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me, I will leave this party right now.”
    Her cousin’s gaze narrowed worriedly. “Are you okay?”
    Dani forced a smile. “Just feeling a little pressured, that’s all. Don’t worry about it. Tell me about you instead. How’s life in Montana? Are you happy?”
    Angela sat beside her and set the swing into a lazy motion. “Deliriously happy,” she confessed, beaming. “Clint’s the most wonderful, sexiest, kindest man on earth. He’s the best husband and father a woman could ask for.”
    Dani chuckled at the exuberant praise. “I seem to recall a time when you thought he was a sneaky, low-down, conniving son of a gun. Are we talking about the same man?”
    Angela grinned. “You bet.” She regarded Dani slyly. “Which just proves how quickly attitudes change. Never say never, when it comes to a man.”
    Dani stood up abruptly. “I have to go.”
    Her cousin nabbed her hand and held it tightly, preventing the escape. “Dani, I’m sorry. I was just teasing. You know how I am. I didn’t realize it would upset you so.”
    â€œNever mind.” She squeezed Angela’s hand reassuringly. “It’s okay. I’m too sensitive.”
    â€œMaybe if you or somebody would tell me what happened, I wouldn’t be sticking my foot in my mouth every time I turn around. My mother, your father, Jenny, practically everyone has told me to leave it alone, but I can’t. I care too much about you.”
    Dani sighed and sat back down in the swing, idly setting it into motion again. “It’s not as if it’s a big secret,” she said finally. “Everyone in the family knows.”
    â€œAnd everyone tries to protect you by being tight-lipped about it, giving you your space,” Angelaguessed. “Maybe what you really need is to talk about it, scream, rant and rave, get it out of your system.”
    Dani grinned at the image of herself screaming, ranting and raving. It just wasn’t the way she handled things. She kept her emotions all bottled up inside, unlike the rest of her far more demonstrative relatives. She had envied Angela for some of the shouting matches she and Clint had had. Blowing off steam had seemed to pave the way to healing. Maybe her way just allowed the wound to fester.
    She’d said absolutely nothing about the broken relationship and shattered dreams when she’d come home to Los Pinos, after leaving Rob. Her family had seen her with him and the girls often enough to know exactly how much she had loved them all. They had come to adore Robin and Amy as well, though her father especially had always seemed to have reservations about Rob. At any rate, they had been able to guess the depth of her anguish and had left her alone to deal with it in her own way.
    She glanced at Angela, saw the sympathy and concern in her cousin’s expression and decided it wouldn’t hurt to just tell her what had happened. Maybe it would put an end to these awkward moments that kept cropping up between them after so many years of being as close as sisters. She would keep the telling simple and dispassionate.
    Once she began, though, the words began to pour out, words filled with far more rage than she imagined she had ever held inside.
    â€œThat beast, that terrible, awful beast,” Angela said fiercely when Dani was done. “How could he do that to you, to them?”
    â€œRelationships don’t always work out,” Dani said objectively. “I mean now that I think about it, I can see how wrong we were for each other. Marriage would have been a disaster.”
    â€œBut what about those girls of his? Didn’t he take their feelings into account at all?”
    Dani found herself trying to defend Rob’s decision to go along with Tiffany’s demand for a clean break, but she simply couldn’t muster any conviction.
    â€œThe man was a bastard,” Angela said.