“Pregnant emotions,” she said, waving him off, looking away.

“We never talked much about the hysterectomy, either. I don’t know,” he said. “I think we’re dealing with something else here and you’re not coming clean with me, which is totally unlike you, Melinda. You’re so goddamn honest with me it stings sometimes. But not about this. You’re trying to push me into something I don’t want. And I don’t think you want a baby that bad. I think you want a uterus again.”

She stared at him in utter disbelief. “That’s perfectly ridiculous,” she said. “If I had needed to talk about that, I would have.”

“But we had a new baby, we had a forest fire, Doc died, we had Rick in Iraq and then home trying to adjust to a disability. Hardly small distractions. This is the first quiet spell we’ve had in a couple of years, Mel. If you need to talk about this now—”

She slammed her fork down on the table. “Are you out of your mind? Haven’t you been listening?”

“No, I am not out of my mind and yes, I have heard every word. Mel. Having a third party have a baby for us is going to be painful, difficult, expensive and full of potential problems. I get that in some circumstances it’s well worth it. We don’t have those circumstances.”

“I do! I do have those circumstances!”

He fixed his gaze on hers. Damn, she was some fireball. She was a fighter and when her mind was made up there was almost nothing that could pull her off the target. He just looked at her until he sensed she had simmered down a little bit. “Baby, something else is going on here. Talk to me about it. Please.”

“I did talk to you! And I expected you to keep an open mind and research it a little bit! Jesus,” she said, standing from the table. “When do I ask anything of you?”

She walked away from their dining room table and to her back he said, “Every day. Every night.”

She turned back and stared at him.

“We do this together, Mel. It’s not that easy sometimes. I keep the kids while you see patients, while you go out on calls. I cook and take them on errands and tend bar and do inventory with kids in backpacks and playpens. You take the kids to work with you and manage the house while I work early and late at the bar. We both have real long days and nights. We manage, but it’s not easy. I do as much as you do and you’re still tired.”

“I haven’t complained. And until now, neither have you. If you want me to, I can get a house cleaner and a nanny. I have some money saved.”

“I think we get by all right. I like the time I spend with the kids. If we had another one, we’d manage and be happy about it. But I’m not going to the lengths you want me to for a third.”

She got tears in her eyes. “Even if it means everything to me? Even if I want to so much it’s all I think about? Day and night?”

He stood up from the table and went to her, standing in front of her. “That’s what’s weird about this. It came out of the blue. This isn’t something you started talking about after Emma was born. When I asked you if you were doing okay with the hysterectomy, you blew it off. You were fine, you said. You didn’t whimper and cry that you were so disappointed you couldn’t have more children…. You said you had a lot of blessings to count and considered us damn lucky to get the two kids. Now, suddenly, this is a desperate move. It’s out of character. I’m worried about you.”

“This isn’t anything to worry about,” she insisted. “It’s something to talk about doing!”

He shook his head. “I think the person who should talk to John is you,” he said gently.

She stared at him openmouthed for a moment, then said, “Ach!” She turned and stomped off to the bedroom.

“Mel! You haven’t eaten!”

“I’ve lost my appetite!” She disappeared around the corner.

“We still haven’t talked about it!” he said to her departing form, voice raised. “We need to talk about your uterus, not someone else’s!”

She poked her head back into the dining room. “There is nothing to talk about!” Then she escaped again.

He looked at the doorway to the bedroom. “Exactly,” he said.

Erin thought about running home to Chico before she had to see Aiden again. She knew she was incomparably strong, but in this instance, she truly feared she might crumble. When she thought about all the heartbreaking things she had managed to survive with strength—her mother’s death, her father’s, Marcie’s husband Bobby’s catastrophic war injuries—it was amazing even to her she hadn’t collapsed. Surely she could get through this without coming completely apart.

But she was so in love with him, and despite her practical nature she had been secretly hoping this was the real thing. Before this story even approached the ending, she was in the garden Aiden had laid for her, pulling weeds, dropping her tears on the freshly tilled dirt.

Then she heard his SUV grinding its way up her road; she knew at once it wasn’t that smooth, expensive, quiet baby-blue Lexus. She stood up from the garden, mud on her knees, dirt under her nails, her soup pot and metal spoon nearby. She briefly wondered if she could bang it to scare him away.

Her front door was locked and he walked around the deck to the back. He stood at the edge of the garden and said, “I’ve seen the lawyer. Worst case, it takes a few months because she’s uncooperative or unresponsive, but it’ll get done. She doesn’t have to agree to the divorce.”

“Uncooperative? Unresponsive?” she asked.

“When she showed up at Luke’s, she gave me a business card with a phone number on it, but it’s a nonworking number. There’s no business number or address on the card. She’s dropped out of sight. Typical, I’m afraid.”

“Have you called her?”

He shook his head. “Why would I even try? I want nothing to do with her. And Preston advised me not to contact her—he tried to reach her. It’s time for her lawyer to talk to my lawyer, if she has a lawyer.”

She took a step toward him and damn it all, her voice trembled when she spoke. “She was here, Aiden.”

His face got red—instantly! “Here?” he said, raising his voice. “How the hell would she know who you are or where you live?”

“Please don’t yell at me,” she said. “I have no idea how.”

“God!” he barked. “Does this give you any indication of what kind of a person she is?”

Erin shook her head. “She’s just a kid,” she said. “A very beautiful kid. Just looking at her, I felt so middle-aged.”

“Don’t do that to yourself—you’re perfect. Annalee used her looks to snag me—that incredible combination of blow-your-mind sex appeal combined with innocent youth. It’s all an act. You should see how much older she can look when she’s firing glassware across the room.”

“She was only eighteen when she met you. How could she be so—”

“Twenty-one,” he said. “I looked at her driver’s license, for God’s sake—I married her!”

“Oh, man,” Erin said weakly, running a dirty hand through her hair. “Oh, man, this is so creeping me out.”

“How do you think I got trapped in this mess to start with?” he asked her. “I know I was stupid, but I wasn’t stupid in all these ways. I was deceived.”

“What ways were you stupid?” she asked.

“I told you,” he said impatiently. “Young, horny, picked up a girl in a bar…No matter what you might be tempted to believe right now, that was never a habit of mine. Listen, we have to work this out, Erin. I’m not going to let her f**k up our lives. We have to get this behind us.”

“I have to ask you some things. I want answers—calm answers. You lose your cool any more and I’m going to wonder what you’re hiding.”

He shook his head in frustration. “I know you’re right, but try to understand—she’s a pathological liar and she’s cost me in the past. When she showed up at Luke’s, my mother was horrified by the way I talked to her. She’d never heard me talk to another human being that way, much less a woman.”

“Were you actually together three years, not three months?” Erin asked. The shocked look on his face told her he wasn’t prepared for that question, or else he was a brilliant actor, better even than what he’d given Annalee credit for. “Have you been in touch all this time—you and your wife?” He couldn’t seem able to close his mouth. “Did you give her that big check so she’d get an abortion?”

“Abortion?” he asked in shock. “Erin. No. No to all of that!”

“Is she going to say everything you tell me is a lie? And are you going to say everything she tells me is a lie?”

He didn’t answer. He didn’t even shake his head. He met her eyes steadily—green on green. He was done begging to be believed, she could see that.

“Answer this for me, Aiden. Please. When you found yourself married to this beautiful young woman, did you try to make it work? Did you hope you could make it work with her? The truth. Please.”

“Even though I hated her? Even though I’d been trapped by my affair with her? Even though every day with her was sheer hell while she abused me, stole from me, deceived me, cheated on me and had sex with other men in my bed? You really want the true answer to that? Because I don’t think it’ll help my case with you. I don’t think you’ll respect me for it. The truth is—yes, I tried. And I didn’t try for three years—it was three months. It was only three months because when I called my brothers and told them what had been going on since I hit land, Luke came right away. Then Sean, right behind him. They had her number in thirty seconds and wouldn’t allow it to go on. But yes, if I could’ve transformed her into a wife, I would have. Not because I cared about her. Because I took an oath. Because in our family it takes a lot to get a man to take those vows and when we do…Ask Sean. Ask Luke. Don’t take my word for it.”

She felt a slight smile reach her lips; very slight. “She suggested your brothers would lie for you.”

“I think that’s probably the single truth she told you,” he admitted with a nod. “Under most circumstances, they probably would. Lie for me, kill for me, risk their lives for me. I would for them. What she didn’t mention because she doesn’t understand—I’d never be in the kind of position that would require it. Neither would they. We tend to admit our mistakes and take our lumps.”

“Aiden,” she said. “This is so awful.”

“I know,” he said so softly she barely heard.

“Is there any way you can prove to me that she’s lying and you’re telling the truth?”

“I don’t know,” he said. Then something seemed to occur to him. “Did she tell you she wanted to reconcile?”

“Something like that, yes….”

“She said that in front of my family.” He frowned and shook his head. “I have no idea how this figures into her scheme, her plan. I assume it’s more money—signing new documents will carry a price tag, just like the last time….”

“Well, that’s easy. Don’t pay her,” Erin said.

“I want her to go away,” he said.

“If what you say about her is true, she’s probably counting on just that. Ron told you correctly—you don’t have to have permission to divorce her. It might take a little longer without her cooperation, but Ron knows how to deal with that—he deals with it all the time. Just move forward.”

“And us?” he asked. “Can we just move forward?”

Us? she thought. She wanted him so much; she wanted everything he said to be true. She wanted this insane, wild summer on a mountain to be the forever she thought was completely out of her reach. But she had to protect her flanks. And her heart. “I need something from you.”

“Anything.”

“I need you to give Ron Preston permission to share with me whatever information he finds about your case—about your last lawyer, Annalee, all the stuff that’s in dispute. I know he’ll have his paralegals researching in order to represent your interests and he can’t talk to me about a client without the client’s permission. Even though I’m a member of the firm.”

“Done,” he said.

“And I can’t sleep with you until at least most of this is resolved.”

“You don’t trust me,” he said, the pain in his voice obvious.

“Remember how you felt when you realized you’d been used, abused, deceived? I don’t want to feel that way. What I want is for Ron to work his magic, get some facts and prove to me that I was right about you from the start. That’s all I ask. And that’s not a lot.”

“Whatever you want,” he said. Then he got a familiar glint in his eye and said, “You’re not going to be able to make that stick, but as long as you tell me no, I’ll listen and obey. It’s just that you and me, together, is a little bigger than both of us.” He straightened his spine and drew in a deep breath, putting his hands in his pockets. “One way or another, we’ll get this done. I don’t have any other shadows that can ruin this for us. It’ll be terrible, not sleeping with you, holding you, loving you. But if that’s what you need, I can do that. When this is over,” he said, “I’m never letting you go.”