It had been his night to see Dee Dee, but Terri had come up with another excuse to keep him from his daughter. Only half a mile away and it might as well be half a continent.

Just like Bliss—so near but so damned far. Completely out of reach.

“Where she should be,” he reminded himself as he refocused on the illuminated screen, but try as he might, he couldn’t concentrate on the spreadsheet for his ranch in Montana. Tonight he didn’t give a damn. The numbers didn’t mean anything to him now. Nothing did. Not when his daughter was being kept from him.

Or when Bliss Cawthorne was less than twenty minutes away.

“Stop it,” he growled at himself and blinked to clear his head.

Restless by nature, he could never sit for long and had always worked off his excess energy in physical labor. But this evening had been different.

After his telephone conversation with Terri, he’d kicked off his boots and jeans, donned sweats and running shoes and jogged six miles across hilly terrain. He’d returned sweating and overheated, his blood pounding, and had taken a cold shower, letting the needles of water spray against his skin as he’d rested his head against the tiles and willed his thoughts away from Bliss.

So what if she was close by? So what if she was still as intriguing as ever? So what if he still wanted her so badly he felt himself stiffen at the thought of her? She was still John Cawthorne’s daughter and still off-limits. Way off-limits. He had enough problems in his life without the complication of a woman—especially that one.

Now, as he sat in his boxer shorts, a half-drunk bottle of beer in one hand, he stared at the ledgers on the computer screen and wondered how his life had careened so far out of control.

Oh, come on, Lafferty; it’s your fault. You’re the one who sent her out riding in that storm ten years ago, you’re the one who took her old man’s money and you’re the one who got Terri pregnant. If your life’s on an unwanted path, you’ve got no one to blame but yourself.

He took a draft from his long-necked bottle. Ever since seeing Bliss again, he’d been distracted. Half-a-dozen times he’d reached for the phone to dial her number, only to stop before he picked up the receiver. Why call her? What could he say? The old torment gnawed at his soul. “You nearly killed her.”

He snapped off the toggle switch, felt a sense of satisfaction as the screen faded, and took another long swallow. He remembered the first time he’d seen her as if it had been yesterday.

She’d been the boss’s daughter, a pretty girl of nearly eighteen, who had come to spend a few weeks on her old man’s ranch. He’d been twenty-four at the time, old enough to know better, young enough not to give a damn.

At first he’d wanted nothing to do with Cawthorne’s daughter, or so he’d tried to convince himself. She’d been trilingual, for Pete’s sake, danced ballet, rode polo ponies, played tennis, sailed, and was rumored to have a portfolio of investments that would have made a stockbroker’s mouth water. In short, she hadn’t been his kind of woman. No way. No how.