“No, uh, I think I can handle the rest.”

“You sure?” His voice was low and a little raspy, as if he’d breathed too much dust or smoked too many cigarettes.

She wasn’t sure of anything. “Yeah. Don’t worry about it.”

With a wink that bordered on something far more sexual than she’d ever experienced, he left the room as quickly as he’d come in. She set her suitcase on the bed and opened the window. Suddenly the tiny bedroom seemed airless and hot. In the old mirror over the bureau she caught her reflection and nearly died. Her cheeks were a bright shade of pink, her blond hair wild, her eyes wide with an anticipation she’d never seen before.

The breeze that moved the curtains and filled the room didn’t help much. Nothing did, she came to find out. Whenever she was around Mason, she couldn’t seem to catch her breath or even untangle her thoughts.

* * *

In the days that followed, that summer ten years ago, she saw Mason enough, though most often from a distance. He roped steers, he branded stock, he castrated calves, he shoed horses and strung fence wire. The muscles of his back and shoulders, tanned from long hours laboring in the sun, moved fluidly as he worked, straining, then relaxing and drawing her eyes to the faded jeans that rode low on his hips. Dusty and torn, they offered a glimpse of a strip of whiter skin whenever he stretched, and that tantalizing slash of white, coupled with the curling golden hair on his chest, caused a warmth to invade the deepest, most private part of her, and she had to force her gaze away.

“You’re being silly,” she told herself on Tuesday evening when she was walking toward the stables and spied Mason leaning against a car—a yellow sedan—she didn’t recognize. The driver was a pert woman with short dark hair, an upturned nose and doelike brown eyes that gazed upward through the open window to Mason’s face. The car idled, exhaust seeping from the tailpipe, the thrum of the engine competing with the sounds of warblers and sparrows singing in the trees and fields.

Mason, wearing sunglasses and an irritated expression, shook his head, and though Bliss’s ears strained to hear the conversation she only caught snippets.

“. . . waited all night,” the woman said.

“No one asked you to.”

“. . . we had an understanding.”

“Did we? Wasn’t my idea.”

“Mason, please—” The woman cast a sidelong glance at Bliss who increased her pace as she walked to the stables. The sun was hovering low in the western sky and the air was breathless and still.

Bored with listening to her tapes and reading old magazines, Bliss had decided to go for a ride. Her father had already pointed out the docile horses he wanted her to saddle, but Bliss had other ideas.

“Lousy son of a bitch!” The woman’s voice blasted through the hot air.