SPENCER WAS ALREADY in bed Wednesday night, almost asleep, when his phone signaled a text message.
Meet tomorrow at eight?
It was almost midnight.
The kids would be on the bus at seven fifty-five.
Your office, he typed back, keeping things businesslike. He had a nice office, too, but it was in his home. He wasn’t ready to have their meetings there.
Not until this project, as she’d called it, was firmly in place.
Though he was worn out, he sat up. Grabbed his tablet off the bedside table and added a couple of items to the list that had been growing since he’d left her that morning. Then he checked hay and beef prices. Read some news. He did everything he could to keep his mind occupied so that he didn’t think about the woman who was going to be a part of the rest of his life.
* * *
WITH HER SEATED on one side of the table serving as a temporary desk in his barn and soon-to-be full-time studio, and him on the other, they discussed everything on his list. And hers.
They were going to continue on as friends in front of the kids, letting them get used to having Natasha around more, having dinner with them whenever she was at the ranch and free, spending Saturday evenings with them after the remaining three shows. They’d wait until right before Thanksgiving to tell them they were getting married.
She’d continue to stay at the cabin until they were married, at which time she’d move to a spare bedroom in the house when she was on the ranch. For the first six months.
After the Family Secrets segments at the ranch were over, he and the kids would spend at least one night a week in Palm Desert—or as often as he could work it out that he could be gone overnight.
They would wait until the first of November and then, before the engagement was announced, each see their own lawyers regarding the prenuptial agreement so that all was in place before they went public.
They would hold hands where appropriate. And kiss occasionally.
He would keep her apprised of any major business decisions he made. She would do the same. The small things they didn’t need to bother sharing.
She would pick out and purchase her own engagement ring.
He had it all down. Even managed to fall into a somewhat comfortable routine over the next weeks as the plan fell easily into action. Other than the “family”-style dinners and the offstage hand holding, everything was pretty much as it had been.
With one major difference—he felt secure for the first time in a long time.
He called Claire. Invited her to stay at the ranch with him and the kids the last weekend in October and wasn’t the least bit surprised when she opted to stay in Palm Desert and drive out. What did surprise him was that she actually showed.
And that the visit went…well. It was low-key. They’d agreed not to tell the kids yet who she was, just said she was a friend, but she seemed genuinely interested in every aspect of their lives. And while every other sentence seemed to be filled with innuendo, promises to Tabitha that she’d take her to see Washington, DC, and that she’d love it there, the woman hadn’t crossed a line that would have allowed him to end the visit.
Or prevent future visits.
He told Natasha so when she called from New Orleans an hour after Claire had left.
“She doesn’t know about us yet,” Natasha reminded him. “Next visit, I’ll make sure I’m home…”
His gut clenched at the surge of emotions rocking through him.
Home.
She’d be home. He knew what she meant. And still, the word uprooted his world.
But more important was the sense of…something warm and fuzzy and therefore god-awful that came with knowing she had his back. That a woman as powerful, as sure of herself, as confident and contained as Natasha Stevens was on his team.
The realization was sickening.
So he went and took a shower.
* * *
BY THE FIRST Monday in November, Natasha was at her wits’ end. She hadn’t been sleeping. Her appetite was half of what it had been. She’d been to see her doctor. Had a full barrage of tests. She was in perfect health. The Longfellow Ranch Family Secrets segment had wrapped up with the highest ratings ever. Sponsors were flooding in. Plans were in full swing for the live Thanksgiving Day show, featuring dishes made by Natasha from mailed-in “family secret” recipes. The judges would choose their favorite dish. The submitter of that recipe would be one of the eight contestants on the January segment of Family Secrets.
Because of the wedding, they were filming the first segment of the year on site. The other three would be traveling—one to Longfellow Ranch.
And she was losing weight.
Late that night, she gave in and did what she’d always done… She called her mother.
“You know the problem, Natasha,” her mother said without even asking about her physical symptoms. “It’s this wedding.”
It wasn’t.
“You’ve been this way your whole life. Some people get nosebleeds when they lie. You can’t sleep and you lose weight when you know you’re doing something that goes against your instinctive sense of right. You’re making a decision that isn’t good for you.”
She wanted her mother to be wrong.
But some part of her acknowledged, because she was at such a low point, that she’d called because she’d known what her mother would say.
Because she knew she was right.
“It’s the perfect solution,” she said, sitting out in the darkness of her walled-in garden, thinking about turning on the jets in the hot tub.
The kids had been there the previous weekend. It had been too cold for them to swim, but they’d loved being able to “take a bath outside.”
She couldn’t ever remember a better night spent in her own home.
“If it were the perfect solution, you’d be embracing it, rather than making yourself sick with forcing it.”
She knew that, too.
“So, what do I do?”
“Uh-uh,” Susan said. “I can’t tell you that. Only you can figure out what’s at war within you, Tasha.”
Then why could her mother tell her the marriage was wrong? If she couldn’t give her the solution?
Now, in addition to feeling sick, she was adding peevish to her growing list of discomforts.
“Ask yourself what you most want from life. Answer honestly and act upon it, and you will be in the right place at the right time. Ask, answer, act, and you will be happy with you.” The Law of Susan.
“I have.”
“And?”
“Family Secrets is what I most want,” she said, feeling a headache coming on. “My career, being my own boss, having the outlet for my creativity, making people’s dreams come true, just like you said.”
She’d been doing a lot of thinking over the past several weeks. Instead of sleeping.
“You sound sure.”
“I am sure.”
The pause at the other end of the line could have been purposeful. Whether it was or not, Natasha second-guessed herself. Asked herself again. Listened honestly to how she felt. “Family Secrets,” she said.
“So, how do you act upon that?”
“I don’t know.” She’d never felt so utterly alone. “The marriage, it helps Family Secrets. A lot. Our ratings have always been above average, but they’re skyrocketing with Spencer on the show. Viewers love our relationship. I see that carrying on, like so many family reality TV shows, far into the future. We’ll show the cooking, and America will also watch the rancher and the TV host meld their lives…”
She had it all worked out.
“Then there’s Spencer’s beef. He really knows what he’s doing, Mom. And he does it for the right reasons. Out of love for the ranch. For his family. For his heritage. He’ll be a show sponsor,” she said. “We’ll not only advertise his beef but also get proceeds from the sales.” She and Spencer had worked it all out.
In a few short weeks, he’d gone from a disbeliever to the driving force in their merger. He insisted on meetings. Pushing her for times when he could bring the kids to the city so that he was keeping up with his part of the agreement, in spite of the fact that she knew he really hated to be away from the ranch.
He’d already completed all of his prenuptial paperwork and was just waiting for her and her lawyer to do the same before setting up a meeting between the two attorneys to hash out the differences—if there were any.
He’d held her hand when they were in town together.
The only thing he hadn’t done was kiss her again…
“You’ve said the marriage is blocking you, Tasha.” Her mother’s tone held warning.
Because she didn’t have to marry Spencer to have him on the show. Yes, the wedding would inflate ratings. A bit of their ongoing family reality would add extra spice to the show. But the health of her show did not depend on a marriage. Spencer was already under contract for the rest of it—the continued shows, the continued hosting, the beef sponsorship.
“I know. It is.”
“And you’re sure about that?”
Unfortunately, she was. Absolutely. She’d asked herself so many times. And each time she thought about the marriage, she was besieged with unrest. Sometimes even nausea.
“So find what’s blocking you from acting,” Susan said. Her tone held sympathy. But warning, too.
And she knew. Spencer was blocking her. He’d become a good friend to her over the past weeks. She thought she’d become a friend to him, too. She didn’t want to disappoint him. More than that, his kids were blocking her. She wasn’t ready to dim the light they brought to her life.
But Susan was right. She had to act. Anything else was wrong. Selfish. Unfair. For everyone involved.
She’d loved becoming part of a family.
She’d been playing make-believe with herself. Asking, but not answering honestly. Lying to herself and living on quicksand.
She’d managed to kid herself until she’d made herself sick.
Her body was telling her the jig was up.
* * *
SHE WAS GOING to tell him the next time she talked to him. They’d reached an agreement to be in touch at least once a day. But the next morning, he called right after putting the kids on the bus to tell her he’d heard from Claire, who was planning to fly in the day after Thanksgiving and wanted to have the kids with her at her hotel in Palm Desert overnight. And Natasha held her tongue.
“I have to tell you, you were right.” He sounded…happy? Did guys like Spencer allow themselves that? “Announcing our engagement on Thanksgiving is perfect timing. We can make arrangements to stay in the city the whole weekend instead of just the couple of days we were going to take for the PR shots. Claire can see the kids, but they’ll have a home to sleep in at night—no need for them to stay in the hotel with her.”
Yes, it was all working so perfectly.
Except that, for her, it wasn’t.
But she couldn’t tell him yet. She had to come up with another plan to cover the Claire problem—some way to protect Tabitha and Justin from being lured away from their home on the ranch—before she could break their agreement.
And she’d best do it quickly or the whole thing was going to get messier than anyone wanted. To announce the engagement and then break it off would be…catastrophic.
On Tuesday she told herself she’d have something figured out before Friday, when she was going back to the ranch for the weekend and was supposed to be moving most of her personal files to her now-complete office in the new studio. She slept well for the first time in weeks.
Maybe they could stage the wedding. For the show. For his beef. For all of the publicity for both of them. For Claire.
But not really go through with it.
She tried on the solution. Thought it might fit. Wore it all day Wednesday. Slept okay Wednesday night. Made a note as soon as she got up the next day to call her PR firm and run the idea by them. Confidentially.
On Thursday morning, before she had a chance to get to anything on her list, her lawyer called.
She wanted to see Natasha as soon as possible.
Not liking the sound of that, Natasha, dressed in her power purple blouse with the black slim line suit she’d had on when she’d signed her largest sponsorship a few weeks before, left the studio before Angela had even arrived, driving straight to Sharon Divers’s office. The middle-aged attorney met her in the parking lot, but they didn’t exchange anything other than pleasantries until the two of them were seated in her office.
On a leather couch, not at the desk.
Sharon pulled a folder out of the satchel she’d carried in. Handed it to Natasha and said, “You asked me to do a thorough background check.”
With an instant headache traveling up through the cords in her neck, Natasha held the folder closed.
“You found something.” That much was clear.
Sharon, dressed in a gray suit with a pale pink blouse, looked so nonthreatening as she nodded her head full of short, dark hair.
“What?” She preferred to be told. As though whatever was coming would be less painful if she heard it rather than read it herself.
Was this why she’d been feeling sick lately at the thought of marrying Spencer Longfellow? Because some part of her had known something wasn’t right? Had she sensed that he was hiding something from her?
“What if you found out, somewhere down the road, that I have some dirty little secret…?” He’d asked the question.
And she’d hidden from it. Or hidden it away so that it could rob her of sleep and her appetite.
“He’s not a Longfellow.”
Whatever she’d been expecting…some kind of criminal record, maybe…it hadn’t been that.
She’d have preferred the record. People made mistakes. They made reckless choices and spent the rest of their lives being responsible to them.
But to lie about who you were?
The blood drained from her face as the next thought occurred to her. If he wasn’t a Longfellow, who was he? And why was he pretending to own a ranch that wasn’t his?
“Who is he?”
“He was born Spencer Justin Barber.”
“When?”
She named the date. Natasha did the math. He was thirty, just like he’d said he was. She took a deep breath, as though the fact that he hadn’t lied about his age made it all a little better.
It didn’t.
How could he think he’d get away with this? Entering into contracts with her?
Saying he was going to marry her?
Like she wouldn’t have known when they got the license that he wasn’t who he said he was?
Family Secrets. She’d made him a cohost of her show. This news was going to put a blemish on a show that had been fair and true reality since its inception…
Panic started to set in. She focused on her attorney. Took a deep breath. It had taken her several thoughts down the path to get to Family Secrets.
This whole knowing-Spencer-Longfellow thing—or rather, Spencer Justin Barber—had been putting her off her game since the beginning.
“Tell me the rest,” she said.
And wasn’t happy when Sharon shook her head. “I don’t know much more yet. I wanted to show you what I’ve got and discuss the possibility of hiring a private detective to dig deeper.”
She didn’t have to think about that one. She stood. Clasped the folder against her chest. Walked calmly to the door.
Turned back and said, “Dig.”