Excerpt from The Scent of Rain and Lightning by Nancy Pickard, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

"Somebody just pulled up outside."

"Who?"

She threw him a look.

Sometimes she wondered if Red was one post short of a fence.

"What?" he repeated, half laughing.

He was thirteen years older than she, but sometimes Jody felt as if she were the more mature one. Abandoning him as he lay naked and limp on her bed, she peeled herself off her new white sheets. She slid down off the high old walnut bed with its new pillows and mattress cover and its new mattress and box springs. Once her bare feet landed on the equally bare walnut floorboards that she had polished and buffed until they glowed in the sunshine, she bounded to the windows--much taller than her own five feet four inches, their panes shining and cleaned, their borders rimmed in polished walnut--to check what was up. A road crew? Unlikely, given that Rose barely had the budget to keep its half dozen traffic lights changing colors.

Jody peeked outside and got a shock that panicked her.

"Ohmygod. Red! Get up! Get dressed! You've got to leave now!"

What she saw from two stories up was the unnerving sight of her three uncles parking their pickup trucks in front of her parents' house, when she hadn't even known that two of the uncles were in town. She still called it her parents' house even though Hugh-Jay and Laurie Jo Linder had been gone almost all of her life. It was still their home to their only child--the descendent of a famous, violent night twenty-three years earlier--and it was still their home to everybody else in Henderson County, which was named for Jody's great-great-grandfather on her father's mother's side of the family.

"What is this fearsome thing I see?" she whispered at the high windows, mimicking Shakespeare. Her master's degree in English literature was a happy achievement, which, upon attainment, she had automatically shaded with doubts that she could ever find a job for teaching it.

"Who is it, your other boyfriend?"

Red's tone was joking, with an insecure edge to it.

"I don't have another one. I don't even have one."

That was blunt enough to be mean, and she immediately regretted it.

"What am I?" Red asked quietly.

Convenient was the adjective that popped into Jody's head but which she didn't say aloud. He was that, along with being the only available male for miles around who wasn't a child or a grandfather. Or a relative. She glanced back at her current lover-not-boyfriend, at his wiry cowboy self sprawled across her sheets. Her fingers knew that his long frame was checkered and slashed with scars, bruises, odd bumps where bones had healed awkwardly, and fresh little wounds. Red wasn't the most careful of cowboys. He tended to get bucked, bounced, and "rode over," more than your average rodeo rider, and he wasn't even one of those anymore, he was just an ordinary ranch hand. Maybe that's why she liked him, she sometimes thought, because that's all and everything Red was--just a cowboy, with no pretense of anything else, or more. It was also true that other men's bodies--the bodies of accountants, for instance, or lawyers, not that she'd ever been with such and really knew--were boring to her compared to the interesting terrain of cowboy skin.

"Well?" he challenged her.

She gave him an exasperated look--because the question irritated her and she couldn't think of any answer that was true without also being hurtful. She turned her bare back on him, returning her attention to the disturbing view from her window, hiding her naked self behind the new white eyelet curtains. The hot breeze coming through the open window blew dangerously around her, threatening to expose her nakedness to the street and to any uncle who happened to look up.

Jody sucked in her upper lip and held it between her teeth.

Red had sucked on a breath mint after lunch at the Rose Cafe, right before slipping into her house, her bedroom, and her. She could still taste peppermint in her own mouth, along with a tangy hint of hot sauce and an even tangier taste of him. She could still feel his callused touch on her skin, too, a feeling so real she would have sworn his rough hands had followed her to the window. They were not sensations she wanted to have with her uncles arriving.

Excerpted from The Scent of Rain and Lightning by Nancy Pickard Copyright © 2010 by Nancy Pickard. Excerpted by permission of Ballantine Books, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.