A Hasty Wedding. Cara Colter

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 run Tomas over to the Coltons?” she suggested softly.

      “Is 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