True Heart. Peggy Nicholson

night wind sucked her name through the open window, sent it spinning and tumbling across the desert behind her humming wheels.

      “Cotter, Cotter, Cotter,” she chanted, squinting into the headlights of an oncoming truck, the first vehicle she’d encountered for twenty miles or more. “My name is Kaley Cotter.” Again. After eight years as Kaley Bosworth. It would take practice before it sounded right. Her car shuddered in the truck’s slipstream, then surged on through the dark.

      Roughly two hours to go. She’d reach Four Corners, where the southwest border of Colorado touched the borders of three other states, by dawn. “Then home before eight,” she comforted herself. She could make it. “Kaley Cotter’s coming home.”

      Where she should have stayed all along.

      “Kaley Cotter and daughter are coming home,” she amended, one hand slipping off the wheel to cup her flat—still utterly flat—belly.

      Or possibly Cotter and son.

      But something told her this baby would be a girl. “Love you either way,” she murmured, lashes drifting lower. Boy or girl, healthy or damaged, her baby would be welcome.

      As she would be welcome at the Cotter family ranch. “Home,” she half whispered, stroking her stomach, “is where, when you’ve got no place else to go, they have to take you in.”

      Suddenly, her head dropped forward with a sickening jolt. She gasped and jerked upright just as the off wheel bit into the roadside gravel. The car swerved wildly, then straightened to the road.

      “Whew!” Kaley shuddered, rubbed a hand along a thigh roughened with goose bumps, and shook her head to clear it. That had been closer than close! If there had been an oncoming car… “Not good.” Las Vegas, where she’d obtained her quickie divorce this afternoon, was five hundred miles behind her. She should have stopped in Page for the night, but like a wounded rabbit intent on reaching its own burrow, she’d found that no intermediate bolt-hole had looked safe enough. She’d sped past every possible motel until there was nothing left but rock and sand and stars and the pale road beckoning her eastward, home to Trueheart, then the ranch in the foothills above it.

      KALEY MADE IT into Four Corners without further mishap, and pulled in at a truck stop for a cup of coffee to go.

      Coffee. She frowned down at her stomach as she turned away from the cash register. She’d sworn that no matter how she craved it, she wouldn’t drink another cup for eight months. Her baby had taken enough abuse already in the first four weeks of life, without having to put up with her mother’s caffeine habit.

      On the other hand, any sensible baby would agree that sharing one last cup of stale brew beat running off the road at seventy miles an hour any day. Last one, I promise you. Let’s just limp on home, then I swear I’ll never touch another—

      “Um, excuse me?” A woman loomed at Kaley’s elbow as she stiff-armed the exit door. She was tall and blond, with a rueful smile. “I saw you pull in and I noticed you seem to be heading east and I was wondering if…”

      THE BLONDE’S NAME was Michelle Something; Kaley hadn’t caught the last half. Her car radiator had sprung a leak, she’d explained, forty miles back down the reservation road, and rather than stop in the middle of nowhere, she’d crept on to the truck stop, pausing to let it cool off each time the needle on her temperature gauge kissed red. She didn’t dare push on to Trueheart, but she had a restaurant there, customers who’d be expecting their breakfast, so if Kaley would be so kind? She could send somebody back to collect her car once the morning rush was over.

      Kaley was glad for the company. “I’ve been driving on snooze control for the past hour. Just talk to me and it’s you who’ll be doing the favor.”

      “Where are you headed,” Michelle asked as they swung out onto the highway. “Durango?”

      “No, Trueheart. At least, that’s where I turn north. The Cotter ranch.” It warmed Kaley just to say the words. Four generations of Cotters had held that patch of upland valley and now her baby would make the fifth. Heading home. Once she was home, she could face anything. Let go of the protective numbness that had carried her this far, and collapse.

      “You’re a friend of Jim Cotter’s?” Michelle turned to prop one elbow on the dash.

      “His sister,” Kaley admitted. “So you know him?”

      “Two eggs over easy with a double order of hash browns, half a bottle of ketchup, and if I were a cradle robber…”

      Kaley stole a glance at her smiling passenger. Elegant rather than cowgirl-pretty like Jim’s usual sweethearts, the blonde was perhaps five years older than his twenty-seven. But there was a certain level of…sophistication? Experience? Whatever, the cool, wry confidence beneath Michelle’s surface warmth made her seem half a generation older than Kaley’s younger brother.

      “You’re a teacher over in Phoenix, I think he told me. Married to—um—a lawyer?” Michelle continued.

      Kaley winced. “Was…” Might as well say it. There was no keeping your life private in a small town like Trueheart. Still, she hadn’t expected to have to fess up so soon, or to a stranger; had yet to shape her explanation or polish her delivery. Gray as the fading night, a wave of desolation washed over her. Richard was history now, a story to be told, not a man to wait up for, supper cooling on the table night after night. Not always a considerate man, maybe, but still, her man. Was.

      “Oops!” Michelle said lightly, though a ready sympathy lurked under her humor. “Was a teacher? Or was married to a lawyer? I’m sorry, don’t answer that. Either way, it’s none of my biz. Me and my runaway mouth!”

      “No, it’s okay. I was married, but that’s all over now. I passed through Las Vegas yesterday.”

      “Wham, bam, we’ll be happy to stamp that paper for you, ma’am,” Michelle said, “God bless them. And good for you. Once you decide to yank the bandage off, it’s best to do it fast.”

      “Yes…” Kaley supposed it was. In her case, it certainly was, once Richard had given his ultimatum.

      Abort it, Kaley, and let’s forget about this. We don’t want a defective child.

      Or any child at all, Richard. Why had it taken her so long to see that?

      Because I didn’t want to see. I was happier blind, living in hope. But once Richard had made it clear that no matter how she pleaded or argued, there’d be no marriage counseling, no compromise and no reprieve, that it was his way or the highway, she’d had only one choice. She’d chosen the road home to Colorado.

      “So is this a short visit, to regroup and decide what next, or…?”

      Kaley shook her head decisively, her straight dark auburn hair swinging from shoulder to shoulder. “No, I’m home for good.” Never should have left. “I own half the ranch, though Jim’s the active partner and I’m the silent one.” Despite Richard’s complaints, she’d contributed half her salary as a high-school English teacher these past eight years to keep the ranch operating. Jim had supplied the manpower and all the daily decisions; she, the vital cash. That was the very least she could do if she wanted the ranch to stay in the family. Jim had had the hard part after their father passed away, running a five-thousand-acre spread with little help. Not like the old days, when a ranch was a family enterprise and families were extended and capable.

      She’d always assumed that if they could hang on through just a few hard years, Jim would choose one of his local sweethearts, a mate with ranching in her veins, and they’d start raising their own brood of cowhands. And when at last she and Richard started a family, she’d have sons and daughters to contribute to the tribe. Sons and daughters who’d happily summer at the family spread, learning to ride and rope and round ’em up as had so many Cotters before them.

      So much for blithe assumptions. So much for dreams. Kaley grimaced.

      Finally she’d had to face the reality that her