But she’d been fascinating. No doubt about it. And it hadn’t just been her beauty. No, there was something more, something deeper that he’d sensed in her; and whatever that female essence had been, it had scared him. It had scared the hell out of him.

With eyes as blue as a mountain lake, cheekbones that a model would have killed for, pouty lips and an easy smile, she had caused most of the men who had worked for her father to think about risking their employment for a few hours alone with her. Including Mason.

Now he damned himself for being two times a fool, but the truth of the matter was that Bliss Cawthorne, curse her sexy smile and twinkling eyes, had gotten to him all over again.

It had taken less than ten minutes.

So what’re you gonna do about it, Lafferty? his mind taunted as he peeled the label from his beer bottle.

There was only one safe answer—the same as it had always been. Stay away from the woman.

Trouble was, Mason wasn’t known to take the safe path.

* * *

“So this is Bliss!” Brynnie Anderson-Smith-McBaine-Kinkaid-Perez breezed into the Cawthorne house in a cloud of sweet perfume laced with cigarette smoke. Her hair was a deep red beginning to streak with gray, her face tanned, her lips colored peach, her eyelids shaded in a soft pewter color. She wore jeans a size too tight and a white T-shirt that showed off her enviable chest. “Well, John, you’re right again. She’s beautiful.” Brynnie winked at Bliss and extended a beringed work-roughened hand. “I’ve heard a lot about you. All good, mind you, all good.”

“Same here,” Bliss said, though what she’d found out about this woman had been recent and she wasn’t holding her breath that the story her father gave her was the entire truth. Besides, not only had Brynnie wed more than her share of husbands, but she’d been a married man’s lover. That thought was sour, no matter how hard Bliss tried to swallow it.

John captured Brynnie in a bear hug, and with his arm still slung over her shoulders, led them all through the kitchen and onto the back porch. A sweating pitcher of iced tea and several glasses were waiting on the picnic table.

“Looks like you were expecting me,” Brynnie said.

“All Bliss’s doin’.”

“Thoughtful.”

“Thanks.” Bliss didn’t know what to say. This was, after all, the woman with whom her father had been involved in an affair, the woman who had knowingly cheated on Margaret Cawthorne, the woman who had gotten pregnant with John’s child while he was married.

Forcing a smile she didn’t feel, Bliss told herself that discretion, if she could find it, was the better part of valor. Her mother was dead, had known of the affair and dealt with it in her own way. Somehow Bliss should do the same. But as she poured the tea into glasses, watching the slices of lemon dance, she felt a stinging loss, a pain deep in her heart, and she nearly slopped tea onto the table.