fairly easy. The ranch had everything, and the area was booming. The ranch could be sold in a week. Or less.
“Who’s ‘Dad?’” Amber asked. “Do I know him?”
Hope looked at Amber and her heart broke all over again. Derek had never seen his only granddaughter. Probably didn’t even know she existed. Faith had had some bad luck in the bed of a Chevy two-ton truck one weekend about eleven years ago, and when Amber’s father learned that he had a child coming, he took off before Amber was born. Derek was long gone by then.
The McNaughton women don’t have much luck with men sticking, Hope thought.
She looked around the table at her family, saw the mingled fear, hopelessness, and confusion. The way her family had felt way too often. Amber had about as much notion of what a father was as she had about particle physics. Suzanne had too much experience with settling for what she could get. Faith always saw the good in things, no matter how bad they looked. And she herself—she was focused, heads down, and hemmed in. The reliable one. The problem solver.
Their problem right now was that they needed two million dollars. And right now she didn’t see how she could solve that one.
Chapter 2
After they’d eaten supper and cleaned up the kitchen, Hope went to her room. She threw open the big patio doors and let in the sage-scented air, breathing deeply. She looked out into the dark Nevada night and made a decision. Then she walked over to her desk, unlocked the bottom drawer, took out a metal lock-box, and unlocked that, as well.
The box contained a small stash of papers—her will, some certificates of deposit, her passport. And a small black book.
She didn’t know why she still had the black book. She hadn’t opened it for seventeen years, and she didn’t want to open it now. She hated what the book represented.
But the black book was her last chance. Her only chance. It might have the key that could save the ranch. Save their futures.
The black address book contained the phone numbers of her father’s old friends, acquaintances, enemies, and gambling buddies—people on the right or wrong side of the law who made their living by risking everything on cards, dice, slots, ponies, dogs, cars, or sports. A few of the people in this book, the special ones, had always been more than friends. She’d called them her honorary uncles—people she’d seen all the time, people she’d enjoyed and respected.
People she’d loved.
Whenever Derek had taken her along with him to the casino, the track, the cardroom, the private parties—there they were. They bought her ice cream and sodas and treated her like a mascot. They sent her to bed when it was late and protected her from the darkness that hovered just beyond the bright lights. They taught her everything they knew, and she’d been awed by their knowledge, the vast sums of money that passed through their hands, how generous they were when they won, how gracious they were when they lost. When school sucked and her mother struggled and her father disappeared, the honorary uncles made her life bearable. Fun. Even cool.
On her fifteenth birthday—the day she realized Derek was gone and never coming back—she’d phoned Marty the Sneak. She’d been afraid Derek had been killed by somebody he’d cheated or by a jealous husband, something. At fifteen, Hope knew all the ways her father could meet his end. Marty had stumbled around, making excuses for Derek. And that’s how she found out that her father wasn’t coming because he would rather play cards, or throw dice, or run numbers than see her. Marty had felt so sorry for her that he’d offered to drive out for her party. The toughest poker player on the circuit, a guy who’d once bluffed an unsuited ten-seven against a full house, had gone sentimental.
Hope said no. She didn’t want Marty’s pity. She was done, finished, with all of it. She’d never played another hand of poker, never bet another nickel. And she’d never seen or heard from her father again. She’d never talked to Marty the Sneak again, and she’d never called the other honorary uncles, either, although they’d tried off and on for months, even years, to call her.
Derek was addicted to gambling. She understood that now. And she understood that if she went back to that world, she could become an addict, too. Seventeen years ago, she’d liked the life too