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CHAPTER FOUR

“IS HE DEAD?”

“Dead drunk.” Garrett surveyed Mack, collapsed and motionless, on Samantha’s porch. How had he managed to walk here from the Whittaker property with all that whiskey in him?

“Do you know who he is?” Samantha looked at Garrett with an extraordinary degree of equanimity. He could think of several women in town whom he’d known since childhood, yet those very women would be all bent out of shape in this situation. Had been in similar situations.

“I know him,” he replied, unwilling to give out too much information. “Mack Whittaker.” He began to calculate what it would take to get his friend’s six-four, two-hundred-pound-plus frame into the cruiser. Although the men were equally matched size-wise, Garrett was at a disadvantage when Mack was unconscious and Garrett was doing all the work.

“Is someone missing him?” Without so much as wrinkling her nose, Samantha knelt beside Mack’s none-too-clean form. Garrett found himself staring at the curls of blond hair floating around her face, found himself noting that her porcelain complexion wasn’t the norm around here. He worried a little at the hint of sunburn across her nose and cheeks, before catching himself. She looked up at him. Her eyes were actually the softest shade of hazel, not brown as he’d first thought, but her gaze was penetrating. “A wife maybe?”

“N-no. No wife. Parents.” He pulled himself back into professional mode. “But I don’t want Miss Lily to see her son like this. She’s worried enough about him as is. I’ll call for backup. Let him sleep it off in a jail cell. Clean him up when he wakes.”

“Is he dangerous?”

“No.” He didn’t want to add, only to himself. It would be an admission on Garrett’s part of how low his old buddy had sunk, of how grim the road to recovery seemed and how little Garrett had been able to help. He wasn’t ready to throw in the towel yet, even if Mack was.

“Then let him stay here,” she said, standing. As if she was in charge. In fact, the way she spoke, the way she carried herself, said she was accustomed to giving orders. And used to having those orders followed.

“You don’t even know him.”

“But I know something about—”

Red Harris drove up then, interrupting their conversation. Too bad. Garrett couldn’t imagine how Samantha could possibly relate to this sorry-looking piece of humanity taking up floor space on her porch. As different from her as night and day.

Red jumped out of his truck. “Ziggy Newsome told me he saw Mack heading this way. None too steady on his feet, he said.” With concern on his craggy features, he studied Samantha. “Did he scare you, Duchess?”

“I’m okay now. But at first I thought he was dead.”

“He couldn’t look much worse if he was.” Red turned to Garrett. “You want help gettin’ him in the car?”

“Yeah. Thanks.”

“Wait!” Samantha put out a hand to stop them. “I still think he should stay here. Until he sobers up.”

“Don’t take this the wrong way,” Garrett replied, squatting to get a grip under Mack’s armpits, “but you’re crazy. A jail cell’s the place for him until he comes round.”

“On second thought, maybe she isn’t crazy,” Red countered, hefting Mack from under his knees. “He’d be right pissed with you if he woke up in front of coworkers. Humiliated. Let’s carry him to the bunkhouse. I’ll keep an eye on him.”

Garrett was still skeptical. “You don’t have to do this, Red.”

“I know I don’t. But everyone—me included—has a story about Mack helping ’em at one time or another. He’s good people. Laid a little low, is all.”

Samantha seemed to hang on every word.

Garrett could fully understand Red’s feelings, but he couldn’t get a handle on hers.

“Duchess,” Red said, “get the bunkhouse door for us. The sheriff and I’ll haul Mack along as best we can.”

Even with the two of them, they had to sidle cautiously, Mack’s dead weight hanging between them. Inside the old bunkhouse Samantha stood beside a bed in the corner of what used to be the foreman’s room.

“Not there!” Red exclaimed. “That’s my bed and I just put on fresh sheets. I may be a Good Samaritan, but I’m no saint. Let’s get him on a bunk in the workers’ dorm, next room over.”

Garrett was glad to finally lay Mack down. That whole “He ain’t heavy, he’s my brother” saying was a crock.

“You’ll let me know when he’s conscious?” Samantha asked Red. “I want to talk to him.”

“Sure.”

She then turned to Garrett. “I’ll see you to your cruiser.”

“No need.” He wondered what Samantha could possibly have to say to Mack.

Despite the brush-off, she followed anyway. “This man works for the sheriff’s department?”

“He’s on leave.” It wasn’t any of her business. Besides, he didn’t like being questioned. Especially about things beyond his control. “Plus, he’s a buddy from way back. So…what’s your interest?”

She leveled her cool gaze at him. There was strength and resolve beneath that sophisticated exterior. You could tell by being three minutes in her company. What he didn’t know—yet—was what made her tick. Why she’d picked Applegate in the first place. Why, after being a quiet newcomer to this point, she’d chosen to get involved with Mack, of all people.

“Do you want us to call you?” she asked, “When—Mack, did you say?—is in better shape?”

“I’ll circle back in a while. If you wait until he gets his feet under him, he may be gone before you know it.”

“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.