When he pulled into Luke’s compound, he knew immediately that something was different. Too many cars, for one thing. Too many people on Luke’s porch, for another. He parked in front of his cabin and, wearing his tux shirt and pants, shirtsleeves rolled up, collar open, jacket slung over one shoulder, he walked toward Luke’s house. Had he missed something by way of family plans? he wondered. In his concentration on Erin’s prom night, had he forgotten some important gathering or event? His mother and George were there, Franci and Sean, too, and if he hadn’t seen a very pregnant Shelby he would wonder if it was time. As everyone turned to watch his approach, he could see they were not wearing their happy faces.

Then he saw her. Annalee. She had been behind Luke, leaning against the porch railing. She stood straight and came around Luke. She was wearing that totally phony, contrived, I’m-so-young-and-vulnerable expression. She wore a black snug-fitting but classy sleeveless dress and black sandals—all so conservative on her tiny, completely perfect body, her white-blond hair pulled back in a clip, her huge, luminous blue eyes trained on him. Did any of them—his family—buy this shit? This wasn’t real! He remembered that same little-girl look—she’d turned it on the hospital commander. Poor little Annalee. She could turn that whole image into a hot little dish in less than five seconds. Or a screaming, clawing banshee.

She walked toward the porch steps as he walked toward her.

“Aiden,” she said in a soft, breathy voice.

“If you’re not an apparition, I’m going to have to kill myself.”

“You wouldn’t answer my calls, messages or e-mails,” she said. Oh, and there it came, the tears. By God, the woman should really act! She could cry on demand!

“I did answer. I said, we’ve been divorced for eight years—we don’t have any business. Stop with the bloody tears, goddamn it! You flooded my in-box with hundreds of hostile e-mails! I’m afraid to turn the computer on—you probably crashed it!”

“Aiden, please,” she said sweetly, pathetically. “There was nothing hostile—I was begging you to talk to me. I just meant to send a couple and only because I so need to talk to you.”

“No! We’re divorced! You have no business here!”

“But we’re not! That’s why I’ve been trying to reach you! The divorce—I don’t know how it happened, but it didn’t go through! We’re still married!”

His mouth fell open and he felt the knife twist in his gut. She could still do it to him, totally surprise him. Totally scare him to death. He checked eyes with Sean and Luke and he saw that, thank God, they weren’t buying her crap. Aiden briefly wondered, Does everyone get one person in the universe who can throw them completely off balance like this?

“That’s ridiculous,” he said.

“No, it’s true. That lawyer we used? He’s gone—pfffttt. Gone. Not a member of the California bar, never filed our divorce paperwork. I checked—it should be a matter of public record, but the only thing on record is our marriage.”

The sudden suicidal urge he felt was real. He couldn’t be married to this…this…“Then fine, I’ll get a lawyer and make sure it’s done right this time.”

“But wait,” she said, stepping toward him. “Can we at least talk about it?”

“No, Annalee, there’s nothing to talk about. And you didn’t have to come here for this. You could have told Jeff to tell me, or since you found my e-mail address you could have e-mailed me about the failure of the divorce. But you’re here. There can only be one reason for you to be here. It’s not about the problem with the divorce. You want something. Why don’t you cut to the chase—what do you want now?”

“A chance,” she said in a tiny voice. “Just a chance.”

Again Aiden was stunned. Then he threw back his head and laughed. “A chance?”

“I’d like to try to work through this. I was only twenty-one years old and—”

“Did you bring back the ten grand you demanded from me to sign the original papers?” he asked. Then he stole a look at his mother out of the corner of his eye; oh, boy. She was not happy. He had no way of knowing who she was least happy with.

“Aiden, I was a kid, I was in trouble, I did a stupid thing and I’ve regretted it every day since. When I learned that the divorce hadn’t gone through, that we’re still married, I thought it was kind of a message. A gift from God. A chance for us to—”

He plunged his hands into his pockets and scowled at her, backing away. “Don’t throw God’s name around here, Annalee. You conned me. You used me, set me up, tricked me, almost had me court-martialed, almost cost me my residency, my career, and once I wrote you a check, you ran for your life. I don’t even want to know what went wrong in your ever-complex scheming to bring you around here, but—”

“Aiden,” Maureen said sharply. “Son.”

“Mom, you shouldn’t be hearing this. This isn’t for you to hear. This was a horrible catastrophe and I’m not proud of it, but I swear to you, I was the victim. I was the—” And then he stopped. Sure, he was the victim in his mind, but he’d been a twenty-eight-year-old man, a doctor. He should have been so much smarter. He had thrown caution to the wind, went wild with this little tart and got caught breaking military rules. Stupid rules, he thought—you should be able to date whomever you liked, regardless of rank or commission—but that was not the case, so he was caught.

He couldn’t prove she’d set him up.

“I was twenty-one,” she repeated. “I thought I loved you. We made some mistakes but I think we deserve—”

“No!” he said. “We are done! I’ll get that divorce taken care of! You can leave!”

“Aiden,” Maureen said again. “Sit down with the woman. You don’t have to talk to her alone. One of your brothers or George can sit in. But, Aiden, you absolutely must—”

A very loud and long groan came out of Shelby. She bent over her stomach, holding it, groaning and then breathing deeply. Luke was immediately on one knee beside her, rubbing a hand along her back. It was quite a while before Shelby lifted her head, her eyes clouded with tears. “Sorry. As much as I wanted labor, I hate to leave before I find out how this comes out. But—I have to go to the hospital.”

“Okay, baby,” Luke said, helping her stand. “How long have you been having them?”

“Since what’s-her-name got here. Call Mel to meet us there and grab my little duffel, will you?”

Luke was off to do her bidding. “Sean, we need you to keep tabs on Art. Aiden, if you can’t come, we understand.”

“I’m coming. Of course I’m coming. Annalee—I need you out of here. I’ll take your phone number. I’ll call you. I’ll get this sorted out, but you are out of here. No way you stay on my family’s property while I’m not here.”

Annalee dropped her gaze and shuffled down the porch steps like a pitiful, rejected little girl, and Aiden took in his mother’s pained expression. He noticed that George put an arm around Maureen’s shoulders and gave comfort.

Annalee walked to her car, opened the passenger door and took out a small, elegant clutch. She opened it, pulled out a business card and took it to Aiden. He studied it for a second. Annalee Riordan—Fashion Consultant. There was a cell number.

Okay, this was more proof in Aiden’s mind that she was a liar and a con. Part of that divorce decree demanded that she resume the use of her maiden name—Kovacevic. And yet she was still using his name? How long had she really known the divorce hadn’t worked? And had she had anything to do with that?

“We don’t get cell reception in the mountains, Annalee,” he said as calmly as possible. “My sister-in-law is in labor and I’m going to the hospital with them. There are some nice motels in Fortuna—go there. If you’re anywhere near Virgin River, I’ll get a restraining order. I’ll call you when I’m free to talk.”

She shook her head and tears poured out of her large blue eyes. “Why are you so cruel?” she asked him. “This isn’t my fault. None of this is my fault.”

“You’re supposed to be using your maiden name,” he said. “Not Riordan. You’re just playing me again, Annalee, and you’d better move on. I mean it.”

“Oh, Aiden…” She let her chin drop and she cried, placing trembling hands over her face.

He just stood in front of her, hands in his pockets. When she looked up, her tearstained face looking for all the world authentic, he said, “Save it. I don’t buy it. Now, get out of here.”

He heard his mother gasp in shock. Annalee lifted her chin and said, “All right, Aiden. I’ll go. Please just take care of the divorce. You have my phone number and e-mail address if there’s a problem.”

“Fine. Go. Now.” Then he watched as Annalee bravely turned, got in her late-model Lexus and backed away from Luke’s house until she could turn around.

“I don’t believe I’ve ever heard you speak to another human being like that in my life,” Maureen said, clearly appalled. “Especially a woman. A woman in tears.”

“Not just any woman,” he said without looking at his mother. “Sean, I’m going to the hospital—Luke wants me to be there. It’s not as though I can do anything—maybe he wants someone who can help him understand how and why things are happening. I’ll take you, Mom, if you want to ride with me. Or if you don’t think you can stand my company, George can take you.”

“I don’t think George wants to sit around a hospital, waiting for a baby to come, and I won’t miss it. Besides, I’d like a chance to talk to you.”

He shook his head a little bit. “I don’t think there’s any possible way I can satisfy your curiosity, but I’ll tell you what I can.” He turned to his brother. “Sean, please hear me on this—make sure Annalee isn’t hanging around here. She’s destructive. I wouldn’t dare try to predict what she might do next.”

“Aiden,” Maureen began, “she’s just a slight little woman who—”

“I won’t let her hang around,” Sean said.

“The thing you have to remember about her—no lie is too big a lie. Her stories have been so extraordinary, I think she believes them. I’m not even sure where she grew up—not in this country, that’s for sure. Russia or maybe Bosnia—probably a place of grave unrest. The lying and manipulations—it might be something she learned in childhood, a survival thing. It’s pathological…it’s automatic for her. I’m not telling you that to make an excuse for her, but so you’ll be on your guard. She’s very convincing.”

He felt his mother’s hand on his shoulder. “What kind of lies, Aiden?” she asked him. “Do you think she’d lie about wanting another chance?”

He looked at his mother levelly, his expression angry. “Absolutely. She’d lie about anything, Mom,” he tried to say gently. “She has lied about anything.”

Annalee already had a little hotel room, though it was not in Fortuna. She was staying in Garberville for the time being, but not under the name Annalee Riordan. And she wasn’t alone, but Aiden didn’t need to know that. Annalee was with Mujo, her partner in every sense of the word.

Annalee drove around the countryside for a little while, then finally pulled into the little town of Virgin River. She sat in her car, refreshed her makeup and made sure her hair was just so before walking into the little bar at the center of town. It was a crapshoot—she had to choose between the bar, church or medical clinic. Since Luke’s truck was not outside the clinic, she assumed they had not gone there to have the baby.

Baby. She wished she’d had a baby with Aiden. That was a major miscalculation of hers, not having a baby. That would have been a much better long-term arrangement. But at the time they’d married and divorced she’d been so young, the very idea of being tied down to an infant made her feel claustrophobic. Truthfully, it still made her cringe—she wasn’t crazy about kids. But—she could have let him have the kid, then come back regularly to discuss taking over custody…That thought made her smile. An arrangement like that would be like an annuity.

She walked into the bar and, wearing her prettiest smile, jumped up on a stool in front of one of the best-looking bartenders she’d ever seen in her life. “Hi,” she said cheerily.

“Hello, there. You must be lost.”

“No,” she said with a laugh, shaking her head. “Not in the least. But my timing is really off today. I was just visiting family and almost the second I arrived, my cousin-in-law was in labor, heading off to the hospital to have her baby, and the entire family was following. To tell the truth, I wanted to go along, but I’d barely met her, so it didn’t seem like a good idea to horn in.”

He lifted a handsome brow. “Shelby, by chance?”

“Exactly!” she said as if surprised. “My gosh, you must know everyone!”

“Pretty much,” he said. “And sometimes it seems like all the women are pregnant, but that isn’t really the case. I know she was due any second, and my wife was called out for a delivery.”

“You’re married to Mel, the doctor?”

“Midwife,” he corrected. He put out his big hand. “Jack Sheridan,” he said, introducing himself.