Single-Dad Sheriff

“Perhaps.” She looked as if she knew something about his old friend that he didn’t.

“I’ll check in later anyway.”

“No need,” she insisted in an echo of his own words earlier. “Red and I are good.”

Dissatisfied, he got in the car. This morning he’d set two goals at the top of his mental to-do list: help Mack and run a background check on Rory’s employer. And what had he accomplished at the end of the day? Damn little.

Samantha watched the sheriff leave. Having deliberately sought solitude to put her life back together, why had she stuck out her neck just then?

Trying to avoid her own question, she made her way to the barn to ready the equipment for tomorrow’s lunch-and-wine trek with a group of retirees from Atlanta. She wanted everything to be a go when she got back from her early-morning AA meeting.

Not five minutes into her work, Percy poked his head over the pasture-side half door. Ever since she’d brought him into the paddock two weeks ago to treat a split and infected toenail, he’d decided he liked her company more than his fellow pack animals’ and had shown an uncanny propensity to act more human than llama. And more nosy than most. Today it was apparent he was going to stick around to see what was what.

What, exactly, was what?

Why had she come out of hiding to help Mack Whittaker? The sheriff’s buddy, no less. As Percy eyed her, she told herself she wasn’t hiding. She told herself Samantha Weston wasn’t an alias. Samantha had been her paternal grandmother’s first name, and Weston her maternal grandmother’s maiden name. She hoped combining and using the two now was less lie and more homage to a pair of women who had led purposeful lives. She wanted to do the same.

And if you led a purposeful life, you didn’t just let a fellow human being self-destruct as Mack seemed intent on doing. She recognized his pain. Maybe it was time she dug deep inside herself, to see how strong she really was, to see what she had to offer.

A daunting proposition.

“Mind your own business,” she said to Percy, who continued to stare at her. Llamas could seem unsettlingly perceptive. “Go hang out with the boys.”

He didn’t, and she finished her business in the barn under his soulful gaze.

True to his word, Garrett returned later that evening, but he checked in at the bunkhouse without as much as a hello to her. She told herself it was just as well. Of course, she was telling herself a lot of things lately, some of them helpful, but many of them obvious rationalizations.

EARLY WEDNESDAY MORNING Garrett drove Rory to work at Whistling Meadows only to be met by Red.

“We need to see to the fence—” the older man said to Rory, hefting the bicycle out of the trunk “—before the Duchess gets back. Someone damaged a length of it by ramming it with a tractor or an ATV, maybe. I have my suspicions as to who mighta done it, but I’ll take care of those in my own good time. I’ve got the fence supplies in my truck. Let’s get a move on.”

“I’ll go see Mack,” Garrett said.

“He’s not here,” Red replied, wheeling Rory’s bike to the side of the porch. “The Duchess took him to her AA meeting.”

“Her AA meeting?”

“She goes like clockwork every morning after early chores.”

That little bomb had barely gone off when Garrett thought of something else. “But she doesn’t drive, and Mack—”

“Her sponsor picks her up.” Red got in his truck and Rory followed. “Don’t worry about Mack. He’s in good hands. The Duchess may look like a china doll, but she’s one tough cookie.”

Standing in a cloud of dust as Red drove away, Garrett didn’t know what perplexed him more. That elegant and in-control Samantha attended AA, or that she’d succeeded in getting Mack to accept help. Where he’d failed. Suddenly, he felt his world slip sideways. Not only had his best friend put himself in the hands of a stranger, but his son was working his first real job—had taken off just now without a backward glance—even as his ex-wife plotted a new life overseas. None of this involved Garrett, and it stung.

It wasn’t that he needed to feel in charge. He just wanted some say in the matter. And on those three issues he had none.

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