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What it told him was that he wasn’t going to give Cara one minute more than necessary before coming back to claim her. She would have her space, her time to sort through the emotional turmoil and the tragedies of the past couple of months.

But he wasn’t going to give her time to forget about him, to convince herself that what they had wasn’t real. In fact, now that he knew without a doubt what he wanted, he was going to do everything in his power to make sure she understood that it was going to last a lifetime.

Cara started to miss Rafe almost the instant she watched his flight to New York take off. But even as tears stung her eyes, her friends closed ranks around

her.

“He’ll be back,” Lauren predicted.

“When?” she asked wistfully, just as she had asked him the day before. “When the time is right,” Lauren assured her. “Something tells me Rafe

O’Donnell is the kind of man who has a finely honed sense of timing. Besides that, the man is crazy in love with you.”

Cara was startled by the assessment. “He is?”

“Well, of course he is,” Emma said with a touch of exasperation. “Even I can see that.”

Lauren chuckled. “Listen to Emma. She may be oblivious to the way Ford feels about her, but she can still recognize love when she spots it in anyone else.”

“Oh, go suck an egg,” Emma snapped.

“Is that what you say in a courtroom when you don’t like what a judge has to say?” Lauren chided. “You must be held in contempt quite a lot.”

“Sometimes I am, but it’s worth it,” Emma said loftily. “Now, let’s go to the Heartbreak and have a beer. Tony’s is closed tonight, so Cara doesn’t have to work. I’m not due in court tomorrow. We can live it up. Maybe there will be some handsome men around who’ll dance with us and make us forget everything else.”

Cara didn’t hold out much hope that anything could take her mind off the fact that she had sent Rafe away, but she was willing to give it a try.

“I’m game,” she said. “How about you, Lauren?”

“Count me in. I’ve always been a sucker for a handsome cowboy who can dance.”

“Since when?” Cara asked. “You couldn’t wait to get away from a whole town filled with cowboys.”

Lauren shrugged. “Times change. Are we going to talk this to death or do

it?”

Cara cast one more look at the sky in the direction where she’d last seen

Rafe’s plane heading east. “Let’s do it,” she said finally.

Unfortunately, though, a couple of beers and the attention of a few men she’d known since childhood didn’t do a thing to keep her from thinking about Rafe and the fact that she’d sent him away.

“He jumped at the chance to leave,” she said despondently to Lauren. “Don’t you think he was awfully eager to go?”

“No, what I think is that he was doing what you asked him to do, even though he didn’t want to. Did you see how much paperwork he loaded into that plane? Boxes of it. That was a man who was settling in right here. If you’d asked, he probably would have left his firm in New York, opened an office in

Winding River and stuck around indefinitely.”

“The town could use a really good lawyer,” Emma said, her expression thoughtful. “If Rafe had been in practice here, instead of a seventy-year-old man who’s still living in the Dark Ages, I wouldn’t be running back and forth from Denver right now to handle Sue Ellen’s case.”

“I like having you coming back and forth,” Cara protested. “I’m going to hate it when you go back to Denver full-time.”

“Me, too,” Karen agreed. “In fact, I think you should be the one opening a practice here.”

“With Rafe as her partner,” Lauren said, grinning. “Perfect. Everybody gets what they want.”

“Rafe is with a huge firm in New York,” Cara pointed out dryly. “I don’t think he’s into small-town law.”

“Neither was Emma,” Karen noted. “She hasn’t said anything, but I heard she took on two other cases while she was here last week. I think that’s very telling, don’t you?”

“Whoa,” Emma said. “Let’s not leap to any conclusions here. Sue Ellen’s case is a one-time thing, a tragic situation for someone we know. When it’s over, that’s that. I’ll be back in Denver.”

“What about the other cases?” Lauren asked.

“They were quickies,” Emma insisted. “Nothing the least bit complicated. I wrote a will for someone and helped another person straighten out a billing error. They’re both already over and done with.”

“We’ll see,” Lauren said smugly. “I predict you’ll decide to stay before the end of the trial. It’s what Caitlyn wants. It’s what your family wants. It is most definitely what Ford Hamilton wants.”

Emma scowled. “Leave Ford out of this. He has nothing to do with any decision I make.”

“I don’t think he’ll agree to be left out,” Lauren teased. “Have you guys seen them together?”

“I’ve heard them,” Karen said, grinning. “They argue. Morning, noon, night, it doesn’t matter, they argue.” She gave an exaggerated shiver. “All that untapped passion just waiting to cut loose.”

“I refuse to listen to another word of this,” Emma said with a huff. “I’m going home, where I will get a good night’s sleep, untroubled by dreams of Ford Hamilton or any other man, for that matter.”

“Give me a lift?” Cara asked. “I told Rafe I needed this time to think. I guess I’d better start doing it.”

Lauren glanced at Karen. “I guess it’s just you and me then. Can we stick

around and listen to the music?”

“Sure,” Karen agreed, though without much enthusiasm.

Cara gave a fierce hug to each of her friends. “Thanks for sticking by me tonight. Watching Rafe leave was harder than I’d expected it to be.”

“All the more reason to get on the phone and tell him to come back, don’t you think?” Lauren asked.

“Leave her alone,” Emma advised. “She needs time to think.”

“No,” Lauren said adamantly. “What she needs is to listen to her heart for the first time in her life.”

“Hey, you guys can stop talking about me as if I’m not here,” Cara said, waving a protesting hand in front of their faces. “I don’t know what I need or what I want or even what my heart is saying.” She smiled to take the sting out of her words. “I’ll keep you posted.”

She got her first clue when she walked into her room at the hotel and saw the message light blinking. Sure that Rafe must have called, her heart thumped unsteadily. Filled with an unfamiliar sense of anticipation, she grabbed the phone and asked for the message.

“Deidre called,” the desk clerk reported, dimming Cara’s excitement. “She says it’s urgent. Call her at the restaurant or at home, no matter what time it is.”

“Thanks, Lucille,” Cara told the woman. Now her heart was beating too hard for another reason entirely. She glanced at the clock, then dialed the restaurant’s number. Deidre picked up at once. “Hi, it’s Cara. What’s going on?”

“Three of our biggest investors were in here earlier tonight demanding to see you or Bobby,” she said without preamble. “I didn’t know what to do, so I lied. I told them you were away on a family emergency and couldn’t be reached and that Bobby was due back soon. They seemed to accept that.”

Cara was surprised they’d bought it. “Are you sure they didn’t know Bobby had taken off with the money?”

“Apparently not, or maybe they were on a fishing expedition. My hunch was that they’d heard rumors and came by to check them out, but they took my story at face value.”

“Did they leave right away or cause trouble?”

“Neither. I invited them to stay for dinner. I made sure they had the best meal of their lives, a bottle of our best wine and great service. It didn’t hurt that the place was packed. They left happy men. I still think you might want to call them, though, follow up on their visit, so to speak. I got their business cards.”

“Give me the names,” Cara said, taking them down. “I’ll call first thing in the morning. Thanks again, Deidre. I honestly don’t know what I’d do without you.”

“Are you coming back soon?” Deidre asked wistfully. “I like running this place and I’m good at most of it, but dealing with this kind of thing gives me hives. I’m a wreck.”

“But you did exactly the right thing,” Cara said. “That fib you told was pretty close to the truth, and it got the job done.”

“You didn’t answer my question. Are you coming back soon?” “Another couple of weeks,” Cara said. “I promise.”

By then Tony and Francesca should be back. With any luck Cara would have sorted through her own options and be ready to deal with the fallout, whichever way she went.