“Yes, sir,” she said meekly, and he laughed and leaned over and kissed her. So naturally, so easily, as though he’d done it many times before. And her heart stood still.

“Although…” he said thoughtfully as he drew away from her. She blinked and struggled to focus on the teasing glint in his eyes. “Now that you mention it…”

“Oh, no,” she groaned, closing her eyes. “I knew it. What did I do?”

“Well, now, there was one thing you said was kinda cute-really had me goin’ there for a while.” He paused for dramatic effect, showing his dimples.

“Tell me,” she breathed. “I can take it.”

“You told me you’d never made love before, and since that’s not very likely to be true, I was kinda wonderin’ if you could tell me what you mighta meant by that.”

“Oh, God.” Heat flooded through her, rose from her belly and chest and rushed up into her cheeks. She tried to cover her face with her one free hand, desperately wishing she had something bigger-like a grocery sack, maybe. “I can’t believe I told you that,” she whispered. “I never tell anybody that. Ever.” Her deepest, most closely guarded secret. Oh, God. Oh…damn.

“Yeah? Why not?” His voice was light, and she didn’t notice, then, how still he’d gotten.

She took her hand from across her eyes and glared at him. “Well, how would you feel?” she asked hotly. “If you were pushing forty years old and still a virgin, would you go around admitting it? It’s not like I planned it that way, you know. It’s not like that’s what I wanted. It just happened.”

“Are you tryin’ to tell me…it’s true?”

Humiliated beyond bearing, she couldn’t look at him, could only hear the shock and utter disbelief in his voice. “Well, technically, I don’t suppose I am anymore. But…yeah, it’s true. I’ve never made love before. Ever.”

There was a gust of incredulous laughter. “Marybell, I don’t know how to tell you this, but unless I just witnessed the Second Coming, that just ain’t possible.”

She flicked him a pitying glance, then fastened her mortified glare on the front windshield. “What century are you living in? Of course, it’s possible. Didn’t you ever hear of artificial insemination?”

After a stunned silence, he repeated it. “Artificial… insemination?” The words seemed to hang in the air like an accusation. He rose from her side, moving slowly and stiffly, and paced the two careful steps to the front of the cab. Standing there facing the windshield, rubbing mechanically at the back of his neck, he said hoarsely, “Are you telling me…you did this by yourself? You went and had this baby…and you’ve never-Oh, man. I mean…I don’t believe this.”

“It’s not what you think,” Mirabella said in a low voice. He was looking at her now, and in his blanched face, his eyes seemed almost as black and cold as the night outside the windows. Looking into them she suddenly felt desolate and afraid. Words tumbled urgently from her. “I’m not…gay, or anything. I just always wanted children. I always took it for granted I’d have them someday-the usual way-you know, meet somebody, fall in love, get married. But that didn’t happen. I never met the right one.” Until it was too late. Until… tonight.

She took a deep breath and went on, looking down, now, at her baby’s face. Her voice grew calm and soft. “I thought, maybe it was never going to happen. And meanwhile, the years were going by, and I was getting older. I didn’t have forever, you know? Maybe I could have settled for something less. Settled for anything. Anyone. Just so long as he gave me children. But…” She shrugged, and her lips curved into a smile that ached all through her tired body. Mirabella had never “settled” in her life. “I thought this way was better.”

And it was. It was. She’d seen enough of her friends suffer in bad relationships to know that. Her way was better. She was right. She knew she was right. Don’t you dare judge me, her heart cried. I have my baby, and it was worth it. It’s worth it.

Jimmy Joe suddenly realized that she was waiting for him to say something, watching him with a wry and weary smile that was going to haunt him from now on. Not the smile so much as the pride and disappointment he could see in her eyes. But he didn’t have any words to give her. He never had been one to spend them freely, and the ones he did, especially at important moments like this one, he generally liked to think about first, to make sure they were the right ones and a true indicator of what he was feeling. Right now he didn’t know what he was feeling, and he couldn’t think. So he stayed silent.

He’d taken a deep breath, then didn’t seem to know what to do with it. The air in the cab already seemed too dense, charged with tension and cluttered with emotions. He thought suddenly that he was going to suffocate if he didn’t get out of there and get some fresh, uncrowded air.

“I, uh, think I’m gon’ go use the rest room,” he mumbled, and grabbing up his sleeveless, down-filled vest, yanked open the door and dived out into the night.

The door slammed. Mirabella winced involuntarily and closed her eyes.

She felt bewildered and abandoned, but at the same time vindicated, never more sure of the rightness of her decision than at this moment. Relationships were just too hard. Men and women never really understood one another. They were like alien species, struggling to cohabit on the same planet, each believing they’d figured out how to speak the other’s language when in reality neither of them had a clue. And while it was true that some people did seem to find ways to make it work, those relationships always seemed wonderful and miraculous to her, like stories of scientists cohabiting with chimps, or gorilla mothers rescuing human children. As far as she could see, most marriages-even seemingly happy ones like her own parents’-were quiet daily struggles just to understand and be understood.

I don’t understand, she thought. What did I do to make him look at me like that?

It couldn’t be the fact that she’d had a baby-a moment ago he’d told her, with glowing softness in his eyes and tenderness in his touch, what a wonderful thing she’d done. And if he didn’t particularly approve of the way she’d done it, why on earth should it matter so much to him? What could possibly make him look at her with such pain and disappointment in his eyes? As if, in some indefinable way, she’d betrayed him.


It was one of the few times in Jimmy Joe’s life he wished he’d had the courage to go against his mama and take up smoking. Then at least he would have an explainable excuse for what he was doing, stomping up and down in the bitter cold, trying to keep his extremities from freezing. Funny how nobody ever seemed to think it was crazy to risk a case of frostbite just to grab a few puffs of a cigarette.

But he couldn’t think of any kind of reasonable explanation for not wanting to go back inside his nice warm truck just yet. He was just so…well, hell. He didn’t know what he was, that was the problem. He didn’t know if he was mad, or disappointed, or what. He for sure didn’t know why it mattered so much.

Well, yeah, he did, too. He just didn’t know what to do about it.

He thought about how he’d felt when he’d first run into Mirabella back there in New Mexico; how he’d judged her selfish and irresponsible for doing what she was doing, making a trip like that all alone; how angry it had made him to see her putting her child at risk. He hadn’t known what to do with those feelings then, when she’d been no more than a stranger to him. And he sure didn’t know what to do with them now that there was so much more at stake.

And that was the crux of his problem. Because somewhere along the way he’d gotten to know her, even thought he was beginning to understand her.

Somewhere along the way he’d fallen in love with her, even though she was as different from him-with her sophisticated big-city ways-as night was from day. And not only with her, but with her baby, too. And now he just couldn’t figure out how in the name of heaven he could have done such a thing. How could he love a woman when her beliefs and her whole way of thinking and living were completely different from his?

You just do.

The answer didn’t come to him like a revelation or anything, with beckoning stars and singing angels. It had been in his heart all along, and what he was doing out there freezing his butt off in the Panhandle wind was trying to get used to having it there. Trying to get used to the pain it brought him. Because yeah, he loved the woman, in spite of all the ways she was different from him. No doubt in his mind about that at all. And even if she loved him back-which was by no means a given-there wasn’t any way in the world it was ever going to work out between them.

So, what was he going to do? What could he do?

Well, he knew the answer to that one, too. What he was going to do was go back there to his truck and keep the woman he loved and her new baby girl warm and safe until somebody came to take them away from him forever. And while he was doing that, he would be trying his best to understand how a beautiful, bright, funny woman could think it was okay to have a baby without ever knowing what it was like to make love to a man, and how she could do something so selfish as to deliberately deny her child the chance to grow up in a home with both a mom and a dad in it.

And, he thought, remembering the pain and disappointment in her eyes when he’d left her, if that didn’t work, he would do his best to pretend it didn’t matter.

An apology was sitting primed and ready on his tongue when he climbed back into his truck, but he never got a chance to give it to her. She’d gone to sleep at last, with the baby snuggled on her bosom, cozy as a bunny in a nest. And again he thought he’d never seen a more beautiful sight.