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out anything about the lien, give me a call. Otherwise … it’s only a few weeks, Harrison.”
    “It’s more than that, and you know it. But I can wait. God knows, I’m used to it.”
    His low tone vibrated through her. Jo dropped her forehead to rest for an instant against the door panel. “Thank you.”
    Without pausing to hear his reply, she pushed open the door and escaped before he could make it any clearer that his legendary patience was strained to the breaking point.
    She just had to get through the next month without Dabney Leeds taking her to court over Aunt Dottie’s debt. Or anyone finding out how far the renovation and opening of Windy Corner Stables had depleted her savings. Or Harrison finally getting fed up and washing his hands of her.
    Most of all, she needed to make sure none of those problems surfaced to scuttle Ella and Merry’s visit.
    Jo Ellen Hollister had waited fifteen years for the chance to get to know her own daughters and to try and make up for the sins of her past. Now that they were finally ready to see her, she couldn’t let anything stand in the way of this chance.
    She might not get another opportunity to say what had to be said.

 
    CHAPTER 5
    “I am in agony,” Merry moaned as soon as Ella got back to the car. “Screw the suspension or the shocks or whatever—just get us to a bathroom!”
    “Why didn’t you go in the bushes?” Ella demanded as she buckled in, silently impressed with how steady her voice was. Considering how fast her heart was thumping in her chest, it was an accomplishment.
    “I got all the way over there and wrestled my leggings down before I remembered the TP problem.”
    “What—”
    “Toilet paper,” Merry clarified. “As in, I didn’t have any. And I know hikers and whatever use leaves, but I don’t exactly have a degree in horticulture. It’d be just my luck to wipe my hoo-hah with poison ivy. So rev it up, Dale Earnhardt Jr.! Before my bladder splatters the inside of this ugly rental car.”
    “Yikes.” Ella checked the rearview mirror, but they’d already turned off the main road. There was nothing behind them but sassafras trees, loblolly pines, and a muddy dirt track.
    That’s definitely not a pang of disappointment, she told herself. The less you see of Grady Wilkes while you’re here, the better.
    “I’m not sorry we stopped, though,” Merry gushed. “If we hadn’t stopped, we would’ve missed meeting Voyager!”
    She went on to describe the horse they had both just seen in loving detail, reliving the moment when he’d nosed over her hand looking for a lump of sugar or a stray thumb to chomp on, and Ella didn’t feel more than a passing tickle of guilt at tuning the recitation out.
    Her mind was too full of Voyager’s rider to do much more than add the occasional “Hmmm” to the monologue.
    Grady Wilkes, the watchdog at her mother’s gate.
    Why now? Why him?
    Because of course, of freaking course, this was the way it went. It had been months since she could think about anything other than her dwindling portfolio of clients and inability to land a deal, mere days since her boss booted her out of the office to get her head on straight … and here she was trundling down this pitted mud trap of a road toward a reunion with the mother who’d abandoned her family in every way that mattered.
    So of course, now was when Ella was suddenly walloped in the head with an attraction she couldn’t deny.
    The fact that the man in question was a friend of her mother’s, and had already decided that Ella was out to hurt her somehow? That was the cherry on the crap sundae of Ella’s life.
    Seriously, Fate. If you exist, I hope you know you’re a stone-cold witch.
    As she wheeled the car carefully down the nearly hidden side road Grady Wilkes had mentioned, it occurred to her that maybe she was fixating on that weird, surprising spark she’d felt with Grady in order to avoid thinking about the fact that she was moments away from