“Too late for that, don’t you think?” she asked with more than a trace of irony. The anger drained from her face and was replaced by sadness. “Way, way too late.”

The sky was dark, threatening, the air hot and cloying as a storm brewed over the hills. Clouds moved in the barest of breezes, and Mason wished that he could shake some sense into her.

“Wait a minute, Bliss.” Again he reached for the bridle, but she was quick. Too quick. She slapped Lucifer on his rump.

“Just stay away from me!” Leaning forward, she pressed her knees into the pinto’s sides. “Hi-ya!”

“No—”

Ears flattened to his head, the colt bolted forward at a dead gallop. His hooves flung mud and dirt. Aptly named Lucifer, the demon tore across the paddock and through the open gate to the grassy fields beyond.

Mason’s back teeth ground together. He was torn. Bliss Cawthorne was a stubborn, prideful creature who deserved to get caught in a downpour, but then again, the storm might be worse than just a summer shower.

I love you. Words he’d longed to hear but which scared the stuffing out of him. There was no future for them; there never would be.

You can’t tell me what to do, Lafferty; don’t even try! Just stay away from me!

As if he could. Hadn’t he spent the past weeks trying to do just that?

Thunder rumbled over the surrounding hills and he silently cursed himself up one side and down the other. He shouldn’t have let her go. Should have physically restrained her, but short of hog-tying her, there’d been no way to keep her at the house.

You could have told her you loved her, too, and right this minute you might finally be in bed with her, feeling her hands on your body, kissing those pouting lips and making love to her.

Hell. He didn’t love her and wouldn’t lie, so he’d been between the proverbial rock and a hard place.

Eyes narrowing against the first spattering of rain, he rubbed his jaw where she’d slapped him as he’d argued with her. The skin stretched over his cheek still stung, but he’d been turned on by the fury in her eyes. “Dammit all.” He kicked at a rock and sent it careening into the fence post, but his gaze was fixed on Bliss again, now far in the distance astride Lucifer.

Just the sway of her rump as the horse loped gave him an arousal that ached against his fly. What the devil was wrong with him? The boss’s daughter was off-limits. Way off-limits. No one who worked on the ranch knew it better than he, yet he’d found excuse after flimsy excuse to be next to her, or close enough that he could watch her.

The smell of her skin aroused him, the way she angled her chin and wrinkled her nose caught him off guard and was sexy as all get-out. But why?

Sure, she was pretty with her pale blond hair and cornflower-blue eyes. Her cheekbones were high, her jawline strong, her eyebrows arched, but, come on, Lafferty, there were lots of pretty women in the world. Yet, this woman—no, make that girl, she wasn’t quite eighteen yet—was different and appealed to him on another level, a level that scared the living tar right out of him.