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her more trouble than a herd of reckless heifers, alternately running at her and from her. She’d wasted a whole morning and it wasn’t even her cow. What she didn’t do for her neighbors, she thought, shaking her head as she turned her pretty sorrel and pointed him toward the barn.
    She looked over her shoulder. Henry was more than halfway through the huge field of alfalfa. She swept the rows of hay with the critical gaze of someone who knows her job well. Pretty good, she acknowledged. One little dip, but otherwise nice and straight. He had done this before.
    She watched the swather cut its way down another row. He’ll work out okay, she decided. At least for the farming. She’d have to wait and see how well he’d do when he moved to camp to watch the cows and work on the miles and miles of Bennett Mountain fence lines. Ranch hands were so unpredictable.
    But she couldn’t see Henry going off and leaving the herd for a drunk in town. She couldn’t see him overlooking a saggy fence just because he’d have to climb to get to it. She couldn’t see him taking a too young horse down a too steep rocky canyon, bruising him and rendering him useless for the remainder of the summer; all things Lester had done in the past.
    She could trust Henry. She knew it already. He’d do the right thing.
    She watched him a moment more. And felt a stirring inside her, a feeling that had become alarmingly familiar in the hours since Henry had leaned his long frame against her barn door.
    Now, if she could just be trusted to do the right thing.

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    Chapter 5
    « ^ »
    I t took two weeks to put up the hay. Henry ran the swather, Lester came along after him a few days later with the baler, and Calla came after Lester with the stacker. Together they put up four hundred tons of sweet, Sulphur Lake hay. Calla was thrilled at how smoothly everything went.
    It was the first year she hadn’t had to fight with Lester at every turn. Every summer he’d argued with her about the moisture content of the hay and the number of bales in a stack and the position of the stacks in the hay yard. But this summer he did as he was told. Calla was surprised how much free time she had now that she didn’t have to spend time arguing with Lester. She suspected Lester’s compliant mood had a lot to do with Henry.
    He was a little afraid of Henry, she knew.
    Henry was up every morning before anyone else. He wolfed down his breakfast, usually before Calla was even back from her chores in the barn, and was out on the swather all morning. He came in for lunch and to flirt briefly with Aunt Helen, who was thrilled at having another man to compliment her cooking, and then he was gone again. When he finished for the day, he took his evening meal into the bunkhouse. He never ate with the family in the evening. Not like Lester. No one else seemed to notice that was odd, but Calla wondered at it. Ranch hands had always eaten at the McFadden table. It was tradition.
    Henry didn’t come in and watch TV at night. Or stay around the ranch on Sundays. Or inquire after her health or ask for advances on his pay. He didn’t follow her into the barn in the mornings. Never touched her wrist again with his thumb, in that heated, hypnotic way.
    He was the perfect employee. Darn it.
    Clark had left a week into haying. He’d gone East again. Calla never missed him when he was gone, her life was too busy for that kind of nonsense, she told herself, but she found herself wishing he’d hurry back. She felt better, more comfortable, when he was around every night. Even though she saw almost nothing of Henry after that first day, except to wave at him occasionally from across a new-mown field or smile as he brushed past her on his way out the kitchen door, she knew she was spending less time thinking about Clark—her beloved, intended Clark—and more and more time thinking about her new ranch hand.
    Calla ran the roaring, dusty stacker around the field, picking up the last of the