Whatever! She shouldn’t have brought it to begin with… then she wouldn’t have been wearing it when Linda made her appearance. Not willing to be caught in anything but her best again, Samantha made certain the only clothes with her were on par with the former Duchess of Albany, maybe a few decades younger in style, but worthy of what the woman on Blake’s arm should be wearing.

The rain let up during their afternoon drive to the country. As London faded away, and the rolling hills spread before them, Samantha tried to relax in the seat beside Blake.

He spoke of his sister, who was about Samantha’s age. “Gwen’s always wanted me to settle down.”

Sam felt her stomach twist with Blake’s words. “Doesn’t it worry you…” Sam let her words trail off, her gaze shifting to the driver in the front seat. She wanted to ask if he worried about his sister becoming attached to her new sister in the short span of their marriage.

Blake flinched, uncertainly skirted over his face. “You and Gwen will get along fine. She’s very kind. Perhaps a little spoiled, but never mean spirited.”

Samantha dropped her discussion about Gwen’s attachment to a temporary sister-in-law for a time when the two of them could talk alone. The thought of deceiving all the people she was about to meet started to weight on her. The memories of her father, of the time right before he was placed in handcuffs, surfaced in her mind.

As a business major, Samantha spent many hours outside class discussing her father’s success with her professors. Even her boyfriend at the time, Dan, seemed to want to know everything about Harris Elliot and his small empire of wealth and property.

Dan was charming, charismatic, and more sly than a fox at a hole waiting for the rabbit to peek it’s soft, fuzzy head out.

Sam was the rabbit who didn’t know she was being played.

To think she’d slept with the man who eventually put her father behind bars. How stupid she’d been. They’d dated, studied, or so she thought, and rumpled a fair number of sheets. All the while Dan recorded their conversations, asked seemingly innocent questions, and helped the prosecution make their case against her father.

Even now, years later sitting beside her temporary husband, Samantha felt ill. Not that she’d knowingly given the prosecution evidence against her father, but the sins of her father snowballed into the death of her mother and Jordan’s wasted life.

Samantha remembered the day Dan confronted her with the truth about who he was. He stood beside a Federal Agent who threatened Samantha with her mother’s incarceration if she didn’t cooperate with their investigation.

The agent and Dan revealed some of the holes in her father’s business practices and informed her about the bugs throughout her house. “We have reason to believe your mother knows more about your father’s crimes. We need you to find proof otherwise or we’ll be forced to put them both behind bars.”

Samantha knew her mother was clueless, and was too shocked at the time to question why a Federal Agent would make a daughter prove a mother’s innocence. In the end, Dan and his friends simply used Sam to nail her father. They knew Martha had nothing to do with Harris’s schemes.

Samantha had questioned many things her father did over the years. He had silent partners, or so he said, but Samantha never met one. It really wasn’t until her business professor in her first year in college asked about her father’s profession that Sam became suspicious. She couldn’t give a concrete answer as to what her father did to make money… only that he did.

As for her mother, Martha, she was a housewife of a rich man. She lunched with her elite neighbors, never washed her own dishes, and looked the other way when her father had an affair. Her clothes were always perfect, and she didn’t allow Samantha or Jordan to leave the house in anything worn or cheap.

Samantha’s first year in collage opened her eyes to how the world really ran. Her sorority sisters, who disappeared like roaches to light when her father ended up in jail, showed Sam an awful lot about how to budget money. Two of the girls were from broken marriages and revealed their talents for skimming daddy’s money off their living expenses so they could take their spring breaks wherever the sisters wanted to go. They introduced Sam to big box stores where everyday essentials didn’t have to cost a small fortune. Samantha had been proud when she’d told her mom about how she’d budgeted her money so that her father’s bill would be nearly half what they’d originally thought. Martha took one look at the blue jeans Sam wore and refused to listen. “No daughter of mine is going to dress like that.”

Offended, but not willing to let her mother’s narrow mind stop her from learning financial reality, Samantha continued to put away nearly half of her father’s allowance every month into a separate account. That account saved her ass when the Fed’s seized the Elliot money.

Now Samantha was shuffling right back into a lifestyle she’d left behind. She couldn’t help but worry how her deception to Linda, Gwen, and whoever else Blake introduced her to, would turn out when Samantha and Blake split.

Blake’s hand covered hers, bringing to Sam’s attention that she twisted them in her lap. When she glanced into his beautiful grey eyes, she saw sympathy. He probably thinks I’m nervous about meeting the family.

Little could he know her worry was much deeper.

For the first time since she’d slid on his ring, she questioned her decision.

What if she said or did something to mess this up for Blake, and his sister and mother were left without funds? Would Linda cope?