she said.Luke’s ears turned red. “Yeah,” he said. “Whaddya want?”“I’m leaving for a little bit. Tell your sister when you see her. If you need anything, Auntie Maeve is around somewhere.”His flush deepened. “Ma, I’m fifteen years old. I don’t need a baby-sitter.”He was right. She didn’t want to admit that her baby was growing up. She held back the caress her fingers automatically wanted to bestow. Instead, she said gruffly, “Stay out of trouble, kemosabe.”She found Jesse Lindstrom leaning against the back porch railing. Beer bottle in hand, he was chatting with a dark-haired man she didn’t know. When he saw her, he set down the half-empty beer and stepped away from the railing, and she felt an instant of panic. She knew nothing about this man except that he was Casey’s former brother-in-law. She was thirty-six years old, for God’s sake, not twenty, and in spite of her liberation from Eddie, she didn’t make a habit of picking up strange men.But logic didn’t enter into the equation. It hadn’t since she’d first noticed him standing there on the lawn, watching her with those dark eyes. She was reasonably certain she knew where this was headed, but she was powerless to resist. Didn’t want to resist. Didn’t even want to think about it for fear that she would lose her nerve and change her mind.He led her to a shiny red GMC pickup, opened the door for her and steadied her as she raised the hem of her dress and climbed up into the cab. Inside, it was hotter than the hinges of hell. Rose lowered the window, and fresh air, ripe with the scent of new-mown grass, rushed through the opening, cooling some of the perspiration that had gathered under her arms and between her breasts. Jesse walked around to the driver’s side and climbed in, started the truck, backed it around and squeezed between two cars parked in the grass at the edge of the drive. Afraid to look at him or at the three feet of no-man’s-land on the bench seat between them, Rose stared out the window at the passing landscape, as exotic to her as a foreign country, with its rolling hills and trees and its green pastures dotted with black and white cattle.A couple of miles down the road, near a large, tidy Colonial home, Jesse slowed, clicked on his blinker, and turned off the highway onto a drive that was little more than a gravel path through a broad meadow of gently nodding grasses and wild roses that bloomed in clusters. He brought the truck to a halt atop a slight rise, and Rose sucked in her breath at the brilliant vista of meadow and sky and broad blue river that was laid out before her.“This is spectacular,”
