Jim closed the notepad.

So much for burnout, thought Graham.

“You’re being rather hostile,” Anne Kelley said to Neal.

“Right, which is what your ex-husband will think about me when I find him. Now, do you want to throw a little tea party, or do you want your kid back?”

“I want my kid back.”

Neal sat back in the sofa.

“So pitch,” he said.

Harley McCall was a cowboy. They met on a film shoot in Nevada. He was working as a wrangler-a horse handler-on the movie she was producing, one of the last of a brief resurgence of westerns.

He was tall, lanky, and bowlegged and spoke with a slow drawl that she found charming, especially contrasted with the affected inflections of the Hollywood men she’d been seeing. His dirty blond hair had natural streaks in it, his mustache was bronze, and his tan stopped at the level of his rolled-up sleeves, a tan he got from working outdoors, not frying himself in oil on a Malibu beach or poolside at the Beverly.

He ate chicken-fried steaks, eggs and bacon, and wicked hot burritos, and never-ever-queried the waiter about where the sun-dried tomatoes were grown. He liked his beer cold and his women warm, and he touched a warm spot in her all right, a warmth as soft and fine as a summer afternoon.

They’d walked out on the desert one night, away from the horrid little motel that was their location headquarters, away from the director, and the actors, the crew, and the business types, out onto the open desert under the stars and she’d seduced him there… or maybe he’d seduced her into seducing him… but she wanted him-badly-so she took him.

The sex was fantastic-that was never their problem-and she felt that he’d changed her life, turned her into the natural woman they all seem to sing about. He brought desert flowers to her trailer, took her out on long rides, called her “ma’am” everywhere except in bed, and one afternoon they’d jumped into his pickup and rode to Vegas, went to one of those tacky chapels, and actually got married.