Cowboy

On a whim, while working on the television series Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman, Sara Davidson flies to Elko, Nevada, for a cowboy poetry festival. She has a chance meeting with an attractive, green-eyed cowboy from Arizona who makes bridles out of rawhide. At first she dismisses him as a jerk, an "insolent yokel," but months later, feeling at loose ends, she calls and invites him to visit for a weekenda weekend that alters the course of both their lives.

Having a fling with a cowboy is a common female fantasy, but for Sara and Zack the sexual fling deepens and intensifies. They try to resist it because they seem completely wrong for each other's and don't fit into each other's lives. Sara writes books and television shows, studied at Berkley and Columbia and lives in a suburb with her two young children. Zack barely finished high school, doesn't read the newspaper and lives in a trailer in the desert. Yet after several weeks apart, they're compelled to see each other again.

Sara's children are charmed at first by the visiting cowboy, but when they realize he's going to stay around, they react with anger and vulnerability. Sara's friends and colleagues are skeptical, and she's forced to adjust her own ideas about who's a suitable partner.

"The affair has endured," she writes, "and it has taught me things I did not know about love, the body and the heart, the way we link ourselves to people who may not be politically or socially or in any way correct."

Sara faces a classic struggle between the mind and the heart, the worldly and the timeless, and between one's loyalty and devotion to children and one's physical needs as a woman. She understands she must find a way to yoke these conflicting needs or be grateful for the romantic interlude and walk ahead on her own.