MATCHMAKERS

by

Jude Deveraux

Chapter One

There was a console telephone on Kane Taggert's desk with six buttons on it, every one of which was lit up, but when his private line rang, he put line number six on hold and answered it. His private line was for his family and anyone who had anything to do with his two young sons.

"Mom," he said, turning in his chair and looking at the New York skyline, "what an unexpected pleasure." He didn't ask, but he knew his mother wanted or needed something, because she didn't call him while the stock exchange was open if she just wanted to chat.

"I have a favor to ask of you."

Kane didn't groan, but he wanted to. Five months ago his twin brother had gotten married, and since then his mother had been relentless in her attempts to get Kane, her widower son, married.

"I think you need a vacation."

At that Kane did groan. Looking at his switchboard, he saw line number four start to blink, meaning Tokyo was about to hang up. "Out with it, Mom," he said. "What torture have you planned for me now?"

"Your father isn't feeling well and–"

"I'll be there–"

"No, no, it's nothing like that. It's just that his soft heart has put him in a bit of a pickle and I've promised to get him out of it."

This was a common occurrence in his parents' household. His father often volunteered to help people, and volunteered so generously that he took on too much, did too much. In her attempt to protect him, his wife often had to play the bad guy and unvolunteer him.

"What's he done now?" Kane said as light number four went off.

"You know how our neighbor Clem," – she was explaining who Clem was to emphasize that it had been so long since Kane had been home that he might have forgotten a man he'd known all his life – "often takes easterners on camping trips? Well, last month he took six men and, well, it was a bit rough on him. Clem's getting on in years now, and those climbs are hard on him."

Kane didn't say a word. Clem was as strong and as wiry as a mustang, and Kane well knew that Clem's health had nothing whatever to do with what his mother wanted her son to do.

"Anyway, your father said he'd take the next group of easterners."

Clem was also part con man so if he'd conned Ian Taggert into taking the next group, there was a reason. "That bad, huh?" Kane asked. "A real bunch of jerks, were they?"

Pat Taggert sighed. "The worst. Complainers. Afraid of the horses. The boss had 'requested' that they go, and they didn't want to be there."

"The worst kind. So what's Clem conned Dad into this time?"

Kane heard some anger in Pat's voice when she spoke. "It seems that Clem knew his next group of tourists was from this same company, only, Kane…"

"What's the bad news?"

"They're women! Clem knew this, and he's asked your father to spend two weeks leading four reluctant New York women on a trail ride. Can you imagine! Oh, Kane, you can't–"

At that Kane began to laugh. "Mom, you are never going to win an Academy Award for acting, so you can cut it out. So you want me, your widower son – your poor, lonely widower son – to spend two weeks alone with four nubile young women and maybe find a mother for his sons."

"In a word, yes," Pat said, annoyed. "How do you expect to meet anyone if you spend all your time working? All four of these women live in New York City where both you and Mike have chosen to live and–"

Unspoken words were sizzling through the telephone lines about how Kane and his brother had left the family home and taken grandbabies away from their grandparents.

"The answer is an unequivocal no," Kane said. "No! That's it, Mom. I can find my own women without any matchmaking on your part."

"All right," Pat said, sighing. "Go answer your telephones." At that she hung up, and for a moment Kane stared at the phone, frowning. He'd have to send her flowers and maybe a piece of jewelry. Even as he thought that, he knew that flowers and jewelry were a poor substitute for grandchildren.

* * * * *

He didn't get home until eight that evening, and by then his sister-in-law, Samantha, had his twin sons neatly tucked away in their beds. His brother Mike was at the gym, so he and Sam were alone, and after Kane had returned from kissing his sleepy sons, he met her in the living room. She was hugely pregnant, her hand seeming to be permanently attached to her lower back as she ambled about the town house taking care of two men and two active five-year-olds. Kane had his own apartment in New York, a barren place that for the most part was filled with kids' toys, and he had a place in his parents' house in Colorado, but after his brother had introduced him to Samantha, Kane and his sons had gradually moved into Mike's town house. That was Sam's doing, Kane thought. Sam had wanted a family, and if that was what Sam wanted, then Mike was going to give it to her.

Without asking, Sam brought Kane a beer in a cold mug and handed it to him. A thousand times he'd told her that she shouldn't wait on him, but Sam had a very hard head. Setting the beer down, he got up and went to lower her into one of Mike's fat leather chairs. She wasn't heavy, but she was as unwieldy as a dirigible.

"Thanks," she said, then nodded toward his beer. "Defeats the purpose of my waiting on you if you have to get up to help me, doesn't it?"

Smiling at her, he sat down and drank half the beer in one gulp. Sometimes he wanted what his brother had so badly that it was like a flame that threatened to burn him up. He wanted a wife who loved him and his sons, wanted a home of his own; he wanted to stop living vicariously through his brother.

"Out with it," Sam said.

"Out with what?"

"You can't lie any better than Mike can. What's bothering you?"

You, he wanted to say. Loving my sister-in-law, beginning to hate my brother.

"Kane," Sam said, "stop looking at me like that and talk to me. Tell me what's bothering you."

He couldn't tell her the truth, so he told her about his mother's call.

"What are you going to do?" Sam asked.

Kane hadn't considered accepting his mother's invitation, but suddenly the thought of two weeks alone in the high mountain desert with four women appealed to him. If they were New York women, they'd be afraid of the open space, of the noises in the night, and they always fell in love with their cowboy guide. Show a New York woman a man in a denim shirt, tight Levi's, and a worn pair of cowboy boots and you had her. Throw your leg over a horse and she'd probably swoon.

As he finished his beer, he smiled. It might be nice to have a woman look at him with stars in her eyes. Samantha looked at Mike as though he were an Olympic god, and his sons looked at Sam as though she were the only mother they'd ever had.

"Thinking you might go?"

"Maybe," Kane said, getting up. 'I'm going to have another beer. Can I get you anything?"

"On the countertop in the kitchen is a fax from Pat. It tells all about the four women who are going on the trip."

With a face filled with astonishment, Kane looked back at her, but Sam just shrugged. "She called and said she hoped you'd change your mind. Kane, one of the women is a widow. Three years ago she was in a car crash that killed her husband and made her miscarry her child."

When he went to the kitchen, Kane picked up the fax and read it. Ruth Edwards was the widow's name, and his mother had even found a photo of her. Even in the bad reproduction he could tell she was beautiful, as tall, as long-legged, as dark-haired as his beloved wife had been.

Quickly, Kane read about the other three women. One was a hairdresser's assistant, another ran a metaphysical shop in the Village, and the fourth was a short, pretty blonde whose name seemed vaguely familiar.

"She writes murder mysteries," Sam said from over his shoulder. She was standing so close her belly was touching his side, but the distance from the front of her belly to her head made her face seem nearly a yard away.

"Read any of them?"

"All of them. I buy them the minute they hit the stands."

"Speaking of writers, how's Mike's book coming?"

"Our book," she said with emphasis, knowing Kane was teasing her, "will be out in six months." She was speaking of the biography she and Mike had written, The Surgeon by Elliot Taggert, the pen name combining her maiden name with Mike's surname. "Well?" she said impatiently. "Are you going?"

"Will you keep the boys?"

It was a rhetorical question and they both knew it. "I'd keep them forever."

"Which is exactly why I think I'll go check out Mom's ladies."

Sam's eyes twinkled. "Pat's sending the family jet to pick you up at eight tomorrow morning. It's already left Denver."

Kane wasn't sure whether to laugh or groan. In the end he did both, then put his arm around Sam's shoulders and kissed her cheek. "Do I seem as lonely as you women think I am?"

More, Sam thought, but she didn't answer him. She was glad he was going to be around people.

Chapter Two

You know what's guaranteed to turn a man off? No, it's not laughing at him when he's in the throes of passion. The guaranteed, absolute, sure-bet turnoff is to tell a man you earn more money than he does.

Men seem to think it's okay for some daffy, brainless little lady to inherit millions – after all, some man earned that money. But let me tell you, men do not like to hear that a female pulled down 1.4 million last year and that, what's more, she manages all that money all by her itty-bitty self, with no help from any man anywhere.

Five years ago, when I was twenty-five, I was in a boring, dead-end job – the less said about it the better – and living in a boring, nowhere midwestern town, of which I want to say less than nothing. As I have always done, to occupy myself and keep my mind from stagnating, I told myself stories. I know, that's about a quarter inch away from having a split personality, but at an early age I found it was either take myself away or lose my mind altogether. My father was terrified of his own shadow and so demanded absolute obedience from his family at all times. I had to wear what he dictated, eat what he decided I was to eat, like what he decreed, move to his specifications. He controlled every bit of my life until I escaped at eighteen, but before that time I found out that there was one part of me he couldn't control: my mind. I may have been forced to wear blue when I wanted to wear red, and I may have been denied ginger ale because the ol' man hated ginger ale, but inside my head I was free. In my thoughts I did what I wanted, went where I wanted, said all the clever things I thought, and was praised for saying them. (My father had a tendency to smack smart mouths, which was very effective in making one keep one's thoughts to oneself.)

When I was twenty-five and living a few miles from my parents and doing my best to save enough money for a one-way ticket out, I wrote one of my stories down on paper. It was a murder mystery, and the killer was a young woman who'd done away with her tyrant of a father. After I wrote it, I thought, What the heck, and mailed it to a publishing house, never thinking they'd accept it. I guess a lot of people are sick of fathers and husbands who run their lives for them because twenty-eight days later I received a letter asking if they could please publish my book and send me a lot of money.

I thought, and still do, What a scam! These people were willing to pay me to do something I'd been doing all my life.

With the money they sent me, I moved to New York. I'd never been to the big city before, but it seemed to be where writers went – that's what I was now, not just a bored nobody who was on the verge of a split personality – and I rented a tiny apartment and bought a computer.

For the next four years I hardly looked up from the keyboard as I wrote one story after another. I killed off an uncle I didn't like. I killed off several co-workers who'd snubbed me, and in my mega-seller I killed off the entire cheerleading team of my high school.

During these four years I got a glimpse of a very different world from the one where I'd grown up. People were impressed by how competent I was. I'm sure I mentioned that my father was a tyrant, but did I also mention that he was the laziest creature alive? As far as I could figure out, at work he was a real wimp, afraid to stand up for himself, so he let others bully him. Then, when he got home, he took his rage out on me. My mother had long ago escaped to some never-never land of her own, and she was no fun for him to rage at. I, on the other hand, gave him a great deal of satisfaction because I cried and suffered and smoldered and felt ail the injustice of it.

But for all of my father's flaws, he made me into a competent, fearless person. After you've lived with a man like my father, trust me, nothing anyone else ever says or does to you can hurt you in exactly the way he could. Sadists make a study of their victims, whereas most people are too self-absorbed to care enough. So, thanks to the training I'd received in childhood, I was a very competent businesswoman. I wrote incessantly, I negotiated my own contracts, I invested the money I made without the help of a manager, and at the end of the four years I bought myself a penthouse apartment on Park Avenue. I had made it – and made it in a big way.

So what was my personal life like? Think nonexistent. My editor took me out now and then, and when I was writing without a break for days on end she'd even bring me food. But editors don't bring you dates. Authors who fall in love, authors who are social, don't write. I think if it were left up to publishing houses, they'd lock all their best-selling writers in Park Avenue towers and send them food and never allow them out.

So, after five years of writing, after making millions, after becoming a household name all over the world, I decided to accept Ruth Edwards' invitation to go on a two-week-long trail ride in the wilds of Colorado.

Ruth's boss had seen the movie City Slickers and had decided that it would be a good life-experience for his top male managers to go on a trail ride and deliver a calf or whatever, so of course they went. Unfortunately the boss decided at the last minute that his marriage was of utmost importance, so he went off to Bermuda with his wife and left his male employees to tough it out on beans and overcooked beef. Of course when they returned, all the men said they'd had a marvelous life-enhancing experience, and the boss never saw the dartboard covered with a horse's head smack in the middle of a map of Colorado.

After the men's return, the boss said all of his female executives should go on the same trip and experience the same deep, mind-altering peace the men had found. Since all of his females who weren't secretaries – and who had run the company for the two weeks the men were in Colorado – consisted of Ruth, she was told to choose three friends and go with them.

That's when Ruth called me. Not by any stretch of the imagination could Ruth and I be called friends. We were in college together and during our freshman year our dorm rooms were across the hall from each other. Ruth had grown up rich, with adoring parents who made it their goal in life to give their daughter anything she wanted, while I was going to school on government loans and went to my father's house every weekend to do things like cut the grass and wash the clothes and satisfy my father's insatiable need to belittle someone. Our backgrounds did not give us a great deal of common ground to talk about.

Also, there was Ruth herself. She was tall, with lots of thick, dark hair that always obeyed her, gorgeous clothes – she was one of those girls who, even if she wore a sweatshirt, tucked a Hermès scarf at her throat – and she had an entourage of bad-skinned, overweight, gaga-eyed girls following her. These girls constantly changed as they got tired of fetching for Ruth and adoring Ruth, and were replaced by others.

Since I always had my nose in a book and only watched Ruth from afar – okay, so I watched her with envy, fantasizing that I was an ugly duckling and that someday I was going to grow a foot, my hair was going to start curling, and I was going to become a social success instead of always saying the wrong thing at the wrong time – I had no idea she knew I existed.

I underestimated Ruth. Any woman who could claw her way to the top of her field by the time she hit thirty should never be underestimated.

She called me and told me how proud she was of my success, how she'd been following my career for years, and how she had envied me so much in college.

"Really?" I heard myself asking, as wide-eyed as a kid. "You envied me?"

Even while part of me was telling myself that everything she was saying was a crock, I was flattered. She told me how she used to watch me at school and used to see how respected I was by the other students, although what I remember is people trying to get me to write their papers for them. But Ruth seemed to be willing to go on and on with her praise, so I let her. What people don't understand about writers is that they desperately want approval. There's a saying, If you want to write, have the worst childhood you can survive. When I was a kid I tried everything in the world to get my father's approval: I made straight A's, I did ninety percent of the household chores, I was clever when I thought he wanted me to be clever, and I tried to figure out when I was supposed to be quiet. His joy was in changing the rules and not telling me he'd changed them. I used to visualize my life as one of those little ducks at a fairground shoot. I'd travel by and sometimes I'd get shot by the man with the rifle and sometimes I'd survive unscathed. It made for an exciting childhood, but it also made for an adult who'd do almost anything for praise. Money couldn't buy me, people yelling at me never made me do anything I didn't want to do, but give me six words of praise and I'm yours.

So Ruth told me lots of great things about myself and how she'd read all my books. Oddly enough, her favorite was one in which the victim was modeled on her. I'd even had her killer shave her head, eyebrows, and lashes so she looked dreadful in her coffin.

Anyway, Ruth told me she had to go on this trip to Colorado and wanted me to go with her so we could "renew" our friendship.

I hate to say that all of this went to my head. I thought that now that I was successful and rich, women like Ruth considered me their equal. No more small-town nobody for me. Now I was Somebody.

Unfortunately, I once again underestimated Ruth, or maybe I overestimated her, because as soon as I got to Colorado I realized she'd invited me to impress her boss. When she returned to her New York office she could tell him she'd invited her good, dear, longtime friend, the best-selling author Cale Anderson.

It didn't take any sleuthing to figure this out. As I disembarked from the tiny toy plane propelled by a fat rubber band outside a place called Chandler, Colorado, Ruth ran across the tarmac and threw her arms around me. Great. I got a face full of suspiciously firm boobs and a mouthful of silk scarf, as well as my carefully applied makeup smeared across my face. Behind her, just as in college, were two women looking at Ruth with adoring eyes.

"Cale," Ruth said, "meet Maggie and Winnie."

I wasn't told which was which, but one was fat and winked at me, and the other was short and thin and I just knew she was going to lecture me on the value of herbal medicines.

I smiled hello and thought about running back to the plane, but the pilot had already retwisted its rubber band and it was chugging down the runway. There were a couple of hangars there, one closed and one containing – I swear to God this is true – a World War I biplane. I looked back at Ruth and decided she and her satellites weren't so bad after all.

But then Ruth said, smiling over her shoulder, "Cale darling, you wouldn't mind being a dear and carrying my blue bag, would you? I just can't seem to manage by myself."

How come I can negotiate multimillion dollar contracts and get what I want, and I can write about women who stand up for themselves, but when faced with a woman like Ruth all I can do is smolder and pick up her damned suitcase for her? Was it because my mother didn't love me? Hell, my mother didn't know I was alive unless the toilet needed cleaning, so you'd think that would make me despise women. Instead it makes me do most anything to get one of them to like me.

So there I am, the inside of me sane and enraged, and the outside of me schlepping Ruth's bloody suitcase along with three of my own, following her two soldiers, also laden with Ruth's luggage, while her royal highness breezed ahead of us toward God knows where. We were the foot soldiers and she the general leading the charge.

By the time we got to the edge of the runway – this was a private field so there was no nice, comfortable lounge – Ruth halted and vaguely waved her hand for us to set her luggage down.

Oh, thank you, kind mistress, I thought, and dropped her medium-expensive case and sat on it.

Ruth, her two puppies looking up at her – as far as I knew, she never had an acolyte who was as tall as or taller than she; she liked them short and homely – said, "Someone was supposed to be here to meet us." She was frowning as she looked up and down the tarmac. Not a person was in sight and I somehow doubted that Ruth had ever had much experience in being kept waiting.

I had been told very little about the trip. Ruth's instructions had been vague to say the least, but at the time she'd been telling me in detail how much she'd loved No More Pep Rallies. It was one of my best plots: a high school student is sick of always missing her Friday afternoon chemistry class to sit in the gym and cheer for a bunch of bozos chasing a ball around, so she blew up all the cheerleaders, proving once and for all that chemistry is more useful than football. Anyway, I was basking in Ruth's praise, and when she said, "Leave everything to me," I did so gladly. After all, by that time I was convinced that she was one of the great geniuses of our time.

So now here I was sitting in the Colorado sun. My only consolation was that I was sure to get a book out of this experience. Maybe I'd make a mystery writer the killer. She'd do in a tall brunette named Edwina Ruthan, and she'd never be caught. Or maybe at the end the detective would say, "I know you did it, but having dated Edwina, I know you did the world a favor. You're free to go. Just don't do it again."

Of course that would never happen because the only people who adored Ruth more than no-life-of-their-own women were men. Short men, tall men, ugly men, gorgeous men, whatever – they all adored her. Somehow, all five feet eight inches of Ruth could make men believe she was little and cute and desperately needed help. Like King Kong needed help. Like Cybill Shepherd didn't have a date for the prom.

About two minutes after I had decided that I was going to leave this state forever, a blue pickup came screeching to a halt in front of us. I mean "us" euphemistically. The pickup stopped so the driver could look at Ruth. The rest of us – hot, tired, bored, sitting on Ruth's suitcases – were staring at the tires and the scraped paint of the truck bed.

I looked up at Ruth, and when I saw her face change, I knew the driver must be somewhere between puberty and male menopause, because that frown disappeared immediately and was replaced with a flirtatious look as she leaned into the passenger side of the truck.

"Are you Mr. Taggert?" she purred.

I wish I could purr. Had Mel Gibson Himself driven up, I still probably would have said, "You're late."

A male voice rumbled out of the truck, and even I could feel the masculinity of it. Either the driver was a heap-big male stud cowboy or they'd trained one of the bulls to drive.

Ruth batted her eyelashes and said, "No, of course you're not late. We're early."

Gag me with a spoon.

"Of course we forgive you, don't we, girls?" Ruth asked, looking at us with adoring eyes. I hadn't been called a girl in so many years I almost liked it.

The driver's door opened, and I saw the big tire in my face – truck tires, mud tires, man tires – relieved of weight. They had sent the big one. Still bored, wondering if there was any place in this podunk town that took American Express so I could get out of here, I watched his feet as he walked around the truck. He was wearing cowboy boots, but they weren't made of exotic leather, and they looked as though they'd been used a great deal. Kicking cow pies?

Just as he walked around the tail of the truck, I sneezed, so I got to see him last. What I saw first was the open-mouthed speechlessness of Maggie and Winnie – or was it Winnie and Maggie?

Great, I thought, blowing my nose, they sent some pretty cowboy to bedazzle the city ladies.

I am ashamed to say that when I finally did look up at him, I reacted as badly as the duo and worse than our fearless leader. His name was Kane Taggert, and he was gorgeous: black curly hair, black eyes, sun-browned skin, shoulders an elk would envy, and a sweet, gentle expression on his face that made my knees weak. If I hadn't been sitting down, I might have fallen.

Ruth, still fluttering her lashes, introduced us, and he held out his hand to shake mine. I just sat there looking at him.

"We're all a little tired," Ruth explained and glared at me before grabbing her largest suitcase and attempting to toss it in the back of the truck. She'd learned long ago that the fastest way to make most men notice you is to start to do man's work.

Instantly, Cowboy Taggert left off staring at me as though trying to remember his sign language skills and turned to help dear Ruth with her bag. Personally, I was surprised she knew where the handle was – before then I hadn't seen her touch it.

It was at that moment that we all heard a sound we'd heard a million times in movies but had never wanted to hear in real life: the rattling of a rattlesnake. Mr. Taggert had the big heavy suitcase in his arms, and Ruth, standing so close to him I hoped she was using some sort of birth control, was to his left. Six inches away from her foot was a coiled rattler that looked as though it meant business.

Very slowly, Mr. Taggert spoke to me because I was farthest away from the snake and nearest the truck door. "Open the door," he said calmly, patiently. "Under the driver's seat is a pistol. Get it out and very slowly come around the far side of the truck and give it to me."

If I do say so myself, my mind works quickly in an emergency. I'm not one of those people who freeze, and right now I saw lots of things wrong with this plan. One, how was this man going to shoot if his arms and hands were full of Ruth's seventy-five-pound suitcase? And two, it would take me a long time to walk around the truck, longer maybe than the snake intended to give Ruth.

Slowly, I opened the door to the truck. I was the only thing moving except the rattles of the snake, which sounded awfully loud on that windswept field. Also slowly, I leaned into the truck, and when I pulled out the pistol, I breathed a sigh of relief. I was hoping it wasn't one of those heavy revolvers that take the hands of a lumberjack to fire. It was a nice, neat little nine-millimeter, and all one had to do was pull the slide back, aim, and shoot.

Which is what I did. I was shaking some, so I didn't quite blow the head clean off the poor snake – after all, it'd probably only wanted the warmth of Ruth's suitcase – but I certainly killed it.

Everything happened at once then. The cowboy tossed the suitcase to the ground just in time to catch Ruth when she fainted into his big, strong arms, while Winnie and Maggie fell sobbing onto each other.

I was left standing there with a smoking revolver in my hand. Looking at Ruth draped aesthetically across the cowboy's sun-bronzed arms, I did my best Matt Dillon imitation, legs apart, and blew on the end of the revolver, then stuck it into my skirt pocket. "Well, Tex," I drawled, "there's another one for Boot Hill."

It didn't take a degree in psychology to see that the cowboy was angry. In fact, he was looking at me as though he wanted to wrap his hands around my throat and squeeze, but since his hands were so very full of Ruth's swooning body, he could do nothing but glare meaningfully. In spite of his encumbrances, when he started walking toward me, I stepped aside. I don't think they allow public murders in Colorado, but I didn't want to press my luck.

But he just slipped his precious burden onto the truck seat – Ruth was still doing her dying swan act, but from the flicker of her eyelashes I knew she was as wide awake as I was – then told the skinny follower to get in with her. I think he would have slammed the door shut, but the noise might have disturbed Sleeping Beauty.

Winnie – Maggie? – and I stood to one side while he tossed suitcases, four at a time, into the back of the truck.

"Get in," he said to Ruth's minion, and she obeyed with the speed, if not the grace, of a gazelle.

He turned to me next, his face blazing, and right then I decided that I was not going to get into that truck and let him drive me off to heaven knew where.

"Look," I said, backing up, "all I did was shoot the snake. I'm sorry if I offended your masculine sensibilities, but…" Maybe this wasn't the way to talk to a cowboy. There's a reason why big, beautiful men are jocks and little, wimpy men are brains. It's as though God tried to even things out, as though he said, "You get beauty but no brains, and you, over there, get brains but no beauty." So talking to this scrumptious-looking creature about the finer points of psychology might not be the best thing to do. Could he read and write? I wondered.

"When I give an order, you are to obey it. You understand me?"

Suddenly I wasn't in Colorado anymore. I wasn't an award-winning author; I was again a little girl whose father controlled everything. As fast as I was transported backward, I returned to the present, but all the rage that little girl had felt was still with me. "Like hell I will," I said and started to walk around the truck.

When he put his hands on me I went berserk. No one had touched me in anger since I escaped my father's house, and no one was going to now. I kicked and bit and fought and scratched my way away from him. I don't know how long I fought before I came back to the present reality and realized he had his hands on my shoulders and was shaking me. Ruth and her skinny follower were gaping at me out the back window of the truck, and the one in the back was cringing behind Ruth's suitcases, as though she was afraid I'd attack her next.

"Are you okay?" the cowboy asked.

There were three bloody streaks on his beautiful cheek, and I had put them there. I couldn't look at him. "I want to go home," I managed to whisper. Home to my own lovely apartment, away from Ruth and her cowboy. Away from my embarrassment.

"Okay," he said, sounding as though he were speaking to a dangerously wacko person. "When we get to the ranch, I can arrange transportation back, but there's no one here now. Do you understand me?"

I hated his patronizing tone, and when I looked back at him I didn't think he was as beautiful as I'd originally thought. "No, I don't understand you. Maybe you should speak a little slower, or maybe you should call the men with white jackets."

He didn't seem to find that funny as he picked me up at the waist and threw me into the bed of the truck with all the finesse he'd used with the suitcases. I was halfway out the back when he stepped on the gas and knocked me backward. Fortunately I landed unhurt on the very soft form of Winnie/Maggie. I didn't bother to ask about her.

I was an internationally successful writer sitting in the back of a dirty truck. A heavy suitcase was starting to crush my ankle, and four people were thinking I was a crazy. Did Mary Higgins Clark go through this?

Chapter Three

"What happened to you?" Sandy asked, looking up from the kitchen table and seeing the fury on Kane's face as well as the three bloody scratches.

Kane didn't answer until he'd poured himself a healthy shot of MacTarvit whisky and downed it in one gulp. "I got these marks from being a fool," he said, refilling his glass as he turned to the older man. "Have they written any books on this mother-son thing?"

Sandy smiled, making his face fold into thousands of wrinkles caused by many years of being in the high-altitude sun. "A few hundred, maybe thousands," he said. "What's Pat done now?"

"Talked me into taking a bunch of idiots into the mountains. She made me feel guilty about the kids and–" He broke off as he drank more of the whisky. "Have you met these women?"

"No," Sandy said. "Why don't you tell me about them?"

Kane shook his head in disbelief. "One of them put her hand inside my shirt and felt me up, another one asked me questions about blockage of my bowels, and the other one…"

Sandy frowned when Kane took another drink, for he knew he wasn't much of a drinker.

"The other one nearly shot me, and afterward she turned into a raving lunatic. If she doesn't kill us in our sleep, she's at least going to terrify the horses."

"And what about the fourth one?"

Kane smiled. "Ah, now, that would be Ruth."

Sandy had to turn away so Kane wouldn't see his smile. Pat had made it clear that romance was the motive for coercing her widowed son into taking the women on this trip, and it looked as though her plan was working, if the silly expression on Kane's face was any indication of what was happening.

"I've got to get back to them. No telling what that crazy one will do. There are rifles in the main house, and she might decide to be Annie Oakley and see if she can shoot the barrettes off the heads of the other women."

"That bad?" Sandy asked, frowning.

"Worse." Kane finished his drink. "I want you to radio home and have Dad send the helicopter here to pick her up. I don't want to be around her; she's dangerous."

"Frank took the copter to Washington State. Something to do with Tynan Mills."

"Damn!" Kane said under his breath. "Look, radio Dad and tell him to get some transportation here fast. If nothing else, tell him to have a truck meet us in Eternity. If I have to spend the entire two weeks with that woman I may kill her."

"You'd better hold off on that. Your mother might not like a dead greenhorn."

"It's not a laughing matter. You haven't met her." Kane took a deep breath. "I will do my best to get along with her until I can ship her out of here. All right? Will you radio Dad now?"

Nodding in agreement as Kane left the cabin, Sandy went to the radio to call.

When Kane entered the big two-story main house, the first thing he saw was the little blond mystery writer, and his first thought was to wonder if all her stories were based on people trying to kill her. If they were, he could understand why they'd tried to do it. In spite of what he'd told Sandy about trying to get along with her, when he saw her there alone, he tried to tiptoe out before she saw him.

"Caught!" she said, seeming to be highly amused at seeing him trying to escape undetected.

Turning back to her, Kane tried to force himself to smile at her. She was a guest of his, or, more correctly, his neighbor's, and he was going to try to be a good host to her. The bottom floor of the big log house was all one room, with the bedrooms upstairs, and she was sitting at the bar, looking amused. He couldn't explain what it was he disliked so much about her, but it was something. She was pretty enough, and if he'd seen her on the street he might have been interested, but she seemed so smug, so sure of herself, that all he could think of was getting away from her.

He forced himself to smile, and moved behind the bar. "Would you like a drink? You must be thirsty after your long flight."

"Aren't you worried about what I'll do if I get drunk?"

That thought had been uppermost in his mind, and when she seemed to guess it, he could feel his face turning red.

"Don't worry, Tex," she said in an exaggerated drawl as she put her foot up on the bar stool next to her. "I can handle my liquor as well as the next man."

Kane's hand tightened around the bottle of whisky. Something about the woman more than annoyed him: everything she said, did, insinuated, hinted at, made him furious. Without bothering to ask her what she wanted, he fixed her a weak gin and tonic with no ice, and when he handed it to her, he couldn't bring himself to smile.

She looked down at the drink, and for the first time he saw a human expression cross her face. The first time she'd looked at him, she'd stared at him as though he were something in a circus and he'd wondered if she was retarded. Minutes later she was shooting the snake, and minutes after that she was screaming and clawing. Now she looked a little sad, but the expression went away and she looked back at him with a smirk.

"To you, cowboy," she said, but he put his hand on her wrist and wouldn't allow her to drink.

"The name isn't 'cowboy'."

Lowering the glass, she frowned at him. "What was it that ticked you off so much this afternoon? That I didn't do what you ordered me to do or that you didn't get to play the hero and save Miss Ruthie yourself?"

Very slowly he walked around the bar to stand in front of her. Then, his eyes never leaving hers, he put his foot on her stool right between her legs. When she saw the hole that her bullet had made in the toe of his boot – had it been even a fraction of an inch to the right, it would have taken his toes with it – she did have the courtesy to look a little shocked. But the expression didn't last long. The next minute she stuck her finger into the hole and touched his toe – the bullet had taken away a patch of his sock – and said, "This little piggy went to market, this little piggy stayed home, this little piggy…"

Even as a child Kane had never hurt a girl. His eldest brother, Frank, had given him a lecture once when he came home from first grade with two black eyes that Cindy Miller had given him. Kane hadn't fought back but had stood there and let her slug him until the teacher came and pulled Cindy away. His teacher had said she didn't know if Kane was a fool or a hero in the making. Frank hadn't been ambivalent: he'd said Kane was stupid.

But right now Kane wanted to hurt this girl. He wanted to strangle her, and before he knew what he was doing, he went after her, his hands extended.

"There you are," Ruth said, floating down the stairs in a lovely dress of red silk.

Abruptly, Kane came out of what he was sure was a waking nightmare, and when he straightened up, he saw the little mystery writer scurry off the stool and run to Ruth as though for protection. Kane had to turn away, horrified at himself at what he'd been about to do.

"Am I glad to see you!" Cale said to Ruth. "We were having the most boring discussion about pork bellies. You want a drink? Cowboy Taggert makes a very nice warm, weak gin and tonic."

"I'll get you anything you want, Ruth," Kane said, calming his racing heart and refusing to look at the horrid woman standing so near her.

"A little chilled white wine," Ruth said demurely, and Kane smiled at her.

"Lovebirds already," Cale muttered, but Kane resolutely refused to acknowledge her presence. Maybe if he ignored her, she'd realize she was unwanted and leave him and Ruth alone.

When he handed Ruth her glass, he looked into her dark eyes and thought about her hair spread out on a pillow.

"Gee, I guess three's a crowd," Cale said and made Kane turn away so Ruth couldn't see his expression turn to one of rage.

When he'd recovered himself, he walked to the window, hoping Ruth would follow him and when she did, he thought how natural it would be to slip his arm about her waist. She was so like his wife that he knew his arm would fit perfectly, but the presence of the blonde on the other side of Ruth kept him from touching her. He couldn't be himself around that woman.

Outside the window, Kane could see Sandy coming toward the house, leading two saddled horses.

"Who's he?" Ruth asked.

"Sandy. Actually, he's J. Sanderson." Kane smiled at her, noting the way the evening light touched her hair. "No one knows what the J stands for, so we've always called him Sandy. He's a distant relative of mine."

Cale peered around Ruth and looked up at Kane. "And which one is your relative? The one with the brown saddle or the one with the black saddle?"

Without thinking what he was doing, Kane went for her. He leaped over a chair back while she, after one gasp of fright, climbed up on the couch, then jumped over the back and headed for the door. Kane caught her just as she ran smack into Sandy as he entered the room. With one bounce, she was behind Sandy, her hands on his hips as she used him as a shield.

Kane was too angry to comprehend what was going on. His one goal in life was to kill this woman. Reaching around Sandy, he made a grab for her, but she evaded him, so he pushed Sandy to one side.

"Kane!" Sandy bellowed in his ear, and it was the voice of a man who had changed Kane's diapers.

Once again Kane felt as though he were waking from a trance. For a moment he stood there blinking; then he realized what he'd been about to do. The woman, half his size, was smiling at him from behind Sandy, looking like the school tattletale who'd just done her bad deed for the day and was glorying in it. Sandy was disgusted and shocked by him, and Kane didn't dare look at Ruth. Too mortified with embarrassment to move, Kane just stood there.

With one more look of reproach at Kane, Sandy slipped his arm about the woman's shoulders and escorted her from the room, and she left with him, her round little tail twitching in triumph as she left the house.

Chapter Four

Sandy had to admit to himself that Kane's behavior had shaken him. He'd known the man since he was a child, and Kane and his twin brother had always been the kindest, sweetest children, always ready to lend a helping hand to anyone who needed them. They were the children who would sleep in the barn with a sick horse and cry when one of the dogs killed a snake. They were boys who'd rather laugh than anything else, boys who were happy and wanted to share their happiness with others.

So when Sandy had walked into the house and seen Kane threatening the life of one very pretty, very small female, he hadn't at first known how to react. One thing that had been so stunning to him was the fact that Kane was responding at all. After his wife died five years ago, Kane had seemed to retreat within himself. Except for his sons, nothing seemed to make him angry or sad; nothing seemed to delight him or disappoint him or bore him. In truth, nothing in the world seemed to affect him at all.

When Pat had told Sandy what she was up to with these four women and that she'd even chosen one of them to be her son's future wife, Sandy hadn't laughed. He had been hoping that something or someone would bring Kane back to life, and if a widow could do that, then he was for whatever deception had to be perpetrated to make it come about.

But when Sandy walked into the house, Kane hadn't been mooning over some beautiful widow; he'd been chasing a minx of a girl across the furniture. Sandy had to admit that he was intrigued as much as puzzled by what he'd seen.

"You the one who shot the snake?" Sandy asked the young woman walking silently beside him. She was a pretty little thing, blonde and blue-eyed, and if he hadn't just seen her in action, he would have thought her rather shy and quiet.

"And went crazy," she added tightly, and Sandy saw the very slight movement of her shoulders, as though she were preparing to defend herself against him.

"You want to tell me what happened?"

"Not especially," she answered.

Sandy wanted to hear another side to the story, and he meant to find out what had happened. "Kane says you nearly killed him and afterward you went hysterical. You always get hysterical and use guns?"

Trying his best to keep from smiling, he watched as she took his bait, her pretty little face turning a couple of shades of red, ranging from pink to almost purple, before she erupted in words.

"I saved that ungrateful woman's life!" she said, then went on to tell Sandy about the suitcase Kane had been holding and how she figured that if she didn't act quickly the snake might strike at Ruth.

As Sandy listened, the smile left his face. The impression Kane had given him was that the woman was beyond irrational, but her reasons for what she'd done were sound, and it did indeed seem as though she'd saved Ruth's life. "What about later?" he asked softly. "Did you get scared and a little too excited?" He could understand if she had, but he watched her as she looked away from him, her face again red, but this time from embarrassment rather than rage. He could see her debating whether or not to tell him the truth, so he just stood there and waited patiently while she made up her mind.

After a big sigh, she said, "Well, uh… my old man used to get mad at me and… lay his hands on me, and I guess when your cowboy touched me I sort of did a little time travel."

After she'd told him, she stood there looking at him belligerently, as though daring him to make any comment. She looked a bit like the local bully who'd just revealed that he wasn't so tough after all.

Sandy nodded in understanding of what she'd told him, but made no comment. "Do you know anything about horses?"

"I can tell when one's upside down, but that's about it."

He grinned at her. "Why don't you come help me unsaddle these animals and tell me how you know so much about guns?"

"I guess I don't know enough, because I almost shot that cowboy's foot off."

Walking, Sandy didn't look back at her, but he could hear the remorse in her voice, and he heard the way she referred to Kane as "that cowboy". "Did you tell Kane you were sorry?"

"Ha! I'd die first."

When Sandy gave her a surreptitious glance from under his hat brim, she was looking at the mountains, her hands clenched into fists, her mouth set into a hard little line. "Are you the hair lady or the widow or the one with the funny shop?" Before she could answer, his eyes began to sparkle. "You write the murder mysteries."

"Yes," she said, still angry, but then she looked at him and smiled. "My next book is going to be called Death of a Cowboy. What sort of death do you think would be appropriate? Caught in his own lariat and hanged? Maybe a rattlesnake in his bedroll." Her grin broadened. "Maybe blood poisoning from a dirty bullet that shot all his toes off."

Chuckling, Sandy opened the barn door for her. "Come in here and tell me the rest of this story. I like a good story."

"Then you're going to like me," she said happily, "because I can tell lots of good stories." Then, frowning, she muttered, "It'll be good to have somebody around here like me."

Chapter Five

Contrary to the way it looked, I didn't really want Cowboy Taggert to hate me. I've always had fantasies about being likable. I'd like to walk into a room and have people sigh and say, "Cale's here. Now the party can begin." Of course that's never happened. Bookish people don't get invited to parties that often, and when they do, they tend to sit in the corner and watch.

As I helped that dear, sweet old man, Sandy, in the barn, I pretended nothing was bothering me, and I vowed to behave myself for as long as I was on this trip. Ten years from now the cowboy would look back and say, "That little mystery writer was actually a good egg."

I did well for a whole twenty-four hours. At dinner all of us sat at one round table – and I didn't say a word. I didn't say anything when the cowboy reached across Ruth for the hundredth time to refill her wineglass. I didn't say anything when the skinny groupie started talking about her channelers. I didn't even laugh when the fat groupie spilled wine in the cowboy's lap, then tried to rub away the red stain on his crotch. I bade everyone a polite good-night and went to my room, planning to work on an outline for my next book.

But my strongest and best character trait is the ability to concentrate, which is also known as the ability to obsess, and that's what I did that night.

Why is it that men can't see through women like Ruth? Why are men so dumb when it comes to women? Long legs, a cantilevered chest, acres of hair, and a woman can get any man she wants.

It bothered me that I was attracted – seriously attracted – to some big dumb cowboy while he looked at me as though he wanted to feed me rat poison.

I behaved myself all through breakfast while Ruth and the jock made goo-goo eyes at each other, seeming to read meaning into comments like "Pass me the honey." Nothing in life is more boring than being near self-absorbed lovers. They find amusement in every word; every gesture from one is a thing of beauty to the other. They have no interest in anything outside themselves.

I bit into a piece of toast and watched the way the cowboy looked at Ruth: he was gone. As for Ruth, her heart wasn't in her eyes. Now and then she'd look at the Maggie-Winnie duet with a glance of triumph, as though to say, Look what I can do. She was probably looking forward to the great, drippy final scene when she'd bid him a tearful farewell. But poor dumb Taggert looked as if he wanted to tie an apron around Ruthie's perfectly maintained waist and put her behind a stove. For a moment I got a great deal of pleasure from imagining Ruth in a kitchen: worn linoleum floor, gingham curtains, the smell of onions frying, hot enough to fry beef on the tabletop, three whining kids hanging on to her swollen, red, unshaven legs.

When I looked up, Sandy was smiling at me as though he knew exactly what I was thinking, so I winked and gave him a mock salute with my orange juice.

By the time afternoon rolled around, I'd behaved myself so well that I guess I was feeling a little smug, because I blew it.

We'd all mounted horses and started riding up a trail into the woods. I'd been on a horse only a couple of times in my life before, but when you get down to it, riding a horse doesn't take all that much brainpower. I'm not talking about dressage or show jumping, which require years of practice and training, but sitting on some well-fed, complacent animal that already knows the trail takes no skill.

But that's not how Ruth and the duet viewed it. Given Ruth's background, I would have thought she'd be a great horsewoman, but the truth was, she was terrified of the animal. Terrified and appalled at its big, wide nostrils, its hairy mouth, as well as the back end of it. When she climbed on that horse, her eyes wide with fear, I came close to liking her. She must really want to keep her job if she was willing to climb on an animal that terrified her as much as this one did.

It was late afternoon when I did it again. We all dismounted, sore, tired, and for the most part not speaking. Ruth had ridden behind Taggert and what conversation there was on the trail had been between them. The skinny one of the duet had tried to talk to me about a vegetarian diet, but when I told her I ate nothing but meat and lots of it, she clammed up and wouldn't speak to me. The silence of the woods, with Sandy riding behind me, had been bliss.

But after we'd dismounted and most of the group had wandered into the woods to make use of the facilities, I glanced at Ruth and saw that she had an odd look in her eye. She had her hand on her lower back, and I knew that if she was half as sore as I was, she was in pain. I don't know what she was thinking, but then again, she probably wasn't thinking at all. She was in pain and the cause of her pain was the placidly munching horse in front of her.

With hands shaking from exhaustion, she lit a cigarette. Then, with the look of a malicious child, she crushed out the cigarette in the soft neck of the unsuspecting horse.

Everything happened at once then. The horse cried out, sidestepped into Ruth, knocked her down, and started to walk on her. I didn't think. I just ran, trying to place myself between Ruth and the horse, but the horse was angry and in pain; some of the hair on its neck had caught fire and was smoldering. As best I could, I held on to the bridle with my left hand and slapped my right hand over the burn as I tried to tell the horse that it was safe and no one was going to harm it again. Somewhere during the turmoil, Ruth had slithered away like the snake she was and left me alone with the horse.

Thrashing through the woods like the Abominable Snowman was the big cowboy, and when I glanced up, I saw that he was heading straight for me – and his face was contorted with rage. What now? I thought. What in the world was he angry at me about this time?

Ruth, true to form, threw herself into the cowboy's strong, protective arms, weeping copiously, but without mussing her eye makeup, and begging him to save her. Taggert held her, but it was me he was glaring at as I stood there petting that poor burned horse. I wondered what Ruth would say if I told that I'd seen what she'd done.

"You should have called me," Taggert said, his teeth locked together.

About a thousand sentences went through my head at once. I could have told him the truth about his beloved; I could have pointed out that if I'd called him, then waited for him to arrive, Ruthie's lovely face might now have a horseshoe print in the middle of it. In the end I didn't defend myself. I just said, "You're a real jerk, you know that? A plain ol' everyday jerk," then dropped the bridle and walked away into the woods.

Is there any anger in the world more cold, more deep within you than the anger that comes from being falsely accused? I felt like a coal left over from an all-day fire. With the least bit of encouragement I could have erupted into a full-fledged forest fire. I stood there in the woods, not seeing anything, my fists clenched, feeling like a martyr. It wasn't fair! It really, truly wasn't fair.

My anger never lasted long, and this time was no exception. Within minutes I had turned it inward and burst my own bubble. I stood still, trembling with emotion and exhaustion, and to my disgust, tears stung my eyes.

When I heard someone behind me, I rubbed at my eyes with the back of my hand and looked up to see Sandy, his face a mask of concern.

"I don't know what's wrong with Kane," he said. "Usually he's not like this. Usually he's–"

Rule number one in my father's house: Never let 'em know you're in pain. If they know you're hurt, they can hurt you more.

I did my best to smile and sound lighthearted. "It's me. I always rub men the wrong way. If I'd screamed in fear and covered my face with my hands in terror he'd probably be feeding me brandy and pâté now."

Sandy chuckled. "Probably." He paused a moment, then said, "What's Ruth like?"

I could do nothing but roll my eyes. Should I tell him about the cigarette burn?

"Kane…" Sandy said hesitantly. "I think he wants a wife."

My earlier vision of Ruth in a kitchen came back to me and did a great deal to cheer me up. But I wasn't going to lie to this man; he'd been too nice to me, and he didn't deserve lies in return. "And he thinks to get a wife out of Ruth? Ruth likes the conquest, but once she's won, she's on to new goals." I thought of the cowboy bawling me out for saving Ruth not once but twice. "I think they deserve each other. I hopes she breaks his heart."

Sandy was silent. "So," he said after a while, "are you married?"

I knew he was thinking about Kane, who was like a son to him. Why is it that some people receive love no matter what they do and some people don't? I purposely misunderstood Sandy. "Is this an offer?"

When Sandy spoke, he was utterly serious. "If I were ten years younger I'd pursue you so hard that you'd end up marrying me just to get me to leave you alone."

My laugh was a little forced, but I couldn't deny that I was flattered. "You wouldn't want to marry me," I said honestly. "I'm too competent to marry. Men like women who are helpless or at least know how to pretend to be like Ruth can, but me, I'm ridiculously capable, and I always forget to hide it." I turned away to leave. I didn't want to talk to anyone else. In the mood I was in, there was no telling what I'd say next.

"Hurry back," Sandy called after me. "We're having buffalo tongue for dinner."

"Mmmm, my favorite," I said and kept going.

Chapter Six

Cale stretched out on the grass in that favorite posture of writers, where the body is completely supported, thus leaving the mind free to think and create. She was thinking of a story in which the killer was a cowboy who was so handsome that no one suspected him, when she heard people approach.

Now what? she thought, not wanting to move, not wanting to cease the fantasies playing about in her head. There are people who hate to write, hate to have to come up with ideas, and people who will go to any length to be allowed to continue to create. Now, hearing footsteps, Cale thought that if she stayed very quiet, whoever it was might go away and leave her in peace.

But Cale looked up to see Kane take Ruth in his arms and kiss her incredibly gently, as though she were fragile and precious. Cale knew she should leave, and she moved to do so, but then Kane pulled away from Ruth.

"You're all right?" he asked. "You weren't hurt by the horse?"

With great interest, Cale propped her head on her hand and listened for Ruth's answer. She thought of it as not so much eavesdropping as research.

"I'm fine, Kane," Ruth said with a gentle flutter of her eyelashes. "You don't know how I worried about coming on this trip. I was so frightened – frightened of the great outdoors, afraid of the animals, afraid of the people running the trip. I thought you'd be aggressive." She laughed seductively. "I was concerned that you'd want us to… to shoe horses or something like that."

So she wasn't going to tell him about burning the horse. Not that Cale had thought she would. If anything terrified this woman it was the possibility that men wouldn't adore her. Philosophical question to ponder, Cale thought: Does Ruth Edwards exist if no one is looking at her?

"Out here in the West we're just the same as any men. We want the same things as other men," Kane said in a deep voice.

Yeah, Cale thought. They want Ruth.

Ruth ran her hand up his arm. "I wouldn't say you're the same as any other man."

Even this guy couldn't possibly fall for that line. Could he? It would be the equivalent of a guy coming up to you in a bar and saying, "What's a nice girl like you," et cetera. Women were past that, but was any man past Ruth's tired line?

"I'd like to think I'm not like other men," he answered as he touched her arm.

Once again Cale had overestimated the male animal. Question, she thought, What's the difference between a rutting stag and a man on the make? Answer: nothing. They are both blind, deaf, and very dumb.

When they started kissing, Cale gave a loud "ahem." Eavesdropping was one thing, but voyeurism was something else.

Kane's face changed when he saw Cale, but for one second she saw what Ruth had seen: a man with lust on his face, as well as desire, passion, and perhaps even greed. Even more interesting was the look Ruth was wearing. Unless Cale missed her guess, ol' predatory Ruth was afraid of Cowboy Taggert. The minute Ruth saw him turn away, she turned tail and headed back to camp.

"I guess I can add spying to your list of accomplishments," he said through a jaw clenched tight in rage.

"I was here first," Cale began, starting to defend herself, but the look on his face made her stop. "What's the use talking to you? You've made up your mind about me." She stood up and started to leave, but he reached for her. "Don't touch me," she answered, pulling back from him.

His look was almost a sneer. "Right. Being touched is one of your phobias."

"Contrary to your opinion of me… Oh, who cares?" she said at last, and headed back to camp.

At the camp, Sandy had prepared a meal of beans and hot dogs, which the skinny one of the duet poked about on her tin plate, muttering about what nasty things hot dogs were, while the fat one brushed Ruth's hair to the obvious delight of Kane. After dinner the skinny one began talking about crystals and pyramids, telling in burdensome detail how pyramids were supposed to improve one's sex life, then slyly suggesting that Ruth hang one from a tree branch over her sleeping bag. In disgust, Cale walked away from the fire, heading toward the horses.

"You want to remove your shirt and let me have a look at that shoulder?"

Cale tried not to let her surprise show at Sandy's words, but she turned a radiant smile toward him. The moment she saw him the smile disappeared because hovering behind him was Kane.

"What's wrong with her shoulder?" Kane asked.

Sandy whipped around and snapped at the younger man. "If your brain was somewhere besides in your pants you'd see that she hurt herself when she saved Ruth's neck for the second time."

Ah, sweet justice, Cale thought. My own darling knight come to my rescue. She wondered if Sandy would like to move to New York and live with her in her penthouse?

Kane's face turned red and he muttered something about looking at Cale's shoulder himself, but she put her chin up, pulled her shoulders back, and walked confidently back to the campsite, feeling the best she'd felt since coming to Colorado.

Chapter Seven

Kane was restless in his sleeping bag, punching at the thing that was supposed to be a pillow, turning frequently so the nylon made enough noise to scare the owls, and cursing at every opportunity. He knew he should have been thinking about Ruth. So far as he could tell, she was perfect. Under her beautiful façade was a sweet, gentle personality. He could almost see her with his sons; he could imagine her eight months pregnant with their child.

But try as he might, Kane couldn't seem to think of Ruth. Instead, he could only see and hear that bratty little writer. She was like a splinter that couldn't be dug out and was now festering. When he saw her leap over Ruth to grab the bridle of that horse, he'd been terrified. One misstep and she would have been down and under the hooves. He knew it was dumb of him to have told her to wait for him, and he knew she had done what had to be done, but she still rankled him.

He wasn't sure what it was about her that bothered him so much. Maybe it was her smiles and her wisecracks. Maybe it was the way she looked at Ruth, as though Ruth had climbed out from under a rock. Or maybe it was the way her backside curved into her jeans.

Why had he been so angry at her when she saved Ruth? If it had been any other woman, he would have been proud of her for her fast thinking and faster action, but something about the blonde always enraged him. Yet even as he had stood there glaring at her, he'd had an urge to pull her into his arms and protect her.

Protect her? That was like saying you wanted to protect a porcupine. And a porcupine was just what she was: small, prickly, and dangerous.

Sometime around three in the morning he got out of his sleeping bag and stepped into the woods, walking down a path he knew well, to look over the ridge to the trail below. Tomorrow evening they'd be in the ghost town of Eternity and his father's truck would be there to take the writer away. After that he'd have long days to spend with Ruth. He'd have time to get to know her, time to allow her to know him. He'd have time to–

He broke off his thoughts as below him he saw the flash of headlights. Someone was driving down the old road to Eternity. But who and why at this time of the morning? As soon as the questions occurred to him, he thought of an answer: something was wrong.

Immediately he too vividly remembered the night he'd come home to find an ambulance outside the apartment building in Paris where he and his wife and their new babies were living. Inside the ambulance was the broken and lifeless body of his beloved wife. Kane had been away on an overnight business trip and she'd been awake with the boys all the night before. In the late afternoon she'd sat down on the windowsill, sipping a cup of tea, and waiting for her husband to arrive. Quite simply, she must have fallen asleep, lost her balance, and fallen from the window.

Now Kane didn't bother with a horse, but went tearing down the hillside, stumbling over rocks and trees, sinking into piles of dry oak leaves, skidding down a shale slide in his attempt to intercept the truck before it reached the turnoff.

He leaped the last few feet, to land on all fours just a few yards in front of the truck. In an explosion of gravel, the driver slammed on the brakes, sending the truck into a skid that turned it sharply to one side as the driver fought to control it and straighten the wheels. Before the truck came to a full stop, the door flew open and out jumped Kane's brother Michael.

"What the hell are you trying to do? I could have killed you!" Mike shouted at his brother, not bothering to help him stand up.

Slowly Kane got up, brushing gravel and dirt from his clothes and hands. "What's wrong? Why are you here in Colorado?"

As though every muscle in his body ached, Mike leaned back against the hood of the car while Kane looked at him.

The two men were identical twins, as alike as two humans could be: exactly the same height, size, eye and hair color. All their lives they had been close, so close that they often communicated without talking. Many times they'd had the same ideas and thoughts independently of one another, and it was commonplace for them to buy the same shirt unknowingly and wear it on the same occasion. There had never been a secret between them, and when one had news, he always went first to his twin brother.

"Congratulations," Kane said softly, because he knew without being told that his brother's wife had just been delivered of twins. For a long moment the brothers hugged each other in a fierce bond of love and understanding. Then they broke apart, both of them grinning.

"So?" Kane said, aware that his brother would know what his first question would be: Why did he leave New York?

Mike wiped his hand over his eyes in a gesture of tiredness and exasperation. "It was harrowing. At the first pain Samantha decided she wanted the babies to be born in Chandler, Colorado, that she wanted Mom there. No one could reason with her, and then… well, she started to cry, so Blair and I loaded her and your boys into the jet and took off. Sam was calm throughout the trip but Blair and I were frantic. What if the kids were born during the flight and they needed something we didn't have? Sam kept saying that we shouldn't worry, that the boys were going to wait until they could see their grandmother. Dad and Mom were waiting at the airport with an ambulance. As soon as we got to the hospital, Sam's water broke and the kids popped out like champagne corks."

Mike paused and grinned. "You would think that the birth of my children would be a private time, but Mom, Dad, Jilly, Blair, and I plus two nurses were all in the delivery room. I expected someone to pass a tray of canapés.

Kane wasn't fooled by his brother's tone. Mike was more than pleased that his sons had been born into the arms of his parents; he was pleased that his family loved Samantha as much as he did. "Sam's okay? Kids okay?"

"Yeah, great. Everyone's fine, but–"

"But what?"

"It's a madhouse at the hospital. Relatives I've never heard of are showing up there."

Mike didn't have to explain to Kane that he wanted his wife and his sons to himself, that he wanted to be alone with them, because Kane knew how he felt. For two weeks after his sons were born, his wife's family had hovered about them until he felt suffocated. His mother-in-law was one of those women who believed men shouldn't change diapers, so Kane had rarely been allowed to touch his tiny sons. It wasn't until after she left that he was able to pull his wife and his children into his arms and feel them, touch them, hold them.

Now, looking at his brother, he knew the frustration Mike was feeling and the jealousy that was eating at him. He could picture Mike standing in the hospital room doorway watching one relative after another peer down at his newborn sons and thinking that they had spent more time with the children than he had. Kane used to worry that one of the babies would give his first smile to someone other than him.

Companionably, Kane put his arm around Mike's shoulders. "You know what I'd like more than anything in the world? I'd like to get my boys and bring them out here. This group is just women, and I'm sure they'd spoil them to death."

"Yeah?" Mike said gloomily. "Want me to bring them back here?"

"I was thinking that maybe I'd go to Chandler and get them."

Mike was so involved in his own misery that at first he didn't understand. "Wait a minute. You want me to stay here while you go back?"

"Twenty-four hours, that's all. And, besides, I want to see my new nephews. Are they as ugly as you?"

It was an old joke between them that never failed to produce a smile. "How would I know what they look like?" Mike said with a sigh. "The relatives won't let me near them."

"Why should they?" Kane asked. "You did your job, and they don't need you anymore." Laughing at his brother's expression of gloom, Kane moved away. "I'm serious. I need… a break from this."

"A break? You've only been around those women for a few days." Mike quirked an eyebrow. "What's going on?"

Kane gave his version of the past few days, telling Mike how lovely Ruth was and how flaky the duo was.

"How about the mystery writer? Sam loves her books and wants to meet her."

After a moment of silence Kane nearly exploded in a barrage of invective as he told about her nearly shooting his foot off, running under an enraged horse's hooves, and being an all around pain in the neck. "Everywhere I look, there she is. She spies on me when I'm with Ruth, calls me Cowboy Taggert, and asks if I count by pawing the earth."

Mike had to bite his lips to keep from laughing.

"It's not funny. The woman is insane," he said, then told Mike about Cale's fit after she'd killed the snake. "They're healed now, but I had three scratches down the side of my face where she clawed me."

"Couldn't have been too deep if they've healed so quickly."

Mike and Kane rarely disagreed. Their mother said it would be like having a fight with your shadow, so now, at Kane's look, Mike backed off. Twenty-four hours wasn't long, and the way things were now, Sam wouldn't know he wasn't there. Maybe it wouldn't be such a bad idea for him to be away for a whole day. "You're on," Mike said. "We'll meet you in Eternity tomorrow evening."

Chapter Eight

When morning came, I was glad this was going to be my last day on the trail ride. I hated being a failure, but I hated being hated more. For a few minutes I lay in my sleeping bag and thought about the entertaining stories I'd tell my editor when I got back to New York. I'd get my revenge by making an entire publishing house laugh at my escapade in the wilds of Colorado. Better yet, I'd write a book that would make the world laugh at the big cowboy and his lust for the two-faced woman.

Feeling a great deal better about myself and about life in general, I got out of the hated sleeping bag, tugged at my jeans – is there anything worse than sleeping in your clothes? – picked up my kit of toiletries, and headed for the stream to see if I could scour some of the grunge off my face. With the way my luck was running, I'd probably pick up a fungus from the clear mountain water and die a terrible death.

I'd just finished scrubbing when I heard heavy footsteps behind me. It was either our fearless leader or the last remaining dinosaur.

As usual he stopped near me, no doubt glaring down at me, just waiting to tell me I was doing something wrong. I ignored him as long as I could, then turned to look up at him, but was surprised to find standing there a man I'd never seen before.

"Oh!" I said, startled. "I thought you were someone else."

This seemed to surprise the man. They sure grow them dumb in Colorado, I thought. Big, beautiful, built, but definitely dumb.

"Who did you think I was?" he asked.

I stood up and looked at him. "I don't know if anyone's ever told you this, but you look a bit like our… our guide."

The man grinned at me as though I'd said something he'd waited all his life to hear, and I thought, This is great. I couldn't say or do anything to please one man, but this one seemed to be pleased by even a casual comment. Of course, being compared in looks to our cowboy leader might have seemed flattering to this man.

He extended his hand to me. "You must be Ruth. I'm Kane's brother, Mike."

I shook his hand, then set him straight. "I am not Ruth. I'm Cale Anderson, and your brother hates me."

I don't know whether it was the "hates me" part or the fact that I wasn't the beauteous Ruth, whom he'd obviously heard a lot about, but something seemed to bother him. He stood there opening and closing his mouth so that it looked like a pumping human heart on one of those PBS programs.

"But Ruth is– Ruth and Kane– I thought–"

Wow, I thought, a real intellectual here.

As though he could read my mind, he stopped flailing about and smiled at me, and he kept holding my hand even when I tugged on it.

"Look," he said, "I'm sorry about the mistake. Kane told me that he and Ruth were an item, so when you didn't know who I was, I assumed you were Ruth."

Now everything was clear. Now everything made sense. If I meet a man I've never seen before, then I must be Ruth Edwards. Of course. That made perfect sense to me.

Mike laughed, released my hand, and we sat down. He began to tell me a long-winded story about how he and his brother were identical twins. Yeah, right, and I'm Kathleen Turner's twin. I guess he could see my skepticism, but I started to laugh when he said that for the next twenty-four hours he was going to pretend to be Kane. This made as much sense as my saying I was going to impersonate O. J. Simpson.

I listened to his whole story, told him congratulations on his new babies, and even asked after Kane's sons, but I still thought he was crazy if he believed anyone was going to mistake him for his brother.

When he got through, he laughed at my expression and reassured me that he could pull it off. By the way, he said very seriously, "Who's better looking, me or my brother?"

I didn't want to hurt his feelings, but the truth is, Kane is in a whole different class of men when it comes to looks. As tactfully as I could, I said, "It's not that you aren't a very handsome man, Mike, but Kane–" I didn't finish my sentence because Mike laughed out loud, then kissed both my cheeks soundly. I don't know what had pleased him, but something had.

Since he insisted that he could indeed impersonate his brother, we spent about half an hour by the stream discussing how he was to treat each person on the trail ride. I told him about Winnie-Maggie, and when he laughed at my jokes, I knew I had an audience, so I began to pour it on. At first I was cautious about saying anything about Ruth, but Mike's laughter and his grin – the more he laughed at my jokes, the better looking he got – encouraged me. He encouraged me so much that I ended up doing a little impromptu parody of Kane and Ruth that sent Mike falling to the ground laughing.

"By the way," I said, while he was still laughing, "I was telling the truth when I said that Kane hates my guts."

He tried to look shocked, but I could see a little flicker in his eyes that told me Kane had warned him about me. Mike had thought I was the "good" one; therefore I must be Ruth.

"Why does he hate you?"

When he spoke, his tone told me that he couldn't believe that anyone could possibly hate me. It was very gratifying, very, very gratifying, and I smiled at him with nothing short of love. "You may not be as good looking or as sexy as your brother, but I think I like you better. Why don't you stay for the whole trip?" Somehow, that seemed to please him again, and when he got up, he offered his hands to help me up.

You know, I wish someone could explain sexual attraction to me. Why is it that you can put two equally good-looking men side by side and one will turn you on and the other won't? Here I was, alone in the woods with a dream of a man, a man who laughed at my jokes and obviously liked me very much. But I felt only sisterly toward him. Sure, he had a wife and a couple of brand-new kids, but since when has marriage prevented attraction? On the other hand, Kane Taggert did nothing but frown at me at best, shout at worst. He hated me; I hated him. But too often my thoughts wandered to questions about whether his skin was that lovely golden color all over or was his stomach the color of a frog's belly?

Mike and I walked back to camp arm in arm while he told me how much his wife loved my books. When Sandy's campfire was in sight, we separated, and I stood back to watch him make a fool of himself as he pretended to be Kane.

It's difficult to describe how I felt when I heard those people refer to Mike as Kane. Even Sandy grumbled that Kane had been in the woods too long and wasn't helping. I nearly giggled when Mike winked at me conspiratorially. It was heaven to be the one who was liked!

Everything went smoothly as the two men saddled the horses and all of us prepared to move out. Mike came over to check my stirrup, which was fine, and asked me how Ruth's horse's neck came to be burned. I wanted to tell him, but I couldn't. Too many years of elementary school with kids chanting, "Tattletale, tattletale," made me keep my mouth shut. I said that I had no idea, but my face turned red, and Mike snorted. "Somebody ought to give you some lessons in lying," he said.

It felt good to be vindicated.

We rode for a couple of hours, and Mike gave all his attention to Ruth. We'd reached the wide section of an old road so he could ride next to her. Behind them were her handmaidens, both of them holding the pommels of their saddles as though they were going to fall off. Sandy and I brought up the rear, neither of us talking much and both of us watching Ruth and Mike.

By late afternoon my early happiness had worn off. I shouldn't have been jealous, but I was. It looked as though Ruth had made yet another conquest. Mike was smiling at her, laughing softly over things she said, and in general adoring her.

We reached the falling-down town of Eternity at sundown. There were several buildings of weathered gray boards with a few signs falling off the buildings. One that said "Paris in the Desert" made me smile. Silently we rode down the wide main street, tumbleweeds blowing around us, heading toward a big house at the edge of town where Sandy said we'd camp.

Tired and aching, I dismounted when we reached the house, then looked up to see Mike coming toward me, Ruth's saddle across his arms.

"Ruth is everything you said she was," he said just to me as he walked past.

I cheered up immediately. Cheered up and got a spurt of new energy.

An hour later I'd helped Sandy and Mike cook up hamburgers. It was at dinner that I blew it. "Would you hand me the mustard, Mike?" I asked.

Of course everyone stopped and looked at me, so I gave a little laugh and said that Kane reminded me of someone I knew who was named Mike so I'd mixed up the names. The women paid no attention to me, but I was sure that Sandy knew what was up. I felt bad for messing up Mike's secret and wanted very much to apologize.

After dinner I helped clean up, but I couldn't get Mike alone – Ruth seemed to be permanently attached to his left side – so I went for a walk.

I'm a good walker, and I find that hiking helps me think, so I guess I walked some miles down an old weed-infested road before I reached what had once been a pretty little house. It was set all by itself in what was once a lovely garden. A couple of roses were still blooming beside the porch.

"An ancestor of mine used to live here."

Mike spoke softly, but still I jumped.

"Sorry," he said. "I thought you wanted to be alone, but I didn't want to lose you."

I smiled at him. In the moonlight he was almost as handsome as his brother. "About this evening…" I began, but Mike just laughed and said Sandy was used to twin tricks, and he was fine once Mike had explained.

"I brought a lantern. You want to look around?"

Mike was heavenly company. He told me about his ancestors who'd lived in the house, including one who was an actor so good he was called the Great Templeton. Being a lover of stories, I was thrilled with the house with the faded wallpaper covered with fat roses.

"Cale," Mike said when we'd finished the tour, "whatever you do, don't tell Kane you know we switched places."

I had no idea why it would matter, but I laughed.

"I'm very serious about this," he said. "Don't make a mistake and say 'Mike said,' or 'Mike did.' It's important, Cale."

"All right. Scout's honor." All this cloak-and-dagger stuff was like my books.

"I have to go now and meet Kane's truck. The next time you see me, I'll be someone else."

I guess that was twin humor. I reached out to shake his hand, but he gave me a sisterly hug and kissed my cheeks and made me promise to visit him and his family. Then he was gone, and I felt as though I'd just lost someone who could have been a lifelong friend.

I had no desire to leave the house. It had a good feeling to it, as though the people who'd lived in it so long ago had had a lot of love and laughter inside them.

Holding the lantern Mike had left behind, I wandered around the rooms on the ground floor, climbed into the loft, then back down again. I knew it was getting late and I should start the long walk back to that lovely group of women, but I was postponing leaving.

It was when I'd procrastinated until the last minute that I looked up to see Kane Taggert standing in the doorway. And in each arm was a little boy about five years old. They were asleep, snuggled against their father in complete trust, and they were the most beautiful things I'd ever seen in my life. And I wanted them.

Once I saw a $30,000 table I loved. I dreamed about it the way men dream about owning the fastest cars or a woman dreams about a man. But I had never in my life coveted anything as much as I did those two sleepy-eyed little boys.

I knew that Cowboy Taggert and I were mortal enemies; I knew we hated each other; but I also knew I had to touch those delicious creatures. Reaching up, I stroked a black curl that was as soft as angel's hair.

"Are they real?" I whispered.

Amused, Taggert said, "Very real."

I moved my hand down to touch a soft cheek. "But they look too perfect."

He snorted. "I don't know about perfect, but at least they're clean now. Give them about two hours and they'll be filthy again."

"What are their names?"

"Jamie and Todd."

I knew he was looking at me oddly, but I ignored him as I touched the other sleeping child. "Which is which?"

"Not that it matters, but this one is Jamie and this is Todd."

Not that it matters, I thought. What a very odd thing to say, and then I thought: twins. Mike and Kane were supposed to be twins, Mike's baby sons were twins, so no doubt someone thought these children were also twins. It didn't matter to me if the whole Taggert family was nuts. If Kane wanted to pretend that his children looked alike, far be it from me to tell him otherwise.

As I looked at them, they began to wake up. I was truly amazed they had enough strength in their eyelids to raise that thick crop of eyelashes.

"Where is this?" Jamie asked, rubbing his eyes with his fist.

"This used to be somebody's house," I answered. "There's an enormous spiderweb in the bedroom. Like to see it?"

"Any spiders in it?" Todd asked, his beautiful head still on his father's shoulder.

"One big spider and some dead flies."

Tentatively I put out my hand, and Jamie took it. Then Todd held out his hand. Seconds later the boys were standing one on either side of me, and we walked into the bedroom.

They were lovely children: smart, curious, ready to laugh, full of energy. We talked about spiders and webs, and I described in detail how a spider catches flies and spins a web around them. We sat on the floor for a few minutes, a warm little boy wrapped inside each of my arms, and talked.

During this time I don't know what Cowboy Dad was doing. I think maybe he was standing in the doorway watching, but I wasn't sure, and I was too focused on the boys to care where he was. After a while Kane told the boys they had to go back to camp and go to bed, so the darlings jumped up and ran around the room making a deafening noise. After a few minutes Kane grabbed a shirt collar and reached for another, but Jamie ran behind my legs for protection and then Todd tried to run to me too.

"Todd," I said, "you go with your father, and, Jamie, you come with me."

As soon as I said it, I knew I'd made a mistake. I guess I wasn't supposed to be able to tell these twins apart either. But I am proud to say that I covered myself by saying that Todd had a grease spot on his shirt collar and that was how I knew one from the other. I got an odd look from Kane, but then he shrugged and picked up first one boy, then the other.

"Who are you?" Todd asked. I knew that Todd was going to be the businessman while Jamie was going to break hearts.

I considered my answer before replying. "I'm a storyteller."

Both boys nodded.

As always, Kane thought I was stupid and had no understanding of even the simplest concepts. "I think he meant what's your name?"

"Jamie, what's my name?"

"Cale," the brilliant child answered, and I gave Kane my most enigmatic smile before sweeping ahead of them and leaving the little house.

I knew the child knew my name but that he didn't know how I fit into his world. When you have a father like mine, a man who never allows you any independence, yet dumps enormous responsibility on your young shoulders, half of you is never a child and half of you never grows up. I understand children because about two and a half feet of me is still eight years old.

Chapter Nine

The next day Kane wouldn't allow me near his little boys. It was obvious that he wanted them to bond with Ruth, but it took no genius to see that Ruth didn't like children. The skinny one of the duet wanted to know what the boys ate just as Jamie popped a grasshopper into his mouth. I was pleased when he spit it out and it went sailing down the front of Ruth's silk blouse. I had to leave the campsite after Ruth smacked Kane's hands away from her blouse buttons and said, "Get those filthy beasts away from me." I had to leave or I'd have died from keeping laughter bottled up inside me. I did have the satisfaction of meeting Kane's eyes just before I turned away and was able to give him a raised-eyebrow, this-is-the-woman-you're-going-to-marry? look. Grabbing an apple, I started walking toward the Templeton house.

Once I was in that old house I felt better and began to wonder when I could go back to Chandler and catch the first toy plane out. I wanted to get away from the entire Taggert clan. All of them were crazy, what with their twins who didn't look alike, and their quick hate and love. It was going to be great to be back in New York where people acted sane.

I went upstairs to the loft, sat on the windowsill, looked down the road, and ate my apple. I was certainty going to miss those children, though. Which was absurd, considering I'd known them less than twenty-four hours. Jamie had crawled inside the sleeping bag with me last night; then this morning Todd had cried because Jamie had spent more time with me than he had. That was when Kane took both boys away from me and steered them toward Ruth.

I was sitting there eating my apple when I saw Kane – alone, no kids – walking toward the cabin. He looked up, saw me, and for a moment I thought he was seeing the dead actor's ghostly face. Even from the second story I could see that he'd turned pale, and he began to run toward the house. The way he ran was almost frightening, as though he'd seen something terrible, terrifying.

As for me, I was paralyzed. I couldn't move as I heard him thunder into the house, then tear up the ladder to the loft.

He pulled me off the windowsill and we went tumbling to the floor where my back scraped the rough wood as all two hundred pounds of him landed on top of me. At first I struggled to get away from him, but I stopped when I realized he wasn't moving. He was sprawled on top of me, looking down at me as though I were some museum specimen. For a moment I glared up at him to give him the idea that I wanted him off of me.

God, but he was a good-looking man! He had short, thick eyelashes that actually curled, like mine did after I'd spent ten minutes torturing them with a curler. His lips were full and soft and just barely parted, and I could feel his breath on my face.

I guess we all think of ourselves as rational human beings, and we like to think that if faced with an irrational situation – a burning building, for example – we would act with calm and intelligence. But then something dreadful happens and we embarrass ourselves by acting just as we'd hoped we wouldn't.

That's what I did when this big cowboy was looking down at me from under those eyelashes with his sweet, warm breath touching me. I wanted to get away from him. Honest, I did. I could imagine rolling away from him and standing over him, hands on hips, cool, triumphant, unaffected by his beauty, and saying something like "Don't you ever touch me again."

That's what I wanted to do. What I did was flick my tongue across his lips.

The gesture startled me, and it startled him. Well, I guess it more than startled him. Actually, it turned him on.

One thing I like about being female is that the evidence of sexual excitement isn't known to the world. Oh, a woman's face may turn red and her breath may get a little weird, but she can always say that she's having a hot flash. But men can't hide what they're feeling – or maybe "wanting" is the correct term. And right now I knew that that cowboy wanted me, because the evidence of his desire was about to cut into my left thigh.

Now, I thought, would be the perfect time to roll away from him and laugh at him. Ha-ha-ha, I'd say. You want me, but I couldn't care less for your passion.

But life never works out the way one plans it, because I wanted that man more than I'd ever wanted anything – except for my first book to be published – and there was no way I was going to roll away from him.

I think all first sex should be candlelight dinners, little kisses inside the elbow, that sort of thing, but there wasn't any chance of sex like that between this man and me. We didn't even kiss but started tearing at each other as if we meant to kill one another. It was like sex in those black-and-white foreign movies where the people talk and talk and talk and all you can think about is how full your bladder is; then suddenly he shoves her against the barn door and you forget all about your bladder.

We started on each other with all the fury and anger that we spoke to each other with. His shirt came open with one pull, and I found out what I'd always wanted to know: why cowboy shirts have snaps instead of buttons. Makes for speedy hayloft trysts.

I don't know how he got my clothes off. I was wearing jeans with one of those annoying short zippers that, in order to get them on, you have to stick your butt out and wiggle. But this time I didn't have to wiggle to get them down. He slid them over my hips as easy as you please and then, like a magician, he ran his hands over my lace-on boots and they fell away – just fell off, no struggles.

When he moved his hands back up, we were both naked, and God, what a body the man had! I couldn't see much of it, but I could feel it. Think beautiful athletes. Think about smooth, warm skin covering that body. When his skin touched mine, I drew in my breath as though someone had doused me with ice water – only it wasn't cold that sent that sensation through me.

Muscle wasn't the only thing interesting about the man. I've heard that the skin is the largest organ in the human body, but with this man, I thought some measurements were going to have to be taken to be absolutely sure.

He entered me with all the ease and expertise of a cat burglar slipping into a twenty-first-story bedroom.

Now came the part of sex I hated – not that I'd had that much experience, but three minutes seemed to be a man's limit. Sometimes I'd read the history of man trying to break, the four-minute mile and wonder why a man didn't try for something important, like the four-minute screw.

At first I just lay there, ready to be disappointed when he grunted and collapsed on top of me and said, "That was good, baby," then started snoring. But this guy didn't stop after three minutes. I'm not a good timekeeper in such circumstances, but it's my guess that after six minutes he was still moving in and out of me, slowly, smoothly, as though he didn't mean to stop before next Saturday.

I can't really explain what began to happen to me, but all I can say is that I began to wake up. It was as though there were this woman inside me – no, correction: this tall, blonde, beautiful goddess inside me – who began to unroll from where she'd been asleep all her life. Languorously she uncurled, stood up, rubbed her eyes, and looked around her. And when she was awake, she began to expand. She grew bigger and bigger and bigger until she began to fill me, fill me out to my fingertips and my toes. She filled my head so completely that for the first time since I could remember I didn't have stories inside my head. Instead of stories I had this man in my body, and I was awake, really, truly, fully awake, for the first time in my life. Every nerve ending, every pore, every cell in my body was alert and sensitive and alive.

I'm not sure what I did. I mean, I don't remember where my hands went, where my mouth went. I remember at one point he turned me over and with two hundred pounds of male propelling me, I went sliding across the floor and had to put my hands on a hay bale to keep from moving.

I remember I was shameless. I remember I had no dignity, no thoughts. I remember I was closer to being an animal than to a thinking, rational human being. I remember that I at last understood what people meant when they said that sex was a basic need, like food and water. Up until that day in that loft with that man, I hadn't believed that old saw. I'd believed people needed food and water but they didn't need sex. I was wrong.

He turned me over again and pulled my ankles up around his shoulders and kept on. I think I was a cheering section. I don't think I was making sexy, ladylike little moans, and I can guarantee that I wasn't saying anything rational. On the food chain, right then I was way below the human level that had the ability to talk.

After a while I began to feel as if I were going to explode. Okay, I know that's a cliché. I know it's been said a million times, but the first time it happens to you it's almost scary. I guess it would be scary if the explosion were something you wanted to stop, but it was like those salmon fighting to go upstream. It was something I was driving myself toward.

I wrapped my legs around his waist while he was on his knees, and I began to move with more strength than I actually possessed. At that moment I could have moved a train with my pelvis, but I couldn't move this man who seemed to have the strength of a couple of ocean liners.

I'd read about orgasms and I thought I'd experienced a couple, but I hadn't. Not a real orgasm. It's not something that happens in one big flash. At least it isn't for a woman.

I'm so glad I'm a woman. How could sex be as good for a man when it happens outside his body? For a woman, it's all inside, deep inside, and it radiates from within.

I guess an orgasm could best be compared to ocean waves breaking against the beach. Wave after wave came from inside me and moved outward to the very limits of my body. It seemed to go on and on and on, pulsating, extending, retreating, at first with urgency but gradually slowing, fading from a brilliant white light to a luminescent glow.

My fingers and toes hurt, as though the waves inside me had stretched them to their limit.

After a while I began to breathe again, and the woman inside me, that goddess who I hadn't known existed, realized she was tired and began to recede. With her went my energy. She also took my anger and my general rage at life. I'd never felt so calm, so peaceful, in my life.

When the man kissed my ear, I smiled sleepily, snuggled against his sweaty skin, then followed the goddess inside me and went to sleep.

Later, when I woke up, still in Kane's arms, his skin next to mine, suddenly I knew I had to share more with him than just the greatest sex ever experienced in the history of the world.

Once when I was one of the judges at the Miss USA pageant, one of the many instructions they gave us was to never give a girl a score lower than 5. They said, and I agreed, that the girls had worked hard and deserved at least a 5 in every category.

The pageant officials had asked local volunteers to stand in for the contestants during rehearsals so we could practice with the computers. Sitting next to me was the famous actor Richard Woodward, and when the first volunteer pirouetted for us, he punched in 2.2. Now, I didn't know this man but I knew these practice scores were going to be shown on a screen, and I didn't think it was very nice of him to give these nice, nervous ladies such a low score, so I told him so.

Richard looked at me and said, "You're a real writer, aren't you?"

I was highly flattered by this because, to me, "real writer" means Pulitzer Prize. Not sales, but the prize. As I was flushing with pleasure at this accolade, Richard said, "Real writers are incurably nosy and cannot keep their mouths shut."

I laughed so hard that the man who was trying to teach us called me down, and after that, Richard and I were great friends.

Well, I am, in every sense of the word, a real writer. I'm nosy and I don't keep my mouth shut. If someone tells me she's just gotten a divorce, I'll say, "So why'd you divorce him?"

Kane and I had been introduced, and we'd shared enough that I guess we were at least on a first-name basis, so I said, "How come you've been p.o.'d since your wife died? Did you hate her or what?" Subtlety is not part of my personality, and besides, I've found that the direct approach earns me either silence or a story.

I could feel Kane hesitate, and a part of me sensed that he'd never told anyone, not anyone on the face of the earth, the truth about his wife. While he was making up his mind whether or not to tell me, I held my breath because I suddenly knew that I wanted to know whatever was inside him. It was at that moment that he became a person to me. Maybe it was the sex, maybe it was his looks, maybe it was the sweetness of his breath, and maybe it was my love of a story from any source, but I don't think so. I think it was a feeling that there was more to him than muscle and sex appeal. I think I knew that a man who could make me feel as he'd just done was not an insensitive clod, that there was a real person inside.

"I have an identical twin brother," he said.

I didn't expel my breath. Several times I had wondered why Mike had asked me not to let Kane know that I knew about him.

He went on. "There's an asinine saying in my family: You marry the one who can tell the twins apart."

Oh, Lord, I thought. No wonder Mike asked me to, for once, keep my mouth shut. Marry? Me? Marry some great big, sexy cowpoke whom, until a few hours ago, I disliked rather heartily?

"Could your wife tell the twins apart?" I asked, and my voice was a small thing.

Kane didn't seem to notice my voice as he started telling me how he'd met her in Paris.

Paris? I thought. What was a cowboy doing in Paris? Having the hair done on his best bull?

Anyway, he was in Paris, met her, fell madly in love, and married her six days later. Sometime during this six days he called his mother, and she sent his brother Mike over to check out the bride. Here Kane's body began to tense up as he told how his family had sent Mike to see if she could tell the twins apart.

"And when she couldn't, that was it," Kane said. "No one else in the family besides Mike attended my wedding. It was as though they'd dismissed her because of some stupid legend."

He didn't say anything after that, so I said, "You liked her, though?" I was praying he wasn't going to tell me that the legend had been right, that he'd fallen out of love with her two weeks after the wedding.

"Yeah, I loved her. I loved her madly. We were perfectly suited. It was as though we were two halves of a whole. If she had a thought, I had it at the same time. We liked the same food, the same people, wanted to do the same things at the same time."

If I lived with somebody like that, I'd be crazy in a week. In fact, once I had a boyfriend like that. The girls in the dorm all said I was so lucky, but I thought I'd go out of my mind. One night I said I wanted Italian for dinner, and when he said he did too, I attacked. "What if I wanted Chinese? What if I wanted Peking cat?" I yelled at the poor guy. "Don't you have any thoughts of your own? Don't you ever want a good ol'-fashioned argument about where we'll eat tonight?" Need I say that that particular young man never called me again?

I'd learned long ago that most people aren't like me, so maybe most people would enjoy living in complete peace and harmony. Personally, I've never experienced tranquility, but my intuition tells me that it's not something for which I have any natural talent.

One minute Kane was telling me about his dead wife and the next, he was telling me about his brother's wife, and for a while, from the tone of his voice, I thought he was in love with her. But he was explaining how his family had accepted Mike's wife, Samantha, into the family but not his wife. There was anger in his voice, but I'm glad to say there was no jealousy.

So now what do I do? I thought. Say, Hey, I can tell the twins apart? I'm not much of a believer in magic – magician shows put me to sleep – so I'm sure there are hundreds of women in America who can tell Kane from his very different brother. Next time Kane got married, he should pick one of them and make his family happy.

He went on talking to me, telling me in detail about his paragon of a wife. I refrained from making snide remarks about how "perfect" the two of them sounded – how perfectly boring, that is. Perfect conversations, perfect sex, perfect children. If she'd lived, would they have had a perfect divorce? Maybe they wouldn't have divorced and maybe I'm just being cynical, but every marriage where I've heard the wife say, "My husband is a darling. We never fight," ends in divorce. The marriages that last have a wife who says, "My husband is a pain in the neck," then elaborates on the subject. Maybe it has to do with telling yourself what you hope is the truth and facing what actually is.

Kane went on to tell of his loneliness after her death and how he had not been allowed to grieve for her. Everyone in his family seemed to have the same attitude: Buck up and think of your sons. He'd wanted to sit in a dark room and cry for days, but his wife's mother had been the one to cry while Kane had to be the strong one and listen to everyone else's grief. How could they mourn her death, he wondered, when they'd never celebrated her life?

In the end he didn't get to cry. Everyone seemed to think that it was the boys who were important, who were going to need their mother. Kane wasn't the type to shout that he needed her too, so he'd kept his tears inside and carried on as before, except that there was no longer anyone waiting for him at the end of the day. No one to laugh at his jokes and rub his tired shoulders, no one to bounce ideas off – no one to make love to.

I don't know why people tend to tell me their most intimate secrets. Maybe it's because I'm interested, but then, maybe it's because I'm an empath.

I saw a "Star Trek" episode where a woman was an empath; she felt other people's joys and miseries. That's what I do. I think it has to do with my being a fixer and listening so hard that I try to solve people's problems for them. If I want something, I go after it. I have tunnel vision. Nothing distracts me; nothing discourages me.

It took a really rotten secretary to teach me that everyone isn't like me. Hildy told me that what she wanted most in the world was to write children's books. In fact, she had written one and now all she needed was a publisher.

I don't know what's wrong with me: I believe what people tell me. Hildy said she wanted a publisher, so I called in some favors and arranged for her story to be read by one of the top children's book editors in New York. I then spent three days on the phone trying to reach Hildy. When I finally got her, late on a Sunday night, she told me angrily that since I hadn't called her as I said I would, she'd mailed her manuscript in to the slush pile at another house. Of course she received a rejection, and she felt that it was my fault.

It took me a long time to figure out that what Hildy really wanted was to tell people that someday she wanted to write children's books.

Since I listen to people so intently, following their angst-ridden sighs with offers of help – all of which I carry out – I figure that's why people talk to me about their problems.

But I didn't know what to offer Kane in the way of help. Maybe I could gather his family together and bawl them out. Maybe I could take his boys for a year or so and let him go away and grieve. Somehow, though, I didn't think he'd let me have them. Maybe I could say, "Kane, I can tell you and your brother apart. Therefore I must be more suitable for you than your perfect wife was."

Yeah, right. A big good-looking cowboy whose idea of a good time was scraping horses' hooves, and a smart-mouthed city girl. Was I supposed to marry him, move onto a ranch, and show sheep at the state fair? Or maybe Kane would move to New York, become Mr. Cale Anderson, and fetch me cold drinks at autograph parties.

On the other hand, if we got down to hard, cold truth, I can't imagine anyone wanting to live with me. Not to make a melodrama out of it, but if your own parents don't like you, you never actually believe that anyone likes you.

Chapter Ten

To say that it was awkward between Kane and me after the sex and the talk is this century's understatement. I don't know how long we would have stayed there, safe, holding each other, if Sandy hadn't arrived with the boys. The moment we heard voices, the spell was broken, and we suddenly looked at each other in horror, then in embarrassment. As quickly as possible I pulled on my clothes, wincing because my knees were raw. When I tried to put my boots on, I found the laces had been slashed. So that was how he got them off, I thought, then had to clump down the loft ladder in loose boots.

Sandy, standing behind the boys, took one look at the two of us and I knew he knew what had happened. I couldn't meet his eyes or Kane's, so I concentrated on the boys.

Sandy had brought horses, so I got to ride back, which was good considering the state of my boots. When we were back at camp, I didn't look at Kane, and when he held out a ball of heavy cotton twine and said he was going to tie my boots for me, I snatched the ball away from him and said I'd do it myself. I knew he stood there for a moment looking at me, but I wouldn't look at him.

The night before, I'd slept outside, near the men and boys, while the other women slept inside the old house, but that night I went inside with the women. What had happened between me and the dumb cowboy was an accident, and I didn't plan to add to the mistake. Tomorrow I'd start back to Chandler if I had to walk.

Thinking of accidents made me wonder if I had just gotten myself pregnant. I didn't seem to remember any form of birth control being used.

"I can get an abortion," I said into the darkness.

Like hell I would kill my own child. I hadn't thought much about children in my life, but right now I could imagine myself sitting in a rocking chair at three a.m., a black-haired baby at my breast, writing notes for my next book. I could imagine bandaging a three-year-old's knee and kissing away baby tears. I could imagine a maid washing dirty diapers and cleaning strained carrots off the kitchen wall. (Hey, I'm a realist!)

I didn't get to sleep for hours, and when I awoke, no one else was in the room.

Chapter Eleven

The next day I didn't see Kane much. In fact I saw him practically not at all, which suited me, since I wasn't sure how I felt about him. He went off with Ruth into the woods and left me to take care of his darling boys. Actually he left them with Sandy, but I sort of took them and we had a great time looking into each and every old house in Eternity and making up stories about who had lived there and how they'd died. In the afternoon they put their heads in my lap, one on either side, and I told them stories until they fell asleep.

It was about three when we went back to camp, but only Sandy was there, napping in the shade. The boys immediately jumped on him, and I could tell that he wanted to see them, so I reluctantly gave them up and went down the road leading out of town where I saw a pickup truck and knew without a doubt that it was the truck that was to take me back to Chandler. I braced myself, but then I saw that Mike was standing by the side of the pickup, and again I marveled at how much he didn't look like Kane. Mike had short, stubby eyelashes, lips that bordered on thin, and a body that was about to run to fat. Also, the pitch of his voice was higher than Kane's deep bass rumble.

"Hi, Mike," I said. "How're the new babies?"

When Mike turned to look at me, I knew something was wrong, and it didn't take the use of many brain cells to figure out what it was. Too late, I saw the pair of booted feet upside down in the truck.

Why is it that men love to hang head-down from car seats and look at the wires under the dashboard? Is that what they do after their mothers have finally made them realize that it is socially unacceptable to lie on the floor and look up girls' skirts?

"You want this wrench?" Mike asked his brother, and for a moment both of us held our breath. Maybe Kane hadn't heard me. Maybe Kane had his ears full of car wires and didn't realize that I had just let him know of my betrayal.

I have never been a lucky person.

Kane made no pretense of not being angry. He was furious. Without looking at me or his brother, he twirled around in the seat and got out of the truck and started climbing the mountain nearest him. Straight up through brush and over rocks, eating ground with all the energy that fury gave him.

I followed him because I thought he deserved an explanation.

* * * * *

"What now?" he asked as soon as Cale reached him. "Should I propose marriage?"

She ignored his sarcasm and didn't pretend that she didn't know what he was talking about. "Surely there are other people who can tell you from your brother."

"My mother, sometimes my father, my youngest sister…" His voice lowered. "And my brother's wife."

"That's it?" Her disbelief was evident in her tone.

When he turned to look at her, he was no longer the sweet-faced cowboy she'd had a tumble with. He had one eyebrow raised and his nostrils flared. "No doubt to you we don't look at all alike. Something to do with eyelashes and which of us is fatter, right?"

She wasn't going to answer that because he was too close to home. "You know, of course, that this invalidates the legend?"

He continued to look at her, his expression unchanged. "How do you figure that?"

"Your wife couldn't tell you apart, yet you two were the love of the century. I can tell you from your brother, but you and I can't abide each other." She paused a moment. "Except for sex," she said softly.

He looked away. "Yeah, except for sex."

"You should marry somebody normal, somebody who wants to be a wife and mother, and wants to live on a ranch and ride horses and milk cows or whatever. Above all, you shouldn't think of, shouldn't even consider, marrying someone because of great… I mean, because of one very ordinary sexual encounter. These things happen. I bet this kind of thing happens with every group you take out – especially New York women." She was warming to her subject. "There's the disease scare in New York so the women don't feel safe – not that I endorse one-night stands – but they feel safe with a big, clean cowboy who's lived all his life in pure, innocent Colorado. I mean, what can you get from a cowboy? Hoof-and-mouth disease? Anthrax? Are they the same thing? So, anyway, it was just something that happened. The right time, the right place. I bet that if Ruth had been in that upstairs window it would have… been… Ruth that you…" She was slowing down, and, with horror, she recognized that what she was feeling was jealousy. If, she thought. If. If Ruth had been there, Kane would have pulled her from the window. Then Ruth and Kane would have…

Getting up, she dusted off the seat of her jeans. "There are millions of women out there. Go meet them and find someone to fulfill your legend. I'm not the one. I'm not anyone's princess in a tower."

* * * * *

All the way down that mountain, with every step I took, I hoped he'd come after me. Since my thoughts are my own, I figured I could indulge them – there was no one to tell them to and no one to laugh at me.

I knew his coming after me was a stupid idea. I knew we were completely incompatible, since we'd barely said a civil word to each other. Except for one afternoon of wonderful, divine, heavenly sex followed by a beautiful man holding me in his arms and pouring his soul out to me, we'd always fought. We disliked each other a great deal. We had nothing in common. Except maybe two kids that I wanted. Wanted in the abstract, that is. What was I thinking of: moving those darling children out of the wilds of Colorado, out of the clean air of this mountainous state, and putting them in a penthouse in New York with nothing but a terrace to play on? Of course, being raised in Colorado was no assurance that a person would grow up happy. Maybe the kids would like big, dirty New York. Or maybe I could move to Colorado.

None of this thinking did me any good, because the cowboy didn't come after me, didn't fall on his knees before me and tell me he couldn't live without me. In fact, he stayed on top of the mountain while I went down it.

Mike was waiting at the bottom. Not that I thought he was waiting for me, but he gave a good imitation of concern. I was so depressed I didn't even suggest that he should visit a gym now and then. After Kane, Mike was a pale second best.

"I want to go home," I said.

"Home?"

Mike sounded as dumb as I'd once thought Kane was. But Kane wasn't dumb. He was smart and funny and kind, and… and I wished he believed that stupid ol' legend. My fantasies started going on me, and I imagined a father with a shotgun forcing us to marry because we fulfilled the prophecy. Where were fathers with shotguns when you really needed them?

"Yes, home," I said. "Home to New York."

Mike looked up the mountain, but I knew he wasn't going to see his brother.

"We said our good-byes up there."

"But…"

It was obvious Mike didn't know what else to say. No doubt he'd done the expected thing and hauled his wife before the family tribunal before he even considered marrying her. Oh, well, it was a good thing nothing was going to come of Kane and me, because I'm not good with families, and I think I could come to hate his.

"Mike," I said slowly and as though I meant it, "I want you to drive me to Chandler so I can leave this state. I want to go back to a place where they just cut your heart out." Not break it as they did in Colorado.

I had to look away because I was giving in to my flair for drama. Just once I wanted to make an unflamboyant exit. No fits, no tantrums. I wanted to keep my pride and just walk out.

Mike helped me get my gear together, but he took forever doing it. I know he was trying to give his brother time to make up his mind. But Kane had made up his mind, and he was right to be so sensible. I would make a rotten wife. I'd be involved in a book and forget about food for days at a time. If I didn't have a nanny for the kids, I'd probably forget about them too. And heaven help the man if he crossed me! I'd dig my heels in and do whatever he didn't want me to do just because he wanted me to do it. All in all, it was better for somebody like me to live alone. To be free. Yes, that's it. Freedom. Freedom to come and go as I please. Freedom to… to have no one to laugh at my jokes, to rub my keyboard-tightened shoulders, no one to listen to my latest plot idea. No one to make love to.

Mike managed to dawdle until sundown, then began to find reasons why we shouldn't leave until morning.

"Colorado's so backward they don't have headlights on the cars yet?" I asked, with my most belligerent New York attitude.

Mike gave in to me and drove me back to the tiny town of Chandler. He wanted to take me to his parents' house. And what? Tuck me in Kane's bed and hope his brother would come home during the night and stumble into bed with me?

I made him take me to a motel, and at ten o'clock the next morning he drove me to the airport where I took a tiny airplane to Denver. From there I flew to New York.

* * * * *

My editor wasn't very happy with me. In the six weeks since I'd been back from Colorado, I hadn't killed anybody. I mean on paper, of course. Since my publishing house sent me all that lovely money for killing people, they weren't too happy with me either.

It wasn't that I wasn't writing. I was writing ten to fourteen hours a day, but I kept writing about things like mail-order brides and shotgun weddings. I never finished any of the stories, I just wrote proposals and sent them to my editor.

At the beginning of the seventh week, my editor came to my apartment to have a talk with me.

"It isn't that we mind your changing genres," she said patiently. (All editors deliver bad news to their best-selling authors with extreme patience and tact, rather like you'd talk to a crazy man who was holding a machete: "It's not that you're wrong to want to mutilate and maim…") "After all," she said, "romances make a fortune." (Thank God I wasn't trying to write something that would make no money – there'd be mass hysteria in the corridors of my publishing house.)

She lowered her voice and smiled sweetly. "It's just that your romances aren't any good. They're so sad."

Life is weird, isn't it? You kill people off in book after book and that's not considered sad, but the heroine of a romance falls for some guy who then walks off into the sunset, and that's considered too sad. If I'd killed the s.o.b., the story would have been a tragedy. Tragedy is okay, murder is grand, but sad is bad. Even worse, sad doesn't sell.

I listened to everything she said and noticed that for once she didn't bring flowers or food – concrete proof that the publishers were genuinely annoyed. Bet they wished they could shake me until I saw sense, saw that it was my duty in life to kill people on paper and support the family of everyone who worked at my publishing house.

Funny thing was, I wanted to write mysteries. I was happy when I was angry. I was happy and confident when I was having fights with cab drivers and imagining which character I was going to kill next. Yesterday I had to go to Saks to return a suit that didn't fit, and I told the taxi driver to take me to Fiftieth and Fifth. Ten minutes later I'm over on First Avenue – this is in the opposite direction from Saks. I just said calmly, "You're going the wrong way." When the driver told me in all of his seven words of English that this was his first day on the job, I smiled and told him how to get to Saks, then I paid the whole excursion fare and tipped him a dollar fifty. Trust me, this is not the real me.

Chapter Twelve

Cale was in her apartment, the terrace doors open, playing with an unreadable story of unrequited love when she heard the sound of a helicopter. At first she paid no attention to it, but it seemed to grow louder, then to remain in one place, a place that seemed to be just outside her windows. Annoyed, frowning, she got up to close the doors when she saw that the helicopter was indeed hovering above her terrace. Surely that was illegal, she thought. Surely New York had laws against helicopters being that close to apartment buildings.

With her hand on the knob, she started to close the terrace door when she heard an odd noise. Curious, she looked up at the wind-producing, noisy helicopter, then opened her mouth in astonishment.

Descending from the copter, his foot in a stirrup, holding on to a thick rope, was a man. Cale's first impulse was to slam the door and get out of the apartment, but then she looked again. On the man's feet were what looked to be cowboy boots of a deep carmine red. Only one person she'd ever met in her life wore cowboy boots: Kane Taggert.

She wanted to shut the door and go back inside the apartment, but she couldn't. Instead, she stepped out onto the terrace and watched the slow descent of the man. Of all the absurd things, he was wearing a tuxedo at four in the afternoon, and if she could see clearly, he had a large green bottle under his arm and two champagne flutes in his hand.

She stepped back when he alighted and took his foot out of the stirrup. She didn't say a word when he motioned to the helicopter that he was safely down. Even when the copter was gone and it was once again quiet, she still said nothing, just stood there and looked at this big man standing on her terrace, and waited for him to say something.

With a bit of a smile, he set the bottle down, opened it, poured, and handed her a glass of champagne. She didn't take it.

"What do you want?" she said with as much hostility as she could manage.

Kane took a deep drink of the wine before answering her. "I came to ask you to marry me."

Cale didn't so much as hesitate but turned away and headed for the doors into her apartment. When Kane caught her arm, she jerked from his grasp.

"Get away from me," she said. "I never want to see you again."

"Cale–" he began.

She whirled on him. "I can't believe you know my name," she snapped. "I thought I was 'the writer'." With a sigh, she made herself calm down. "Okay, you've made your big entrance and I'm impressed, so now you can go. You can go down the elevator, unless you plan to use a parachute."

Kane put himself in front of the terrace doors. "I guess I deserve whatever you hand me. I know I've been a heel. You've told me, Mike has told me, Sandy, my own sons have told me. Even my sister-in-law and my mother, neither of whom has met you, have told me in graphic terms that I am an idiot, stupid, and in general a fool."

Cale wasn't in the least swayed by what he was saying. "I'm sure there are other women who can tell you from your brother," she said, "so go find one of them. Your tactics are wasted on me."

Again Kane caught her arm. "It wasn't the twin thing. It was that you made me forget my wife."

She turned to frown at him. "Ruth made you forget your wife."

Dropping her arm, Kane walked away from her to stand at the edge of the terrace and look at the back of the General Motors Building. Before it was built there was a scrumptious view of the Plaza Hotel and Central Park. "I don't know if anyone told you or not, but Ruth looks like my wife. When I saw a photo of Ruth, I began to imagine that I'd get back what I once had. I thought about bringing Janine back to life; I thought of picnics and moonlight walks and the four of us snuggled together. I never questioned what Ruth was like because I thought I knew. She'd lost her husband and child in an accident, just as I had, and I knew we were meant to be together."

Turning to look at Cale, he saw that her face was unforgiving. "I think I was attracted to you from the first moment I saw you. You were sitting there on that suitcase looking mad at the world. Then you started sneezing, and when you looked at me…" He grinned. "Well, you made me feel like every movie star, athlete, and astronaut rolled into one. I thought you were the prettiest thing I'd seen in years, and that annoyed the hell out of me."

He took a drink of champagne then looked at her. "I was pretty awful about the rattlesnake. I should have said thank you, but the fact that you were competent, unafraid, and beautiful all in one didn't fit into my plans. There was Ruth, my ideal woman, and I was lusting after a feisty little blonde. You made me feel… well, adulterous."

He drained his glass, poured himself more champagne, and turned away again. "I've spent the last month with Ruth Edwards. It took a long time, but I finally realized that she wasn't Janine, that she was someone else altogether. In fact, she was someone I didn't like very much." He chuckled. "And my sons hated her."

Turning back around, he looked at Cale, still standing by the terrace doors, her face unreadable.

"So I'm your second choice," she said. "Come on, cowboy, surely you could find a third woman and choose her. Why do you pick on New York women? Find yourself some nice cowgirl and–"

"I live in New York," he said, obviously not planning to elaborate on that statement.

"You've had your say, so now you can go," she said, turning toward the doors, but Kane caught her in his arms, spun her around, and kissed her. He kissed her ears, her neck, her face.

"I love you, Cale," he said against her lips. "I love the way you make me look at you so that I can't see any other women. I love your cynicism, your sense of humor. I love the way you look at my sons, the way you look at me. I love the way we make love together. I love your competency, your vulnerability, your neediness, your–"

"I am not needy!" It wasn't easy to think when he was this close to her.

At that Kane snorted. "I've never met a human who needed more than you do. You need," – he kissed the end of her nose – "love." He kissed her cheek. "Kindness." With each word he gave a sweet kiss to another part of her face. "Attention. A family. Security."

She jerked out of his arms. "You need a puppy!"

He didn't let her get away from him. "I need someone who can see reality. I need someone who won't allow me to wallow in self-pity for years, blind to everything else in life. I imagine that with you if I feel melancholy you'll kick me and tell me to stop moping and give me some work to do. I can't see you allowing someone the luxury of wallowing in his own grief."

"You make me sound like an overseer on a plantation."

Chuckling, he drew her closer to him, rubbing his body against hers. "What can I say to convince you that I love you and want to marry you?"

Cale pulled away from him, holding him at arm's length. "Look, I know you think this is all very romantic. We had a quickie… well, okay, maybe more than a quickie, in a hayloft, and you began to think it was the basis for a lifetime together. But you can't marry me. I'm not… wife material."

"What's wrong with you?" he asked, but she could tell by his tone that he was teasing her.

"I'm a business, that's what's wrong with me. I am big business." She took a deep breath and delivered the coup de grâce, the thrust that was guaranteed to turn any man off. "Last year I earned one-point-four million dollars, and I'll probably earn more this year."

Kane didn't lose his smile, but nuzzled her ear. "That's all right, sweetheart. A person can live on that."

She pushed away from him. "Are you listening to me, cowboy? I'm not your ordinary little housewife. I'm not the little wife who's there waiting for you when you come home at night. I get so absorbed in my stories that I can't remember to eat, much less remember that I'm supposed to fix hubby a martini and have it waiting for him. Or do you just drink beer? And what do you mean, you live in New York?"

"I mean that I'm not what you think I am. I'm no more a cowboy than you are a circus performer. I deal with the stock market; I deal with real money, not that pittance you earn."

She stared up at him, her mouth slightly open, her eyes blinking rapidly.

"Go on," he said, "tell me the worst there is to know about you. No matter what you say, no matter what you've done, I love you. I want you to marry me. I'll buy a floor of this building, and the kids and I'll live there with their nanny so you can have this place just for your writing and to get away from us. Whatever you want, you can have."

She thought of lots of reasons why she shouldn't marry him, such as the fact that she hated him. Yeah, like she hated writing books, she hated him. Since she'd walked away from him she hadn't been able to think of anything but him. Every waking, every dreaming moment she thought of him and his children.

"I hate you," she whispered as she collapsed into his strong arms. "I really do hate you."

"Yeah, I know," he whispered. "And I don't blame you. But if you give me the rest of your life, maybe I can change your mind about me."

She couldn't speak because the lump in her throat was choking her. When she heard the doorbell, she pulled away from him, trying to sniff back tears. "I have to… to…"

"That'll be the boys. They want to show you their new books and–"

"Jamie and Todd are here?" The next second she was running into the apartment and throwing open the door. After only a second's hesitation the boys leaped on her and the three of them went rolling onto the foyer floor. In the next minute Kane had joined them and the three males began tickling Cale.

"Answer me," Kane said. "Answer me now!"

"Yes," Cale said, laughing. "Yes, I'll marry you."

With one push, Kane removed his sons from Cale and pulled her into his arms. "I don't know why I didn't recognize you the minute I saw you."

"Neither do I," she whispered against his lips. "Neither do I."

THE END

Table of Contents

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve