Single-Dad Sheriff. Amy Frazier

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 no future together.”

      “Oh, darling, that was the stress talking.”

      No. Of all the things she’d done to please others, turning down Justin had been the first genuine action she’d taken for herself. She wouldn’t debate her mother on the issue.

      After a long silence, her mother tried a different approach. “Can you give me a tiny hint as to where you are?”

      “Mother!” As much as she missed her parents, Samantha needed this time. Alone. She didn’t need her mother’s well- intentioned meddling. And she certainly didn’t need the intrusion of the paparazzi that had followed her arrest and court date. “I’m counting on you to honor Dr. Kumar’s advice, and to make sure Dad doesn’t send Max out on the trail.” Max was the personal detective her father kept on retainer.

      “You flatter me. I have very little real control over your father. As you say, a steamroller in a tux.”

      “I’m not trying to hide from you, Mother. Every day I feel stronger and stronger. But before I come home, I want to make certain I’m strong enough to avoid a repeat of—”

      “An unfortunate incident. There’s no need to bring it up.”

      “But part of my recovery is accepting responsibility.”

      “Darling, you had a drink or two during a social occasion. We all do. No matter what the judge thought, you are not a drunk.”

      “An alcoholic. A recovering alcoholic. And, over time, it was more than a couple drinks. In fact, so many drinks at that particular luncheon I don’t even remember the school zone—”

      “No!” The single syllable pierced the distance between mother and daughter. “You paid your debt. Can we, please, not relive it all?” her mother pleaded.

      “Agreed. I’d like to focus on the present. And right now the sky is blue, the sun is shining and I’m breathing the most wonderful fresh air.”

      “Sea air? The Hamptons, perhaps? That lovely spa on the far end—?”

      “Mother, you’re incorrigible.”

      “Well, Dr. Kumar may have prescribed a year’s rest, but you’re not going to keep the location secret for the whole time, are you?”

      “No. I just need to settle in.” It had been three months since her rather secret—to keep the newshounds away—release from rehab. At first she hadn’t wanted her parents to know her new location because she was afraid of being drawn back into her old life. Now,