Chapter One

      Eleanor Whitman saw the red Porsche sitting in the driveway and deliberately accelerated past the small shotgun house on the mammoth K. G. Taber farm outside Lexington, Kentucky. She knew the car too well to mistake it, and she knew who would be driving it. Her heart quickened despite all her efforts at control, although she had every reason in the world to hate the car’s owner.

      Her slender hands tightened on the steering wheel and she took slow, deep breaths until they stopped trembling, until the apprehension left her huge dark eyes.

      She had no idea where she was going as she turned onto a long, calm avenue with big, graceful shade trees down the median. Lexington was like a series of small communities, each with its own personality and neighbors who were like family. Eleanor often wished that she and her father could live in town, instead of on the farm. But the house was theirs rent-free as long as her father lived, a kind of fringe benefit for employees of the elder Taber. Dozens of employees lived on the mammoth farm: carpenters, mechanics, farm laborers, a veterinarian and his assistants, a trainer and his assistants, a black smith…the list went on and on. The farm had two champion racehorses, one a Triple Crown winner, and a prime collection of purebred Black Angus bulls as well. It was a diversified, self-contained property and the Tabers had money to burn.

      Eleanor’s father was a carpenter, a good one, and he alternated between repairing existing buildings and helping put up new ones. He’d had a bad fall and broken his hip three months ago—an accident from which he was only just now recovering after extensive physical therapy. And the Tabers had been keeping him on, paying his insurance and all his utilities despite Eleanor’s proud efforts to stop them. They were holding his job open and looking after him like family until he could work again, which the doctors said would be soon. Meanwhile, Eleanor took care of him and petted him and was grateful that the fall hadn’t killed him. He was all she had.

      In her teens, Eleanor had loved the big white house with its long, open porches and wide, elegant columns. Most of all, she’d loved Keegan Taber. That had been her downfall. Four years of nursing school in Louisville had matured her, however, and her decision to accept a position at a private