He raised an eyebrow.

"I have to," she replied. "I'm a new hire. I don't want to risk losing my job for being AWOL."

"Sounds like the military," he suggested.

"I guess so. It sort of feels like it, on the ranch, too."

"All three of the brothers fought overseas," he said. "Two of them didn't fare so well. Mallory, though, he's hard to dent."

"I noticed." She hadn't known that Mallory had been in the military, but it made sense, considering his air of authority. He was probably an officer, as well, when he'd been on active duty.

She saw him staring, waiting. She grimaced. "If I can get the time off, I'd like to see the film."

He beamed. "Great!"

She sighed. "I've forgotten how to go on a date. I'll have to go in jeans and a shirt. I didn't bring a dress or even a skirt to the ranch when I hired on. All my stuff is back home with my folks."

"You're noticing the suit. I wear it to impress potential customers," he said with a grin. "Around town, I mostly wear slacks and sport shirts, so jeans will be fine. We aren't exactly going to a ball, Cinderella," he added with twinkling eyes. "And I'm no prince."

"I think they're rewriting that fairy tale so that Cinderella is CEO of a corporation and she rescues a poor dockworker from his evil step brothers," she said, tongue-in-cheek.

"God forbid!" he exclaimed. "Don't women want to be women anymore?"

"Apparently not, if you watch television or films much." She sighed. She looked down at her own clothing. "Modern life requires us to work for a living, and there are only so many jobs available. Not much economically viable stuff for girls who lounge around in eyelet and lace and drink tea in parlors." Her dark eyes smiled.

"Did I sound sarcastic? I didn't mean to. I like feminine women, but I think lady wrestlers are exciting when they do it in mud."

She laughed explosively. "Sexist!"

"Hey, I'd watch two men wrestle in mud, too. I like mud."

She remembered being covered in that, and pesticide, on the ranch and winced. "You wouldn't if you had to dip cattle around it," she promised him.

"Good thing I don't know anything about the cattle business, then," he said lightly. "So ask your boss if you can have three hours off next Friday and we'll see the werewolf movie."

She hesitated. "Won't it be kind of gory?"

He sighed. "There's always that cartoon movie that Johnny Depp does the voice-over for, the chameleon Western."

She laughed. He was pleasant, nice to look at and had a sense of humor. And she hadn't been on a date in months. It just might be fun.

"Okay, then," she told him. "I like Johnny Depp in anything, even if it's only his voice. That's a date."

He smiled back. "That's a date," he agreed.

THERE WAS A LOT TO DO around a ranch during calving season, and most of the cowboys-and cowgirl-didn't plan on getting much sleep.

Heifers who were calving for the first time were watched carefully. There was also an old mama cow who was known for wandering off and hiding in thickets to calve. Nobody knew why; she just did it. Morie named her Bessy and devoted herself to keeping a careful eye on the old girl.

"Now don't go following that old cow around and forget to watch the others," Darby cautioned. "She can't hide where we won't be able to find her."

"I know that, but she's getting some age on her and there's snow being forecast again," she said worriedly. "What if she got stuck in a drift? If we had a repeat of the last storm, we might not even be able to hunt for her. Hard to ride a horse through snow that's over his head," she added, with a straight face.

He laughed. "I see your point. But you have to consider that this is a big spread, and we've got dozens of mama cows around here. Not to mention, we've got a lot of replacement heifers who are dropping calves for the first time. That's a lot of profit in a recession. Can't afford to lose many."

"I know." Her father had cut his cattle herd because of the rising prices of grain, she recalled, and he was concentrating on a higher-quality bull herd rather than expanding into a cow-calf operation like the one his father, the late Jim Brannt, had built up.

"Dang, it's cold today," Darby said as he finished doctoring one of the seed bulls.

"I noticed." Morie chuckled, pulling her denim coat tighter and buttoning it. She had really good clothes back home, but she'd brought the oldest ones with her, so that she didn't raise any suspicions about her status.

"Better get back to riding that fence line," he added.

"I'm on my way. Just had to pick up my iPod," she said, displaying it in its case. "I can't live without my tunes."

He pursed his lips. "What sort of music do you like?"

"Let's see, country and western, classical, soundtracks, blues..."

"All of it, in other words."

She nodded. "I like world music, too. It's fun to listen to foreign artists, even if I mostly can't understand anything they sing."

He shook his head. "I'm just a straight John Denver man."

She lifted both eyebrows.

"He was a folk singer in the sixties," he told her. "Did this one song, 'Calypso,' about that ship that Jacques Cousteau used to drive around the world when he was diving." He smiled with nostalgia. "Dang, I must have spent a small fortune playing that one on jukeboxes." He looked at her. "Don't know what a jukebox is, I'll bet."

"I do so. My mom told me all about them."

He shook his head. "How the world has changed since I was a boy." He sighed. "Some changes are good. Most-" he glowered "-are not."

She laughed. "Well, I like my iPod, because it's portable music." She attached her earphones to the device, with which she could surf the internet, listen to music, even watch movies as long as she was within reach of the Wi-Fi system on the ranch. "I'll see you later."

"Got a gun?" he asked suddenly.

She gaped at him. "What am I going to do, shoot wolves? That's against the law."

"Everything's against the law where ranchers are concerned. No, I wasn't thinking about four-legged varmints. There's an escaped convict, a murderer. They think he's in the area."

She caught her breath. "Could he get onto the ranch?"

"No fence can keep out a determined man. He'll just go right over it," he told her. He went back into the bunkhouse and returned with a small handgun in a leather holster. "It's a .32 Smith & Wesson," he said, handing it up. He made a face when she hesitated. "You don't have to kill a man to scare him. Just shoot near him and run." He frowned. "Can you shoot a gun?"

"Oh, yes, my dad made sure of it," she told him. "He taught me and my brother to use anything from a peashooter to all four gauges of shotguns."