I am not resigned to the shutting away of loving hearts in the hard ground. So it is, and so it will be, for so it has been, time out of mind.

-- from Dirge Without Music by Edna St. Vincent Millay

THE SCALDING COFFEE slipping down Samantha Moore's throat didn't warm her any better than the sunlight filtering through the tinted, triple-pane windows surrounding her. Why couldn't she warm up? She was home. She'd grown up in this house, playing with her paper dolls on this very porch.

But that had been a long time ago. A lifetime ago. Literally, her father's lifetime. He'd died six weeks back and taken the warmth of her haven with him. Samantha's fingers tightened around the coffee mug, and she turned her face from the early morning sunlight that couldn't warm her.

"Just settle Dad's estate and get back to the city, to work." She blew the objective through the steaming tendrils rising from the mug pressed between her palms. But her voice lacked the decisive edge that usually punctuated her directives.

Just as the father who'd meant everything to her was now gone from her life. How could he have passed a physical one week and died the next?

Before she could think beyond her father's doctor's sympathetic, "Sometimes there is no rhyme or reason to death," a tapping on glass drew her attention toward the sun porch door. A man stood beyond the long, clear panel, taller than most she knew in Killdeer, his denim-clad legs braced apart at a manly angle.

She squinted into the bright sunbeams that slashed across the side yard and the man's broad shoulders. He gripped a flannel shirt in a tight fist against a lean hip. His other hung suspended in mid-knock against a background of tousled, dark hair. As for his face, the harsh light seared one side and cast the other into deep shade, making it impossible for her to see details. Samantha Moore distrusted anything she couldn't see clearly.

Maybe she should borrow on her city-learned brusqueness and pretend she'd heard nothing -- turn her back to the door and stroll from the room as though she saw no one. But this was rural Wisconsin where everybody knew everyone... usually.

She opened the door and, belatedly, realized she didn't recognize the strapping figure of a man on her doorstep. Tersely, she demanded, "Who are you?"

There was a hesitation as he lowered the hand from between his face and her door, a stretched moment during which she thought he might be unable to answer... or debated what best to reply. That last -- that suspiciousness, she blamed on the attorney in her. And the attorney in her never apologized for that ingrained mistrust even if the woman would. Before she could determine whether woman or lawyer prevailed, the stranger on her doorstep answered in a voice barely more than a husky whisper and acidic as peat. "Name's Michael Archer."

She was a master negotiator and an expert in the art of poker faces. Yet, Samantha shivered. To cover, she shifted her weight from one foot to the other. But the move brought her shoulder nearer the doorjamb -- nearer the hard contours of a chest defined by a close fitting, black T-shirt. The cool, musty aroma of the swamp clung to the dark threads, as if the man wearing that shirt had just stepped from that dying place.

"Didn't mean to take you by surprise," he said through lips that looked as though they'd be as smooth to the touch as the brass doorknob her fingers gripped and as strong to the taste as the coffee in the mug she pressed between her breasts.

But she still couldn't see through the blaze of sunlight what details lie beneath the whisker-textured jaw cocked at her.

"If you'd rather I come back later...." He leaned forward as though he meant to say more. But the shadow of the door-casing fell across his face, erasing the blinding glare of the sun; and Samantha found herself captivated by a mossy-green pair of eyes that seemed as old as time. She blinked to break the spell and reminded herself how very much he'd left unsaid.

"What do you want?" she demanded in an oddly husky voice.

"Mac from the gas station at the crossroads told me you'd be needing a handyman."

Mac. Her father's best buddy. Mac, who'd owned and run the service station at the crossroads for as long as she could remember.

It seemed Michael Archer had been around Killdeer long enough to learn only tourists and transients said in town when referring to the intersection of Highway 13 and Washout Road where Mac's was situated. That the locals referred to that intersection as the crossroads.

Locals or canny con artists. Might Mr. Archer also have learned that the local biologist's daughter was alone and worth a bundle? Rural communities like Killdeer kept few secrets. She decided to remain cautious of the stranger with hair dusky as silt.

"You sure you have the right place?" she quizzed.

"This the Moore place?"

She nodded when she should have demanded to know why a man with a face too carnal for any woman to ever forget, even a woman focused on business, wasn't better employed. But she'd never learned to casually probe a person about their background, and there were too many rules these days about what kind of questions an employer could ask a prospective employee. Edward Benet, her business partner, had been sued for such a reason.

Besides, this mossy-eyed stranger with the dark hair curling down his neck and around his ears had a way about him that tended to distract her.

"You expecting me to hire you just like that?" She snapped her fingers.

One corner of Michael Archer's smooth, chiseled lips tugged upwards. "I come with a recommendation from Mac."

"I could call him and check up on you, you know." She probed his face for any telltale sign of uncertainty.

He jutted his square chin toward the far wall that partitioned the kitchen from the porch where the phone hung just out of sight. "I'd expect no less from you, Miss Moore."

"That's Ms."

He grinned, a quick, wide flash of white teeth. "Ms. Moore."

He'd made a target of her all right, this man with his potent charm. Two things brokering land had taught her. How to recognize and make use of opportunity, and how to spot another opportunist. Still, while every fiber of logic in her commanded that she send the stranger at her door packing, some inexplicable compulsion kept her testing him.

"Of course you'd have no problem with my calling Mac now. I'm sure you don't expect him to be in the station at this hour."

"I don't know the time." The stranger on her doorstep waved his wrist in front of her face. "No watch."

"But you do know it is early."

His smile eased a bit. "If it's after 6:30, Mac'll be there."

So, he knew Mac arrived at the station every morning well before opening time. It didn't take a rocket scientist to spot a bunch of old men with coffee mugs in hand hunkered down on the cracked Naugahyde and rusty chrome furniture beyond the broad, front window of Mac's full-service station. It wouldn't take a Sherlock Holmes to figure out that Mac, in spite of his husky build, didn't eat the two dozen doughnuts he picked up from the bakery each morning by himself.

The stranger braced his free hand against the doorjamb above her head and leaned closer, close enough that she should have strained back from him rather than stand there inhaling his intoxicating musk and warming to his animal heat.

"Brews a mean pot of coffee, that Mac does," he said in his deep, heady voice. "Thick enough it could eat the paint off the bumper of a fifty-five Ford."

An unsettling sensation surged through her, like something in what he'd said had triggered a reaction to a long forgotten memory. Only she couldn't put her finger on what that memory might be.

Couldn't put her finger on why Michael Archer studied her as though he waited for a reaction, either. But reaction to what? The cleverness of his retort?

Not that simple, an instinctive voice inside her warned.

"Wait here," she said, shutting the door between them with an abruptness that made Michael Archer jump back from her threshold.

She slid the bolt into place and headed for the phone in the kitchen. She shouldn't even bother to check the man out. He raised every instinctive alarm she possessed.

He also aroused a few she didn't even know she had. Dangerous, letting a pretty boy with just enough ruggedness about him to spark a lady's curiosity hang around her back door.

She set her coffee mug down on the kitchen counter, picked up the phone receiver, and punched out the number she'd known by heart since childhood. So Michael Archer had gotten himself invited to one of Mac's coffee klatches. Big mystery.

The phone rang in her ear.

Or he'd heard about Mac's penchant for strong coffee and made use of the information for his own ends.

Which was?

Get her to drop her guard.

Ring two.

Get her to hire him.

She glanced through the narrow archway between the kitchen and sunroom toward the far wall. He still waited beyond the triple panes of glass that insulated the house against whatever weather mid-Wisconsin flung at the abode -- that now insulated her from a man too tall, too dark, too handsome for her own good.

Mac answered on the third ring. Samantha ducked away from the opening between the rooms and started asking her questions.

Following a glowing report of Michael Archer's amiability and quick wit, Mac summarized, "Right nice young man."

"Do you remember when he showed up?" she probed.

"Wouldn't likely forget. We'd just laid your daddy to rest."

"I was still here?"

"You'd just left."

She paused, digesting the convenient timing of Michael Archer's arrival before continuing. "Where's he been staying?"

"In the swamp."

"Camping practically in my back yard," she muttered under her breath, pacing the breadth of the short wall and eyeing the stranger who'd obviously won over Killdeer's most conservative congregation of residents.

"You say something, Samantha?"

"I was just wondering what brought him to Killdeer. Did he say?"

Like the stranger loitering at her back door would have told any friend of hers his true motives. But, she might catch him telling contradictory stories.

Silence stretched on the other end of the phone, fueling her suspicion, followed by a perplexed, "Can't say that he did. Though I think he's some kind of biologist like your daddy was. Wait. What're you saying, Doc?"

She heard the voices of the regulars in the gas station echoing off its cinder-block walls before Mac spoke again. "Doc Evers says he's an ornithologist. Kirby thinks he's studying insects out in the swamp. And Lud insists he's a land developer looking to drain our wetlands and turn them into vacation home sites. That Lud's full of it." Mac snorted. "Like some developer would hang around this berg, living off odd jobs."

Samantha sagged into the opening between rooms and smiled, not because Mac's reasoning reassured her, not because she knew Lud Hangstrom and his alarmist viewpoints. She smiled because the banter of her father's friends brought back fond memories of simpler, safer times. She smiled because the camaraderie prompted images of her father.

She smiled because part of her still belonged here.

Through the window almost the width of the house away, Michael Archer flashed a brilliant smile. She resented his invading her pleasant recollections. Worse. His beard-shadowed chin leveled the same angle it had when he'd challenged her to call Mac -- an angle that had pointed directly to where her phone was -- a telephone that hung on the backside of the kitchen wall... beyond view from the sunroom door. How had he known?

"Thanks, Mac," she murmured and hung up. Her smile faded and her resolve firmed. There would be no job here for a man who seemed to have made it his business to know more about her than he should.

Copyright © 2002 by Barbara Raffin