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swear if this hadn’t been your cabin, Reece”—Joanna paused to shake her head—“I would have turned around and gone back to California.” She sat up. “I left the suitcases in the car.”
    â€œWe can get them later,” he assured her.
    Joanna settled back into the chair. “I just don’t understand what you see in this godforsaken place,” she sighed, remembering all she had gone through to get here.
    â€œGodforsaken?” He frowned narrowly at her choice of adjectives. “It is far from ’godforsaken,’ Joanna. Just look at the beauty around you,” he demanded.
    It was rare for those dark eyes to look at her with disapproval. It wasn’t a comfortable feeling. His scolding tone forced her to look beyond the porch. The rocky clearing sloped down to the shimmering waters of a lake, the source of the breeze cooling her skin.
    On the opposite shore, there was another ridge of mountains, cloaked in a myriad of green shades and contrasted by a milk-blue sky. A flash of scarlet in the trees near the cabin caught her eye. She turned to see a black-beaked cardinal flitting among the tree limbs. A squirrel chattered angrily at the bird’s intrusion.
    â€œGodforsaken was perhaps the wrong word,” Joanna conceded, because there was the rustic beauty of nature around her, relatively untouched by civilization and untamed. “But you have to admit it’s far from anywhere—and next to impossible to reach.”
    â€œThat is a part of its charm,” he smiled and settled into the matching rocking chair next to hers. “Its isolation. Its distance from large metropolitan centers. Getting here isn’t easy but once you are here—” He lifted his shoulders to indicate how little the hardships mattered.
    â€œYou can say that but I’ll bet you didn’t drive twenty miles behind a fuel truck, then get stuck behind some farmer poking along to market, miss the turn to this road—which by any sane person’s standards doesn’t deserve to called a road.” She paused to cast a wary glance at her uncle. “I suppose that
road
is the only way out of this place.”
    â€œIt is,” he admitted. “The spring rains eroded it badly. It is worse this year than it has ever been.” Then Reece Morgan picked up on what she had said. “You got lost.”
    â€œAs far as I’m concerned, I wasn’t really lost. I just missed the turn. Of course, the man at the gas station who gave me directions felt that was a moot point,” Joanna inserted dryly. “Then when I did find the road, I almost ran into a pair of mules pulling a wagon. I ended up going into the ditch.”
    â€œYou weren’t hurt, were you?” He studied her more closely, leaning forward with concern.
    â€œNo. I didn’t get a scratch or a bruise. Luckily.” She was able to smile about it now as she took another drink of cold tea, her sense of humor slowly returning. “I thought I was seeing things when the mules and wagon suddenly pulled onto the road ahead of me,” she laughed briefly. “I want you to know that’s quite a shock for this California girl.”
    â€œI can imagine.” He chuckled with her. “It must have been Jessie Bates. He’s a marvelous character that lives in an old cabin up the road.”
    â€œCharacter is right, if it’s the same man.”
    â€œHe was thin with overalls a size too big and hair that had probably never seen a comb,” her uncle described the man who had been driving the mules.
    â€œThat’s him,” she nodded.
    â€œYou should hear some of the stories he tells about these hills,” he said. “He is a natural storyteller. His tales are colored with regional phrases. He plays the fiddle, too, and the dulcimer, banjo. An extremely talented man. I’m convinced he dresses and acts the way he does to draw attention to