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Sultan, Colorado

January

RORY GORENZI WAS on time for the 10:00 a.m. meeting with her father. She was usually punctual and she’d never lost a job because of absenteeism or tardiness. She’d lost none of her previous jobs because of incompetence, either. Instead, she had lost them for speaking before thinking—or, rather, for speaking her mind as her thoughts occurred.

It was imperative that she keep her mouth shut now. She wouldn’t say anything unless her father required her to speak.

But she would focus on the conversation at hand, rather than dwelling on her recent loss or on the other minor problem in her personal life. The problem wasn’t really her problem: a disagreement among her fire-dancing/belly-dancing troupe regarding a living creature in the household they shared. A living creature that had long since ceased to be useful to their troupe, a living creature that no zoo or reptile rescue facility had so far agreed to adopt.

It was a bad situation, but Rory couldn’t think about it now.

Nor could she think about her beloved pet, Gandalf, now, or she would break down in tears. The vet had put down the old dog after a long illness only the day before. Now, he was out of pain, at last, and she mustn’t cry about that.

In his office at the Sultan Mountain School, Kurt Gorenzi sat behind a scarred walnut desk, a remnant of Sultan’s earlier mining days. His hair was thick, gray-flecked, wavy, a little long. Rory’s curls, sun-lightened brown and reaching to her waist, had come from him, from her father. As had her nose—straight, lightly dusted with freckles. And her brown eyes.

It was unlikely that her personality had been influenced by him, however, since she’d had little contact with him over the years, despite having grown up in the town of three hundred where he lived.

Kurt Gorenzi wore a plaid flannel shirt, Carhartts and Sorels. The driving force behind Sultan’s recently reborn economy looked like the unapproachable mountain man he was. He stood when she entered, considered her formally, did not invite her to sit—and did the talking. “You’ll be forming the program for Seamus Lee’s family,” he said. “I’ve given them the Empire Street house, and they’re bringing a dog.”

A dog.

Gandalf had been fourteen, old for a German shepherd.

She blinked away the thought of Seamus Lee’s dog. Rory was unlikely to have another of her own—not now, in any case. She lived with the two other members of Caldera, one of whom was allergic to both dogs and cats and had put up with Gandalf only because Rory had refused to live there without him.

“Seamus Lee is a cartoonist and animator,” Kurt continued. “He employs five people full-time in Telluride and is considering moving his business and family to Sultan. He has four children.”

Rory understood the importance of all this. Four children was four children’s worth of funding for the public school. Five full-time employees meant population and economic growth.

“He and I have known each other for—well—a while. We were skiing buddies years back, during a winter I spent in Telluride. He wants to get his kids out of there because he thinks they’re being corrupted by the…” He chose his words carefully. “Atmosphere of affluence.”

She pressed her lips tightly together, finishing his sentence in her mind. The atmosphere of affluence that you hope to bring to Sultan. Her self-restraint made her proud.

“But none of that is relevant. In fact, the family’s enrollment at the school wasn’t his idea. He received an anonymous gift package and he’s agreed to take it.

“They’re signed up for a three-month program, and I need you to plan activities that will give the kids each three months’ worth of school credit. Except for the youngest, who’s just four.”

“Four?” echoed Rory. The Sultan Mountain School provided an outdoor education, as well as academics, for children as young as kindergarten age and up to grade 12, and, in certain cases, even offered university credit. The academic work was tailored to complement outdoor programs and provide school credit for the periods enrolled children would be absent from their regular schools. The longest SMS program lasted three months.

“In this packet—” Kurt handed her a thick ten-by-thirteen envelope “—you’ll find background to fill you in on the Lees’ skills and interests.”

“Is the dad supposed to get school credit, too?” That didn’t sound the way she had intended it to sound. “I just mean,” she said, “what is he looking for?”

“Exactly what the Sultan Mountain School offers. Backcountry experience, tutorials in free-heel skiing and ice-climbing, natural history, mountain science…”

And more. The Sultan Mountain School was dedicated to “increasing appreciation for the mountain environment through education and experience.”

Of course, SMS wasn’t the only local enterprise that bore Kurt Gorenzi’s fingerprints. He was a town council member and he’d even helped create the Sultan Childhood Learning Center—ironic, thought Rory, considering how much he’d had to do with his own child’s early life. He’d led the push for the Sultan Recreation Center and had brought a chairlift to Silver Slope, the town’s small family ski area. He’d helped restore a historical mining tramway up into Eureka Gulch for the use of sightseers and had promoted kayaking and river rafting on the Sultana River. He’d done everything he could to keep the town of Sultan, elevation 9,632 feet, from dying. But this was the first time he’d made Rory part of one of his projects.

He hadn’t sought her out. She’d applied for the job of instructor and assistant director of the Sultan Mountain School. Her father had interviewed her, had made no comment regarding her extensive and varied work history and then he’d hired her. It was the first time in her life she’d ever asked him for anything. She couldn’t remember her mother, who’d died when she was small; she’d been raised by her mother’s mother. Her father had simply cut himself out of her life, although she knew he’d given Gran money every month to support them both financially.

And now, as during her interview, she was grateful to him for not mentioning the reason she’d been fired by the State of Colorado—which the entire town knew. She’d been an avalanche researcher with the misfortune to be in the field when a United States senator from Colorado accompanied a Realtor and a land developer into a backcountry area just outside Sultan. The group of visitors had stopped to ask about her work and she’d demonstrated the volatility of current avalanche conditions, using a snow pit she’d just dug. After they told her their destination, listened to her strenuous advice to avoid the area because of extreme avalanche danger and started forward anyway, she’d said, Are you on crack? Which was probably not the most tactful way to comment on their foolhardy behavior.

The senator, to his credit, had tried to prevent her from being fired—he was a politician after all and no doubt wanted her vote. But the Realtor also had friends in high places, and he had been massively annoyed.

Her previous job had been with the local towing company. Speaking too frankly to customers who told her how to use equipment they’d never been trained to use had cost her that job. Well, actually, it was one snowy night when she’d finally said, Fine. I’ve got other calls. Dig it out yourself.

She had taught skiing at Silver Slope until she’d told one parent that he was spoiling his daughter and turning her into a brat.

She’d taught avalanche-awareness classes over the mountains in Telluride until a wolf dog she was watching for a boyfriend destroyed four beacons and two shovels she’d left in her car. He’d also consumed the passenger seat, but since the avalanche school didn’t own that, it hadn’t figured in the complaint. Rory’d replaced the equipment, which had left her in debt, but it hadn’t mattered.

This time, however, nothing was going to go wrong. She reached for the packet. “Sounds good. When will they be here?”

His lips smiled slightly. “Today.”

Rory nodded. “I’ll get right on this, then. Thank you.” She didn’t say for what, because her gratitude took in so many things. Thank you for giving me a chance. Thank you for believing in me.

Thank you for noticing me.

She was at the door when her father spoke. “Where is the snake?”

Rory bit her lip. Of course her father knew about Lola; everyone in Sultan knew. He probably didn’t know Rory had just put down Gandalf. “At the house,” she said. “She’s…contained.”

“Maybe,” her father suggested, “you three should simply move her home outside.”

“Yes,” was all Rory said. Let Lola freeze in her reptile palace? At the moment, and despite Rory’s recent loss, the suggestion was not entirely unappealing. Besides, snakes were different from dogs, and Rory could not believe that Lola had any feelings whatsoever for her human family. Finally, she said simply, “She’s not my snake.”

Just a member of her household.

SEAMUS LEE HAD a career, money, four children and a recent ex-girlfriend who had left him burdened with a wealth of accusations he was having trouble clearing from his mind.

Every girlfriend you’ve had since Janine died has just been a glorified nanny.

Unfair. He’d always employed an au pair, in addition to Fiona Murray, who was essential to his household, far more than just a nanny or housekeeper.

And it’s not as though you’re any kind of a father. They might as well be orphans, Elizabeth, his ex, had continued.

He should never have gotten involved with one of his artists. Yes, she was a freelancer; and yes, she had income independent from what he provided. In fact, she was loaded and she worked because she wanted to, not because she had to. He’d wondered if she was behind the anonymous gift he’d received of a deluxe term at the Sultan Mountain School. Elizabeth had certainly approved.

The drive to Sultan will probably be the most time you’ve spent with them since their mother died, she’d said.

AND THAT, unfortunately, was true. So he’d accepted the gift without knowing who was behind it. He would spend this time with his children.

He would manage without Fiona.

Well, not the entire time. His seventy-three-year-old household manager would be joining them after a month of sea kayaking in Mexico with her son and his wife.

So alone he was taking the children out of school in Telluride, Colorado, where his own business—the empire of Ki-Rin, the manga and anime character, half-boy, half-dragon—thrived, and over two mountain passes to Sultan to spend three months at the Sultan Mountain School. There, the children would receive school credit while improving their skills as snowboarders, skiers and mountaineers and learning mountain science. The characteristics of aspens and ponderosa pines, the mechanics of avalanches, the rules of water. Four-year-old Belle would learn to ski. And Seamus would demonstrate that “we never stop learning,” by completing the three-month course alongside them.

He would also prove that he was not the stranger to his own children that his ex-girlfriend had seemed to think he was. At least she hadn’t also become an ex-employee.

I have no problem with your art, she’d said. It’s very accessible. But you’re not.

Not emotionally accessible?

Well, there might be reasons.

As there was also a reason—a good reason—why he approached any time alone with his children with extreme caution. There was part of his emotional makeup that he definitely wanted to keep inaccessible to them, for the sake of the family’s survival.

He drove a new Toyota SUV hybrid, the latest in nanny cars. It was his first trip anywhere in the vehicle, which had been the previous au pair’s car while she lived with them.

Now, fourteen-year-old Lauren had claimed the front passenger seat. In the back, twelve-year-old Beau and seven-year-old Caleb took the window seats while Belle, in her special car seat, endured the position of the youngest—the middle of the backseat, with her stuffed animal, a mouse, in her lap. Behind them, in a metal dog crate, rode the family’s new pet, Seuss, a twelve-week-old German shepherd.

The drive to Sultan took seventy-four minutes. It felt like seventy-four days, however, with Belle asking far too often when Fiona would be back.

“I hate this town,” Lauren announced, glowering as they passed the first junk store on the edge of town—The Sultan Flea Market. “The people are, like, backward.”

Another good reason to spend some time out of Telluride, Seamus thought. Sure, Telluride was “a great place to raise kids,” with world-class skiing, good schools, culture, of a sort, and natural beauty. But he’d noticed a tendency in his children to see themselves as intellectually brilliant and world-class athletes. Seamus, born and raised in the Silicon Valley in California, surrounded by exceptional brains, the brother of a cyclist who’d finished near the top in the Tour de France, knew his children to be simply “above average.” And more than a bit snotty.

They were beautiful children. Beau was the only one of the four without a horde of friends. He wore white T-shirts on which he wrote, in magic marker, obscure quotations from obscure texts, sometimes in dead languages. Beau actually might be brilliant, a thought that terrified Seamus. Already, he was studying trigonometry and his first love was chess. He had little interest in snowboarding, skateboarding or skiing, and spent too much time indoors playing video games on his computer. Now, Lauren gazed through the windshield with visible dissatisfaction. She’d been chosen homecoming princess of the freshman class that fall. She was so popular and had so many friends that she hadn’t wanted to leave—not even for three months. Caleb was a soccer star and an easy child. And Belle…

Elizabeth’s words pounded at him again.

He just didn’t know Belle.

Seamus had memorized directions to the historic hotel that was the home base for the Sultan Mountain School. He would meet his old friend Kurt there and pick up the keys to the house.

The hotel was three storeys high, with its historic name, the Hotel Ambassador, painted on the brick facade. A shingle hanging over the street, a block from Main Street, read, SULTAN MOUNTAIN SCHOOL. Seamus parked.

Beau shoved open his door. “I’m going to get Seuss out, okay?”

“Put his leash on him,” Seamus ordered. German shepherds were supposed to be smart, but he hadn’t seen many signs of intelligence in Seuss so far. He did have a startling baritone bark—strange coming from a puppy.

As Lauren climbed out and stalked to the rear of the vehicle, no doubt intending to criticize her brother’s behavior with the dog, Seamus headed for a wood-and-glass door beneath the shingle. It opened as he reached it and a young woman came out, almost colliding with him. She had long, thick hair, curly and tied back in a loose ponytail. Her eyes were brown, her nose straight and lightly sprinkled with freckles. The eyes widened slightly at the sight of him and his vehicle. “You’re…You’re Mr. Lee,” she exclaimed, and shifted a manila envelope, book and a huge, lumpy package, then held out her hand. “You are, aren’t you? I’m Rory Gorenzi.”

“Any relation to Kurt?”

“Ah, yes. Yes. I’m his daughter, actually.” As if the fact surprised even her. “And you are Seamus Lee?” She sought confirmation again.

“Yes.” Kurt’s daughter was beautiful. He’d heard about her from Kurt: she’d been raised by her grandmother, Seamus was fairly certain, and she wasn’t as successful as Kurt wished, though Seamus didn’t know the details. Seamus hadn’t paid much attention to Kurt’s conversation on the matter—he’d been too worried that his own children might not turn out all right because they, like Rory Gorenzi, had no mother.

And if Elizabeth was right, an inaccessible father.

It was over three years since Janine’s death. There had seemed to be no time for his own mourning, not to mention his accompanying feelings, with his youngest child just one and not even weaned when everything changed. With the whole story unfolding around him.

How his wife had come to die that way. And his inner conviction that her death had been her own fault. Her most aggravating traits had led to her dying, and he still couldn’t forgive her—and couldn’t speak to his children because he was afraid he’d tell them how angry he was at their mother for being so fatally single-minded.

Immediately after Janine’s death, the succession of au pairs had begun.

He dragged himself away from his grim thoughts.

Rory Gorenzi wore a black snowboarding jacket, black snow pants, Sorel-style boots and mittens. Both jacket and pants were patched with duct tape, and the boots had seen more than a few seasons. “Look,” she said, “I’ve got the key to your place, and I’ll take you over there. I just need to quickly run down there…” She indicated an area across the street and half a block up, “and drop off this stuff.”

“Can I help you?” He reached out, offering to relieve her of her package, which seemed not only oddly shaped but heavy.

She sidestepped him. “Oh, I’ll get it. It’s, um, pet food. Just let me…Just—I’ll be right back.” She turned away and tripped over a crack on the sidewalk, and the parcel, envelope and book all flew out of her arms and landed in front of her, the brown paper ripping to reveal what were unmistakably dead rabbits—frozen.

Seamus ran his tongue around the inside of his cheek and bent to pick up the book and envelope while she reached for the rabbits.

“My roommate bought these in Montrose,” she explained. “Usually we have them shipped, but we ran out and had to get some while we’re waiting for our next order to arrive. I realize it looks odd. They’re for a snake. It’s not mine.”

The snake must be large, Seamus thought, to eat full-grown rabbits.

He glanced back toward a sound behind him, to find his two oldest children and Seuss, the puppy, all breathing steam in the frigid air and gazing at the scene before them with a mixture of disbelief and puzzlement.

Seuss had one ear up and one ear down, and Rory Gorenzi suddenly swallowed hard and looked away. Seamus had the strangest feeling that she was about to cry.

She said, shakily, “My dog was just put down yesterday.”

“I’m sorry,” Seamus responded politely. Though he couldn’t really imagine crying over a dog. He’d never had one until now, and he’d only agreed to the puppy in order to demonstrate, at least to himself, that he did have a relationship with his kids.

Rory seemed to make up her mind about something. She crouched down and looked at the puppy, who immediately came toward her and sat down beside her as if finally he’d found security. “You’re a handsome guy,” she said.

Eyeing the frozen rabbits with disgust, Lauren looked as though all her suspicions about the residents of Sultan had been confirmed. “What are those for?”

“My roommate has a…well, a Burmese python. She’s sort of all of ours, but…”

“Can we see it?” asked Beau, unusually engaged. “Can we watch it eat?”

“Eating’s maybe not the best time to see her,” Rory said apologetically. “She’s a bit unpredictable then.”

“How big is this creature?” asked Seamus, inexplicably fascinated by Kurt Gorenzi’s daughter.

“Well, almost thirteen feet. And she has a nice disposition. It’s just that, well, the disposition doesn’t exactly matter with a snake that size. If you see what I mean. Because she weighs about sixty pounds, we follow a protocol when we clean the vivarium or feed her. There always have to be two of us, and preferably three on hand. Actually, we’re trying to find a zoo or reptile rescue place to accept her, because she’s really gotten too big for us to care for. That’s probably much more than you wanted to know about Lola.”

Lauren picked up Seuss and gazed at Rory as if she were a python who might suddenly decide to eat the puppy.

Seamus wondered just what Rory’s “roommate” was like. A boyfriend with a Harley and a love of gigantic pythons?

She wrested the frozen rabbits away from him and said, “I’ll just go to my house, and then I’ll be right back. After that, I’ll take you to the place where you’ll be staying—it’s right around the corner from where I live. Across the alley, so it’s on the next street, but…I’ll be back.”

Rory hurried away, stepping carefully over the ice on Solomon Street and imagining Seamus Lee and his two children watching her.

He was handsome. She supposed she should have expected he would be one of those Telluride types, probably a regular speaker at the film festival and probably with his own private jet tucked into a hangar at the airport. If he wasn’t rich, he looked like he should be. Those new hybrid SUVs weren’t cheap, in any case.

His hair was a bit long and so dark brown it was almost black; his features angular. He was six feet, definitely, and dressed in Gore-Tex and Carhartts. Very Telluride. Very Colorado. Very ski resort. His eyes were green, a true green and not remotely hazel. Probably around forty, she thought. Probably divorced, she also thought. Damn it, she hadn’t even had a chance to look at the packet her father had given her. She’d just had time to get the rabbits out of the school freezer, where Desert had left them in a rush the previous afternoon on her way to an appointment. Desert, the founder of Caldera, their dance troupe—was a massage therapist at the local hot springs; her current boyfriend worked at the mountain school. Lola belonged to Desert, and Rory could not believe that Desert had just casually left the rabbits in the freezer here. Is she trying to ruin my working relationship with my father before it even begins?

That wasn’t Desert’s style, though. Desert simply felt that, well, people should be able to cope with just about anything. She thought rabbits in the freezer were not a big deal, and they were no problem for Rory; but other people might not feel that way. Desert also thought it shouldn’t have been a problem for the State of Colorado, if Rory was less than polite when speaking to a U.S. senator.

Her roommates were home.

In fact, they were treating the frigid day as good weather, and spinning poi—firelit balls attached to cables—out in their backyard. Rory wished she could practice with them, as she’d planned to do, but Seamus Lee and his family had arrived sooner than expected. She hadn’t even had time to figure out their course work. Samantha, whose white-blond hair was pulled into a knot at the back of her head and covered with a tight-fitting ski hat, was the spotter, standing by with a fire blanket, just in case. Without taking her eyes from Desert, Samantha edged to the fence to greet Rory.

Desert, whose head was entirely shaven beneath her ski hat, ignored the approach of her roommate and continued spinning the burning balls. Total concentration was required, and still poi spinners got burned. Samantha asked, “Did you bring the rabbits?”

“Yes,” Rory said, with resignation, letting herself in the back gate. She and Samantha were of one mind about Lola—the python had to go. Samantha now refused to have anything to do with the snake beyond assisting—from a safe distance—at feeding time. She’d been bitten the previous summer and she was convinced the snake would have killed her—by constriction—if both Desert and Rory hadn’t been there to pull it off. As it was, she’d needed sixteen stitches to close the bite.

Rory agreed that the snake might have killed Samantha. In fact, Lola had frightened Rory more thoroughly than anything else ever had in her entire life. And Rory was not afraid of snakes.

She wanted to plead with Desert not to do anything that might jeopardize her job. But Desert wouldn’t welcome an interruption to her practice. And on second thought, Rory didn’t think she was up to coping with Desert at the moment.

Desert, christened Naomi Katz, had come to Colorado at the age of eighteen. She’d immediately rechristened herself and had begun living off a trust fund provided by her grandfather, a diamond broker, and also by her mother’s family. Rich and beautiful, she’d trained in Boulder as a massage therapist and as a fire dancer, had moved to Sultan and bought the two-storey Victorian where she, Rory and Samantha now lived. Its exterior was painted bordello pink.

Sometimes, Rory and Samantha asked themselves why they put up with Desert.

But they loved her. And pitied her. And wanted to help her somehow; help her to not make life hard for herself. Desert’s boyfriend was a recent acquisition—they’d been together nine weeks. Rory and Samantha were holding their breaths, dreading the ending. Dreading it for themselves as well as for Desert, who was sensitive and, well, troubled.

Rory said to Samantha, “Can you take these? I’ve got to go show some clients to the Empire Street house.”

“Sure.” Samantha took the rabbits, clutching the bundle against her with one arm. “Go.”

RORY GORENZI WAS ATTRACTIVE, but Seamus had come from Telluride, where beautiful was the norm. He didn’t want another girlfriend; he only wanted to sort through the things his ex-girlfriend had said. He wanted to attend to the flaws she’d pointed out. And they were flaws. He didn’t want to marry again—his experiences with other women reminded him not that Janine had been the perfect wife and mother, but that she hadn’t been. No, that wasn’t fair. She’d been the mother of their kids and, so, the perfect mother for them.

But she’d always needed to prove something. He’d known she was sensitive beneath her sometimes-abrasive exterior. One of his male employees had once said to Janine, “You have more testosterone than I do.”

She’d said, “Thank you!” and had clearly been pleased by the compliment.

She’d been an athlete, but that wasn’t the only thing that had made her challenging. It was the way she’d presented herself. Her certainty that her way was right. She’d been insecure and determined to hide the fact, and in their twelve years of marriage she’d never revealed the source of that insecurity or the reason for it.

She’d been smart—a legal-aid lawyer employed by the Women’s Resource Center, defending the battered and the terrified. And she’d never struck him as particularly maternal, although she’d nursed each child for at least nine months. She’d spoken of it so casually, saying once, “When I get this one off my tits…”

Janine had been difficult, and since her death Seamus had vacillated between the notion that no relationship could be as trying as his marriage had been and the idea that no woman would be as good for his children as Janine had been. And how good was that, really?

Better than you, Seamus.

But that hadn’t been so true, back when his wife was alive. He’d spent time with his kids, talked with them and listened to them.

Janine had listened, too—long enough to get the gist of situations. Then, she’d pronounced judgment. You’re not going to take that from anyone, she would order the seven-year-old who’d just had his lunch money stolen.

Lauren seemed determined to remember her as a sort of warrior mother, an Amazon who had demanded warrior-like behavior from her children, as well. Even these days, Seamus occasionally heard his oldest say, “Mom wouldn’t have stood for that,” or “Mom wouldn’t have put up with that.”

But actually, she might have. To be as much bite as bark required a certain resolve that she lacked. Janine had been a great skier, a hard-riding cyclist, a distance runner, a strong ice-climber and, above all, a fantastic talker. She had talked big. It was the one quality that had come to define her and that Seamus had eventually found most annoying.

Seamus went inside the Sultan Mountain School to see if Kurt was around. Lauren accompanied him, leaving Beau, Caleb and Belle outside with Seuss.

As they stepped into the lobby of the Victorian building, Seamus spotted Kurt, talking to two men in mountaineering clothes and showing them something on a topographical map on one wall. Seamus saw that the map was composed of many geological survey maps joined together.

“You don’t want to go that way,” Kurt was saying. “Too much avalanche danger. I’d recommend taking the V-Dot Road….”

Lauren said, “There’s not going to be anything to do here.”

“You’re going to have plenty to do.”

“I don’t want to spend three months snowshoeing.”

“Somehow, I don’t think that’s what Ms. Gorenzi has in store for you.”

“Is she going to be our teacher?” Lauren seemed suspicious. Of what, Seamus couldn’t be sure, until his oldest daughter added, acidly, “Or our new nanny.”

“Seamus.” Kurt had spotted them. Tall, gray-haired, unpolished, he joined Seamus and held out his hand. “Roads clear?”

“Not bad. Snow-packed on the pass. The usual. You’ve met my daughter, Lauren.”

“I think she was a few heads shorter back then. Nice to see you.” Kurt shook Lauren’s hand. “Where are you in school?”

Very politic, Seamus observed, as Kurt knew Lauren’s age.

“Still in high school,” she said, taking the implied compliment—that she was perhaps a college student—in stride.

“In the Sultan Mountain School, no less.” Seamus smiled at his friend, now recognizing traces of Rory in Kurt’s features. “We met your daughter.”

“Where is she?”

Any disapproval was well-concealed, yet Seamus wondered if it was there, nonetheless. Father-daughter tensions? Kurt had high standards—for himself and others.

“She went to feed her snake,” Lauren said.

“Her roommate’s,” Seamus corrected, as if it were important.

“Ah.” Kurt made no further comment.

“And she’s coming back to take us to the house.”

The front door swung open, and Rory came in, curls flying loose from her ponytail, expression mildly agitated. “Hi. Ready to go?” she asked without preamble.

Seamus wondered if Rory was trying to avoid her father’s notice for some reason.

Kurt seemed to sense it, too. “Everything all right?” he asked mildly.

“Yes.” A tight smile. “And here?”

Kurt nodded.

The phone rang, and a young man behind the hotel’s old reception counter picked it up. “Sultan Mountain School,” he said. Then, “She’s here.”

“It’s Desert.”

Irritated, Rory walked to the phone and said, “Hello?”

“When are you going to be able to practice? We’re planning to do our new combo with the staffs on Friday, and we still don’t have it right.”

“I’m at work now, Desert.”

“This is a responsibility, too.”

Rory taught belly dance and fire-dancing at workshops approximately once a month and gave two students weekly private lessons. The troupe was a commitment she’d made, but it wasn’t a job. “I can’t talk now. I’ll see you later.”

“Well…okay.”

Kurt turned away from Seamus Lee and his family, saying, “Let me know if you need anything.”