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trees, she looked down the short incline to the Mackenzie's ranch. Squares of lamplight glimmered in the darkness and lay faint yellow patterns on the ground. She stared at the light for a long time, relishing the knowledge that she wasn't truly, completely alone in the darkness. Down there, the Mackenzie sat in his house, perhaps thinking of their encounter today and wondering where she was and what she was doing. What surprised her was that she was wondering the same thing about him.
    *  *  *
    Jonas stood up, stretched, and said, "I'm for bed. Need to get a couple hours sleep at least."
    Elias nodded from his chair by the fire. His gnarled fingers deftly moved in the flickering light as he twisted and braided a length of rawhide into a bridle strap. "That was a right pretty gal here today."
    Jonas shot the older man a look from over his shoulder. Since taking Hannah into town and leaving her there, Elias hadn't said a word about her. Until now.
    "Yeah, she was," he agreed, although he thought pretty a fairly mild word to describe Hannah Lowell. The words beautiful, crazy, and irritating came to mind.
    "Seems odd," Elias murmured, "come all the way from Massachusetts just to end up here."
    Odder than the old man knew, Jonas thought. Apparently his would-be bride hadn't told Elias the real reason for her visit, and Jonas saw no point in telling the other man about her plans for a marriage that wouldn't happen.
    She was gone. That's all that mattered.
    Rubbing one hand across his whiskered jaw, he thought again, as he had all day, about clear green eyes, shining blond hair, and a mouth made for kissing. Damn it.
    He didn't want to think about her anymore. He wouldn't be seeing her again and that's the way he wanted it. No sense in distracting himself with thoughts of her—or in talking about her to a nosy old coot who would only want to stay up half the night gossiping about the strangeness of her proposal.
    "She got lost is all," he finally said, determined not to tell the other man about Hannah's outlandish story. It was late. He was tired. And he just plain didn't want to talk about it.
    "Uh-huh," Elias muttered.
    "Yeah, lost." Jonas turned for the far wall and the door that led to his bedroom. Already he was trying to figure out a way to wipe Hannah's face from his mind so he could sleep awhile before work began at dawn. "Wyoming's a big place. Easy enough to get lost in."
    "Uh-huh."
    All right, now he understood why that short phrase had bothered Hannah so much. In fact, it was downright irritating.
    "Look, you old coot—"
    Whatever he might have said was forgotten in the next moment, when a choked-off scream rattled through the room.
    Juana.
    Instantly, Jonas was off and running toward the kitchen and the side door, with Elias just one step behind him.
    *  *  *
    Hannah sprinkled the sweet-smelling herbs onto the fire and smiled when a dusting of sparks lifted toward the night sky. The combined scent of the herbs filled her mind and heart as she closed her eyes and whispered fervently, "Rivers from an ocean, streams from a brook. Hannah needs to be the Mackenzie's cook."
    Opening her eyes again, she frowned slightly at the stars overhead and whatever gods were hiding behind their gentle, steady light. "I know my rhyming needs work, but perhaps you could make an exception in this case. Oh," she added quickly, "and please, I don't want anything terrible to happen to Juana, poor woman. It's not her fault that she has the job I need. Perhaps a good, nasty head cold? Just something that will keep her from her work for a while."
    Smiling to herself, she thought that had gone fairly well. After all she didn't mean any harm to a hardÂworking woman. She only needed to get into the Mackenzie's household long enough to prove herself irreplaceable.
    And that shouldn't take more than a couple of weeks.
    A brief, half-heard scream began and ended again in a heartbeat's worth of time. Hannah sat straight up and looked around