There was a storm building in the mountains. Noah could hear it muttering in the distance as he swung down off Doofus. The trees had begun to writhe with a fretful, humid wind, and the birds were chattering like impatient women. The horses nickered and danced as the hands led them into the barn.
It had been a long week. After taking three days to get the majority of the herd up to summer pasture, they had ridden fences and repaired irrigation and harvested hay. They’d gone searching for the three young bulls that had been rustled from another pasture while they’d been fixing the fences by Wilson Creek Road.
Noah was tired, and he was sore, and he was anxious for more reasons than he could name. Ethan had been trying to get in touch with him. Noah had ignored him for the last four days. He knew he couldn’t much longer. Ethan wasn’t the kind to just call and chat.
It didn’t matter. Noah didn’t want to set as much as a toe back into that world until he had this one settled.
At least until he had it figured out.
He had to tell her. That was the only honest thing to do. He had to pull her aside somewhere they’d be safe from prying eyes and admit who he really was.
He had to take the chance.
Until he did, the rest of what they’d shared, what he was feeling, didn’t count.
But every time he tried, other words came out. Funny words, or silly words, or pointless words. Any words but the ones that would once again make Noah Campbell invisible.
“You know where the boss is?” he yelled over to Hank where he was helping get other animals in before the weather hit.
“Cow barn!” Hank yelled.
They’d found something up in the western grazing area Dulcy should see. A running iron and an old fire. Tools of careful rustlers. Sitting a hundred yards or so from Cletus Wilson’s land.
Noah put Doofus away and then headed over to the cow barn, pulling off gloves and hat as he went. It was hot enough to fry eggs on his forehead. Sweat dripped down his back and under his arms. Noah wiped his forehead with the back of his arm and pushed dank hair out of his eyes. The afternoon was just too hot, and the animal life too unsettled. Almost as unsettled as he was.
“Dulcy?”
The barn seemed even more dim. Noah heard the animals shifting inside, smelled the hay and cattle and old leather. He heard a voice and followed it back.
“Hello?”
A cow lowed, an anxious, unhappy sound. Noah saw it at the back of the barn. Saw it bump against the wall and back around. He saw the shadowy form of someone crouched alongside it.
Someone who wasn’t Dulcy.
He stepped farther in and realized it was a man. It was a man he didn’t know.
A man who was bent over Dulcy’s prone form on the floor.
Only she wasn’t prone. She was reclining, her head on a couple bales of hay, her legs stretched out. The guy’s hands were on her shoulders, and his head was right over hers.
“How’s that feel, honey?” he was asking in low tones.
Noah wasn’t sure what happened. Later he might admit that he let other functions override simple logic. All he knew at that moment was that he was hit with a rage that sent him careening into them both.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing!” he roared, spinning the man around.
In a flash he saw Dulcy’s eyes snap open like flags on a high breeze. He saw her hand on her chest, just as it had been the other night when she’d pulled away from him. He saw the confusion in the man’s eyes.
The handsome, young man’s eyes.
And he swung.
The man howled and went over. Noah howled and spun the other way.
“Oh, damn!” He shook his hand in astonishment, the sudden pain clearing his head. “That hurt!”
“You sound surprised,” the other guy responded from the floor where he was rubbing his jaw.
Noah glared at him. “Who the hell are you?”
“The victim, I think,” he answered without moving.
“The vet,” Dulcy amended in a small voice from where she hadn’t moved.
“The vet?” Noah all but howled again, spinning on her.
That was when he realized what was wrong. Dulcy didn’t look rapturous. She looked uncomfortable. And she wasn’t touching her chest, she was rubbing it.
The rest of the rage cleared away in an appalling instant, and Noah realized that he, the man who had climbed to improbable success by always keeping his head, had just lost it. Again.
“I hit him for nothing, didn’t I?” he asked her, feeling the flush climb his neck.
Dulcy grinned, still breathing funny. “Don’t you know not to punch anybody with your thumb inside your fist? It’s a great way to break your hand.”
Noah’s answering grin was pretty sheepish. “Now you tell me.” He took another considering look at his reddened knuckles and then reached out to give his victim a hand up. “I’ve never done that before.”
“Never?” Dulcy echoed.
He scowled as he helped resettle the vet on his feet. “Does that mean you don’t love me anymore?”
She continued to gently rub at her sternum. “No, not at all. I’m thrilled that when you belatedly came to violence in your life, it was over me. I would have preferred you didn’t coldcock the vet, though.”
Noah turned a chagrined glance at the other injured party. “Which means that there’s a perfectly reasonable explanation for all this.”
The vet nodded and held out a hand. “I’m afraid so. Jim Peterson.”
Noah shook hands. “Noah Campbell.”
Peterson grinned. “I know. I was in Lone Star your first night here. I don’t think you remember.”
Another point against him. “Your way of telling me I have nothing to say to a woman who likes to lie in the straw with cows, I guess.”
“Cows who kick,” Dulcy explained gingerly, still not moving.
Noah turned on her, now really upset. “She kicked you?”
Dulcy waved a hand. “It’s only fair. I was shoving a syringe up her teat.”
“You want to sit up now, Dulce?” Peterson asked.
“I don’t know.” She shot Noah a wary look. “If I do, are you going to hit me?”
Noah bit back an oath. “I’m sorry. I really am. I thought he was hurting you.”
Her eyes were getting brighter by the minute. “Uh-huh.”
“Are you okay?”
“Yeah. Just got the wind knocked out of me. Jim’s got some interesting news you should hear.”
“Oh. Good.” Noah felt like an idiot. A randy, rutting teen who went into shutdown the minute a woman looked at him.
He couldn’t help it. He wasn’t getting any sleep, any peace at all. He’d spent three days out in the sun and wind with Dulcy and slept alongside her out in the mountains without being able to touch her. He’d let her send him to do busy work just so he wouldn’t be too close. So he couldn’t smell her and see her and listen to her throaty, full laugh.
He’d sated himself on their small moments together and tormented himself with his deception.
“You ready to get up?” Jim Peterson asked Dulcy.
“Yeah.” She took Jim’s hand, when Noah was too preoccupied to react quickly enough, and levered herself to her feet, still rubbing. “Ethan called while you were out. He’s beginning to sound annoyed.”
“He’ll wait,” Noah said, and realized how annoyed he was beginning to sound. “I have something to share with you, too. We found a running iron out by Cletus’s place.”
The three of them headed back out of the barn, Dulcy already shaking her head. “It’s not Cletus. Jim found some of our cattle.”
Noah pushed open the door and ushered them all out to find the storm even closer. The wind had picked up, piling the clouds higher along the western peaks. Dulcy looked up, her eyes assessing, her nostrils twitching with the smell of the storm, her ears sorting out trouble.
Noah wanted to photograph her that way, with the uncertain light sinking into those crystal eyes and limning her hair with fire. He wanted to wrap himself in that lustrous hair and sink into her mouth. He wanted good-looking Jim Peterson to take his black bag somewhere else. Hell, preferably.
God, he thought in near despair. It was time to either get the hell away or get Dulcy into bed, and he couldn’t do either.
“Head on into the house,” Dulcy suggested, a hand out to each of them. “I need to make sure Hank has everything battened down.”
The three of them battened together, getting animals secured and buildings closed up. Out behind the house, Sally was yanking sheets off the line, and Hannah was pulling in her toys, oblivious to the sudden crack of thunder that ricocheted along the valley.
A storm was brewing. Noah knew just how the atmosphere felt. Itchy and unsettled and anxious. Waiting, sensing, splintering with the harnessed energy that was about to be unleashed.
He wiped at his forehead and found that he wasn’t any cooler, no matter what the wind was doing.
“Where’d he find the cattle?” Noah asked.
They stood in the kitchen like strangers, waiting for the storm. It was the last place Dulcy wanted to be, at least alone with Noah. Sally had taken Hannah back with her to batten down the Bixby house, and Jim had been called away to a horse who had reacted to the lightning with a lunge into barbed wire.
The sky was divided into unequal halves, with the black, thick-bellied clouds shoving out the blue, and the thunder rolling right down the mountains. The bursts of wind were chilly, and the air smelled like lightning. It was almost dark at four in the afternoon.
“Well,” Dulcy said, fumbling through a cabinet for a glass and pouring herself a slug of water. “I asked Jim to check with his contacts around the state. Anybody seeing what might be a Lazy V bull going up for auction. You wouldn’t steal bulls to slaughter,” she explained. “Not ours, anyway. They’re champion stock.”
Noah nodded and Dulcy turned away. It was the storm. Stirring everything up, spinning it around. Skittering along her nerve endings with each shudder of approaching lightning, each surprise clap of thunder.
That was why she couldn’t sit still in here with him. That was why she wanted to touch him.
It was exactly why she shouldn’t.
Dulcy saw it on Noah, too. A stiffness, an uncertainty, as if he’d never set foot in her kitchen before or allowed himself to be alone with a woman. They were discussing business as if they were in a roomful of accountants, and that was the last thing either of them was thinking about.
Dulcy finished her water and poured a second glass, wishing she could just pour it over her head. “Jim said that one of his friends called from Miles City. That’s about three hundred miles away. He’s pretty sure he saw a couple of our bulls up there. Says he knows the rancher who put ‘em up, and he’d never seen stock that good from his ranch in his life.”
“Anybody we know?”
She shook her head. “I’m getting the information to Bart for you so he can check it out.”
Noah kept fussing with the collar of his shirt, as if it were too tight. “Any ideas who our rustlers are?”
“Nope.” Dulcy wanted to fight her own clothes. It was so thick in this room. Breathless with waiting. “You’ve seen the evidence. They’re not disappearing from just one place, like it might be a nearby neighbor. We’ve seen tire tracks and horse tracks, so it’s not one type of conveyance. Uncle Mike has lost about ten head, and Bob Wilson about fifteen. I’m hoping the men we put up in the old line shack with the herd can watch ‘em for now so we don’t lose any more.”
“Do you think that’s why I was shot at?”
“I’d sure rather it be that than just somebody trying to shoot you so they could get the ranch.”
“Whose ranch borders the area I was riding?”
“Cletus Wilson. But it wouldn’t be Cletus.”
“Why not? That’s where we found the running iron.”
Dulcy turned on him, the empty glass tight in her hands, her first instinct to blindly defend her neighbors against this stranger. Then she saw him, saw those sweet eyes, that tight jaw that gave away so little, and knew he was no stranger.
She ended up giving him a self-effacing grin. “I don’t want it to be. I like him.”
“Anybody you don’t like?”
Dulcy laughed at that. “Sure. But I would have thought I’d have had an inkling of who it might be.”
Noah looked away, looked back again. “What about Josh?”
“What about him?”
“Would he be mad enough at you to try and get you fired?”
Dulcy walked to the window and stared out at the barns, where dust was twirling in the air and the automatic lights had come on. “Sure. I’m not sure he’s smart enough to sabotage a computer, though.”
“Who else uses them?”
She shrugged. “Just about everybody. We’re hooked into half the businesses in town and the county agent. Makes ordering a heck of a lot easier, not to mention bill paying. Most everybody’s doing it that way now.”
“Well, that narrows it down.”
“Which is why I’ve been tearing my hair out since you showed up.”
Dulcy fought the urge to look at him, because if she did, she couldn’t think. She couldn’t reason, which was what they needed right now. For more reasons than busting a rustler. “It could be. You’ve seen how people react to my having this position. But you also have to consider the fact that you have some of the best acreage in the area. And some of the best beef. Not to mention the fact that Aunt Cordelia played this valley like an accordion when she decided to sell the ranch.”
Behind her, Noah shifted. Walked a couple of paces. Rubbed at the sweat on his chest. Dulcy could hear him, could see him too-well-reflected in the window.
“What about Hank?”
That got her around. “What about him?”
Noah faced her calmly. “All I heard in town was why Hank wasn’t manager. Why isn’t he?”
“Because I’m better. Because he doesn’t want anything to do with computers. Because we work well just the way we are. He’s the stockman and I’m the technician.”
“You’re sure.”
She smiled. “Yes. Hank is much happier out on a horse than stuck up here staring at numbers all day.”
“Leaves us right back where we started.”
“Call Ethan.”
“After the storm.”
As if summoned, a bolt of lightning split the sky into sparks and the house lights flickered. Thunder shook the windows. The storm was breaking. If Dulcy walked to the front of the house, she could watch the rain dim the mountains and then march across the valley. She could watch the lightning splinter across the sky. She could feel that lovely cool wind on her face.
She started walking before she thought about it. Noah followed right on her heels.
“How are you feeling?” he asked, as if it were perfectly natural to just bolt in the middle of a conversation.
“Fine.”
Dulcy reached the living room and opened the big door. The wind shoved its way past the screen door like an impatient child, battering at her face and rippling across her shirt. It should have cooled her, comforted her. Noah walked up right behind her and took all that away.
“You sure?” he asked, his voice gentle with concern. “You’re walking like you’re an arm short.”
Dulcy didn’t turn away from where the mountains had disappeared through the screen door. “I’m a little stiff. Petula’s bigger than I am.”
Noah’s laugh was a burst of air against her neck. “Petula? You named a cow Petula?”
She couldn’t help but smile. “Hannah named a cow Petula.”
He laid his hands on her shoulders and she damn near bolted in the other direction. “Settle down,” he soothed in a voice like butter. “If there’s one thing I’ve been able to indulge in, in that fast track of mine, it’s a good masseur.”
Dulcy wanted to shiver. She wanted to fold up, just under the weight of two callused, square hands. “You’re sending for him?”
“He taught me some tricks. Now relax.”
It was the oldest come-on in the world. Dulcy knew it. Noah knew it. The problem was he kneaded the taut line of her neck and shoulders into pudding and then stopped.
Stopped!
Dulcy almost screamed at him. Outside, the rain had arrived, blowing in fitful gusts right through the screen door so that it beaded on her cheeks. The valley shuddered and swayed, buffeted by wind and thunder and rain. In that echoing, still room in a darkened house, Dulcy stood rigid and frustrated, exhilarated by the storm, by the sweet honey somebody had just poured all through her muscles, by Noah’s proximity, and yet unable to do anything about it.
She knew it was wrong. It was stupid, it was shortsighted, it was self-destructive. She hadn’t let a man near her in seven years, and she’d done well. She knew every reason she shouldn’t let this man near her today, and yet for the life of her she couldn’t make one reason stand out enough to be noticed past the quicksilver his fingers had unleashed in her. Past the laughter and the silences and the revelations she’d never expected.
“Noah?”
God, his voice was tight as a bowstring. How could his hands be so relaxed on her shoulders? Could he be that much of a gentleman that he would control himself to the point she wouldn’t know how he was affected?
“You’re a very good masseur.”
“Thank you.”
The wind spun the trees and made them bend. Dulcy felt as if it were doing the same to her. “There’s a problem, though.”
“Uh-huh?”
“I’m not relaxed.”
Pause. “You’re not?”
“No.” Breath. Courage. “I’m not.”
He never moved. Still, Dulcy could feel the same moment of hesitation in him, the same gathering of purpose. “Is there something I can do about it?”
She smiled a woman’s smile he couldn’t even see. She battled a terrible headiness. “Well…I’m all hot and sweaty.”
His hands tightened, just a little. His voice was even smaller. “Yes?”
“Are you…hot and sweaty?”
“Yes,” he admitted as another gust of rain spattered them both. “I think I am.”
Dulcy was trembling now. Frightened and hungry and committed. “Do you think a shower would help?”
He groaned. Dulcy heard it and almost went slack beneath him. She never got the chance. Before she could so much as flinch, Noah spun her around and had her in his arms. He brought his mouth down to hers and his hands so tight around her she couldn’t breathe, anyway.
It all ended. All the sanity, all the defenses, all the protest died in that single kiss. In the span of Noah’s arms. Dulcy never had the chance to make up her mind about what was going to happen, because it happened anyway.
She should have run. Instead, she reached up. She caught her hands in his hair and pulled him hard to her. She opened to his kiss, tasting impatience and fire and need in the deep recesses of his quirky mouth. She arched against him so that her breasts were crushed against his chest, so his hands could find her, so he could pull her shirt off and she could feel his skin next to her.
He didn’t pull off her shirt. He pulled out her hair tie. He wound her hair around his fingers and pulled the braid apart. He fanned her hair behind her like a sunset and sent cascades of delight down her back with his touch. He commanded her with his mouth and seduced her with his touch.
His beard chafed her cheek, so she lifted fingers to rub against it. His hands chafed her neck, so she rubbed against them. His neck was slick with sweat, so she tasted it.
“I don’t think…” he managed to say, pulling at her shirt to get it out of her jeans, “we’re going to make that shower yet.”
Dulcy yanked back, suddenly so hungry for the feel of his skin she couldn’t breathe. “1 think you’re right.”
His chest was hard, sculpted, glistening. Dulcy kissed it, kissed his throat, his jaw. She lifted high on her toes to rediscover his mouth, but he had other ideas. He swept her up in his arms and turned for the stairs.
“My room,” she rasped, arms tight around his neck. “Bigger bed.”
“My room,” he retorted, dipping to make another meal of her lower lip. “Supplies.”
Dulcy should have been appalled. With him. With herself. She chuckled, a throaty sound of delight that propelled Noah even faster up the stairs. Up the dim stairs where the lightning licked the walls and the thunder added an urgent rhythm. Back to his room where a four-poster sat in front of the window and Noah laid Dulcy down.
He somehow turned pulling off her boots into an erotic art. He swept impatient hands up her legs and beyond, to where he could pull off her belt and unbutton her fly. Dulcy shuddered with his touch. She reached up to reclaim his arms, his hard, well-worked shoulders. Noah took hold of her hands and lifted them over her head. He ran his hands up her waist, her sides, her arms. He finished lifting her shirt out of her jeans and bent back to unbutton it.
“Poor Dulcy,” he murmured against her throat. “You’re getting a bruise.”
And then he kissed it. He claimed another button, and another, his mouth following, tasting her right through her work clothes, too impatient to wait. Dulcy began to writhe, the storm building in her, gathering with his touch, with his deliberate, maddening seduction. She batted away his hands and reached down to test the strength of his denim.
“Oh, God,” Noah groaned, eyes closed. “That’s not fair.”
Dulcy showed him how fair she was by popping his button.
Suddenly she had on only her jeans. She reacted instinctively, reaching down to cover herself. Noah grabbed hold of her hands and smiled.
He smiled, and Dulcy forgot what she’d thought she didn’t want him to see.
“You’re beautiful,” he whispered, cupping one breast. Tasting the tender underside with tongue and teeth. Sending her almost straight off the bed. “I’ve been thinking…of this…”
Dulcy had, too. But not like this. Never this good, this sweet, this hot. Noah closed his mouth over her breast and she cried out. He flattened his hand across her belly and she moved against him, hungry and hurting with impatience.
The thunder growled and Noah tasted her other breast, the wet trail of his mouth lighting fires in her. Striking lightning. Dulcy whimpered, bucked, reached for him. She teased her fingers with the soft hair that dusted the vee of his throat and darkened his chest. She followed it as it tapered to his belly, his flat, hard belly that beckoned her. She tasted when she could, too. She thought how delicious hard work and open air was, how the smell of lightning in the air was as hedonistic as liquor.
Noah slipped his hand beneath her open jeans, beneath her practical cotton panties. Dulcy couldn’t hold still. She wanted her clothes off, but she didn’t, the feel of his hand beneath that very proper denim dangerous and forbidden.
His fingers sought, dipped, stroked, and she cried out. She wept with want and danced with desire. After interminable hibernation, her body sang with life, with sensation, with the delicious power of being coveted.
Dulcy couldn’t wait any longer. She pulled her jeans off herself. And then she made sure Noah paid for his torment by raising the simple unzipping of a zipper to new and excruciating levels of delight. Noah was laughing and cursing at the same time, his body slick with strain, his eyes dark and deep, his smile knowing.
“You’re beautiful,” Dulcy couldn’t help but say, her eyes following her hands across him, up and down him. He had new tan lines, new scrapes and bruises that she kissed and tasted and touched. He had harder edges to his muscles and a flatter ridge to his abdomen. She explored it all with quick hands and hungry eyes. She saw what she did to him and smiled a secret smile.
And then Noah took charge. He took hold of her hands in his, silenced her mouth with his, covered her body with his and eased his way back with clever fingers to find her slick and ready. He tormented her, delighted her, spun her around and sent her flying with just his fingers, his fingers and his delightful, cunning mouth.
And when he urged her open with his whispers and his questing hands, she welcomed him, took her fill of him, wrapped herself around him and urged him closer, closer, until he was gasping and she was sobbing, and the world spun apart around them in the rain and the lightning and the wind.
The storm must have passed. A shaft of molten sun drizzled down the far wall, and the birds had started to chatter again. Dulcy lay wrapped in Noah’s arms and couldn’t move. She couldn’t think what to do past this moment when everything seemed so right. When her body, for the first time in her life, told her what lovemaking really was.
“Wanna take that shower now?” Noah asked, tickling her breast with a lock of her own hair.
Dulcy couldn’t even muster the energy to protest. “Whenever.”
She felt liquid, warm and complacent and sated. She felt unique. The light crept across the tumbled white sheet where it lay gathered below Noah’s waist, and Dulcy bided her time considering the delicious properties of light and form and substance. Especially substance.
“Would it sound too hokey if I said it’s never been like this before?” he asked.
She chuckled. “Absolutely. I can say it, though, since my one and only real experience was at fifteen.”
Noah lifted his head and looked at her. “I thought you said you were a regular tart.”
Dulcy gave him a crooked smile. “I said everybody thought I was a regular tart. My experience is limited. My learning curve, however, is exceptional.”
“Which means what?”
Which means I shouldn’t be here. I shouldn’t feel so happy, so loved, so complete.
“Which means,” she said instead, nestling a little closer, “that I’m glad you were considerate enough to bring your party favors.”
It was his turn to chuckle. “No gentleman would ask a lady to dance without bringing his good shoes.”
Dulcy knew that he was avoiding the next moment, too. It should have made her angry, frightened. Something. She knew that would all come in time, probably right in line before disillusioned, desolate and resigned. But for now the sunlight was golden and Noah was the one man who could rewrite her history.
That would, of course, be when the back door slammed. “Dulcy!”
Dulcy jerked up as if she’d been hit with a live wire.
Josh.
God, of all people to wander into the kitchen, of all times.
“Ignore him,” Noah all but begged. “He’ll go away.”
Dulcy groaned. “No, he won’t. He knows we’re here.”
She swung out of bed and fumbled for her clothes, the delight she’d carried in her chest curdling hard. She felt like a cheating wife, like a stupid schoolgirl caught behind the bleachers. She felt like every foolish woman who’d let her hormones get the better of her.
“Dulcy, where are you? We got problems at the feed store!”
“I’m coming, Josh!”
Dulcy got her shirt buttoned and spun for the door, leaving Noah behind to pull himself together. She had already reached the bottom of the steps before she realized what she’d forgotten. What Josh would notice right away. What would send her reputation right back to hell.
She’d forgotten her hair.
In all the time she’d been here she had never been seen in anything but that tight braid, except at the dance the week before. She certainly wouldn’t let her hair down in the middle of a working day. And it wouldn’t look fingered and tousled and damp.
Dulcy realized her mistake the minute Josh caught sight of her. His expression went from sullen to furious and from there to triumphant.
“Well,” he said in that pressed little voice that sounded so much like his mother’s. “That didn’t take long.”
“What’s wrong at the feed store?” she asked, walking right by him, even though she knew darn well it was too late to take the high road. By eight o’clock tonight the entire town would know. Even if Noah called every one of them out, it would be too late.
Josh followed her back into the kitchen, his boots clacking on the floor. “What’s wrong is that I couldn’t get the order, because the bank account’s been closed.” She heard that first smile in his voice, the first smirk. “Is that part of the plan?”
Dulcy was fighting so hard not to hit him. She walked to the refrigerator and got herself a cold soda. Took a minute to pop it before answering, her voice deceptively quiet. “Exactly what did they say at the feed store?”
“Same thing they said at the mercantile and the repair shop. We can’t draw on your account because you closed it yesterday. But then, now that I see what’s going on, I imagine you knew already. What was it going to be, Rio or the Caribbean?”
“Thank you for telling me about the bank, Josh. I’ll take care of it. You can get back to work now.”
“And what about you?” he asked, his words a feral snarl. “You gonna get back to work now, too?”
She lost the fight. It probably didn’t hurt Josh as much as it was going to hurt her, but Dulcy put her soda down on the counter and carefully curled her thumb around the outside of her fist. And then she hit Josh squarely across the jaw.
“Never mind getting back to work,” she informed him where he sat stunned on the floor. “Get out. I’ll send your pay wherever you want it. Just not here.”
“You’ll regret this,” he blustered, stumbling to his feet.
Dulcy laughed. “Been there, done that,” she said, dismissing him.
Even though she knew she would. Not the hit. The mistake. The terrible mistake that still thrummed along her arms and legs and settled in her deepest places with a warmth that shouldn’t have made her cry.
Ten minutes ago she’d felt that everything had been possible. Now she knew better. It was over instead.