“I’m sure you’re right,” Flann said. “But they are in the business of business—and they want to make money. If the hospital can make money again, then what would be the point of not making that happen?”

“I don’t know—a bigger profit margin? I don’t know what drives people like…” She almost said Presley, but she couldn’t lump Presley into the faceless mass of people she didn’t know and couldn’t understand. Presley was not a faceless name. She’d already become more than that. She was a flash of humor, a sudden brilliant smile, an unexpected gasp of wonder. She was a surprise and an enigma. Fascinating and frustrating.

“She’s interesting, all right,” Flann said, as if reading Harper’s thoughts.

Harper’s shoulders stiffened and her jaw tightened up again. Heat rose up the back of her neck. “I gathered you think so.”

“Margie says you took her down to the tree house.”

Harper focused on a doe and two fawns grazing at the edge of the cornfield. “Margie has a big mouth.”

“Granted. So did you?”

“Yeah. Mama ordered me to show some manners.”

“I know, she said the same to me. I took Carrie on a tour of the house.”

Harper flicked her a look. “You making some kind of point?”

Flann didn’t grin, and that was a sure sign she was dead serious. “I might be. You could be headed for trouble there, Harp.”

“I’m not headed anywhere.”

“Maybe. What did she think of the tree house?”

“She liked it. What’s not to like?” Remembering Presley’s delight, a quick stirring of pleasure raced through Harper’s belly. “She pegged you for the Tom Swift.”

“She reads people. You got that, right?”

“Yeah.” Of course Flann would see what she had seen in Presley. The two of them, for all their outward differences, had always thought alike. They competed because they loved the same things, and what was better than beating someone you respected and admired? She’d never been bothered by the competition before.

“Did you try out the couch?” Flann asked casually.

Harper shot her a look. “That’s your style, not mine.”

“Now there’s something I’ve never noticed before.” Flann grinned. “One of these days that halo is going to slip, Saint Harper.”

“You trying to piss me off?”

“Did you at least make some kind of move?”

“I just met her.”

Flann pointed a finger at her. “So you thought about it.”

“My heart’s beating, isn’t it?”

“Sometimes I wonder.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Harper muttered, going back to studying the deer.

“I got no problem with you entertaining a beautiful woman while she’s in town,” Flannery said lightly. “But she’s not going to be here very long, and if things go the way we think they might at the hospital, the two of you are going to end up on opposite teams.”

“I know that. And that’s why nothing’s going to happen.”

“You sure about that?”

“Unlike you, I don’t get led around by my gonads.”

Flann’s grin, weary but irrepressible, widened. “You should try it sometime. Hell of a rush.”

“Hear me on this. I don’t plan on pursuing a personal relationship with Presley Worth.”

“Well then, you wouldn’t mind if I—”

“Don’t test me,” Harper said softly, “because I can still beat your ass.”

“Yeah, that’s what I thought,” Flann said. “And you haven’t been able to beat my ass since we were in middle school.”

“Oh yeah? And what about that time—”

“I’m not going there with her, Harper,” Flannery said, serious again. “I don’t think you should, either.”

“Seeing how we both agree, we’ve got nothing to worry about.” Harper tossed the dregs of her coffee onto the ground. “Come on in. I’ll make you breakfast.”

Chapter Fourteen

All the office doors in the admin wing were closed and the halls deserted at eight on Saturday morning. Relishing the privacy, Presley unlocked the door to her new office and set up her laptop on the desk. After scanning her mail and deleting messages that required no follow-up, she keyed in the security information needed to give Carrie access to business accounts, insurance contracts, and admission statistics. Then she pulled up the summary Preston’s team had provided and confirmed what she’d suspected—the acquisition had been pushed through quickly due to ACH’s trustees’ panic over mounting debt, with only a superficial accounting of net profit. Preston had been in a hurry too, probably so he could get her out of the way while he wooed supporters. If she could find evidence that the buyout was financially risky and ill-advised, she could call Preston’s judgment into question. She pulled up the last five years’ financials and started to break down the data. When her cell phone rang, she checked the time. She’d been working for three hours.

“Good morning, Jeff,” she said, leaning back in her chair and stretching the cramped muscles in her back. She swiveled around to the window and was startled once again by the view. She half expected the glare of glinting steel and shimmering heat waves she was used to out the broad sheet-glass windows of her high-rise office in downtown Phoenix. Instead she found rolling hills a dozen shades of green, a crystal blue sky, and white clouds as fluffy as cotton candy. She turned back around.

“How are things in the Appalachians?” Jeff Cohen asked.

“The Adirondacks, not the Appalachians,” Presley said, smiling. Jeff was her counterpart in marketing, a vice president who had worked his way up from sales with amazing speed, and he’d done it without connections. He’d gotten the job because he was the son of one of her father’s college fraternity brothers, but unlike so many of the nepotistic appointments that littered the landscape at SunView, Jeff actually deserved the job and proved it. He was also one of her few friends in or out of the office, and she trusted him as she might have trusted a brother, had her brother been anyone but Preston. She’d known him most of her life, even though he was several years younger. Their families socialized, and while in college, she’d even dated him for a short period of time. When she’d realized she was never going to have more than friendly feelings for him, she’d broken it off. He hadn’t seemed heartbroken, and five years later he’d come out to her, although not to his family. Currently, he was dating the daughter of another well-placed family and would probably marry, produce heirs, and find his private pleasures elsewhere.

“What’s the situation up there?” Jeff asked.

Presley filled him in on what she knew and what she suspected in terms of the hospital’s financial status. “There are decades of loans, investments, debt, and collections to sort out. It will take me a while to untangle it all.”

“I thought it was supposed to be a straightforward reappropriation of assets,” Jeff said. “The place sounds ripe for a long-term care facility.”

“Possibly.” Presley would have agreed with him a few days before, but now she wasn’t so comfortable with a hasty decision. “There’s a lot more going on up here than we realized.”

“There’s a lot more going on down here too,” Jeff said, “and I think you need to be here.”

Jeff was the kind of person who somehow managed to be friends with everyone and never appeared to be choosing sides. Consequently, everyone talked to him, and he was always a font of information that was timely and accurate. If he said something was going on, then she needed to take him seriously. “What exactly?”

“Word is Preston’s courting management heads nonstop. Since you’ve been gone, his schedule is packed with luncheons, dinners, and meetings with power players.”

“I’m not surprised. With my father set to retire at the end of the year, he’s lining up supporters.”

“The vote might be a ways off, but you’ll be starting from behind if this goes on for long. Can you get back here?”

Her first inclination was to say absolutely. She could manage the dissolution of ACH from Phoenix once Carrie was up to speed, but she still had to decide what to do with the physical facility and draft plans for construction and restructuring the management team. She’d get Carrie started on investigating local contractors that week. “I don’t think it’ll take very long to get a handle on what needs to be done here. I’ll get back as soon as I can.”

“Sooner will be much better than later.”

“I appreciate you calling me.”

“I’ll let you know if anything else develops. Be careful of the locals, I hear they might bite.”

Presley laughed. “Everyone here is perfectly charming.” She’d been about to add perfectly safe, but when she thought of Harper and the way her pulse kicked up when she did, safe was the last word she would use to describe her.

*

Harper moved her stethoscope over John Prince’s broad, sun-speckled back, listening to the wheezes and crackles that filled both lung fields. Stepping back from the stretcher, she hung her stethoscope around her neck. “How long have you been short of breath?”

John’s weather-beaten face twisted. He was forty-three but could have been a decade older. His chest and arms were ropy with muscles, his abdomen starting to soften with the effects of a few too many beers and burgers. “Not so long. Few days, maybe. The damn cough is making it hard for me to sleep is all.”

She leaned back against the wall. “A few days?”

He lifted a shoulder and didn’t meet her eyes. “Maybe a week.”

“Have you been having chest pain?”

“Sore muscles now and then, nothing unusual.”

She was used to her patients, especially the men, downplaying their symptoms. Almost everyone in her practice were farmers, small business owners, and working poor. Their common denominator was they needed to work to survive, and very few of them had any kind of nest egg to tide them over if they didn’t have a steady income. Many of them went without medical insurance to pay for heat during the winter or seed during the spring or shoes and clothes for their children. And many of them ignored physical problems until they became so severe they were forced to seek medical attention. John was one of those. If he was here in the ER on a Saturday morning, something had happened to scare the hell out of him. She suspected it was more than a cough that had brought him in.