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stray bales. The empty field gave her a strong sense of satisfaction. She was never especially fond of the farming aspect of the place—that had always been Benny’s department—but she took pride in her tidy fields and intelligently planned watering system.
    As she eased the top-heavy stacker along the corrugates, she watched Henry, in high rubber boots, walk the ditch bank. As soon as she’d finished stacking each field, he’d been there to start the water. She hadn’t known he’d even know how to do it. Gravity irrigation, in the age of huge pivot sprinklers, was fast becoming a lost art. But Henry’s dirt dams held and the water swept into the cleared fields with amazing speed. She couldn’t have done better herself, Calla admitted.
    It was an annoying, exhilarating thought. She’d never met anyone who could do her job as well as she could, with as much determination and skill. Not since Ben. And it had been years since she’d been able to go to sleep at night knowing there was someone other than herself she could depend on.
    A dangerous proposition, she knew, depending on Henry. Henry was a summer hand. She couldn’t afford to keep him on for the year, though the idea of having someone other than Lester and Jackson to help her feed the hay they’d just put up was a heady one.
    No, she told herself firmly. She paid Henry just $850 a month, plus room and board—the going rate for summer cowboys—but it was more than the ranch could afford on a year-round basis. The loan, the final, magic one that had sent her to college loomed over her like a specter. She needed money more than she needed Henry.
    That was why she had to concentrate on Clark. It was why she needed him to hurry back. Clark, and Clark’s money, was what was going to save the ranch. Not that she was marrying him, or hoped to marry him, she corrected herself, for his money. She loved him. She was sure of it. Almost sure of it. The minute she was sure of it, she’d let him know. And then she’d sleep with him, finally, and everything would be fine and she’d stop having those sweaty dreams in the middle of the night about her summer ranch hand.
    She reached the dirt road that led out of the field and toward the hay yard and gunned the stacker to full speed. It wobbled precariously under the full load of hay bales, but righted itself. She glimpsed Henry out of the corner of her eye. He had looked up sharply as she roared down the lane, and she could see him in her long side mirror, watching the stacker.
    Good, she thought with grim satisfaction. He’d been ignoring her pretty much completely for two weeks. She was his boss. He ought to pay a little closer attention to her.
    * * *
    Henry glared at the stacker as it zoomed around a corner and out of sight. He could hear it as it traveled along the road to the hay yard. It was loud. She must have floored it.
    He shook his head and went back to shoveling mud around the corrugate. She had almost tipped it when she came off the field. But she knew what she was doing and he resisted the almost overwhelming urge to run across the field and yank her from the seat of the huge machine. He’d like to shake her sometimes, the way she thundered around.
    She drove everything like that, the pickup, Helen’s little car, the tractors, even the riding lawnmower he’d seen her on the evening before. She went everywhere full tilt, a bat out of hell.
    He dipped his shovel into the thick, sucking mud and slathered it onto the small dam he was building to hold back the irrigation water.
    Haying was finished, the irrigation started again. Tomorrow Lester would take over switching the water from earthen dam to earthen dam, along the complicated system of narrow canals and ditches laid out a hundred years earlier by Calla’s great-grandfather. Henry would move to the camp in the hills to look after Calla’s herd. He was looking forward to it. Desperately. He hadn’t asked Calla about her relationship with