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as he directed the placement of her hands, talked about the basics of safety, and generally involved her more and more deeply in the first lesson. He was good, she realized. An excellent teacher, in fact. If there was one thing she could admire other than sound scholarship, it was the ability to teach.
    “My God! It’s hard,” she suddenly complained in astonishment when the time came to practice drawing back the bowstring. “I’ll never be able to draw it far enough to nock an arrow!”
    “Sure you will. This is considered a very lightweight bow. A strong woman like you can handle it.”
    “What makes you think I’m strong?” she protested, taking a deep breath and attempting once more to draw the bowstring.
    “I was the one holding you down on the floor last night, remember?” he said, grinning.
    “I thought we agreed you wouldn’t bring that up again,” she muttered caustically.
    “I agreed to think about the bargain you suggested. I haven’t made up my mind to accept it yet. There, that’s it. I told you that you could do it.”
    She slackened the tension on the bow so it wouldn’t snap and threw him a glare. But she said nothing else as he took her through the basic fundamentals of archery.
    “These are aluminum-shafted arrows,” he told her as he handed the first one to her. “The best. Which means they’re expensive. Lose one in the grass or the pines and you’re going to be spending the rest of the day looking for it.”
    “Is that a threat?”
    “That’s an added inducement to try to hit the target. Okay, remember that the trick is to combine a relaxation of the muscles in the hand drawing the bowstring at the same moment that you need maximum concentration on aiming. Just relax and release the arrow gently. Hold the release position until the arrow reaches the target.”
    “Or until it misses the target completely,” Brenna sighed as the first one went wide.
    “It takes practice. Don’t worry about the arrow, I’ve got it spotted over there near that tree. Try another.”
    The thrill of having a few actually strike the target was greater than Brenna would have expected. She was elated and not a little exhausted a long time later as she walked with Ryder toward the target to remove the few that had managed to find their way in the right direction.
    “Craig would love this,” she remarked enthusiastically, inserting the arrows back into the quiver as he handed them to her.
    “Craig?” There was a tight curiosity underlying the neutralness of the question. Brenna heard it and smiled to herself.
    “My brother. He’s going to be starting his senior year at the University of California at Berkeley this fall,” she told him.
    “You sound proud.”
    “I am. He’s a good kid.”
    “If he’s almost a senior in college, he should be a good man by now,” Ryder observed, giving her a strange glance.
    “He is.” She smiled easily. “Sometimes I lapse, I’m afraid. There are a lot of years between us. He’s only twenty and I’m twenty-nine. It’s hard not to keep thinking of him as a kid brother.”
    “You sound as if you’re pretty close to him.”
    “After Mom and Dad were killed a few years ago, all we had was each other,” Brenna explained quietly as they walked back toward her cabin.
    “With that much difference in your ages you must have wound up more or less raising him through his late teens,” Ryder said thoughtfully.
    “It was a struggle sometimes.” She laughed, thinking about those years. “But Craig was a very responsible kid and he always seemed to keep in mind that I was a sibling, not a parent. He didn’t deliberately challenge me the way real parents get challenged by teenagers, if you know what I mean.”
    “I know. Not from personal experience, because I’ve never had kids, but I’ve seen it in others,” he admitted. “The Gardners, as a matter of fact, had a little trouble with their oldest boy a couple of years ago.”
    “But he got straightened