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ask.
    “Now,” she said, “where’s your ‘place’?”
    He reluctantly held out the card. Their hands touched as she took it and stuck it in her pocket. A cold, impersonal brush of the fingers. A stranger’s touch. What was he expecting? Fireworks? Electricity? Christ, violin music?
    She wore a thick, artsy-looking ring that was more sculpture than jewelry. A wedding band? He couldn’t tell. He wouldn’t ask.
    “I’ll have Cody there in the morning,” she said. “Is nine o’clock all right?”
    “Yeah, okay. Nine o’clock.”
    “Mom,” the kid said. “Do I really have to—”
    “Get in the Rover, Cody,” she said brusquely. “And
I’ll
drive.”

Chapter 5
    M ichelle shivered against the cold as she walked across the guest compound to the main house at Blue Rock Ranch. The moon was out, dazzling above the peaks of the Swan Range. She could see all the lunar craters as if through the lens of a telescope. Icy silver light poured invasively across the snow-covered meadows.
    She experienced a gut reaction she hadn’t felt in a very long time. It was a strange, impossible-to-forget combination of pain and ecstasy that always preceded inspiration. Artist’s inspiration. Joseph Rain, who had been her teacher that long-ago summer, called it the touch of the damned, because it hurt, it burned, it was beautiful.
    When was the last time she’d felt this desire, this ache? This sharp need to create an image, to speak in color and shape when there were no words?
    She couldn’t remember, because she had learned to squash the feeling as quickly as it came over her. She didn’t have time. She was too busy at work, too busy with Cody and Brad.
    But here? Would she be too busy here? The thought of actually having time on her hands frightened her, it really did. Back in Seattle she took a certain comfort in having so much to do that she never found time to think.
    At the moment she couldn’t do anything
but
think. Sam McPhee was here. He had a ranch called, according to the business card he’d given her, Lonepine. It was located up the old logging road between two hanging lakes. A guy who wasn’t supposed to amount to anything had a place of his own. And first thing in the morning, she had to take his son to see him.
    She hugged herself, staring up at the white winter moon, wondering if he’d guessed yet. Wondering if he would stay up late tonight, thinking about the past.
    The garden gazebo rose like an ice sculpture in the middle of the front yard. She had been sitting on the steps of that gazebo, drawing, the first time she met Sam. She remembered the quiet of that afternoon, the scratch of her pencil on the Firebrand tablet she held in her lap. Joseph Rain had called Montana a “place of great breathing,” his apt phrase for the expansiveness of the landscape.
    “Nice picture,” said a voice behind her.
    She froze, charcoal pencil in hand, at the sound of that voice. It was nice, a baritone, but youthful, too.
    “You think so?” she asked, getting up. And it was him, just as she had suspected—hoped, prayed—it would be. The boy from the training arena. She’d spotted him the day she arrived. Her first glimpse of him had been from a distance.
    He’d been working in a round pen with a mare on a lunge rope. She had been watching from the porch. He wore scuffed boots and blue jeans, a plaid shirt and battered cap with the Big Sky Feed Company logo on it. He was tall and rangy, like Gavin’s favorite trail horse. She knew, to the very depths of her eighteen-year-old soul, that no one in the entire universe had ever looked so good in a pair of Levi’s.
    Up close, she noticed that he had sandy brown hair, a lean, suntanned face, and eyes the color of her birthstone.
    “Yeah, I think so,” he replied. “Haven’t had much call to look at art, but that’s a fine picture.”
    She stuck her pencil behind her ear, suddenly self-conscious in her cutoffs and cropped T-shirt. “I’m Michelle.”
    “I