July passes and then it's bare-knuckled November. Up close to the Canadian border, winter comes in fast and sudden and burns out my crop with frost and snow. That's when the tourists come flooding in. Most of my nearest neighbors have given up farming to turn their historic ranch homes into B&Bs. I'm one of the last.

November is about the time my Katherine stopped riding along the road. It's long since she's started wearing her top again. Her bare chest is the ghost of a memory by mid-December, but I can sometimes still resurrect it when I'm alone in a hot shower.

In November, Kat switches to riding the trails or along the property line. She says the salted roads aren't good for Light's feet. I'm sure she's right, but I don't like losing sight of her anymore. Not since she started playing with Joshua.

I think about how I found them together often. It both disgusts and excites me to think of her with a man -- with another man. A man who isn't me.

I can see them together during those moments in the shower. Katherine's back arched in a perfect bridge from his pelvis to his chin. The way her breasts shook under his hands.

I didn't fire Joshua. I didn't say anything. Kat knows better than to tell me about him, but sometimes I wish that she would. I'd like him to eat at my table, thinking I know nothing about their exploits. He'd tell me how he doesn't want anything improper -- I'd make him tell me that. He'd tell me he aims to marry her. But I'd know all along where they've been. I know what they look like together.

I could lie awake at night knowing he's snuck in through her bedroom window, listening carefully for the gentle squeaking of her boxspring.

It's beautiful because my daughter is beautiful.

Joshua will be back in the spring. But since harvest ended, Katherine has been different. Well, the same as she used to be. She goes out riding once a day, but she always comes right home. Stays for dinner every night. Never goes out. I could almost believe she hasn't seen him since that day. I could almost believe she was wholly mine.

Since that day, I've stopped reminding myself that she's my daughter. I am in love with her physically and emotionally.

At night, I build a fire against the cold. I like the work of maintaining a wood stove for heat over the simplicity of a thermostat. Most winters, I take down a tree. I split the logs myself and build a pile against the back of the house.

I like it more now that Kat is home again.

She comes out to stand by the fire until the whole house is warm. She stands back there far too long, stripping off layer after layer until sometimes it's just her bra left and I can practically trace the triangle of freckles that is the only ornament on her pale back. Then she'll sit with me. And we'll talk. And she'll pull a blanket around herself and lean her head on my shoulder.

This happened last night after my wife, Agatha, had gone to bed. Kat came out of her room, trailing a maroon blanket her mother had knitted for her and sat down on the couch with me, her head falling to my shoulder.

I had been reading the paper, blissfully forgetting the guilty lust I had for her.

I could tell there was something wrong. No sooner had my wife's door closed than my daughter's door opened.

"Nothing," she said when I asked. "Boy trouble. It's nothing."

This was the most we'd ever spoken about her love life. The closest we'd come to talking about sex since her mother and I explained it all to her. The closest she'd come to telling me about Joshua. And I left it at that, afraid that I would allow the conversation to spiral down to what was beginning to happen in my pants.

I was hard again. I put the newspaper down and put my arm around her. I kissed her soft forehead, pausing on the locks of her hair.

I wanted to kiss her again. I thought about kissing her on the cheek, but knew better. So I just held her there like her father would, wanting so much more. She fell asleep on my shoulder and I wouldn't wake her.

Once, during the night, I woke up and the blanket had parted around her chest. I could see through her cleavage nearly to her stomach below. She was wearing a low tank top. Her left breast was right there. I could see myself pulling my daughter's shirt down and putting her in my mouth. I could feel my hard-on pressing against her side.

But I held myself back, held her tighter, and fell back asleep.

We slept together for most of the night until finally, she woke up and told me to go to bed. She got up and I watched her go. I finished the night n the couch, afraid to return to my wife after feeling the way I did all night.

There's a storm coming on Friday. A blizzard for the ages, they keep saying. Thirty-six inches of snow. If it hits us like they say it will, it will cripple the whole county. So I've been splitting more wood and stacking it in the mudroom. I expect to be buried inside for a few days at least.

We're not going to be able to keep the whole house warm, so Agatha and I are going to move our mattress into the living room in front of the fire for the three of us. We have centuries of family quilts to keep us all warm.

On Monday, Katherine beat me to the shower. She dodged naked across the hallway with her towel dangling from her finger and winked at me standing there with my own towel around my waist.

"Sorry, Daddy," she said as she went by.

I only caught a glimpse of her. That small round butt. Her breasts. But it was enough to freeze the image in my mind for the rest of the morning.

I joked about getting in with her through the door, shaking a mock-angry fist. Then I let my hand fall on the door, felt the grain of the wood that kept our naked bodies apart. My towel fell to the floor, pushed open by my hard-on.

I heard Agatha moving around in our bedroom and stopped. I picked up the towel and went back to bed, watching my wife dress.

"Happy to see me?" she said.

"Always," I said, tossing the towel away.

Two days later, the governor declared a state of emergency. The roads were locked down. The grocery stores were totally bare. We were moving our mattress into the living room, piling it high with quilts and blankets, and stoking the fire. I had it running hot. The coals were orange. When we opened the doors, the sound of the air rushing through the pipe chimney was louder than the radio.

By noon, the room was heated to seventy-five degrees and we had to open up the doors to the hallway. The clouds were pregnant over the ridge.

The wind was rushing by the house at fifty-five miles an hour. By four o'clock, fat white flakes were spilling past the window. Inside, we might have been at my sister's house in Florida.

My Katherine had stripped down to her bra by six. I watched from beside the fire, defending it like a mother eagle protects her nest, while she lounged in jeans and a tight black bra on the wicker couch, reading a book about the secret language of horses. The small black beauty mark beside her belly button rose and fell.

By eight o'clock, the wind had died down to a chilling gust and the snow fell lightly on the roof. Kat kept looking out the window, leaping into my armchair on her knees to part the curtains and check the accumulation. Her ass filled out her jeans. I stood behind her and my fingers twitched.

"It's only like an inch so far, Daddy," she said.

"The most is meant to come over night," I said, retreating to my spot beside the fire.

While the snow barely trickled passed, the temperature stayed down. Well below freezing. You could feel the cold leaking through the walls at the edges of the room. But by the blazing fire, it was still unbearably hot.

My wife changed into a ratty old tee shirt and a pair of my old gym shorts. She looked so much like my daughter, but with the two of them sitting beside one another on the couch -- one half dressed, the other dressed in my clothes -- Agatha seemed pale and dull. My Katherine is a golden woman. A creature of wild comfort in herself. I love her confidence, her boldness. I love the valley between her neck and her shoulders, the slim descent of her belly to her waist and the expanse of her ass.

I love my daughter.

The three of us sat in bed and finished a bottle of wine together before bed. Katherine's face grew pink. I think she thought that's why I was staring at her.

She giggled and covered her cheeks with her hands, leaving pale imprints on her skin. Her shoulders came together when she did this and her bra slacked to reveal a deep cleft between her breasts.

"Oh my god," she said often.

My wife fell asleep first. He hand slackened on the stem of the wine glass and she was out, slumped facing the wall on the outside of our mattress. I took her wine glass and finished it, watching my Kat as she told me stories of her friends in college.

"What?" she said when I smiled at her.

I started to speak but my mouth was dry. I took a sip of wine. I wanted to tell her how I felt about her. But that was the wine's idea. I thought about telling her how beautiful she looked, but that was also too revealing.

"You look so much like your mother did when we met," I said.

It was true, but I wanted her to understand so much more.

When she and I were ready to get into bed around ten, the bottle of wine rolled away into the kitchen. Kat looked out the window one last time and reported three inches on the ground. She worried about Light. We'd sent him south to be boarded for the winter. Maybe the brunt of the storm had gone down that way. I knew she hated when he was far away.

All the while I had been loading up the fire. Our mountain of wood had dwindled to a still sizable pile, but opening the door to the furnace loosed a blast of red heat from the coals.

It was clear that we wouldn't be getting the snow they had warned us about. I could relax a bit. I may have let the fire burn too hot. My wife was shrugging off blankets in her sleep and I found myself sweating out of the light jacket I was planning to wear to bed.

Katherine took off her jeans. She turned her back to pile her clothes together on the couch. I was watching her from my position next to my wife. Kat was wearing matching black undies. My eyes hung on the thin line that parted her ass. I convinced myself for a moment that this was all for my benefit. Why was she undressing? The heat wasn't unbearable. But no, she had always been a warm person. That was all it was.

Then, Katherine kissed me lightly on the cheek and rolled up into me on the mattress. I laid myself between her and my wife. We were pressed together, the two of them in a row. My wife clutched my shoulders, making me her little spoon. Kat was before me, her back and ass expanding out in front of me.

She burrowed into the blankets, incidentally rubbing her ass into my crotch. I could feel my penis swelling, I let my arm drape across her body and felt the bare curves of her stomach and hip. The tips of my fingers with inhes from her breasts.

"Goodnight, Daddy," she said.

"Goodnight, baby girl," I said, kissing her bare shoulder. "I love you."