Watching, she thought she understood how cowpunchers got their name. There were several members of a branding crew. First a cowboy on a racing horse would cut out a calf from the herd, rope it, then drag to closer to the fire, where a bulldogger would throw it to the ground and tie it. Then the brander would shove a hot iron into its rump, all in a matter of seconds. Lastly the ears were marked with a sharp knife, and if the animal was male, the testicles were castrated and the fries thrown into a pile to be cooked later.

Heather felt for the poor calves. Their pitiful bawling as they ran crying back to their mamas wrung her heart. But Rusty assured her it wasn’t as brutal an ordeal as it looked.

“Their hides are tough,” he insisted, “and they’re more scared than wounded.”

On her first visit with Janna, Sloan broke away from the branding operation and rode over to greet them. His smile was chiefly for his daughter, but his gaze held Heather’s for a long, sensually charged moment. “Glad you could come.” When he bent near, she caught the hot, earthy scents of sweat, sun, leather, and man, and her blood quickened.

The spell was over in a moment. Sloan scooped Janna up in his arms and set her before him on his horse.

“Come on, darlin’. It’s time you got a look at your heritage.” Much to the child’s awed delight, he rode slowly around the camp, showing her the sights.

Except for the few sojourns to the range, however, Heather saw little of Sloan during the weeks of roundup. After putting in a long day branding calves, he came home late and fell wearily into bed each night, only to rise before dawn to begin all over again.

She found herself missing his presence. There were no longer any quiet cozes in his study, or homey, peaceful meals with Janna between them, or pulsing nights of darkness and desire.

She kept herself occupied, though, as spring slipped into early summer, and was not discontented with her lot. In helping to raise Janna, she’d found a sense of renewed purpose in life, and her former existence in St. Louis began to seem like a distant dream.

Until, that is, she encountered Quinn Lovell.

For the past month or more she’d heard various accounts of Sloan’s political opponent, but she first met him face-to-face one morning when she drove into Greenbriar for supplies. The wealthy mining baron had already begun campaigning for state senator, it seemed, and Heather discovered him holding sway on a street corner before a small crowd of townspeople, explaining the bleakness of the future of Colorado’s cattle industry.