The conversation had nothing to do with the baby that had brought them together—the only reason they were conversing at all. But Caroline couldn’t be rude to him. She stood, turned off all but one light and propped herself up on pillows at the head of her bed.

  “I’m sorry, I’m taking up your study time,” he said eventually, his voice low, husky…and curiously lacking in repentance. “Do you want to hang up?”

  “No.” Apparently she couldn’t lie to him. “I mean, unless you want to.” God, she sounded like an idiot. “What I mean to say,” she tried again, “is that I’m ahead with my homework and can spare the time if you have something we need to talk about.”

  There, was that impersonal enough? Because even though she hadn’t been able to stop herself from talking to him, to stop the pleasure that flooded through her when she saw his number on her screen, she wasn’t kidding about wanting nothing from him. There was too much at stake.

  He was silent for so long she started to worry that she’d offended him.

  “Have you ever thought about marrying again, Caroline?”

  Caroline’s chest tightened around her lungs. Her stomach tightened, too, squeezing so hard it hurt. Surely he wasn’t suggesting…

  She didn’t want to hang up—especially with him sitting all alone in a strange town late at night—but…

  “I look around me at all the people I’ve known who either are married or have been married and I tell you, I find very few who are examples of success. The people I’ve been dealing with this week sure aren’t. Each side’s primary goal was to see that the other side didn’t get what it wanted. Each side knew the other’s vulnerabilities and had no compunction about using that knowledge.”

  Ah, it was just general conversation. That she might be able to handle. She inhaled deeply.

  “I’ve seen some happy marriages,” she said. “Seems there’s at least one fiftieth anniversary celebration in Grainville every year. Of course, there were also painful divorces. Sometimes it’s inevitable, you know?” Damn, it felt good to express herself, to really take part in the conversation. “But a lot of times it just depends on how hard the people are willing to work. Happiness doesn’t seem to come easy.”

  “Were you and Randy happy?”

  “Yes.” To a point. She hadn’t been unhappy. And for most of their years together, neither had Randy.

  “So you think, if the circumstances were right, you’d consider doing it again sometime?”

  She thought about that. Really thought about it. “I don’t think so,” she said, feeling free to speak honestly because her answer meant nothing at all to him. Unlike Jesse, or her parents, or the women she knew in Grainville who couldn’t imagine her being happy without a husband.

  “I’ve spent most of my life feeling like I couldn’t be who I was because of my responsibilities to others…and the expectations they had of me. Now I have the freedom to be true to myself.”

  It was the second time since she’d known him that she’d talked about things she hadn’t previously discussed with anyone but Jesse. John was safe. He had no expectations of her, other than that she include him in his child’s life. She couldn’t disappoint him or be hurt by any lack of understanding on his part.

  “Don’t you think you might get lonely?”

  She didn’t have to think it. She felt it. Every day. “Yeah. But the question is, would it be lonelier living apart from yourself or living apart from other people?”

  He didn’t say anything and she tried to replay her words from his perspective.

  “I guess I sound pretty selfish, huh?” she muttered.

  “Not at all. In fact—” his voice was muffled, as though he was moving around “—I was just figuring that maybe you’d hit on something.”

  Jesse used to think she had a lot of insight. But then, he was a kid. Her kid. He also used to think she had the power to make the sun rise when he was having a bad night or to make thunderstorms go away so he could play ball.

  “Maybe the answer is to find someone with whom you can be yourself,” he went on.

  “Maybe.” Caroline freed her hair from the ponytail, thought about undressing and getting ready for bed. She didn’t want to consider the possibility he’d just raised. She couldn’t. She was afraid to hope. Afraid to open the door to more disappointment. She wasn’t sure she had the emotional capacity to sustain her if despair came knocking again.

  And she sure as hell didn’t want to think about having someone like John Strickland knocking at her door. Someone who was intelligent, who challenged her, someone who didn’t bore her to tears, someone who understood and seemed to appreciate her ideas, someone who was sexy as hell, someone whose voice—even on the phone—could raise those peculiar little knots of tension… Therein lay the biggest danger, the largest risk of foolhardy behavior. And that was a damn huge risk, considering that she was a woman experiencing the second unplanned pregnancy of her life.

  And, to complicate things further, she was pregnant by that very same man.

  The intelligent, interesting, sexy John Strickland himself.

  CHAPTER TEN

  “I’M TAKING A TRIP down to Tucson on Saturday afternoon to drop off some plans,” John was saying. She had no idea what she’d missed in between that and her last “maybe.” “It might be a good time for you to come along and get some maternity clothes.”

  Her nightgown was on the end of her bed, waiting for her, but even though she recognized that she was being ridiculous, she couldn’t take off her top, her bra, while he was on the phone.

  “I told you, I’m not having you buy me clothes.”

  “Have you bought any yet?”

  “No.” She was going to leave the button undone on her jeans. And wear blouses and sweaters to cover it.

  “I’ve been thinking about what you said, about the clothes being yours and personal. The truth is, if it weren’t for the baby, your clothes would continue to fit. It’s not really you we’d be clothing, but the baby who’s sharing your body. So I should pay for half of that.” He sounded pleased with this logical conclusion.

  “I have maternity clothes.” Of sorts. She’d opened the box that afternoon after being sick at school. The bout of retching in a public bathroom surrounded by made-up and fashionably clad young women wasn’t an experience she was eager to repeat.

  “And they’re what, seventeen years old?”

  Almost eighteen. Which had been evident in the dead elastic she’d discovered when she’d pulled on a couple of pairs of jeans. They’d made a crunching sound and had not sprung back to a less stretched state.

  “Maternity clothes don’t date as rapidly as other fashions.” As though any of her clothes had anything to do with fashion.

  “You were pregnant in Kentucky, not Arizona,” John said. The rustling had stopped on his end of the line. She wondered if he’d climbed into bed. Or if he’d already been there and what she’d been hearing was the movement of his sheets and bedspread. “You heard what the doctor said about the heat.”

  “I’m a Kentucky farm girl, John. I’ll make do.”

  “I’m not insisting on buying everything,” he said. “Although it goes against my better judgment, I’ll let you pay half.”

  He just didn’t get it. “I can’t afford to buy maternity clothes.”

  Silence fell and the knot in Caroline’s stomach started to dissipate. Maybe he was falling asleep. It was after midnight there, and he’d had an exhausting couple of days. If she waited just a few more minutes until he’d drifted off completely, she could quietly click off and—

  “I have a compromise for you.”

  “What?” She wouldn’t have taken the bait but he’d surprised her.

  “There’s an outlet mall on the way to Tucson. Pretty much all the merchandise there is half off. We’ll buy only what we find there and I’ll pay for it all. It’s the perfect solution. I’ll be spending the same amount and you can afford the rest.”

  Caroline chuckled out loud. He’d sounded so little-boy proud of his ingenuity she couldn’t help herself.

  “I wouldn’t have figured you for a man who knew his shopping malls,” she said, trying to come up with a reason to refuse his generous offer. A feat made harder by the fact that she desperately needed the clothes. At home on the farm, she could get away with looking like a hillbilly, but at Montford…

  “I broke my putter a few months back,” he said. “It was an older version, but I was pretty partial to it. There’s a golf outlet there that still had some in stock.”

  She’d never met a man so enamored of chasing a little white ball around a plot of grass. But she figured it was better than drinking.

  Not that his habits in either area had anything to do with her.

  As long he didn’t get drunk around her baby.

  “I have a tee time with Will and Matt Sheffield on Saturday morning,” John said. “How about I pick you up around two?”

  Caroline was too tired to fight him anymore.

  ONLY IN ARIZONA could a group of friends party around the pool on Valentine’s Day. In his swim trunks and white muscle shirt, John threw darts with Will, played a rousing tournament of water volleyball with Matt and Ben and David Marks, scoring three wins in a row against Zack, Sam, Will and the sheriff of Shelter Valley in the Richards’s solar-heated pool. Which was saying something, as Zack was the largest, most athletic one of the bunch.

  And all around them, beautiful women lounged in varying degrees of undress and filmy cover-ups—wives of the men who’d become his good friends. He knew most of the women well, having been included in their group for every holiday and most other social occasions over the past two years.

  “I’m going for another glass of wine. Can I get you anything?” Jennifer Mason stood from her seat beside John, her long tanned legs straight out of just about every fashion magazine known to women. None of which he’d read.

  Jennifer, the only unmarried woman in the bunch, was a friend of Beth Richards, visiting for a couple of weeks between photo shoots. She was a model. Divorced. And John’s date.

  “Please,” he said, smiling at her. “Another beer would be great, thanks.” She grinned and he watched her backside as she moved graciously through the crowd, chatting unselfconsciously as she went. She had to be, hands-down, the most physically beautiful woman he’d ever met.

  He was kind of sorry that he didn’t feel anything about that.

  “I’m worried about my old man.” Sam Montford, builder extraordinaire, spoke from across the room. “He’s not himself lately.” John had been trying to talk Sam into teaming up with him in a business partnership. He hadn’t been successful yet, but he suspected eventually he would be.

  “We’re annexed almost all the way out to Wal-Mart.” Becca Parsons was sitting a little closer to John, speaking to Ben Sanders, who was graduating from Montford with a degree in business. Ben, the curly-headed Montford heir, was already running the office side of things for his cousin Sam. “If we grow much more, we’re going to lose the small-town feel we all value so much.”

  “Billy went to the potty all by himself today,” Randi Foster, Montford’s athletic director, said to Ben’s wife, Tory.

  “No kidding!” Tory smiled. “That’s early. Chrissie was almost three.”

  John quickly looked away when he realized how avidly he’d tuned in to that particular conversation.

  Jennifer returned, and the conversation rolled on around him. Sitting there, in a circle with his closest friends, John told himself it was the best Valentine’s he’d had in years. And he figured that, with this beer, he just might believe it.

  It had to happen with this beer. Two was his new limit.

  “I’m surprised Ellen and Aaron preferred watching our whole pack of kids over going to dinner in Phoenix,” Beth Richards said. She was sitting with Martha and David Marks, who’d offered the newlyweds an all-expenses-paid dinner to a restaurant of their choice.

  “Shelly’s helping them,” David said, referring to Martha’s second-oldest daughter, a seventeen-year-old who was in the process of pulling her life back together after making some unfortunate choices during her junior year of high school.

  “Ellen isn’t eager to leave town just now,” Martha added, giving a toss to hair that was already short and sassy-looking.

  John thought back to the few dates he’d had with Martha when he’d first come to town. Older by three or four years, she’d never looked her age to him. He’d suspected a time or two that if circumstances had been different for either of them, they might have ended up together.

  Instead, the new preacher got lucky.

  “Besides, our kids are great!” Bonnie Nielson, keeper of the town’s children, piped up. “Ellen, Aaron and Shelley are probably having fun.”

  “This is the first time Tory’s left the baby with anyone,” said Keith, her husband and a colleague of Martha’s and Matt’s.

  I’m going to be like that. The thought came out of nowhere. Yet it rang true. No matter how hard he was taking this baby thing, how resistant he was to the whole idea, once that kid was born, he was going to watch it like a hawk.

  Poor kid.

  Paper plates full of food were passed around, with plastic tableware rolled up in napkins. Balancing his plate, John grabbed Jennifer’s wineglass and held it while she settled her food in her lap.

  “Phyl’s been having some trouble with her ex,” Matt Sheffield told Greg Richards as their host finally left the grill and joined their circle. It had grown quiet as they’d all begun eating the delicious ribs and potatoes and corn, prepared on Greg’s built-in outdoor grill.

  Greg took a seat next to his wife. John wondered if anyone else had noticed the way the back of the sheriff’s hand brushed Beth’s shoulder as he passed. Or the way his leg was pressing against hers where they sat.

  “Anything I need to be aware of?” Greg was asking Matt.

  “No,” Phyllis said, shaking her head with total confidence. She was one of Caroline’s teachers. He wondered what the professor thought of her.

  “Maybe,” Matt said. With his considerable bulk and black hair and eyes, he looked almost as intimidating as the sheriff. “The guy’s definitely unstable. And apparently he’s just declared bankruptcy.”

  “What’s he want from Phyllis?”

  “A quarter of a million dollars.”

  All eating stopped. Everyone stared at Phyllis, and then six conversations broke out at once.

  “I’m sorry about this,” John said quietly to Jennifer. “Must be hard not knowing any of the people we’re talking about.”

  “Actually I’m enjoying myself.” Her smile was generous. And genuine. “I spend so much time on the road, it’s great to be a part of small-town family life—even if only vicariously.”

  His attention strayed to the cleavage showing from her brightly flowered tankini top. A man could lose himself in cleavage like that. If he gave enough of a damn to try.

  “Be careful,” he teased. “That’s how I used to feel when I visited Will, and look where I ended up.”

  “I could do a lot worse than living in Shelter Valley….”

  So she might be around in the future. Something to think about.

  Dessert appeared. Blue-and-pink cupcakes. Unusual fare.

  “We have an announcement to make,” Greg said, as the plate was passed around. With a lingering look at his wife, he took her hand and glanced around the circle. “Beth and I are going to have a baby.”

  John’s congratulations were genuine, if perhaps lost among the whoops and hollers of their friends. Jennifer was smiling as though she’d known all along, but still got up to hug Beth, whom she’d known since college. Greg and Beth had both come through a lot and had continued to press forward, having faith that happiness was possible.

  Just like someone else he knew.

  As baby advice started to rain down, John quickly finished his beer. Said his goodbyes, avoiding the disappointment in Jennifer’s eyes, and left.

  The leather seat in his Cadillac was comfortable, familiar. The car seemed to be the only thing that hadn’t spun out of control in John’s world. He just needed some sleep. He’d feel better in the morning. Experience had taught him that.

  So John didn’t understand why his car was parked outside Caroline Prater’s boardinghouse. Or why he was looking at the light in the window of her room, wondering if she was up there studying on this night made for lovers. Other than messages he’d left on her cell phone, at times specifically chosen to insure she’d be in class and not answering her phone, he hadn’t spoken to her since he’d called from Minneapolis almost three weeks before.

  He’d invited her to shop for clothes, told her what time he’d be by to get her and then failed to show up. Because, just hours before he was due to pick her up that Saturday, he’d thought about Caroline in a way he’d only ever thought of Meredith. He’d frozen. Known he had to avoid her at all costs.

  Throwing the car into park at the curb, John sat back in his now-dry trunks and tank top, staring up at that window. There were so many reasons he didn’t need to speak to her. So many reasons he shouldn’t.

  Any kind of relationship was just too dangerous. They were already facing far too much built-in intimacy for either of them to be comfortable introducing any more.

  He’d been a jerk.

  And he was angry with her, too.

  CAROLINE WAS IN HER ROOM, preparing for a section exam in algebra Valentine’s night, when a knock sounded on her door. Jumping, surprised at the interruption, she rose slowly. She’d been in the house over a month and had hardly seen the other two tenants, smiling at them while passing in the hall. They’d both chosen the room-only option and either had something on a hot plate in their rooms or ate out, so she never saw them for meals. Since neither of their cars had been in the parking area today, Caroline had assumed they were out.

  And Mrs. Howard rarely climbed the stairs, except when she did her weekly cleaning.