Sunset Surrender by Charlene Sands Page B

branches of the tall pines.” She had herself convinced it was nothing. But after seeing those four words, Sophia feared her world could very well tip upside down. She wasn’t convinced or sure of anything anymore. There was only one conclusion she could come to.
    Someone had been outside her cottage last night.
    Someone was watching her.
    Sophia squinted against the morning sunshine, looked around the yard once again and then shut the door. Her legs wobbly, she made her way to the sofa and lowered herself onto it.
    She closed her eyes.
    She had to get a grip.
    Yet she couldn’t move or summon up the energy to start her busy day. Her mind flashed to two years ago and that very frightening time in her life.
    Shortly after her mother’s cancer treatments had begun, she’d landed a position on the chorus line for the Las Vegas Fantasy Follies. Hospital bills had piled up faster than she could work them off. She’d been scared and worried about a mother who was in major denial about the severity of her illness. Out of necessity, Sophia had become both a worried, doting daughter and the only breadwinner for their little family.
    When the first note had arrived to her dressing room, Sophia hadn’t thought much of it. Her mind was on her mother’s chemo treatments...and kicking her legs high enough and in sync with the other dancers in order to keep her job. Two more notes had followed. After she’d received the third note delivered to the dressing room, her closest friend in the follies remarked, “Oh, wow, Sophia. You have yourself a stalker.”
    It was then that Sophia had learned that propositions usually came to showgirls in face-to-face encounters with gentlemen backstage after the show. They weren’t typed out on unadorned, untraceable white computer paper.
    The notes kept coming sporadically; there was no rhyme or reason to them. Sophia had gotten spooked on several occasions when she was sure there was one particular pair of eyes in her audience with deeper, more observant, more sinister motives than watching pretty girls dance, jiggle and tease on a glitzy stage. There were other times when she felt as if she were being followed home, although she’d never seen a soul. Her life had been one great big ball of fear. Fear for her mother, fear for her job, fear for her safety. She’d called the police once, and they’d taken a report noting her complaint, but they said no crime had been committed and Sophia figured she was pretty much on her own.
    Until Gordon Gregory had come to her rescue, her grey-haired knight in shining armor.
    Gordon felt he owed the Montrose women a great debt for saving his granddaughter’s life. Months prior, Louisa had taken in a wayward girl who had run away from her parents’ home in Northern California. She’d shown up in the alley behind the motel Louisa managed, high on drugs and beaten pretty severely from a mugging. The girl had been a runaway for certain and might have died on the backstreets of Las Vegas if Louisa and Sophia hadn’t taken her in and nursed her back to health. The frightened girl threatened to run again if they called the police. They hadn’t. Instead they’d talked to her for three days straight and gained her trust, making her see that she had hit rock bottom. But she still had a chance to save herself, and once she agreed to go home and make a fresh start, they’d learned that the misguided teenager was Amanda Gregory, granddaughter to Gordon Gregory, a wealthy oil magnate who had a home in Las Vegas.
    Gordon was so grateful to Louisa and Sophia for saving Amanda that he’d offered to give them anything they wanted. The sky was the limit.
    “We shouldn’t be rewarded for doing the right thing,” her ailing mother had told him.
    After that, Gordon had become a friend. And when things got bad and the two Montrose women had really needed help, Gordon had intervened with his offer to take Sophia away from the Follies and any danger she might have been