Chapter 1

Near The Town of Scot's Cove, North Carolina

June 2011

Cassie measured her breathing. In, out. In, out. Above her, the leaves of a giant black oak rippled in the wind. The muscles of her face slid into repose, and she rested her hands with palms upturned on her knees. Cassie found the lotus position comfortable for meditation; she concentrated on the quiet place inside her and didn't detect the stranger's approach.

She focused her mind on the rhythm of her breathing, rising upward on each exhaled breath, allowing her mind to float free of her body, free as a leaf, free as air wafting skyward from Flat Top Mountain.

The stranger moved quietly, wondering how to present himself. He had traveled a long way to find her.

She was not at all what he'd expected, this woman whose stillness contrasted so sharply with the riotous magenta of the rhododendron blooms behind her. Of course, John had known little about her when he started out. But this earthy creature, nut-brown and clothed in a shapeless garment of hyacinth blue, didn't look like the woman he'd sought at the secluded desert estate near Palm Springs, nor did she appear to be the type who would feel at home in the glitzy apartment complex in Los Angeles.

He studied her intently. Her hair was buoyant and long, springing from its roots with a life of its own. The color of it was sun-streaked brunette, and it looked like a crackling extension of her nut-brown skin. Fascinating hair, he decided. But in that moment when she first came into view, her face was what drew his attention

If he were to draw a line down the center of it, dividing it neatly in two, each side would be different. The same eyes, nose, mouth, except that the left eye was ever so slightly more elongated than the right one. The left nostril flared more than the right. The left side of her mouth tilted upward and the right side did not. Each side was beautiful but different, like a sketch blurred on one side by a careless finger.

Cassie, her meditation interrupted, felt her scalp tingle with the sensation of someone watching. Startled, she opened her eyes. The man stood quietly at the edge of the clearing. His expression was so concentrated, so intense, that she gasped.

She scrambled to her feet, frightened. "Who are you?" she said, and her voice had a breathless little-girl quality, as though syllables were filtered through a whisper. To him, her voice sounded familiar. But of course it wasn't. He'd never met her before.

"I'm your neighbor," John said easily, letting her get a feel for him. "I've rented the cabin." He gestured over his shoulder toward the path through the woods.

"No... no one lives there," she stammered. "Not for years."

"I talked Ned Church into leasing it for the season. I needed a place, and..." He shrugged.

"Why didn't you rent a house near Linville? That's where summer people usually go." There was no doubt in Cassie's mind that this man was a tourist. With that fine-spun dark hair and smooth sun-bronzed skin, he looked like the lost denizen of a land where aquamarine swimming pools were standard equipment in every back yard. She could almost smell it on him—a scent of Someplace Else where the sun shone year 'round and the air was flavored with chlorine and the smoke of barbecue grills.

"Linville's not for me."

By this time Cassie couldn't contain her curiosity, and she was no longer afraid. She'd already pegged him as a decent person. She could always tell. Something in the eyes. Cassie divined goodness in this man even before she took note of his high cheekbones, the cleft in his chin, his broad shoulders straight as the cross of a T.

She relaxed. "Well, what are you doing here, then? Flat Top Mountain is definitely off the beaten path."

"I'm a nature photographer," he told her. It was a line that he'd carefully rehearsed. Actually, he'd never held anything more complicated than a one-size-fits-all digital camera in his hands until two weeks ago, when he'd bought the Nikon 35mm and a mystifying set of lenses.

"You're going to photograph the mountains?"

"Mostly the plants native to the area," he said. Would she buy it?

But apparently she didn't sense anything odd.

She smiled and extended her hand. "Welcome," she said. "Neighbor."

Her hand in his was not soft and small, nor was it rough. There was a hardness to it, a competence. She withdrew it quickly from his.

At that point all hell broke loose.

A ramshackle minivan tick-ticked up the winding unpaved road, belching clouds of exhaust before lurching to a stop in front of her house. Out piled people in assorted shapes and sizes followed by a dog or two.

"Grampa's got the colic again," called the smallest child. "He won't let us take him to the clinic in town." The dogs commenced snapping and yapping and chasing each other through the underbrush.

"Excuse me," Cassie said apologetically before she headed for the house. She limped slightly. This drew John's attention to her legs. Looking at them was anything but an unpleasant task, although the left one appeared to be shorter than the right. Her body within her shapeless garment was supple and lithe and exquisitely graceful. Somehow her odd choice of clothing suited her.

John reluctantly followed. By the time he reached her porch, she had stepped briefly inside the house and reappeared in the doorway. She carried a small brown medicine bottle.

"Tell your grandfather to drink this," she said into the milling group. "It's the same thing I sent last time."

"Sure do thank you," said the man to whom she handed the remedy. He grinned a friendly gap-toothed smile.

One of the dogs, a big grayish-white coon hound with spots the exact shade of liver mush, leaped out of the shrubbery and all but bowled John over. With the dog's paws planted in the middle of his chest, John did his best to fend him off, but before the animal galloped away, his claws left two angry red welts on John's right arm.

Without bothering to apologize for their pet's misbehavior, two rambunctious boys rounded up the dogs and shoved them into a back seat. Then the people piled in after them and, amid a cloud of fumes, the minivan jolted down the mountain.

This left Cassie and John staring at each other.

"I—" he said.

"You—" she said at the same time, looking down at the scratches on his arm.

They stopped and laughed self-consciously. He held her gaze for a moment before she glanced away.

"You'd better let me take a look at those," she said, her tone all business.

"You're a nurse? A doctor?"

"Not exactly. You should wash the scratches so they won't get infected. Come in," she said. "I'll take care of it."

He followed her inside, curious about her house. It was no more than a cottage, built partly of stone and partly of wood, and there were many windows. Those afforded a breathtaking view of Magnus Mountain to the right and Pride's Peak on the left, plus a host of lesser hills in between.

"Let me get my things." She disappeared into the kitchen, leaving him holding his hurting arm.

"I'm Cassie Muldoon," she said over her shoulder, busying herself in the long rectangular kitchen adjoining the front room. She stood at an oak counter, pouring clear liquid out of a bottle onto a cloth.

"I'm John Howard," he replied, glad that she couldn't see his eyes when he said it. Somehow he knew she'd detect this bit of falseness in him, not that he had a choice. He had no doubt that if he told her his complete name, she'd send him packing immediately.

He waited quietly in the combination living and dining area, which was furnished with table hewn from a square slab of wood and covered with a cloth laid diagonally to reveal curly-maple corners. Rag rugs allowed the polished oak floor to peek out here and there, and the walls were painted a pleasant cream color. Bunches of flowers and leaves hung from dark ceiling beams, their fragrances mingling to lend the room an aromatic scent. A magnificent fieldstone fireplace took up one whole wall. A handmade quilt, very old, decorated another. The quilt's time-mellowed colors glowed in the sunlight that streamed through the windows.

Cassie limped over to the table. She motioned for him to sit down; it was a graceful gesture. Her breasts bobbed round as plump apples beneath her shapeless dress, but John pulled his eyes away from that part of her anatomy. He wasn't interested in her in that way.

"I'm going to wash your scratches with tincture of marigold in water," she said, moving closer.

"What?" he said, recoiling slightly.

"I use it all the time for bleeding wounds. It's an old herbal remedy of my grandmother's."

Nonplussed, John watched her as she dabbed at his scratches. Her touch was soft but sure. He wondered how she had gained this skill and why she'd chosen to live so far from her previous home.

Cassie concentrated on what she was doing. Nevertheless, it didn't escape her notice that John Howard was an undeniably handsome man. She hoped that he would not mistake her attempt at neighborliness for something else, something sexual. She was celibate, a decision at which she hadn't arrived at lightly, and she intended to stay that way.

She shot him a surreptitious look as she poured more of the tincture on the cloth. His tall, dark good looks were stunning, and those laser-beam eyes, an intense blue, were intelligent. He had a bold chin, and she couldn't help admiring the determined set of it.

John had noticed the profusion of wildflowers decorating the edges of the path to Cassie's house and the more tame varieties massed in beds in her garden in the back. "Do you make this stuff from your own marigolds?" he asked.

"Yes. I also make other remedies from the herbs I grow. For some reason Flat Top Mountain has always been especially fertile, and the rich soil ensures a good harvest." She capped the bottle she held and tossed the cloth into a basket.

"What do you do with your herbs? Sell them to dealers?"

"I have a roadside stand on the highway and supply local restaurants. Otherwise they're for my own use in my herbal remedies. You know the family that was just here? I gave them a garlic potion for their grandfather's stomach spasms."

His eyebrows flew up skeptically. "Does it work?"

"Of course," She smiled. "Herbal medicine has been around since the cavemen."

He looked at the red welts on his arm. The bleeding had stopped, and they didn't look as angry.

"Aren't you worried that you'll hurt someone? Keep people from going to a doctor if they're really sick?"

"My remedies are meant to work in conjunction with medical care, not against it. You have to realize that I'm using recipes that my grandmother employed for fifty years."

"But how did you learn everything you needed to know? And how do you remember what remedy to use for what problem?"

She pulled down a thick volume from a nearby bookshelf. As she set it on the table, he became aware of the sun-warmed scent of her skin. He tried to concentrate on her words and not on her physical presence.

"This is Gran's recipe collection. She wrote everything down, from how to identify the plants and how to make a tonic and how to put together an effective insect repellent and so on. See, it's all here—what to do with marigolds, elm bark, cucumber. Gran learned from her mother, and her mother learned from her mother before her." Cassie flipped through the pages. The elegant slanting script had faded to brown with the passing of years.

"Amazing," he said, shaking his head. He'd noticed that the family earlier hadn't paid her for the stomach remedy. "And you do this for free?"

"That's right," she said. She shoved the book back into its place on the shelf.

"But—"

"I don't want to talk about it," she said firmly, and her silvery eyes—why hadn't he noticed them before?—darkened.

He stood. Based on what she'd told him, he was unsure whether to offer to pay.

"Here," she said, thrusting the bottle toward him. "Take this with you and bathe those scratches in it from time to time. If by any chance they get infected, let me know."

He wasn't ready to leave. He would have liked to sit with her as he absorbed the atmosphere of this house with its hanging plants, clay pots in a sunny window, and woven baskets holding magazines and firewood and balls of brightly colored yarn.

At that moment, a skunk rambled through the room, waddled under the table, sniffed briefly at his shoes, and hopped into a cardboard box in the corner. John stared in disbelief as it burrowed under a few handfuls of wood shavings until all he could see was a patch of black-and-white fur.

A skunk?

"That looks like a skunk," he said, stating the obvious in a tone of disbelief.

Cassie, in the kitchen, was drying her hands on a length of huck toweling. She came and stood at the kitchen door.

"It is," she said, grinning. "That's Bertrand."

"He's descented, right?"

"Nope. He's a fully equipped, nearly grown skunk."

"Your choice of house pets is a little, um, strange, don't you think?"

"Bertrand won't be here long. It's illegal to keep a skunk as a pet, but I'm allowed to rehabilitate him."

"For how long?"

"He'll be going back to the woods soon."

"He looks pretty comfortable right where he is," John observed, getting up and pushing his chair back under the table. Suddenly he wanted to get out of there. Fast.

"Don't worry. He's never gassed me yet." She seemed amused.

"There's always a first time," John said, keeping a wary eye on Bertrand and edging around the table toward the door.

Cassie knelt at the side of the box and absently stroked the skunk's fur. "Somebody brought him to me a couple of months ago. He'd been hurt. He's almost recovered now."

John shook his head as if to clear it. Yoga, skunks and herbs. So this was the long-sought Cassie Muldoon! She was hardly what he'd expected.

"Thank you for taking care of my scratches," he told her as he was halfway out the door.

Cassie smiled up at him. "You're welcome," she said. Her hips looked solid beneath her dress, her legs limber. She was barefoot, and in those few seconds, he admitted to himself that she was very beautiful.

Bertrand wiggled out from beneath Cassie's hand and scrambled out of his box, scurrying to John and sniffing his shoes. Then the skunk backed off a few feet and whipped his backside around, shifting from side to side in a funny little dance with his front feet. When the fluffy black-and-white tail shot up in warning, John knew enough not to prolong his good-bye.

"He only does that with men," Cassie called after him as she scooped up an unprotesting Bertrand.

Once out of skunk shot, John wheeled and walked swiftly down the clean-swept path. He inhaled the sweetly scented mountain air with deep appreciation.

For almost two years Cassie Muldoon had declined to answer his letters, returning some of them unread. She had written him a cool note refusing to meet him at any time, under any circumstances or for any reason. And now that he'd found her, she was protected by a fully functioning skunk named Bertrand who didn't like men.

John smiled jubilantly to himself. It didn't matter. It didn't matter at all.

There was nothing, absolutely nothing, that John enjoyed more than a challenge.