“Come on, Rory,” he replied, only slightly reassured. “I’ll put the bags in place. You tie them.” He headed cautiously toward a piebald llama.
“Dad, meet Fred.”
Fred emitted a sound like high tension wires that Garrett could only hope came from the front end of the beast.
“He’s humming!” Rory looked thrilled to be among these strange-looking creatures. In that, he didn’t take after his father. As a kid Garrett had never been allowed a pet.
“So, how do you keep them clean?” his son asked Samantha. “I can’t picture giving one of these guys a bath.”
“They’d get bathed only if I were going to show them,” she replied. “Which I’m not. Everybody here stays happy with a lot of rolling in the dust on their part and some very careful brushing on mine. And spring shearing.”
For the first time, the woman’s speech pattern, her cultured inflection, fully registered with Garrett. He took note of her spotless designer jeans, her expensive boots and her carefully ironed shirt—some soft material in a grayish-green—nothing from the local discount store. Stuff Noelle would have picked out. The Weston woman seemed to know what she was doing with the llamas, but she sure didn’t look or sound as if she belonged on a North Carolina farm.
“Can I do it as part of my job?” Rory asked her. “Brush ’em, I mean.”
“I’ll teach you if you really want. It’s tricky. Llamas are very sensitive to touch. Their coats can be full of static. And more than that, you have to earn their trust….”
Garrett listened with surprise to his son and this stranger talking easily. Rory had spoken more words in the past five minutes than he had in the entire week he’d been in Applegate. As a father, he wanted to be a part of the conversation, too.
He fell back on what every resident asked a newcomer. “So, Samantha, where are you from originally?”
She looked as if he’d asked her for her Social Security and bank account numbers plus the key to her house. At that moment the instincts of both father and sheriff kicked in. It wouldn’t be a bad idea to run a check on his son’s employer.
Samantha tried to keep her features neutral. “I’ve lived too many places to count,” she replied with her pat answer. It wasn’t a lie. Although the Virginia estate outside D.C. had always been the family home, as an adult she’d traveled the world for the hotel business.
“Army brat?”
Rechecking a cinch, she pretended not to have heard the question.
“How do you come to run a llama trekking business in western North Carolina?” he persisted.
She wasn’t about to tell him about the rehab center just outside Asheville, recommended by an old family friend, and its program, wherein residents took turns caring for a Noah’s ark assortment of animals. She’d fallen in love with Pogo the llama. Actually, she’d fallen in love with the calm and purposeful woman she’d become in the llama’s presence.
She inspected a strap Rory had tightened. “Good work,” she said, then turned to the sheriff. “Who wouldn’t want to do this if they had the opportunity?”
As he lifted the last piece of baggage from the ground, the glance he gave her said he knew she was being deliberately evasive. But he didn’t pursue the issue.
She took the pack from his hands and headed for Percy as the sound of the Rockbrook Camp van floated up the road. Good. She didn’t need any more questions from Sheriff McQuire. Nor any more looks. If her father was a steamroller in a tux, and her ex-almost-fiancé a fox in the henhouse, she suspected this man was a walking, talking lie detector. She preferred staying off his register.
“It seems like you have things under control,” he said, his manner brusque. “Son, see you at supper.”
“Okay.” Rory eyed the giggling girls piling out of the van with as much trepidation as Samantha felt for his father’s questions. “I’m gonna clean up that garbage in the pasture near the road.” And before the lead camper could reach him, he bolted.
Samantha didn’t see the sheriff leave. She made herself busy settling the girls and giving them the basic instructions that would lead to a happy trail experience. As she talked, as she demonstrated what to do, over the girls’ questions and the llamas’ gentle humming, she began to feel at ease. Despite the possibility that her parents or the paparazzi could invade her sanctuary at any moment or that Rory’s father could reveal her as a fraud, she refused to be driven from her new life. These campers didn’t care that she was an heiress. This land didn’t care that she was a recovering alcoholic. Her llamas didn’t care about her background as a deb. They cared about her present behavior. A kind word. A gentle touch. Those were things that Samantha could offer from the heart. It was an authentic start. She would not let others spoil it.
THOUGHTS OF NOELLE AND RORY and the perplexing new owner of Whistling Meadows weighing on his mind, Garrett eased his cruiser up the rutted trail on the Whittaker property—one of many old logging roads that crisscrossed the area. Lily Whittaker had called him to say her son Mack had taken his shotgun and a full bottle of Jack Daniel’s and had left the house without a word. She was worried. It wasn’t hunting season.
Garrett was worried, too.
Mack Whittaker had been his best deputy. And his best friend. Hired because of his army training, Mack had successfully juggled work for the Sheriff’s Department with a continued Armed Forces commitment in the reserves. He had seen active duty in the reserves in a call-up to Iraq. Garrett had promised him his position when he got back. Trouble was, Stateside again, Mack didn’t seem to want the job anymore. Or Garrett’s friendship. Or any part of his previous life. He’d broken up with his longtime girlfriend. His mama said he was a bear to live with. His daddy said his eyes looked like those of a dead man. After one nasty brawl in town, he shunned old friends and acquaintances entirely. People reported seeing him in odd places, on foot tramping the side of the roads, sometimes crossing fields, sometimes lying way up on Lookout Rock, motionless, a bottle in his hand. He rarely drove. He never spoke.
Garrett approached their boyhood hideout with caution. He knew what worried Lily most, but if Mack had taken a full bottle of whiskey, he wasn’t planning on doing away with himself before he did away with the contents of that bottle. Drunk, however, Mack might turn the shotgun on an intruder.
Garrett didn’t feel like an intruder here. The big old cave had been Mack’s and his fortress as boys. Garrett’s refuge. His foster parents had been conscientious enough, sometimes even kind, but Garrett had never felt he fit in anywhere until the first day of school in third grade when Mack had come to his defense on the playground. Even at eight, Mack had had an inordinate sense of fair play. After that the two had been like brothers.
The man staggering on the ledge in front of the cave, however, didn’t look like Garrett’s brother or his friend. Unshaven, hair wild, dirty clothes in disarray, Mack looked like a vagrant ready for a sober-up stay in jail.
“Get out of here!” he shouted as Garrett stepped out of the cruiser. “Don’t want your sermons. Or your pity.”
“When did I ever preach to you?” Garrett stood not ten feet away. He could see the half-empty bottle of booze and the shotgun lying on the pebble-strewn ground. He wasn’t leaving without either his friend or the gun. “But you’ve been back a month now. Don’t you think it’s time you let someone know what’s gnawing at your gut?”
Mack sank against the mossy embankment near the cave entrance. “Even if I told you, you couldn’t begin to understand.”
“Try me.” Garrett suspected part of Mack’s despair was that he’d returned from war while one of his unit—one of their high school classmates, Nate Dona-hue—had not.
“Sheriff—” the word was spoken with uncustomary