“Are you going to tell me how you broke your leg?” she asked as she did the dishes. She’d banished him to a chair at the big pine table.

With a shrug, he grinned and said, “Rampaging cow.”

“I don’t believe that.”

“Then you wouldn’t believe a rampaging chicken, either.”

She laughed at his irreverence: he was well aware she knew he was lying, and just didn’t give a damn. “I hope it’s nothing I caused.”

“You were a thousand miles away in Houston when this happened. Go easy on yourself, Sarah.”

“That’s something I’ve never been able to do,” she admitted wistfully.

“Too many standards to live up to.”

“And nowhere I belong.” She placed a plate, a supermarket special, in the rack; the water was hot and sudsy. “When I was a little girl, there were days—lots of days—when I would have traded all my parents’ wealth for an obscure ranch house in a middle-class suburb, someplace where there were parents who really loved each other and neighbors you could count on to be there for twenty or thirty years and with whom you could trade recipes and whose kids you’d play with. I’ve never had the identity a sense of place can give you—that feeling of roots.”

David nodded. “And no one sympathizes with you because you’re rich.”

“Most of my friends have backgrounds similar to mine, but they don’t see themselves as rootless. They say I look at things the wrong way. I don’t belong to a place, I belong to a group—and that’s just as special. It’s a different kind of community, that’s all. We can afford to move around and have friends in faraway places. We don’t have to rely on a geographical community.”

“Not me. I’m tied to the land. Guess I always will be.”

“What about people?”

“They’re around.”

She smiled at him. “I sensed that about you, David. It’s an appealing quality. What about your sister? I don’t see her as someone who’d drive a beat-up Land Rover with a ‘Massachusetts grown and fresher’ bumper sticker on it.”

“Nah. She’s got a Jeep.”

They both laughed, and finally he got up on his crutches and hobbled through the living room to the stairs. “Ash’s room is the one with the blue-flowered wallpaper. Mine’s the one that smells like chicken crap and looks like a pigsty.” He grinned. “Take your pick.”

“Where will you sleep?”

“Barky’s room. I’ll keep the fires going so you don’t freeze your ass off in the morning.”

She couldn’t quell the giddiness she felt at standing so close, smelling the male sweat on him. “I’ve never met anyone like you. You’re too good to be true.”

“No, I’m not. I can be just as big a jackass as the next guy. But I’ve learned to go on and be myself. That’s what I like my friends to do, too.”

“I hope we can be friends.”

“We already are.”

“So easily?”

“I’m a quick judge of character. Night, Sarah.”