She was about to mount Misty, one booted foot already in the stirrup, both hands gripping the saddle horn, when she turned her head to look back at him over one shoulder. She smiled and something shifted inside J.P., sweet and poignant, soft as the brush of a moth’s wing.

“Don’t try to talk me out of it,” she warned cheerfully. “I know you’re bullheaded, J.P. McCall, but I’m a Garrett, remember. We’re notoriously single-minded, as I’m sure you’ve noticed.”

J.P. gave a rumbling chuckle, but he was still shaken. He wasn’t a fanciful man, and this new element, whatever it was, left him off-balance, inwardly anyway.

“We can argue all day,” he pointed out, surprised that he sounded like his ordinary Montana-rancher self, “or we can ride.”

“Let’s get on with the research,” Sara urged, grinning. Then she hoisted herself off the ground, left foot in the stirrup, right leg ready to swing over Misty’s broad back.

J.P. did a little research of his own, watching her shapely blue-jeaned backside as she swung, somewhat laboriously, up into the saddle.

She settled herself, sunlight rimming her like a golden aura, and, looking up at her, J.P. was nearly blinded.

The phenomenon wasn’t entirely physical, and that confounded him further.

It was ridiculous, reacting like this, he decided, annoyed with himself.

Sara was Eli’s sister, his big sister.

She had two kids, courtesy of her no-good, long-gone husband.

And, though she must have had opportunities, she’d shown no interest, as far as J.P. knew anyway, in finding another husband or even a boyfriend.

She seemed content to raise her son and daughter, write her books and take part in community projects with her friends.

But wasn’t she ever lonely, in a crowd or by herself, at odd hours of the night?

J.P. certainly was, though he was more than reluctant to admit as much. Those bleak bouts, like the infrequent but fiery, bloody flashbacks he sometimes endured, were among the many things he liked to forget.

With no other blood kin—her and Eli’s folks had died when Sara was in middle school, and a few years later their guardian and aunt, Abigail Garrett, had passed away as well—Sara had focused on her children.

She’d had some kind of falling out with her former father-in-law, a very wealthy man who owned vast stretches of land around Painted Pony Creek but rarely spent time in his secluded castle of a mansion, and apparently severed any and all ties with her ex-husband’s family.

Naturally, Eli had helped out as best he could, but he’d been busy in those days, finishing up at the police academy down in Phoenix and then starting his career as a deputy sheriff.