Josh didn't have to ask to whom he was referring, of course. Since he did not trust himself to reply, he did not.

But Cody needed no encouragement. "Wouldn't it be great if she could stay here? Forever, I mean?"

Josh felt his nerves stretch taut. Was that all anyone around her could think about? "She can't stay here, Cody," Josh said. "It wouldn't be proper."

"Oh, I know that," the boy agreed readily enough. "But she could if she was married. You know, if she married… one of us."

Josh was just about to inform him that such a thing would never happen when he noticed the hopeful gleam in the boy's brown eyes. Cody wanted to marry her himself! Josh could only stare for a long moment. "Turn out the light," he finally managed to say before slipping into his own bunk.

He lay there for a long time in the darkness, wondering if the bitter taste in his mouth could possibly be jealousy. But how could he be jealous when he had no feelings for the girl himself? After a while, he reluctantly admitted that he did have some feelings for the girl, but certainly not honorable ones. Not the kind that led to marriage.

Josh couldn't imagine ever having those kinds of feelings for a woman, not after what his mother had done. The thought of his mother-and of her betrayal-sliced into him with an almost physical pain. She had been gone nearly twenty years, but he could still see her lovely face just as plain as day. He remembered times when she had come into his room at night and kissed him, remembered the softness of her lips, the scent of her perfume. But mostly he remembered the things he wasn't supposed to have seen-his father reaching out to touch her and her lily-white hands pushing him away.

"Don't, Gideon," she had said.

"But it's been so long." His father's voice, pleading as Josh had never heard it.

"I told you, I won't have any more babies. I almost died the last time. You know that." Her voice, shrill and angry.

Now he was angry, too. "But you're my wife. I have rights."

And then Josh had run away from the angry voices. He hadn't understood then what they had been arguing about, but he did now. Knowing helped him to understand why she had left finally, but understanding had never helped him to forgive. He also remembered another conversation he was not supposed to have heard.

"I'll only stay a few months. My mother's sick. She needs me, Gideon," she had said,

"Don't lie, Amelia. We both know that if you leave here, you'll never come back," his father had replied.

"I will! I promise!" she had lied again. "I just need some time away. I'm dying here, Gideon, stuck on this ranch alone all the time with no friends and no parties and no fun."

"You'd leave your son?" he had asked, sending fear coursing through Josh's small body.

"Of course not; I'll take Joshua with me. It would be a good experience for him to see another kind of life." Josh recognized her tone. It was the one she used to wheedle things out of his father, half-coaxing, half-seductive.

But his father would not be moved. "You can leave here if you want to, Amelia. I won't stop you, but you aren't taking Josh. He's my son, too, and this is his home, his heritage. He stays."

Paralyzed with fear, the boy Josh had listened as the mother he adored and the father he worshiped had argued on about his fate. Even now he could not bring himself to recall the rest of the argument, the harsh and ugly words that had decided he would lose his mother forever.

The day she left, they took her to the train. She was pretending that she was only going back East on a visit. Although Josh's father had ridden the entire way in grim silence, Josh had not said a thing to indicate that he knew the truth. She wept bitterly when she kissed Josh goodby, and she made him promise to write to her. She hugged him tightly, so tightly that for a moment little Josh had thought she would not be able to leave him after all.

She had, though. She had left and never come back. At first her letters arrived once a week, and at first Josh replied with childish pleas that she return home. Then her letters came less often, sometimes as far apart as six months, until at last they stopped altogether. Josh had never known whether she had simply stopped writing or whether she had died. By that time, he had convinced himself that he did not care.

And by that time, he had his hands full with the ranch. After his mother's departure, his father gradually withdrew into himself. At first the change was barely perceptible, but after a few years, even young Josh began to notice how little interest his father took in running the ranch. By the time he was sixteen, Josh had virtually taken over, and the other men turned to him for leadership.

It was no wonder, he often thought, that his hair had started turning white when he'd been only eighteen, since by that time he had already been bearing the full responsibilities of a grown man for several years. His father had merely sat back and watched, a glass of whiskey in his hand, until his death three years ago.

In all the years since, Josh had been too busy to think about getting married. Or at least that was what he told himself. The truth was, he simply hadn't wanted to.

Not that he hadn't wanted the comfort a wife could give, of course. And the children; he wanted children. He did want someone to whom he could leave his land, someone who would love it the way he did, to whom it would mean something. But he was not ready to accept the comfort of a bed partner and the promise of children in exchange for the misery he knew a wife could also bring. He'd seen that misery firsthand. No woman was ever going to have the chance to tie Josh Logan up in knots the way his mother had done to his father.

He'd managed to resist plenty of temptations, too. Every marriageable girl within a hundred miles had been paraded before him at one time or another, at parties and dances and church sociables. And everyone knew that Blanche Delano had been dragging her rope for him for years, ever since old Sam Delano had passed on. Josh knew better than to let himself get caught, though. He wasn't about to let some woman get ahold of his heart and then rip it to shreds. He'd lost his mother, the one woman he had loved. No one should have to go through that pain more than once in a lifetime. Josh had no intention of even taking a chance that he might have to.

Felicity was quite a temptation, though. If she stayed here much longer, there was no telling what would happen. He might kiss her again, and the next time he might not be able to stop. There was only one solution. He would get rid of her. He would send her away as soon as possible. Day after tomorrow, in fact, when she'd finished with all her picture' taking. With that decided, Josh put all thoughts of Felicity Storm from his mind and fell asleep.

Near dawn Felicity woke for the last time. She had slept fitfully, tormented by dreams of Mr. Logan and the awful thing that they had done, the thing he had told her did not happen but which she could not forget. As she washed and dressed for the coming day, Felicity tried once more to make some sense out of Mr. Logan's kissing her. She failed.

No wonder her father had warned her so often about men. How easily a girl could get trapped into a situation like that. And how innocently! Felicity had only been seeking comfort, and look what she had gotten. Well, if Mr. Logan wanted to pretend that he had not kissed her, then Felicity would be more than happy to go along with him, especially since she really had no choice, at least for the moment. As long as she was stuck here on this ranch, she would simply continue to treat him exactly as she had before. Except more cautiously, she decided, putting the finishing touches on her hair.

Cookie was preparing breakfast when she slipped into the kitchen a few minutes later, but Felicity found that she was much too excited about the coming day to swallow more than a biscuit and a cup of coffee. The men were not even up when she went to her wagon to begin mixing her chemicals.