She could have stayed forever right in that spot, suspended in that moment.

But somewhere ahead on the trail cattle were being branded, work was being done. Mari tugged Clyde’s head up out of the clover and urged him toward the Stars and Bars.

She heard the commotion before she saw it. The bawling of cows and calves filled the air, a frantic cacophony that sang of the confusion and energy of the event. The mule pricked his long ears forward and picked up the pace of his walk, the excitement reaching him even a quarter mile down the road from the ranch. Mari fixed her gaze on the cloud of dust hovering over the corrals in the distance and nudged her mount into a trot, posting in the saddle because it was the way she had been taught.

As she neared the pens she tried to take in everything about the sight at once-the maze of weathered board fences, the movement of the groups of cattle, the men who perched above the chutes, tending to a job she could only guess at. The air was filled with the scents of dust and smoke, fresh manure and burning hide. The scene was something straight out of a John Wayne movie, Technicolor bright, Surround-Sound loud.

“Better click those teeth together, ma’am, or you’re liable to catch a taste of somethin’ you’d rather not.”

Mari pulled herself away from the spectacle and looked down on another walking, talking piece of western lore. The old cowboy who stood beside her was as weathered as an applehead doll, his skin burned brown and age-freckled from years in the sun. He had the stance of a man who had put in too many miles in the saddle, a little bent, a little twisted. His legs were bowed and spindly even though a fair amount of belly spilled over the top of his belt buckle. He squinted up at her from beneath the brim of a disreputable-looking gray hat, his blue eyes merry and a smile tugging shyly at one corner of his mouth.

“Tucker Cahill at your service, ma’am,” he announced. Tipping his head away demurely, he shot a stream of tobacco juice into the dirt, then glanced back up at her. “You lost or somethin’?”

“Not if this is the Stars and Bars.”

“It surely is.”

“I’m Marilee Jennings. J.D. told me I could come watch the branding if I wanted.”

Tucker damn near swallowed his chaw. His eyebrows climbed his forehead until they nearly disappeared beneath his hat. “Did he? Well, I’ll be pan-fried and ate by turkeys,” he muttered.

“Excuse me?”

He shook himself like a dog, trying to shake loose the shock of her statement. He could hardly remember the last time J.D. had invited a woman to the ranch-leastways a woman who wasn’t a veterinarian or a cattle broker or some such. It was a cinch this little mop-headed blonde wasn’t anything of the sort.

He grinned his tight little grin, tickled at the prospect of J.D. showing something other than contempt for a female. “Well, why don’t you climb on down off that lop-eared creature and I’ll get you a ringside seat, Miz Jennings.”

“I’d like that.”

Mari swung her leg over the mule’s back and dropped to her feet, wincing as pain shot up from her toes to the roots of her hair. As pleasant as the ride had been, she was damn glad to have the chance to try to put her knees side by side again-not that it seemed even remotely possible. She felt as bowlegged as Tucker Cahill looked.

Putting off taking those first few steps, she stuck a hand out to the old cowboy. He gripped her fingers with a gloved hand as strong as a vise and gave her a shake. “You can call me Mari,” she said with a grin. “Anybody ever tell you you look like Ben Johnson, the actor?”

Tucker cackled with glee. “From time to time. You just climb up that rail over yonder, Mari, and you’ll see what branding is all about. I’ll see to your mule here.”

“You don’t have to do that.”

“Oh, yes, ma’am. You’re a guest at the Stars and Bars. We don’t get many, but we treat ’em right.”

Mari thanked him as he walked away, Clyde in tow, going off toward a long, weathered gray barn. Gritting her teeth as she forced her aching legs to move, feeling as ungainly as if she were trying to negotiate stilts, she made her way to the corral and climbed up to sit on the top rail. The organized chaos going on below was mesmerizing to watch. After a few minutes, Tucker climbed up beside her, standing on one of the lower rails and laying his arms across the top one.

“I had no idea ranchers still branded cattle,” she said, fairly shouting to be heard above the din. “I would have guessed that went out with bustles and steam engines.”

“Old ways are sometimes best. No one’s come up with a better way to work cows than from the back of a good ol’ quarter horse. No one’s come up with a better system for marking cattle than a brand. Lotta open territory in these parts. Cattle wander off, mix in with other herds.”

He pointed out J.D. moving through the herd in the far holding pen on a pale gray horse, telling her with no small amount of pride that there wasn’t a man for a hundred miles around who knew more about how to get the most out of a horse than J.D. “Knows the cattle business inside and out too. He’s up on all the latest-electronic sales networks, computer tracking herd progress, stuff an old duffer like me don’t know from diddly. Had two years of college before his daddy died. Yes, ma’am,” he said, nodding, “J.D.’s a fine rancher and a fine hand and a good man right down to the ground. You won’t find a soul around here to tell you different.”

His ringing endorsement sounded suspiciously like a sales pitch. Mari found it sweet and did her best to tame her amusement.

“He’s run this place since he was a kid,” Tucker said, fixing his gaze on the man J.D. had become in the years since. “And I mean that. Tom-J.D.’s daddy-God rest him, never had his heart in the job. He gave his to women and it’d liked to killed him. Did kill him in the end, after Will’s mama left.”

Mari studied the old man’s weathered profile, a million questions rushing through her mind. She was probably better off not knowing about Rafferty’s past. If she didn’t know what made him so difficult, so distrustful, so damned hard to deal with, then her soft heart couldn’t feel sympathy or goad her into trying to heal his past hurts, or any of the dozen other foolhardy things she would likely do. But she couldn’t stop herself from being curious, or overly sentimental, or stupidly romantic. You’ll never change, Marilee…

And so the question tumbled out. “What about J.D.’s mother?”

“Died when he was just a little tyke. Cancer, God rest her. She was a fine woman. Poor Tom was just lost without her-at least until Will’s mama breezed onto the scene. Then he was just plain lost.”

And J.D. was lost in the shuffle. Tucker Cahill didn’t say that, but Mari pieced together the fragments he had given her and came up with the picture: J.D., just a boy, taking on responsibilities far beyond his years while his father wandered around in a romantic fog. If it was an accurate picture, it explained a great deal.

In what was probably a futile attempt at self-preservation, she derailed Tucker onto an explanation of the process of sorting the cattle through the pens and chutes.

The men perched above the chutes controlled the gates that determined which pen an animal would be directed to depending on age and sex. In the branding corral, calves were being run one at a time into a squeeze chute, which tipped onto one side, forming a table. Will Rafferty and an old man with a long gray braid worked at the squeeze chute, vaccinating, notching ears, castrating bull calves, and marking all with the Rafter T brand of the Stars and Bars. The whole process took little more than a minute per animal.

She watched them do half a dozen before Will looked over and caught sight of her. A big grin split his dirty face, and he abandoned his post without a backward glance.