Carla rooted for Cash unabashedly, frankly enjoying seeing Luke on the losing end of something for a change. Luke took the "card lessons" in good humor, squeezing every bit of mileage from his shrinking pile of small change.

And then slowly, almost imperceptibly, Luke started winning. He rode the unexpected streak of luck aggressively, repeatedly betting everything he had and getting twice as much back from the pot. By the time the last drops from the magnum of champagne had been poured – by Carla into Luke’s glass, in a blatant attempt to fuzz his mind – Cash was down to his last nickel. He tossed it into the pot philosophically, calling Luke’s most recent raise.

Luke fanned out his cards to reveal a pair of sevens, nine high. Cash made a disgusted sound and threw in his hand without showing his cards.

"What?" Carla said in disbelief. She reached for Cash’s abandoned cards, only to have her fingers lightly slapped by her brother.

"Bad dog, drop!" he teased. "You know the rules. It costs good money to see those cards and you’re broke."

Carla withdrew her fingers and muttered, "I still don’t believe that you couldn’t crawl over a lousy pair of sevens."

"You forgot the nine," Luke said.

"It’s easy to forget something that small," Carla shot back. She sighed. "Well, I guess this just wasn’t your night, big brother. All you won was something you would have gotten anyway – a summer’s worth of dinners cooked by yours truly."

"Sounds like a damned good deal to me," Luke said.

There was a moment of silence, followed by another. The silence stretched. Luke arched his dark eyebrows at Cash in silent query. Cash smiled.

"You’ll have to throw in wages," Cash said.

"Same as I paid the last housekeeper. But she’ll have to keep house, too. For that I’d bet everything on the table. One hand. Winner take all."

"What do you say, sis?" Cash asked, turning toward Carla.

"Huh?"

"Luke has agreed to bet everything in the pot against your agreement to be the Rocking M’s cook and housekeeper."

"You’re out of school for the summer, right?" Luke asked.

She nodded, too off balance to tell him that she was out of school, period. She had crammed four years of studying in the three years since she had graduated from high school. It had been the perfect excuse not to spend summers on the Rocking M, as she had since she was fourteen.

"You can start next weekend and go until the end of August A hundred days, give or take a few," Luke said casually, but his eyes had the predatory intensity of a bird of prey. "Room, board and wages, same as for any hired hand."

Carla stared at Cash. He smiled encouragingly. She tried to think of all the reasons she would be a raving idiot for taking the bet Her blood sizzled softly, champagne and something more.

"Do you have your toes crossed for luck?" Carla demanded of her brother.

"Yep."

She took a deep breath. "Go for it."

Cash turned to Luke. "Five cards, no discard, no draw, nothing wild. Best hand wins."

"Deal," Luke said.

Suddenly it was so quiet that the sound of the cards being shuffled was like muffled thunder. The slap of cards on the table was distinct, rhythmic. There was the ritual exchange of words, the discreet fanning and survey of five cards. Luke’s expression was impossible to read as he laid his hand faceup on the table and said neutrally, "Ace high…and nothing else. Not a damned thing."

Cash swore and swiftly gathered all the cards together into an indistinguishable pile. "You’re shot with luck tonight, Luke. All I had was a jack."

For an instant there was silence. Then Luke began laughing. When he turned and saw Carla’s stunned face, his expression changed.

"When the isolation gets to you," Luke said carefully, "I'll let you welsh on the bet. No hard feelings and no regrets."

"What?"

"Women hate the Rocking M," Luke said simply. "I doubt that you’ll last three weeks, much less three months. College has made a city slicker out of you. Two weekends without bright lights and you’ll be whining and pining like all the other housekeepers and cooks did. You can make book on it."

Whining and pining.

The words echoed in Carla’s mind, leaving a bright, irrational anger in their wake.

"You’re on, cowboy," she said flatly. "What’s more, you’re going to eat every last one of your words. Raw."

"Doubt it"

"I don’t I’m going to be the one who feeds them to you."

Luke’s slow smile doubled Carla’s heart rate and set Are to her nerve endings. He laughed a soft, rough kind of laugh and gave her the only warning she would get.

"There’s something to remember when you start feeding me, baby."

"What’s that?"

"I bite."

3

Who, in God’s name am I doing here? Have I gone entirely crazy?

"Here" was on a dirt road winding and looping and climbing up to the Rocking M. All around Carla for mile upon uninhabited mile, the Four Corners countryside lay in unbridled magnificence. It wasn’t the absence of people that was causing Carla to question her own sanity; she loved the rugged, wild land. It was the presence of people that was giving her stomach the ohmygod flutters. To be precise, it was the presence of one particular person – Luke MacKenzie, owner of a handsome chunk of the surrounding land.

And a handsome chunk himself.

In the back of her mind Carla kept hearing her brother’s advice. Chin up. Carlo. You can do anything for a summer. Besides, you heard Luke. He won’t be any harder on you than he is on any other ranch hand.

"Thanks, big brother," Carla muttered as she remembered Cash’s smiling send-off that morning. "Thanks all to hell."

Not that she was angry with Cash for being amused by her predicament. He had only been doing what big brothers always did, which was to treat their smaller sisters with a combination of mischief, indulgence and love. Nor was it Cash’s fault that Carla found herself driving over a rough road to a live-in summer job with the man who had haunted her dreams for every one of the seven years since she had been fourteen. Cash wasn’t at fault because he hadn’t been the one to suggest the bet that he had ultimately lost.

However, he had neglected to mention that Luke would be part of her birthday celebration. When Carla walked in the front door and saw him, she had nearly dropped the pizza she was carrying. Luke had always had that effect on her. When he was nearby, her normal composure evaporated. She had made a fool of herself around him throughout her teenage years.

Well, not quite all of my teenage years, Carla told herself bracingly. Iwas eighteen when I took the cure. Or rather, when Luke administered it.

After that, she had stopped finding excuses to go out to the Rocking M and watch the man she loved. But she hadn’t stopped soon enough. She hadn’t stopped before she had told Luke that she loved him and begged him to look at her as a woman, not a girl.

The memory of that disastrous evening still had the ability to make Carla flush, go pale and then flush again with a volatile combination of emotions she had no desire to sort out or describe. The one emotion she had no trouble putting a name to was humiliation. She had been mortified to the soles of her feet. But she had learned something useful that night. She had learned that people didn’t die of embarrassment.

They just wanted to.

So she had turned and run from the scene of her personal Waterloo. Driving recklessly, crying, putting as much distance as she could between herself and the man who was much too sophisticated for her, she had fled the ranch. All the way home she had told herself that she hated Luke. She hadn’t believed it, but she had wanted to.

Since then, Carla had tried to put Luke Mac-Kenzie out of her mind. She hadn’t succeeded. Every time she went out on a date, she only missed Luke more. Not surprisingly, she didn’t date much. The harder she tried to find other men attractive, the brighter Luke’s image burned in her memory.

No man can be that special, Carla told herself fiercely. My memory isn’t reliable. If I were around Luke now, as a woman, he wouldn’t be nearly so attractive to me. Familiarity breeds contempt. That’swhy I let all this happen. I wanted to get familiar enough to feel contempt.

That, or outright insanity, was the only explanation for what had happened the evening of her twenty-first birthday, a celebration of the very date when she had legally become old enough to know better.

Look on the bright side. A summer on the Rocking M beats a summer as a gofer for the Department of Archaeology. If I have to check one more reference on one more footnote, I’ll do something rash.

Get used to it. That’s what being an archaeologist is all about.

While learning about vanished cultures and peoples fascinated Carla, she wasn’t certain that a career as an archaeologist was what she wanted. She was certain that she was going to find out; she would begin work on her master’s degree in the fall. But first she had to get through the summer. And Luke.

Carla’s mind was still seething with silent questions when she drove into the Rocking M’s ranch yard, got out slowly and stretched. She was presently just under three and one half hours from the bright lights of Cortez, assuming that the weather continued fair and clear. In bad weather, she was anywhere between six and sixty hours from "civilization."

The isolation didn’t bother her. In fact, it was a positive lure; she had always felt drawn to the wide, wild sweep of the land. After she had turned seventeen, the only serious arguments she and her brother had ever had was over her tendency to go from camp with a canteen, a compass, and a backpack, and leave behind a note and an arrow made of pebbles to indicate the direction of her exploration. The fact that Cash did precisely the same thing didn’t lessen his anger at Carla; in Cash’s book, what was sauce for the goose was not sauce for the gander. When Carla had gone to Luke looking for sympathy, he had calmly told her that he didn’t want her going alone anywhere on the ranch, including the pasture across the road from the big house.