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voice was reassuring. It's damn hard to keep on going when you hurt. He stopped for a moment and then went on. I found that out years ago when my wife died. I thought I could still handle my job on the ranch I was working on then. But after a week my boss said, Bill, my boy, I'm givin' you a month's money, you go on home to your folks and come back when the money's gone.' You know, Sam, I was mad as fire when he did it, thought he was telling me that I couldn't handle the job, but he was right. I went to my sister's outside Phoenix, stayed for about six weeks, and when I came back, I was myself again. You can't expect a man nor a woman to keep going all the time. Sometimes you have to give him room for grief.
    He didn't tell her that he had taken three months off twenty-five years later, time off from the Lord ranch, when his son was killed during the early days of Vietnam. For three months he had been so stricken that he had barely been able to talk. It was Caroline who had nursed him out of it, who had listened, who had cared, who had finally come to find him in a bar in Tucson and dragged him home. He had a job to do on the ranch, she had told him, and enough was enough. She barked at him like a drill sergeant and heaped work on him until he thought he would die. She had shouted, yelled, argued, bullied, until finally one day they had almost come to blows out in the south pasture. They had gotten off their horses, and she had swung at him, and he had knocked her right on her ass, and then suddenly she had been laughing at him, and she laughed until the tears ran from her eyes in streams, and he laughed just as hard and knelt beside her to help her up, and it was then that he had kissed her for the first time.
    It had been eighteen years ago that August, and he had never loved another woman as he loved her. She was the only woman he had actually ached for, longed for, lusted after, laughed with, worked with, dreamed with, and respected more than he 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 rarely equaled 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