She sipped orange juice on autopilot while her analytical mind chewed on that anomaly. She knew it couldn’t just be his kind eyes and sleepy little-boy smile; she’d never been vulnerable to that sort of thing, and in fact usually found extremely handsome men to be pretty much of a turnoff. More likely, she thought, it had something to do with him being way too young for her, and therefore no threat to her sexually-rather like a lioness’s tolerance of the immature males in her pride. That, combined with her own vulnerability in her present condition, and the uniqueness of the circumstances.

Yes, she thought, satisfied with her conclusions. That would explain it.

It did cross her mind that she just might have come up against a man with a will equal to her own, but she rejected that idea. As far as Mirabella was concerned, such a man did not exist.

How does she do it? Jimmy Joe wondered, gazing at her as she drank and then licked the juice glaze from her lips. How can she look so doggone beautiful after the night she had?

He’d sat and watched her long after she’d fallen asleep literally under his hands, finally free to marvel all he wanted to at the old-Burgundy shine of her hair, the delicacy of her bones, the way her skin seemed to glow from inside like his mama’s good china when you held it up to the light. Free to touch, with a mettlesome finger and breathing temporarily forgotten, one strand of hair that lay along the curve of her jaw and pooled in the hollow of her neck, and daringly lift and stroke it behind the fragile sculpture of her ear.

She’d stirred, then, so that his fingers had brushed against her warm cheek and intersected the flow of her breath as it sighed from between her barely parted lips, and he’d been shocked by the stirring of response in his own body.

He’d squelched it immediately. It had seemed wrong to him; a violation not only of her trust in him, but of some indefinable quality-he wasn’t sure what it was-something about the way she looked with one childlike hand pillowing her cheek and the other resting with maternal protectiveness on the side of her swollen belly. Innocence? How could that be? Or…purity? And yet, he thought he’d never in his life seen anyone so overwhelmingly, breathtakingly female.

Which was confusing, because while part of him had been ashamed of his body’s jolting acknowledgment of that femininity, something else in him had found it downright exhilarating.

He’d pulled the comforter over her and left her then, but hadn’t gone back to the truck-stop café, although he knew he would have been more comfortable there. Instead, unable to bring himself to leave her, he’d turned off the light in the sleeper and drawn the curtain and settled into the passenger-side seat with a book and a pillow. He’d made pretty good headway in the new Tony Hillerman mystery he’d picked up in L.A., even dozed some off and on before full daylight and the comings and goings of his neighbors had roused him.

On a quick trip into the truck stop for a cup of coffee and to use the John he’d heard rumblings about the road opening up, so he’d made the coffee to go, picked up the bottle of orange juice for Mirabella and hurried back to his truck to see what he could find out from the CB. He’d expected she would wake up, with all the noise from the radio and slamming doors and all, but she hadn’t, and he’d listened for a good half hour before he was convinced the news coming out of Tucumcari was more than just wishful rumors, and he knew it was time he was going have to wake her. Wake her, say goodbye and send her on her way.

Now, sitting beside her, watching her drink the juice he’d brought, he felt the same protective feelings welling up inside him that had kept him watching over her all night. Last night those feelings had made a certain sense to him-enough so that he hadn’t thought to question them, anyway. This morning, though, they were doggone confusing.

“No more,” she said, shoving the juice bottle blindly in his direction. “I really have to go-now.” Her eyes had lost their unfocused, waking-up look and now held a bright glaze of distress.

“Okay, easy now, I’m gonna get you there,” he said soothingly, reaching past her to set the bottle on the recessed shelf at the head of the bed. “What’d you do with your shoes?”

“I don’t know. I kicked them off, I think.”

He found them in the folds of the comforter and knelt to help her into them, noticing that they went on easily enough. He remembered that swollen feet at this stage of the game were not a good thing, so that eased his mind in one small way.

“There you go,” he grunted as he got to his feet. “What else d’you need? Your pocketbook?” She was already wrestling with the sleeves of her coat. He helped her with that, found her purse and hooked the strap over his shoulder, then bent to get an arm around her and hoist her to her feet.

“It’s okay, I can make it,” she protested. “You don’t have to help me.” To Jimmy Joe her breathlessness sounded not so much cranky as desperate. Hearing it, he did as she asked and let go of her, and after hovering anxiously for a moment, went to open the door for her instead.

“I heard the CB,” she said as she eased herself between the seats, moving like a rig backing into a loading bay. “Did I hear right? Did they say the road’s going to be…opening soon?”

She’d paused, apparently to catch her breath, so he pulled the door closed again to save the heat. “That’s what they’re sayin’ ’Bout noon, looks like.”

“What time is it now?”

“Goin’ on eleven. Plenty a’ time, if you want to wash up…have some breakfast.” He pushed the door open, stepped onto the running board and held out his hand to help her down.

But she’d spotted his pillow and paperback on the seat; he could see her looking at them with that little pleat of frown wrinkles between her eyes as she squeezed by. She transferred the frown to him as she took the hand he’d offered and asked, not with gentle concern but in a sharp, accusing tone, “Did you get any sleep?”

Jimmy Joe couldn’t help but grin, she sounded so much like his mama. “I dozed some,” he said, easing her down to the ground. “Mostly I just read.” Then he had to laugh; the way she glared at him, you would have thought he’d confessed to spending the night in a honky-tonk bar. “It’s okay. Hey, I like to read.”

“You do?” For some reason that seemed to surprise her. Then she shook herself-or maybe it was a shiver as the cold wind hit her-and said, “Oh, that’s right-I saw your books.”

They’d turned and started slowly walking together toward the truck-stop café, and since she seemed to have forgotten he still had her hand, he kept it and tucked it into the bend of his elbow and covered it with his to keep it warm. Looking down at her, he could see that her nose was turning pink and her face had a pinched look to it, and he knew she would go faster if there was any way in the world she could. That high-plateau wind cut like a razor-you could smell the snow in it. To keep her mind off it he picked up the thread of the conversation they’d been having about books, asking her in a polite way if she liked to read.

Her shoulder nudged against him as she shrugged. “I’ve never been much of a reader. It’s not that I don’t like to read-it just seems like I always have too many other things to do.”

“Yeah? What do you do when you want to just…you know, relax?”

“Relax?” She made it sound like a word she’d never heard before. Glancing down at her, he saw that she was frowning again, thinking about it.

He didn’t pursue it, just shook his head and said, “I guess I can’t imagine not readin’. Probably because my mama used to read to me, from the time I was too little to remember. She read to all of us kids. You know…startin’ with those little picture books with animals in ‘em, then Mother Goose and Dr. Seuss, all the way through the Little House books and Tom Sawyer and Treasure Island. Seems like there never was a time we didn’t have a book goin’.”

The wind caught her hair suddenly, and unfurled it like bright red party streamers around her face. She grabbed at it, gathered it in one hand and held it while she looked up at him, squinted an eye shut and asked, “How many of you were there? You mentioned your sister…”

“Three sisters, three brothers.”

She gasped. “Seven! My God, how did she find the time?”

“I don’t know,” said Jimmy Joe with a shrug. “She just did.”

For a few moments she didn’t say anything, just walked along with her head down, her hair caught up in her hand. He felt her take a deep breath. “My mom read to my sisters and me, too. I don’t know why it didn’t take with me.” She let go of her hair then, and shook her head as if saying to the wind, Go on, have your way with it, I don’t care! He saw her face light up with some intense emotion he didn’t know the name of-something fierce and joyful and proud-and she said, “I’m going to read to my baby though. I’ve been buying books, all sorts of books. Mother Goose and Dr. Seuss and those little picture books with animals in them.” And suddenly she laughed.

Jimmy Joe wondered if it was the first time he’d ever heard her laugh. He knew it was the first time he’d heard her laugh that way-a sound as merry and as good for the heart as sleigh bells on Christmas morning.

It also occurred to him that it was the first time he’d heard her talk about her baby like that-as if it was a real live person and not some kind of condition. He wanted to hear more, ask her some questions, like whether she wanted a boy or a girl, and what she planned to name it, and whether the kid’s father was going to be around to help her walk the floor at two in the morning. But they’d reached the truck stop’s double entrance, and there was nothing for him to do but hold the doors for her, first the outer, then the inner, and he had to really hop to it to get there before she did. And he was sorry.