory. “If I had help with my lures, I’d get done twice as fast. Then what excuse would I have to sit on the porch and see how a city slicker runs a hardscrabble farm?” He chortled, and Samantha wondered at his assessment of her. She hadn’t mentioned to him where she’d come from. “Let me tell you, kid,” he continued, “weird doin’ ashe’s doin’a helluva lot better than my good-for-nothin’ nephew woulda, had he got his greedy mitts on the property.”
As Samantha resisted the point-of-pride urge to tell Red she’d grown up feeling far more comfortable in her father’s stables and pastures than at her mother’s posh parties, her BlackBerry vibrated. The caller ID told her it was her mom.
“I have to take this,” she said to Rory. “You can start by clearing the tree branches from the paddock.” The tumultuous winds of a thunderstorm last night had strewn her property with debris. “I’ll be with you in a minute.”
As she walked away, she heard Red say to Rory, “I might have to come up with a new name for her. She really isn’t a Sam. Not at all. More like a Duchess…”
“Mother,” she said quietly into the phone.
“Darling, how are you?” Her mother’s concern was, and always had been, genuine.
“I’m wonderful.” It was becoming the truth.
“Then, perhaps, your father and I could visit—”
“Please, we all agreed with Dr. Kumar. I need a total change. A year off.”
“From us as well?” Her mother’s voice held hurt.
“From everything.”
“You know, dear, we’re not the enemy.”
“I know that. But my old habits are. I need time to forge new ones. Healthy ones.”
“In secret?”
“Not secret. Seclusion.”
“But why?”
“Because I’m vulnerable right now. And you know Dad. A steamroller in a tux.” She smiled at the thought of the man she loved with an only child’s devotion. “If I saw him, I’d be persuaded right back into the rat race.”
“May I remind you Ashley International Hotels is a five-star rat race?”
“You know what I mean.”
“And…now that we’ve broached the subject… will you be attending the opening of the Singapore Ashley? You worked so hard to get it up and running.”
Samantha didn’t quite know how to answer. Although she and her father had worked side by side on the project, although she knew it was his way of introducing her to the world as his heir in the luxury hotel corporation he’d grown from a small chain of economy lodges, she wouldn’t be in Singapore for this event. Her heart wasn’t in it. For her father’s sake, she wished it were. But no matter that she had been immersed in the business from an early age and that her father implicitly believed in her—she wasn’t a hotelier. Because she’d almost self-destructed trying to be someone she wasn’t, she needed to find out who she might be.
“I did my job,” she replied cautiously, “so that others could take over. And they will. Beautifully. With you and Dad there it will be a gala opening.”
“Of course it will, but we’ll miss you, darling. We do miss you. We only want you to be happy.”
“Thank you. I’m working on it.”
“Justin wants to know if he can call you.”
“No.” Justin Steele was her ex-almost-fiancé. She’d come to think of him as the fox in the henhouse. “When he proposed, I was very clear we had
