Contents

      Chapter One

      Chapter Two

      Chapter Three

      Chapter Four

      Chapter Five

      Chapter Six

      Chapter Seven

      Chapter Eight

      Chapter Nine

      Chapter Ten

      Chapter One

      “Willow, there’s a guy… Willow? Are you sleepin’?”

      Willow Colton woke with a start, dropping the bottle of vitamins in her hand. It rolled across her desk and she grabbed it in a hurry, hiding it in her lap as she tried to appear as if she hadn’t just dozed off reading the label.

      “Sleeping? No, I’m not sleeping. Why would I be sleeping in the middle of the day?” she said guiltily.

      “Sure looked like you were sleepin’,” Carl said, as if he still thought so but couldn’t quite believe it himself.

      Of course, there was good reason not to believe it. Willow ran Black Arrow Feed and Grain, the store her great-grandfather had founded, and she ordinarily put in longer and harder hours than anyone. Without napping in her office at the rear of the store.

      But things were different these days.

      “What were you saying when you came in?” she asked, changing the subject before it got to be a bigger deal than she wanted it to be. “That there’s a guy…”

      Carl’s expression let her know he was suspicious, but he had no choice other than to concede. “There’s a guy out here who wants to open a new account. Says he’s the one bought the old Harris place.”

      “Ah,” Willow said as she struggled to fight off the logy feeling of the impromptu snooze, hoping her desk blotter hadn’t left an imprint on her face. “Ask him to wait just a few minutes and I’ll be right with him. Please,” she added, as if it would make this whole thing better.

      “Sure,” Carl replied, but his tone had a quizzical edge. And he sent her a curious glance over his shoulder as he left her office.

      When he’d closed the door behind him, Willow deflated slightly, hoping she’d dodged the bullet and convinced her store manager that she hadn’t been sleeping on the job.

      She also tried to ignore the urge to put her head back on her desk so she could sleep again.

      The fatigue was part of it, she knew now. The doctor she’d sneaked into Tulsa to see had assured her of that, so it didn’t worry her anymore. But it was a nuisance. Especially when it interfered with work.

      Work she needed to get back to.

      With that in mind, she opened the left-hand drawer and slipped the vitamin bottle into it, closing it again with a resounding bang and making a mental note to take the vitamins upstairs to her apartment at the end of the day.

      Then she stood and went to the tiny bathroom connected to the office to make sure she didn’t look like she’d just gotten out of bed. That wouldn’t do with a new customer. Or the old ones, for that matter.

      The bathroom was barely that—a toilet and a sink crammed into a space the size of a closet. Willow had to avail herself of the facilities before she could even look in the mirror.

      It was another of the current nuisances—her bladder seemed to have shrunk to the size of an acorn, and she spent every day hoping no one noticed how much more frequently she was having to go.

      When she was finished, she stood at the sink and washed her hands, finally checking herself in the mirror.

      She was glad to see there wasn’t any evidence that she had dozed off. No imprints of desk accessories and no puffiness around her gray eyes.

      Thank heaven for small favors. And maybe she really had been able to convince Carl that she hadn’t been napping.

      She was also glad to see that the now-usual morning pallor of her skin was gone, too. The Native American half of her bloodline had contributed a healthy looking reddish-brown complexion, but these days Willow started out nauseous and almost as pale as the O’Flannery sisters she’d gone to high school with. Not that there hadn’t been a time during adolescence when she hadn’t longed for the O’Flannerys’ alabaster skin. But adulthood had brought with it an appreciation