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probably just wants to talk about search and rescue, and now you’ve built yourself up for something else and you’ll be disappointed. She’s too pretty and young for you, anyway.

    California State Park Ranger Patty Tyson watched the man she’d fallen in love with come into the Denny’s. For some reason, she immediately pretended she was immersed in the San Francisco Chronicle . She’d broken down and called Quentin at home, and, for all practical purposes, given herself away. She’d broken the Big Rule that she’d read in all the women’s magazines, but she didn’t give a damn.
    What do rules have to do with it , she thought. Venus and Mars my ass .
    She wanted to hook up with Quentin Collier, it was a natural and powerful feeling, and she didn’t feel like fighting it anymore. Desire was exhausting her.
    She had fallen in love with him that past summer up in the high country when they were together on a search for a little girl who had been kidnapped from her parents’ car at one of the freeway rest stops on the highway, just a mile from the ranger station. They’d never found the little girl, or her body. But they had found something else, she thought now, pretending to read her newspaper: a quiet understanding on horseback. For one whole week, that summer, the entire search and rescue community, from Sacramento to Lake Tahoe, had come out, hundreds of volunteers, into the Emigrant Gap Wilderness to help look for the little girl who’d come from Los Angeles with her young parents for a weekend in the mountains.
    Patty let herself look up from the newspaper and study the sheriff as he stopped to talk with a table of older men and women. He was like a presence that wasn’t a presence, she thought. He was quiet and yet, when they’d talked those six July days—sometimes traveling on horseback, sometimes resting in the shade of a big pine tree with views of the Central Valley spread out green-beautiful below them—he’d told her stories about the Timberline he’d grown up in, stories about sheriffing, stories about deer hunting with his father and uncles in the Emigrant Gap Wilderness before it became a state park. As she’d come from the east coast, the stories fascinated her.
    Something was compelling about the way he spoke to her. Something inside the story, something that he told with his eyes and his big cowboy smile. The way he patted a horse, or cinched a saddle, or stretched out by the campfire propped up on his saddle blanket, his shirt stained with sweat and grime. At those moments Quentin Collier looked like a man from another age. When she saw him back in town he seemed a little out of place. By the second day of the search, the others in the posse had disappeared for her.
    The problem, she knew, was that she’d always loved cowboys. And Quentin Collier was a cowboy. It was the reason she’d come west from Virginia; it was the reason she’d gone to the University of Nevada. It was the reason she’d called the sheriff and made herself sound like a schoolgirl with a bad crush.
    But it was more than just the physical attraction, which was very strong. He made her feel safe. She remembered standing next to him one morning in the ranger-station parking lot, after they’d come down from the mountain, empty-handed, and depressed that the little girl hadn’t been found. Quentin was talking to the assembled press, radio and television. She’d felt a sense of well-being just standing next to him in the late afternoon sunshine, sweaty and saddle-sore, his voice deep and sonorous. She could read his body language already; he was trying to say the right things, nothing the little girl’s family might read, or hear, later and be hurt by. It was like standing next to one of those big old pine trees up on the mountain. You knew, that no matter what, the tree could survive it.
    Okay, I have a thing for cowboys , she told herself as Quentin slipped into the booth. He probably thinks I’m a nut and is