The Carson Springs Trilogy: Stranger in Paradise, Taste of Honey, and Wish Come True by Eileen Goudge

of the hill in time.
    Inside the barn, she found the horses straining over their stalls, nickering at her approach: Punch, a seven-year-old Appaloosa, and Judy, the old mare she’d had since she was a child.
    “Hi, guys. Miss me?” She reached into her shirt pocket for the lumps of sugar she was seldom without. Punch nuzzled her palm while Judy patiently waited her turn.
    She heard a rustling in the hayloft, and looked up. A toe-sprung cowboy boot dropped onto the ladder, followed by a pair of sturdy, blue-jeaned legs. Then a muscled body leaped to the floor, agile as a cat.
    “Didn’t expect you back so soon.” Hector grinned, brushing bits of hay from his T-shirt.
    She offered him a crooked smile. “High heels make my feet hurt.”
    “Everything go okay?”
    “The picture-perfect wedding. I’m sure they’ll have the picture-perfect honeymoon as well.” A note of sarcasm crept into her voice and she felt instantly ashamed. When had she become so bitter? Just because it hadn’t worked out with Peter was no reason to take it out on her sister. She brought her cheek to rest against her Appaloosa’s dappled neck, tilting her head to give Hector a sheepish look. “I’m happy for them. Really.”
    “That so?”
    Hector approached her slowly as he might have a skittish mare: a dark-haired man in dust-streaked Levi’s and a white T-shirt worn nearly transparent in spots. He was broad across the chest and arms, with a long waist that tapered into short, muscular legs slightly bowed from years in the saddle. The silver conch buckle on his belt glittered in the sunlight that fell in dusty slats across the barn’s hay-littered floor. For a dreamy instant she thought about running her thumb over its polished surface, how cool and smooth it would feel.
    Annoyed with herself, she straightened, pushing open the latch on Punch’s stall. “Okay, I’m feeling sorry for myself. But I should be over it by now. A year and a half is long enough.” She tossed a halter over the horse’s head and led him to the tacking area. “Besides, the wedding wasn’t a complete wash. I met someone interesting.”
    She thought she saw something flicker in Hector’s depthless eyes as he waited for her to fill him in. He never hurried such things, which was partly why she liked being around him, but which also drove her crazy at times. Watching him saunter over to fetch a blanket and saddle, she felt an urge to shake him like a piggy bank into coughing up his two cents.
    “A girl crashed the wedding. A runaway.” Laura grabbed a hoof pick from its peg on the wall and bent over to hoist one of Punch’s hind legs. “I brought her home with me.”
    “Now why doesn’t that surprise me?” Hector paused in the doorway to the tack room, a saddle slung over one arm.
    “Why don’t you saddle up Judy? I’ll tell you all about it on the way.”
    Hector regarded her curiously, then nodded and said, “She could use the exercise. I didn’t get around to it today. Fan belt went out again on the truck.”
    Through the open barn door she could see his battered blue Chevy pickup in the yard. He was overdue for a new one, and God knew he’d be able to afford it working someplace else. The only reason he stuck around, she knew, was out of a sense of duty—two women all alone, who would look after them? I ought to cut him loose, she told herself. But Hector had been with her for years, and with her family before that. How would she manage without him?
    She remembered the day he’d appeared at their house, broke and hungry, speaking only a few words of English. Not the first illegal alien to show up at their door…but there had been something different about Hector. When her mother brought him a bowl of stew he’d eyed it longingly, then shook his head, indicating mostly through gestures that it was work he was after, not a handout. An hour later he was at the door again, the grass raked and the driveway swept. Laura, sixteen at the time, would