Her fingertips were tingling. She stood up and hung the guitar on its hook next to the door, making a mental note to oil the wood before Johnny's vigorous playing split the instrument in half. She looked over at Mutt, who had lowered her head back to her paws and appeared dead to the world.

"Can I learn to do that?"

"You can learn to do just about anything," Kate said. "It takes practice, is all."

He was about to reply, when a yawn split his face. She fetched sheets, blankets, and a pillow, and, in that unnerving fashion of adolescents, he was asleep before she smoothed the blankets over him. Shadows gathered as she turned off three of the kerosene lanterns, turning down the one hanging in the kitchen corner to leave a soft, dim glow in case he needed to get up in the middle of the night. Shadows moved with her across the floor and on the walls.

The book Johnny had been reading was a history textbook. School wasn't in session for another week. Kate sighed. Johnny was studying as hard as he could because it was his avowed intent to pass his GED when he turned sixteen, thereafter to walk away from school and never go back. She was hoping against hope that he'd fall in love with a girl whose avowed intent was to graduate high school in four years and go on to college afterward.

She stoked the fire in the woodstove, checked the oil stove to see that the pilot light was still burning, and refilled the wood box. After brushing her teeth and washing her face with the last of the water in the kettle, she refilled the kettle and set it on the back of the stove. She climbed the ladder to the loft and lit the lamp that hung next to the bed, undressing by its light, pulling on a nightshirt, and sliding beneath the thick down comforter. She was rereading My Family and Other Animals for what was probably the twenty-seventh time, but she had only lately gone back to full-time reading, and for the present, her preference was for books she had already read and enjoyed, ones with no surprises in them.

But even ten-year-old Gerry Durrell and his scorpions in matchboxes couldn't keep her attention this night. She put the book down and turned off the light to stare at the ceiling.

Jack Morgan had been dead for over a year now. She missed him, missed having him in her life. She missed his voice, she realized suddenly, that slow, deep bass voice that had made every feminine nerve she had stand up and salute every time she'd heard it.

Ethan's voice wasn't as deep, but that wasn't necessarily enough to deny the man her bed.

Jack had been brawny, a bruiser with the muscles of a prizefighter and a face that could most kindly have been described as interesting.

Ethan could have made a living modeling clothes for Brooks Brothers.