For an instant there was silence. Then Luke began laughing. When he turned and saw Carla’s stunned face, his expression changed.

"When the isolation gets to you," Luke said carefully, "I'll let you welsh on the bet. No hard feelings and no regrets."

"What?"

"Women hate the Rocking M," Luke said simply. "I doubt that you’ll last three weeks, much less three months. College has made a city slicker out of you. Two weekends without bright lights and you’ll be whining and pining like all the other housekeepers and cooks did. You can make book on it."

Whining and pining.

The words echoed in Carla’s mind, leaving a bright, irrational anger in their wake.

"You’re on, cowboy," she said flatly. "What’s more, you’re going to eat every last one of your words. Raw."

"Doubt it"

"I don’t I’m going to be the one who feeds them to you."

Luke’s slow smile doubled Carla’s heart rate and set Are to her nerve endings. He laughed a soft, rough kind of laugh and gave her the only warning she would get.

"There’s something to remember when you start feeding me, baby."

"What’s that?"

"I bite."

3

Who, in God’s name am I doing here? Have I gone entirely crazy?

"Here" was on a dirt road winding and looping and climbing up to the Rocking M. All around Carla for mile upon uninhabited mile, the Four Corners countryside lay in unbridled magnificence. It wasn’t the absence of people that was causing Carla to question her own sanity; she loved the rugged, wild land. It was the presence of people that was giving her stomach the ohmygod flutters. To be precise, it was the presence of one particular person – Luke MacKenzie, owner of a handsome chunk of the surrounding land.

And a handsome chunk himself.

In the back of her mind Carla kept hearing her brother’s advice. Chin up. Carlo. You can do anything for a summer. Besides, you heard Luke. He won’t be any harder on you than he is on any other ranch hand.