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they were annoying her with their cheerfulness, their nosiness, their perfect-motherness.
    Lynn could feel the weight of their combined gazes stabbing her in the back as she walked past. Stylish suburban matrons comfortably married to successful men, Pat and Debbie seemed to harbor an instinctive distrust of her. As a single working mother who lived on coffee and cigarettes and had a high-profile, demanding job, Lynn supposed they considered her a different species.
    And, she supposed with some reluctance, maybe they were right.
    “You have any other children?” Owen asked as he stopped to hold a branch aside so that she could enter the woods ahead of him.
    “Rory’s it.” Lynn strove to lighten her mood as well as her tone as she stepped past him onto a well-worn trail. It was dark and gloomy under the trees, and ten degrees cooler. Moss covered everything, from the rocks to the tree trunks to the path. The smell was damp, like somebody’s basement. “My one chick.”
    “She looks like you. I would have known her for your daughter anywhere.”
    Lynn walked smack into a nearly invisible spider web suspended across the path. Shuddering, she wiped the clammy threads from her face and kept going.
    “She does, doesn’t she?” Lynn concentrated on responding intelligently to Owen and tried not to think about the spider that went with the web. She hated spiders. In fact, she and Rory did look alike. Both of them had blond hair—though Lynn admittedly gave nature a hand in keeping her chin-length shag bright—fair complexions, and large, innocent-looking blue eyes. Both were less than tall (she despised the word short), their lack of stature compensated for by slim builds. The difference was that for the last several years Lynn had had to work hard to keep her weight down, while for Rory such slenderness was still effortless. “Poor kid,” she said to Owen.
    “I wouldn’t say that.” He was behind her. Lynn couldn’t see his expression, but his tone told her that he admired her looks. Lynn made a face. She hoped he wasn’t going to hit on her. Ruggedly handsome or not, he was going to be disappointed if he did. She had no interest in a vacation fling and no fantasies about bedding a faux cowboy.
    “Do you have any children?” Lynn asked, for something to say. The path sloped upward, away from the rocky plateau where they would spend the night. Roots and the protruding edges of buried stones made it necessary to watch where she put her feet. Ahead, Lynn could hear the splash of tumbling water. Cracklings and rustlings and chirpings from living things that she preferred not to speculate about were nearer at hand.
    “Nope.” There was a smile in Owen’s voice. “No wife either. My brother says I’m not a keeper. Once they get to know me, women end up throwing me back.”
    Lynn was surprised into glancing around. “Surely you’re not as bad as all that.”
    Owen’s eyes twinkled at her. “That’s what I think. But Jess was pretty positive.”
    Lynn walked on. There was something about that rueful smile that made her wary. It was too charming, almost practiced. Part of the shtick. He might very well be lying to her. For all she knew, the rat could be married with a dozen kids.
    Not that she cared whether Owen Feldman was married or not. But it was irritating to think that he might think she was dumb enough to succumb to a smile, blue eyes, and a cowboy hat. She had her faults, but stupid wasn’t one of them.
    A sudden bright shimmer of light ahead drew Lynn’s attention. Through a frame of swaying branches, sunlight bounced off the surface of silvery water. As she walked toward the light her view broadened to take in a wide stream, a slash of sunny sky, and the brown and green wall of the forest climbing the mountain just beyond the opposite bank. A well-fed muskrat sat up on a smooth-surfaced gray rock rising from the middle of the current, whiskers quivering as it stared at something the humans could