Julie gazed thoughtfully into her wine for a long moment. “I feel bad for both of them. The woman didn’t realize that Wyatt was deaf.” She shrugged. “I’ve only ever been with three guys that way, and I never changed my mind at the last second, but if for some reason I had, I probably would have handled it pretty much the same way she did, simply by asking the man to stop. I mean, getting frantic and hurting him would be pretty stupid. You only go for the jugular when a guy won’t stop. First, you try to just tell him you’ve changed your mind. It’s only when he doesn’t stop that you go bat-shit crazy on him.”

Erin met Julie’s gaze and maintained eye contact. “I’m really, really attracted to Wyatt.”

Julie reached across the table to curl her fingers around Erin’s hand. “Sweetie, I don’t blame you. He’s extremely easy on the eyes, but guys like Wyatt go way deeper than the skin. He’s a genuinely good person, I think. I liked him from the start.”

“Did you know he was deaf when you first met him?”

Julie shook her head, her mouth curving into a tremulous smile. “I’d heard about the deaf cowboy in Mystic Creek. In a town this small, information like that reaches a newcomer pretty fast. But I didn’t recall the man’s name, so I didn’t know Wyatt was the deaf cowboy. In fact, if you’d told me he was deaf right after I first met him, I’d have laughed, because he doesn’t appear to be even slightly hard of hearing. I finally figured it out when he left his wallet lying on my counter one day. I yelled at him to stop. He didn’t. So I ran after him, and with his long legs, he was halfway across the concourse before I caught up with him. That was when I realized. Like you say, he speaks amazingly well for a deaf person. I never even suspected.”

“His ability to speak so well didn’t come easily to him. He spent hundreds of hours perfecting his pronunciation, and he says he still practices.”

Julie’s hold on Erin’s hand tightened. “You have tears in your eyes.”

Erin nodded. “This will sound crazy, but knowing what happened, I now understand Wyatt in ways that I couldn’t before. And it bothers me that he holds himself entirely to blame. Yes, he did misrepresent himself to her in the bar, and, yes, he held fast to the act all evening. But I’m convinced he never anticipated that she might have a sudden attack of misgivings and want to bring a halt to everything. He was twenty-six years old and, like almost every guy that age, wanting to score. But it ended so disastrously for him that even now, nearly seven years later, he’s never been with a woman again.”

Julie’s eyes went sparkly with tears, too. Her big heart was one of the things that made Erin value her so much as a friend. “That’s amazing. For a guy to do that, he has to feel pretty awful about what happened. But I’m not quite getting why you’re so upset that you woke me up to tell me about it. It’s over and done. There’s nothing you can do about it now.”