Here's another update of this FF story. Thanks for reading and the feedback!

C.J. stared at the computer at work, reading the latest email from Matt who of course had settled down to living his life in L.A. He had recovered from his injuries and had started his own company in the city of dreams, miles away from Wild Fork.

Christina of course had joined him and had proven to be as successful a model as she had been in Europe. And from his emails, it seemed like the two of them had picked up where they had left off when they had been together in college. C.J. was happy for them, well mostly for Matt because she had never been all that keen on Christina. The young woman had been chilly to her when they had first met when she had been worn on Matt's arm at a social event during a rare visit to the ranch. Christina didn't bode much for the more rural lifestyle so far away from her jet setting life in metropolises all over the globe. She had stayed indoors while Matt worked the ranch with his father's hands, preparing it for market because she didn't want the sun to prematurely age her skin. So while C.J. and Matt had been out working in the blazing sun, she had spent most of the time on the computer or on her cell phone talking to her agent.

But when Matt and C.J. rode back to the barnyard after a long day out mending fence or rounding up yearlings, Lamar would tell Matt that his girlfriend awaited him inside the ranch house. C.J. just rolled her eyes but smiled at Matt telling him to run on along so his girlfriend wouldn't feel neglected.

And Matt was pretty skilled at getting back on the right side of his women. C.J. knew that from experience. Working alongside him on the ranch after they both returned for a spell had been so damned difficult because the memories of him which she had tucked away had slipped out when she hadn't been looking. Images of him kissing her while unbuttoning her shirt, to slip his hands to stroke her warm flesh. She would blink her eyes and that vision would ebb while her heart stopped racing and she centered herself back in her gritty surroundings of being covered with dust and manure at times while the woman who met Matt smelled of lilacs and roses, with nary a hair out of place.

C.J. would just hit the shower and make sure it was a cold one during those days.

Christina and Matt had returned soon enough to L.A. and his company had grown quickly and she had started appearing on the covers of major women's magazines. C.J. saw them on the racks at the local stores when they finally reached their corner of the state; the woman was truly beautiful and exuded grace and style.

C.J. worked for Jack having returned there after law school and deciding to stay after settling her uncle's estate. She needed experience in criminal law and this seemed a good way to start building on her internship spent with the great F. Lee Bailey. Now that she had a degree, she did more legal research and crafted more briefs for evidentiary motions while studying for the state bar so she could appear in court.

Jack still spent most of the time in his office at the county seat and farmed out the work to a couple of senior prosecutors who worked several days a week. When Jack appeared at the office, he spent most of the time working behind closed doors except when leaving with a young woman who if the trailing whispers were right, was his latest mistress. His father had been one of the greatest district attorneys that the county had ever seen and the younger Jack slipped easily enough in his father's footsteps helped by the same cabal that helped define his father's success.

C.J. worked so hard she never had much time for a social life. She and Alexis would often meet up just like they used to do before she went to law school at the diner. Alexis hoped that her aunt would help her start her own beauty salon in Abilene so that she could leave Wild Fork. She had shaken her head at C.J. just returning to town after having made it all the way to the East Coast. Okay maybe she had to return to settle her uncle's affairs as she was the only family he had left but she could have just left town again after that had been done.

Alexis had a point. Matt had been pestering her to come out to L.A. to work as legal counsel for his company. She had begged him off not being sure why she did except that once he'd healed from his injuries; she just felt it was time for him to build his own life. And she needed to find her own way.

She closed the door of the office where she worked and didn't see him approach her.

"You're keeping awfully late hours," he said, "Are you alone or were you in there with Jack?"

She didn't need to turn around to see that the voice belonged to Dylan who had obviously been drinking probably at the Wrangler before Ron kicked him out for the night.

"Excuse me."

He didn't step aside so she could walk past him to her car but instead blocked her path. She smelled whisky on his breath.

"What if I want to talk to you," he asked.

"Then come back tomorrow morning and bring your case number."

She readjusted the files that she carried and tried to move forward but he wouldn't let her pass.

"Why don't we go get a drink," he suggested.

"Why don't you go back home to Nadine?"

Just mentioning his wife's name made him curl his upper lip in a sneer.

"She's at her sister's in Abilene," he said, stroking her arm with his hand, "We'd have the place to ourselves."

She gritted her teeth and maneuvered away from him and his hand.

"I'm not going anywhere with you," she said, "You need to go home and sleep it off."

He chuckled.

"Oh you think you're so smart giving me orders," he said, "I bet you think that Jack hired you for your smarts and that fancy degree but he didn't. He just knows a great piece of tail when he sees it."

She stood there just looking at him.

"That might be Dylan," she said, "Or not. But I'm here to do a job that I was hired to do for the county, not just for him."

"He runs the county, that branch of it anyway," Dylan said, "Of course even now Daddy's still pulling some strings."

C.J. had heard the stories about the political cabal that ran Wild Fork and welded control over everything within its boundaries with an iron fist. Seriously she hadn't put much stock in them because she had grown up in this patch of dirt most of her life and she didn't get what about it was so valuable that people would fight over who got to control it.

Unless it was the thrill of the power and status of ruling even a small plot of insignificant land that had people so wrapped up in engaging in power plays. She knew that Matt's own father had been one of the main political forces from behind the scenes even though he traveled a lot on business. She didn't know him very well but he seemed to be a very fair employer who paid good wages and took care of those who worked for him. Not like some of the other ranchers in this area who kept their seasonal ranch hands living in substandard shacks with no plumbing and paid them not much more than minimal wages.

But she knew his father didn't engage in any unethical behavior. As for the others, she could only guess because after all, she'd been in Boston most of the past three years which had been a whole different culture than the one that raised her. Even more so than Berkley.

"Get out of my way Dylan and go home," she said, using her body to get past him.

He grabbed her arm and jerked her to look at him. She felt the anger surge through her more than she felt any fear.

"Let go of me."

He sneered.

"What are you going to do," he said, "Why are you acting like an ice queen these days? You think you're too good for all of us here?"

"Only some of you."

That angered him, she knew but she had grown tired of the attitude coming her way because she had spent part of her life away from this place.

"Oh now you're being smart…I ought to…"

"Do what," she challenged, "You need to go back and crawl under whatever rock you crawled out of Dylan."

She pushed past him, nearly knocking off his feet and continued on towards her truck. He just stood there for a moment watching her, his anger dissipating soon enough because he was pretty drunk. She stuck the key in the ignition and started the car, heading on home.

Matt sat on the couch reading the Wall Street Journal while Christina talked shop to her agent on the phone. He had booked her on a modeling assignment in Miami which would include her posing with two other models on the cover of Cosmo. Only one of the top magazines for women in the country, she had told him when she first got the officer. But her agent was haggling over her payment and whether or not she would be used more prominently than the other two models. Christina's career had soared in the past few months and she had been high demand. This meant she left town a lot but then so did he having started to make business trips to build contacts for his fledgling enterprise.

"So are you going to take the job," he asked her when she returned to the sofa.

"Maybe," she said, "Juan wants to get another percentage out of the publisher," she said, "He's never satisfied unless he gets the last word."

"With you or with them?"

"Either, it doesn't matter to him. More money in the bank." she said, sitting beside him.

Matt looked over at her.

"Do you like modeling," he said, "because it doesn't seem to make you happy these days."

She sighed, running her hand through her hair.

"Oh Rooster, I don't mean to be acting this way when I'm home," she said, "I really like parts of it, the showmanship and the excitement of modeling for a new designer. It's just the business side of it that gets to me."

"That's why you hired Juan to handle that."

She nodded.

"But he cares about the bottom line than he does the product," she said, "and that's not the creative side of it."

"Then why don't you cut back on your jobs and find out what it is that you really want to do," he said, "because it doesn't sound like modeling is it."

She looked at him, exasperation showing in her eyes.

"Matt, I love modeling, really I do," she said, "I just need to shift my focus, less magazine covers, more runways."

Matt sipped his coffee.

"Then tell your agent that."

She hedged.

"Maybe after I finish my current commitments which will be in about six months…"

Matt heard the rushed nature of her voice as she picked up her coffee mug and walked back to their kitchen. He knew she had a plane to catch in three hours to head off to Seattle for a photo session at some of the tourist spots. She had packed her traveling case last night while he had finished up the specs on his new project; the one that he hoped would send his company in an exciting new direction. They often both worked late into the nights when they didn't go out although they had been meaning to spend more time with each other. But somehow their divergent career paths tugged them apart from each other that not even intentions could bridge that gap.

Matt knew that he loved Christina but didn't know whether he was truly in love with her. Not the way that he had been when both attended Rice University. And what had happened between them while he had been serving in the military had been moments in time when their lives had collided with each other. They grabbed a few moments together and then they moved apart again. It hadn't seemed as if that part of their relationship had changed very much since he was discharged and she had reunited with him back in California.

And then there had been the one major bone of contention between them which of course had been C.J. Matt had been trying to talk her into leaving her prosecutor job in Wild Fork and heading west to come and work with him in his company. He needed good legal counsel and he knew he'd love working together with her to make his business a success. But she had proven to be stubborn and had decided to continue to work for Jack. Matt hadn't given up but he would give her some space and let her come to her senses. It just wasn't happening quickly enough.

But Christina looked at C.J. as a woman who stood as her greatest competition to Matt's heart. Even though that couldn't be further from the truth, Matt told himself because his relationship with his lifelong friend was much different than Christina believed. Yes, he and C.J. had crossed that line once during the weekend they spent together at the cabin by the lake but that had been a memorable slice of time in both of their lives to be tucked away while they both moved ahead with their lives. Not that flashes of how she had looked when she had offered herself to him and the scent of her shampoo and the taste of her sun kissed skin had never left him. But that had been in the past and in the present, he shared his life with Christina in L.A. while C.J. remained back in Texas.

"Matt, I'd better get ready to go to the airport," she said, heading to take a shower.

He continued reading the newspaper.

C.J. got back to the place she rented and flipped on the light. Feeling famished, she had gone into the kitchen to make a late dinner before heading for bed. She prepared to microwave some pizza slices that she had ordered takeout from the new pizza spot and poured herself some iced tea.

The phone rang and she picked it up while her pizza heated up.

"Hello, this is C.J.," she said.

Only silence met her as she waited for the person on the other end of the line to say something. She walked over to get her pizza and some napkins before heading back to the living room.

"Who is this," she asked.

No one spoke and she heard no background noise to provide any clue to her caller's identity. Finally the phone clicked off and she received a dial tone. Wrong number perhaps, she said, hanging it up and heading into the living room. The wind had picked up a bit when she had been driving home and she felt it rustling against the branches of the trees in front of her place. Her run in with Dylan had unnerved her though she would never admit it to anyone. When she had hooked up with him, she had been naïve and had really believed that he felt the same way about her as she had about him. It hadn't been love or some great romance but she thought he had cared about her. She sighed and realized that she really had no desire to come into contact with him but since both of them lived in the same small town, avoiding him would be impossible. And with Nadine out of town, he would be more likely to get himself into some mischief. He attracted women, she couldn't understand why but they did flock around him and she guessed that he cheated on his wife. Not that this was any of her business, she just wanted him to stay away from her.

The phone rang again and she shook her head, thinking it wasn't going to be a quiet night. She picked it up and this time the caller readily identified herself.

"Where is he," Nadine said, sounding drunk.

Clearly she meant her no good husband Dylan who had been carousing all night. Had he returned home as she told him to do? She had no way of knowing but if Nadine had called her looking for him, either he had passed out cold when he reached his house or he hadn't come home at all.

"I know he's with you," Nadine said, "You just tell that worthless bum that I'm on to him."

C.J. sighed, not thrilled about having to be caught in the middle of their latest fight. If Nadine had a bone to pick with Dylan's wandering eye, she needed to talk to one of his mistresses and not C.J.

"He's not with me Nadine," she said, "I don't want anything to do with him."

"You lying whore," the other woman said, "I've heard you've been in his pants more than once."

C.J. ceased to be shocked at the rumors that swirled around town about her, whether it was speculation about why she had really left Wild Fork and even more about why she had returned. Not to mention that she was screwing around with half a dozen husbands of women in town. No one hearing these lurid tales ever stopped to think about just how ridiculous they sounded. For one thing, C.J. was just too damn busy working for Jack to even have one lover let alone half a dozen.

"Nadine, you're as drunk as your husband was when I saw him tonight," C.J. said, "I advised him to get his hands off of me and go back home."

"You tramp," Nadine said, "sinking your hooks into my man when I'm not even here."

"Nadine I'm hanging up now," C.J. said, "Don't call back."

C.J. hung up not waiting to listen to Nadine's response. Hopefully, the woman would sleep it off and deal with her own husband when she got back to town. She finished her pizza and headed off to bed where sleep quickly caught her and so did her dreams.

Matt woke up from his dreams, in a sweat. He sat up in his empty bed and tried to think. He had been dreaming about a woman and it hadn't been Christina. It had been all about C.J. and what they had shared together, as if she had just slipped away from him moments ago. He hadn't been thinking of her when he had drifted off to sleep, he had been working through some issues with a particular project in his head as the shadows danced inside the bedroom and he listened to the steady hum of the air conditioner.

He hadn't dreamed about C.J. in months not since he had just gotten back with Christina from the time they had spent in Wild Fork to prepare the ranch where he had grown up for sale. Guilt filled him as he remembered that he had never told Christina about what had happened the day that she had decided to fly back early to meet with the organizer of a perfume advertising campaign that she had signed up to serve as its spokes model in a series of television spots.

The night they had been apart.