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her face and said, while tracing the outline of her cheek and the angle of her jaw, "You have good bone structure."
    It was an awkward thing for him to say, and Rose wasn't sure what to make of it, except that for some reason she thought it was a compliment. The man was perplexing. The only thing she could think to reply was, "So do you."
    Tyler smiled, which she found both arousing and unsettling, arousing because she got the impression he was interested in her, and unsettling for the same reason. But as she stood looking at him, he slowly moved toward her, as if he were about to kiss her, and when she thought he would, he stopped, squared his shoulders and did nothing.
    After a stretch of silence, Rose tightened Tundra's leash , and said, "I guess I'd better get back," then quickly turned into the woods. But as she retraced her tracks, with Tundra following along on the leash, her feelings were more conflicted than ever. After having watched Tyler with his horses, playing with them as if he were one of them, and seeing the affection between them, she knew it would be impossible to unravel such a man, one who communicated with horses on a level that transcended normal human-animal communication, yet he refused to believe that the voices in the mountain could be anything more than steam seeping through cracks because the voices didn't touch that special place in him that could connect with horses.
    Why she couldn't let the man go , and shove all thoughts of him from her mind, she couldn't understand. But she also realized he wasn't the dispassionate man she'd thought him to be, at least not with his horses, but it was the human connection that he lacked, which was why he was dispassionate about what he perceived to be ill-informed people hearing non-existent voices. But now, her continued attraction to the man was more confounding that ever.

 
    CHAPTER 4
    Rose gazed around Grace and Jack Hansen's dining table, where they were all finishing a meal of pot roast, garden-grown vegetables, and home baked bread, and topping it off with a fresh-baked blueberry pie. Jack sat at one end of the table and Grace at the other. Beside Rose was Maddy, the youngest of the Hansen offspring and the only girl. Directly across from them were Maureen and Howard Barker, Jack Hansen's mother and step-father.
    Maureen 's mother was the one who brought their Indian heritage to the family. Rose could see it in her dark eyes and higher cheekbones, but that was all, and Jack Hansen just looked like a man with dark hair, dark eyes and a face and hands bronzed by years of ranch work.
    For the evening, Tundra was penned up in a fenced yard behind Marc and Kit's house, and to make sure he didn't try to dig under, or tear the fence down, she'd put in some short stakes the day before she moved in, and stretched an electric wire near the ground and hooked it up to a temporary fence charger. Tundra kept himself occupied, challenging the wire by nipping at it between pulses and occasionally getting zapped, which was a reminder to stay back. Rose was amazed that he could detect the pulses though, because they made no sound.
    It had been four days since she watched the big semi-truck with the long horse trailer leave the ranch, with Tyler following in his truck, but as exasperating and disconcerting as the man was, he'd been on her mind most of the time. She'd even returned to the spring and lit an incense of cedar, aware that its sweet balsamic scent was known for cleansing negative energies, and since her goal had been to dismiss Tyler from her mind, she purposely concentrated on the image of him in the cavern, chipping away with his hammer and chisel. But as she attempted to hold that image, a swirl of cedar smoke wrapped around her nostrils, bringing with it her grandmother's words about meditating...
    " Begin your journey into the spirit world with prayer and meditation by breathing deeply ," Granna said, " and when you exhale, release your worldly wants and