“Wicked woman,” he teased.

She shrugged. “I didn’t start out that way.” She smiled at him. “How long are you going to visit with your cousin?”

“I don’t know. A few weeks, maybe. My foreman is almost as good as I am about ranch management and he calls me if there are any problems he can’t handle. There won’t be. My dad is coming down with his new wife so she can experience ranch life. He always managed the ranch while I was off marketing cattle and talking business. I don’t expect his new wife will last long if she comes with him. None of his women ever took to cattle and dust.”

She drew in a long breath and waited until the waitress took their orders before she spoke. “Your father’s lifestyle affected you, I’ll bet. You didn’t grow up in a stable home with two parents who loved each other.”

“I did, actually. My mother was a little saint. After she died, Dad seemed to lose his mind. He stayed with the model for a few years, but after that, he set new records for promiscuity. I guess maybe it did affect me.”

“My parents married just out of high school,” she recalled with a smile. “They loved each other, and me, so much. He had a heart attack at the age of thirty-five and died in the doctor’s office. It was so massive that nothing would have saved him. My mother grieved and grieved. She kept going for me, but her heart was in the grave with my father. When I was twenty-one she went on a cruise and fell overboard. They never found the body.”

He winced. “That must have been traumatic.”

She nodded. “It’s so much worse when people die like that. You never really give up hope that maybe somebody fished them out, they lost their memory, things like that.” She looked up. “I know that she drowned. I just couldn’t accept it, for a long time. Finally, I bought one of those urns for people who are cremated. I put her favorite jewelry and some hairs from her hairbrush, a ring she liked, a Christmas ornament, and sealed it up. It sits on my mantel. So I have something of her near me.”

“That’s a special kind of memorial,” he said. “I never would have thought of it.”

“An innovation,” she said. She smiled. “It helped me adjust to life without her.”

“We buried my mother in the cemetery at our local Methodist church. I put flowers on her grave on holidays and her birthday, for me and my brothers.”

“I do that for my father.”

The waitress came back with their order.

“Are we going to the dance Thursday night?” he asked.

She smiled. “We’ll be gossiped about.”

“Good,” he said.

She just laughed.

JAKE MCGUIRE WAS right on time to pick Mina up for their date on Friday. As he’d said, they didn’t dress up. But he was wearing designer jeans and boots, with a Western-cut blue plaid shirt under a black leather coat, with a top-of-the-line cream Stetson on his dark hair. He could have modeled for a couture house. But Mina was too shy to mention that.