Only he wasn’t lucky. When his body temp got back to normal, the throbbing ache in his groin resumed. He lay on his back in the dark, staring stupidly upward into what seemed like absolute blackness. He’d been unable to hear all his life, but the addition of sudden blindness made him feel claustrophobic. He scrambled to escape, got his boot stuck between the massive bales, and panicked until all his tugging finally jerked his foot from the shoe. Shit. Now what was he going to do? He had spare boots in the bunkhouse, but he wasn’t about to go in there to get them. He’d wake everyone and have to explain what he was doing up in the middle of the night.

Heart still pounding from the panic attack, Wyatt talked himself down. This was a gigantic building, nothing confining about it, and he’d just let his imagination get the better of him. The darkness couldn’t hurt him, even though it blinded him. He flopped back down and stared into the blackness again. Errant thoughts of Erin De Laney slipped into his mind. How her pretty blue eyes went dark when her feelings got hurt, more precisely when he hurt her feelings. How she would catch herself in a masculine stance, quickly correct her posture, and then flush with embarrassment. How, when she donned civilian clothes, she always wore a top that covered her shoulders and arms because she felt compelled to hide her torso. When in her presence, he found himself wanting to tell her how beautiful he thought she was and that she needed to stop trying so hard to be feminine. Hello. God had taken care of that for her. She could stand with her feet spread and her arms akimbo until hell froze over, and she’d never look manly.

Only he could tell her none of those things, because she’d know he was attracted to her the second he opened his mouth. That could not happen. He just needed to get his head on straight and stop thinking about her. So instead he fell back on a game that he’d played with himself since childhood. He asked himself, What does the chirp of a bird sound like? When cattle bawl, what does the lowing sound like? What does the wind in the trees sound like? What does a rifle shot sound like? What does a belch or fart sound like? It was a stupid game. How could he liken any sound to another one when he’d never heard anything at all?

He closed his eyes to prove to himself that the blinding darkness was nothing more than a matter of perception, a simple absence of light. Then he focused on his senses that were still in fine working order. Smell. The predominant scent was of the alfalfa hay stacked high all around him. To him, it smelled green, retaining some of the freshness of new grass. It also coated his nostrils with dust, which transported him, via his imagination, onto a field in summer, where the earth, still damp from irrigation, embraced the crops that absorbed its nutrients as well as its pungent odor.