“Oh, I have a bit of help now and then, when it’s needed. You go ahead, pet her if you like. She doesn’t mind it.”

“I wasn’t petting her.” It was a little late for dignity, but Shannon made a stab at it. “I was just curious about how they felt.”

“You’ve never touched a cow?” The very idea made him grin. “You have them in America I’m told.”

“Of course we have cows. We just don’t see them strolling down Fifth Avenue very often.” She slanted a look at him. He was still smiling, looking back toward the tree that had started the whole scenario. “Why haven’t you cut that down? It’s in the middle of your wheat.”

“It’s no trouble to plow and plant around it,” he said easily. “And it’s been here longer than me.” At the moment he was more interested in her. She smelled faintly sinful—some cunning female fragrance that had a man wondering. And wasn’t it fine that he’d been thinking of her as he’d come over the rise?

There she’d been, as if she’d been waiting.

“You’ve a fine morning for your first in Clare. There’ll be rain later in the day.”

Brianna had said the same, Shannon remembered, and frowned up at the pretty blue sky. “Why do you say that?”

“Didn’t you see the sunrise?”

Even as she was wondering what that had to do with anything, Murphy was cupping her chin in his hand and turning her face west.

“And there,” he said, gesturing. “The clouds gathering up from the sea. They’ll blow in by noontime and bring us rain. A soft one, not a storm. There’s no temper in the air.”

The hand on her face was hard as rock, gentle as water. She discovered he carried the scents of his farm with him—the horses, the earth, the grass. It seemed wiser all around to concentrate on the sky.

“I suppose farmers have to learn how to gauge the weather.”

“It’s not learning so much. You just know.” To please himself he let his fingers brush through her hair before dropping them onto his own knee. The gesture, the casual intimacy of it, had her turning her head toward him.

They may have been facing opposite ways, with legs dangling on each side of the wall, but they were hip to hip. And now eye to eye. And his were the color of the glass her mother had collected—the glass Shannon had packed so carefully and brought back to New York. Cobalt.

She didn’t see any of the shyness or the bafflement she’d read in them the day before. These were the eyes of a confident man, one comfortable with himself, and one, she realized with some confusion of her own, who had dangerous thoughts behind them.

He was tempted to kiss her. Just lean forward and lay his lips upon hers. Once. Quietly. If she’d been another woman, he would have. Then again, he knew if she’d been another woman he wouldn’t have wanted to quite so badly.