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respected any man. But she was a very special kind of woman. Caroline Lord was no ordinary woman. She was a superwoman. She was brilliant and amusing, attractive, kind, compassionate, intelligent. And he had never been able to understand what she wanted with a ranch hand. But she had known her mind from the beginning and never regretted the decision. For almost twenty years now she had secretly been his woman. And she would have made the affair public long before, had he let her. But he felt that her position as mistress of the Lord Ranch was sacred, and although here and there it was suspected, no one had ever known for certain that they were lovers, the only thing anyone knew for certain was that they were friends. Even Samantha had never been sure that there was more between them, though she and Barbara had suspected and often giggled, but they had never really known.
    “How’s Caroline, Bill?” She looked over at him with a warm smile and saw a special glow come to his eyes.
    “Tough as ever. She’s tougher than anyone on that ranch.” And older. She was three years older than he. She had been one of the most glamorous and elegant women in Hollywood in her twenties, married to one of the most important directors of her day. The parties they had given were still among the early legends, and the home they had built in the hills above Hollywood was still on some of the tours. It had changed hands often but was still a remarkable edifice, a monument to a bygone era rarelyequaled in later years. But at thirty-two Caroline Lord had been widowed, and after that, for her, life in Hollywood had never been the same again. She had stayed on for two more years, but they had been painful and lonely, and then suddenly without explanation she had disappeared. She had spent a year in Europe, and then another six months in New York. It took her another year after that to decide what she really wanted, but as she drove for hours, alone in heir white Lincoln Continental, she suddenly knew where it was she longed to be. Out in the country, in nature, away from the champagne and the parties and the pretense. None of it had had any meaning for her after her husband was gone. All of that was over for her now. She was ready for something very different, a whole new life, a new adventure, and that spring, after looking at every available piece of property in a two-hundred-mile radius of Los Angeles, she bought the ranch.
    She paid a fortune for it, hired an adviser and the best ranch hands around. She paid everyone a handsome wage, built them pleasant, cozy quarters, and offered them a kind of warmth and comfort that few men could deny. And in return, she wanted sound advice and good teaching, she wanted to learn how to run the ranch herself one day, and she expected them all to work as hard as she did herself. It was in her first year at the ranch that Bill King found her, took the place in hand, and taught her all he knew himself. He was a foreman of the kind most ranchers would die for, and it was purely by accident that he landed on the Lord Ranch. And even more so that he and Caroline Lord wound up as lovers. All thatSamantha knew of Bill’s history on the ranch was that he had been there almost since the beginning and had helped make the place a financial success.
    Theirs was one of the few California cattle ranches that showed a profit. They bred Angus cattle and sold a few Morgan horses as well. Most of the big ranches were in the Midwest or the Southwest; only a precious few in California had good luck, and many were kept in operation as tax losses by their owners—city dwellers, stockbrokers, lawyers, and movie stars who bought them as a kind of game. But the Lord Ranch was no game, not to Bill King or Caroline Lord, or to the men who worked there, and Samantha also knew that while she stayed there she would be expected to perform certain chores as well. No one came to the ranch just to be lazy. It seemed indecent, considering