Shocked, trembling, trying not to cry, Carla felt Luke’s pain more deeply than her own.

"But I want you to know this," he continued, his voice savage, his eyes blazing with all he would never know, never do, never be. "No matter who you marry or how many lovers you take, no matter how long you live, no man will ever want you the way I do."

With a swift, powerful movement Luke stood, lifting Carla and setting her aside in the same motion.

"Stay away from me, sunshine. If you come to me again like this I’m afraid I won’t have the strength to say no. Then I would take you and hate you and myself and the ranch that’s as much a part of me as my soul."

9

"Cosy just left." Luke said, answering Carla’s question and watching her intently despite the activity around the corral. "Why? Did you want to go to town with him?"

Carla shook her head, making a shaft of sunlight tangle and run through her hair. "I’ve got a recipe I want to try and it needs a particular spice. By the time I realized it, it was too late to put in on the list."

Luke snapped his leather work gloves impatiently against his thigh. "Hell, schoolgirl, this is a ranch, not a fancy city restaurant. West Fork never heard of most of the junk you want to put in the food."

Carla’s chin came up as belligerently as Luke’s. "Listen, cowboy, the only complaint I’ve ever had from the men about my cooking is that their horses are threatening to go on strike over all the extra poundage they have to haul around these days."

A corner of Luke’s mouth turned up. "Heard rumors of that myself. Even Ten ordered a new pair of jeans, and that old boy was nothing but rawhide and hard times before he started putting away your food like there was no tomorrow. First thing you know he’ll be as fat as I am."

"You? Fat?" Carla looked Luke over from the brim of his cowboy hat to the toes of his boots. "Pull my other leg. There’s not an extra ounce on you anywhere. You and Ten are enough to make me yank my hair out. The more I feed you, the better you look, and Lord knows neither one of you was exactly ugly to begin with."

Luke laughed despite the stabbing pleasure Car-la’s frank admiration sent through him. He had tried to keep her at arm’s length since she had come to him in the blazing silence of the dining room and taught him just how much a man could want a woman and still survive not having her. He had twenty-three more days of hell to endure until her stint as cook and housekeeper was over.

Twenty-three days. He wondered if he could make it. Keeping Carla at a distance had proven to be impossible. The anger he had turned against her earlier in the summer was simply gone, burned up in the far hotter fires of his passion for her. He was edgy, he slept badly, he was short-tempered – but not with Carla. No matter how much easier it would have been to be angry with her, he simply could not feel rage toward the girl who had come to him, offering her body and her soul to him with a single shattering kiss.

One kiss, but no more. Carla had heeded Luke’s pain, if not his warning. She continued to serve Luke hot food when he came in long after the other hands had eaten. She poured coffee for him, joined him if he asked her to, listened with transparent pleasure when he talked about what he had done that day. She cleaned every inch of the house, washed and mended everything in his closet and drawers. She joked with all the men equally, giving no man any encouragement to become personal, and did it all so diplomatically mat Luke was reminded of Marian Turner’s deft handling of the courting outlaws.

In all, Carla had done nothing to earn Luke’s displeasure and everything to fulfill the terms of the bet. He could hardly blame her if sometimes he turned around unexpectedly and saw her watching him with desire and wonder mingling in her beautiful eyes. He watched her in the same way, was caught in the same way, and walked off in the same way.

Alone.

Nothing was said. No excuse was given. None was needed. Luke and Carla could not have understood each other better if they had been connected to the same central nervous system.

And time after time, late at night, when thunder and lightning stalked the wild land, Luke heard Carla pacing her room, men tiptoeing down the hall to the kitchen. A few minutes later he would hear the faint scrape of a dining room chair being moved; and he would lie awake, his body clenched with savage need, and picture how she must look at that instant, sitting and sipping hot lemon water, wearing nothing but the black shirt he had left with Cash…the shirt Carla had chosen to use as a nightgown, wearing nothing beneath it but her fragrant skin.

Sometimes it was Luke who awakened, paced and went to the kitchen for something warm and soothing. Sometimes it was Luke who scraped a dining room chair over linoleum and sat shirtless, his jeans half-buttoned, with nothing under the jeans but his rigid, intractable hunger for his best friend’s kid sister.

"I’d better do the breakfast dishes," Carla said.

She turned away, unable to bear the intensity of Luke’s eyes a moment longer. Yet even with her back turned, she felt him watching her as she went to the house. The thought of leaving tomorrow with Cash for September Canyon was all that kept her from throwing back her head and screaming in a combination of frustration and…frustration. She had thought there could be no worse punishment than loving a man who didn’t love her.

She had been wrong. Wanting a man who wanted but refused to take her was worse. Much worse. She felt his unhappiness as acutely as her own.

Do you feel my pain, Luke? Is that why your eyesfollow me, watching every step, every breath, every gesture?

Don’t do that. Don’t watch me. Don’t look at my mouth and remember how it felt to kiss me so deeply that we tasted of each other long after the kiss ended. Stop torturing yourself. Stop torturing me.

Twenty-three more days. God, how can I do it? And how can I not?

Forcing herself not to think about it, Carla went to the kitchen and frowned over the recipe she wanted to make that night for the men. It was a French recipe for beef stew that had a long, elegant name. But she lacked one of the pungent herbs she needed. She reread the ingredient list again, went to the cupboard and sighed. The closest she could come was sage, which was already in the recipe.

"If only it were pine nuts," she muttered, flipping pages, looking for another recipe, "there would be no problem. I’d just go up the trail to MacKenzie Ridge and shake down some ripe pinon cones and spent the next three days getting the sap out of my hair."

Remembering, Carla laughed. But it had been worth it to see the look on the men’s faces when they asked what the tasty crunchy things in the green beans were. She only wished Luke had been there to share the joke, but it had been during the time he had spent days camping out, scouring the ranch for something he never named.

Suddenly Carla remembered the juniper branch that Luke had brought to her yesterday, saying he thought she might like the smell of it in her room. The deep green of the needles had been studded with the small, powdery silver blue of the hard berries. Flipping quickly to the index of the cookbook, Carla looked up juniper, found a recipe in which it was used and discovered that a very few berries went a long way in flavoring any stew. She closed the book, ran upstairs to her room and returned with several pungent berries in her hand. Singing softly to herself, she began assembling the ingredients for boeuf a la campagne.

By dinnertime the smells emanating from the ranch house were enough to make a hungry man weak. As usual when Luke wasn’t around at dinnertime, Ten was the first man in the door by a good forty minutes. He looked at the stove, noted that she was using the big pot again and crossed the kitchen quickly.