Charlotte licked water droplets from her neck. “You’re still wet.”

Clay kissed her and settled her hips between Charlotte’s thighs. “I was about to say—”

“If you’ve only got two hours, don’t say anything.” Charlotte wrapped her legs around Clay’s hips and nibbled on her lip. “Just fuck me.”

Clay rarely took orders, but when a beautiful woman in bed gave instructions, she didn’t argue. Charlotte didn’t seem to notice when her mind drifted to the upcoming trip and a place she’d hoped never to see again.

Chapter Two


Hands tucked into the front pockets of her jeans, Tess stood in the shade of the main cow barn as the last of the milk was pumped from her holding tanks into the transport tanker that idled in front of the wide-open double doors. Just after six, the last major chore of the day was finished. The heat was unrelenting, she’d been up since four, and she was tired of worrying and feeling helpless. Shaking off the fatigue, she waited patiently while the driver disconnected his hoses, checked gauges to measure the volume of milk he’d added to that already on board, and closed the ports on the refrigerated truck’s body. He finished his tabulations, including the milk temperature, spot bacteria count, and overall milk quality, and handed her the form to review. After she initialed the tube of milk he’d taken from her lot to be tested later and handed it to him, she took the clipboard from him, scanned what he had entered, and signed off on the delivery receipt. He gave her a copy, tucked the clipboard under his arm, and glanced out over the pastures. The grass was grazed down to almost nothing. “Sure could stand a little rain, huh?”

“Sure couldn’t hurt,” Tess said, amazed how an understatement could become the mantra of an entire region. The milk yield had been down for the last few days. When the cows didn’t graze, they didn’t make as much milk. Things weren’t serious yet, but they would be if they went much longer without rain. Unlike some of her neighboring dairy farms who weren’t organic, she couldn’t supplement her feed with anything hormonal or chemical to bolster milk production even if the substance was technically approved, not if she wanted to maintain her organic dairy certification. And she needed that to close the deal with Empire Yogurt—the next stage in her plan to make her farm into a solid, profitable operation for the long term.

Greek yogurt was the key to her success. The demand for organic Greek yogurt was skyrocketing, and the consumption of milk in the production of the higher-milk-content yogurt was enormous. Yogurt plants needed more milk than local dairies could supply, and Rolling Hills Farm—her farm—would be one of the few organic dairy farms in the state. She was in the right place at the right time to build a long-term relationship with the specialty yogurt producers. She was almost at the end of the first year of her five-year plan. In just a few more months, she would meet the state requirements for organic certification, and as soon as she had that, the deal with Empire Yogurt was waiting to be inked. She just had to hang on until then.

“It’s the un-perfect storm, huh?” Tess said. “Mild winter, warm spring, and not enough rain. Water table’s about tapped out.”

“Well,” the driver said, “this drought can’t go on forever.” He tipped his cap. “See you tomorrow.”

“I’ll be here,” Tess said and watched him drive away.

She would be here, rain or no rain. She had always known this was her place. Sure, she’d entertained leaving when she was thirteen or fourteen and was tired of the quiet life on the farm and the lack of excitement in the local scene. There hadn’t been much for a teenage girl to do except hang at the Tastee-Freez or spend time at the 4-H club. The nearest movie theaters were half an hour’s drive away, and her mother didn’t want her riding with the older boys and girls, so she was pretty much stuck with the same kids she’d been in school with all her life. For a time, she’d imagined going to New York or Boston or some faraway city to go to college, maybe study to be a veterinarian or a fashion designer. Then when she was seventeen, she’d gotten a job at the lake and left home for the first time and everything changed. She’d discovered why she’d always been best friends with the boys but hadn’t taken to dating them the way most of her girlfriends had. With the city kids who came with their parents from New York City and Montreal to vacation at the lake, she’d discovered there was far more to life than she’d realized. And then she’d fallen in love, lost her virginity, and gotten her heart broken all in one long, unforgettable summer.

She’d survived, although the distant echo of pain and disillusionment still rang in the silence of a sleepless night, and she’d learned valuable lessons—that people were not always who or what they seemed, and the big wide world was no different than the small community in which she’d been raised, except maybe, on the whole, a little less honest.

The sound of a water bucket being kicked over caught her attention, and sighing, she strode into the barn. She walked down the double row of stalls, checking that the cows were safely bedded down. She left them chewing the feed her foreman, Tomas, had forked out for them and, satisfied that all was in order, turned the classical music on low and the lights out. The strains of Bach followed her across the fields for the quarter-mile hike back to the house. Maybe the soothing music didn’t calm the cows and help them make more milk the way some scientific studies suggested, but they seemed to like it, and so did she.

Once inside, she put the kettle on the stove for tea and sat down at the long, scarred oak table and powered up her laptop. For once, the satellite Internet connection was strong. She searched for gas fracturing in New York and scanned a dozen articles. Finally she found a name—NorthAm Fuels. A few more searches and she pulled up the corporate home page. She got up, made tea, and sat back down with the remains of the sandwich she’d picked up at the café in the village earlier. She nibbled and sipped and clicked through pages.

Suddenly a name jumped out at her, and she set her mug down with a thud that vibrated through the tabletop. Vice President of Operations, NorthAm Fuels: R. Clayton Sutter.

Tess stared at the name, a knot of dread sitting heavy beneath her breast. Clay. She’d wondered—tried not to—where she was, who she had become. She laughed to herself, the pain as bright and fresh as it had been a lifetime ago, before she ruthlessly quelled the memories. What did it matter who Clay had become, she had never even known who Clay was.

She forced herself to keep scanning through the public pages, recognizing most of the information for the slick marketing ploy it was. But she found what she needed on a multicolored map of the US, highlighting various deep-underground gas and oil deposits. Red stars marked drilling sites. NorthAm’s New York operation was about to get under way, and her farm was right in the middle of it all.

Rising swiftly, she sorted through the cabinets in the mudroom for the regional telephone book. She wasn’t sure exactly what she would say after all these years even if she found her, but she needed advice, and she didn’t want to confide in anyone local. In this tight-knit community, nothing was ever a secret, and for this, she needed privacy.



* * *

Clay didn’t know how nearly fifteen years could vanish without leaving a trace of something—anything—that truly mattered, as if those years and all she’d accomplished amounted to nothing, but as the jet circled the Albany airport, she felt like she was eighteen again, on her way to her last summer of freedom before starting down the path her father had designed for her. She hadn’t flown to upstate New York that summer, though. She’d gotten a new Land Rover Defender soft top for graduation and insisted on driving up from the Hamptons with her motorcycle in a trailer on the back. She’d also had a bodyguard in the front seat next to her, the one point her father had not been willing to concede. She could spend the summer at the family vacation home on Lake George, but she wasn’t going to go unprotected. He seemed to think kidnappers lurked around every corner, and she knew she could only push him so far. Besides, she’d figured she could lose Manny at will, and she’d been right. Her father hadn’t wanted her to have a female guard after she’d had a not-so-private tryst with one of his aides the night of her high school graduation, and that had been a strategic error of the kind her father rarely made. Manny couldn’t follow her into the bathroom—and bathrooms always had windows. After the first few times she’d left Manny stranded, he’d given up and decided to enjoy the vacation. And so had she.

Those few weeks had been a beautiful lie, a summer idyll when she’d let herself believe she could be anyone she’d wanted.

Clay squinted against the slanting rays of the sun sifting through the clouds and looked north out the window as the jet banked, as if she might see the sprawling thirty-six-mile lake nestled in the heart of the Adirondacks, but she couldn’t pierce the distance any more than she could rewrite the past. She hadn’t been back to the lake since that summer, but she hadn’t forgotten the place, or the people. Sometimes when she thought of it, and she tried hard to keep busy enough not to look back, she thought perhaps that had been the last honest time in her life—even though she’d spun a web of deception with everyone that mattered. In her heart, at least, she had been honest.