EXCERPT (from Chapter One)

"Ow, dammit!" For one lengthy, inarticulate minute, Hank Oliver wondered if he might be hallucinating. As was his habit, left over from a scholarly life lived with great deliberation, he gathered evidence before committing himself to any one belief.

His thumb throbbed from accidentally striking it with the claw hammer he'd been using to drive the last few nails into the corral fence. There were black-and-yellow California plates on the old pickup and horse trailer pulling to a halt out back of his cabin. It appeared startlingly out of place, like one perfectly assembled establishing shot from a period movie. Hank stood at the edge of the handmade corral, listening to the drone of the old truck's steady engine. To his left stood the small, newly roofed cabin, and above, the blue-black Arizona sky was rapidly changing into night. On this remote stretch of country road there were no other houses, no porch lamps or streetlights, nothing to illuminate Chloe Morgan's expression and deliver him a clue as to what she was feeling. All he'd managed was her brief profile in the headlights, her face pale and startled, her eyes as fixed as a jackrabbit's.

Three tries and he finally managed to hang the hammer on the fence rail and to begin to believe she was here, that Chloe had indeed, as he'd so often wished, come to him from California. She opened her driver's-side door and the white shepherd dog leaped over her and out of the cab, running off to mark her territory in the scrub. Chloe slid out of the truck right after Hannah, but instead of coming to him directly, which was typical of her horsewoman's style, she hung back in the glow of the headlights. Turning her body sideways, she placed her right hand flush against her ribcage, just below her breasts.

Did she have heartburn from eating junk food while crossing the desert?

It wasn't until she turned her head and gave him a tentative smile that he recognized the posture for what it revealed. From the Mona Lisa on down to women he held the door for in the supermarket aisles, he understood: Chloe was pregnant. And considering their history together, that meant he, Hank Oliver, was pregnant too.