Honky-Tonk Cinderella. Karen Templeton

few minutes to observe, to adjust. To prepare.

      To face his memories, one at a time.

      She slowly straightened, absently kneading the muscles in her lower back, turning just enough for him to glimpse her face. His breathing damn near stopped altogether: she was far too pale and frighteningly gaunt, despite the obvious weight gain from the pregnancy. Yet, oddly, her limbs seem weighted, burdened with a deep, soul-weary sadness that tore at his heart.

      He’d bet his life she wouldn’t take his sudden appearance well. But he had his reasons for finding her, some of which would be readily apparent, even as others, still undefined, would perhaps become clear to them both with the passage of time. One reason, however, he would keep to himself. He’d hurt her once, albeit unintentionally; damned if he’d do it again.

      Grief and regret clawed at the door to his consciousness, demanding an audience he refused to grant. Not now, at least. Now it was all he could do to make himself cross the street and face his past.

      Not to mention a future that, six weeks ago, he couldn’t have dreamed of.

      Luanne shoved her bangs off her already-sweaty forehead, allowing as how it was only marginally cooler out here than in the unair-conditioned house. God bless little boys who could sleep no matter what, she thought, then forced down another bite of the packaged cheeseburger she’d just microwaved, the only thing with protein in it she figured she could manage, just at the moment. The ketchup helped some. Funny how she’d always taken her hamburgers plain, until this pregnancy. Nowadays she pretty much only ate the hamburgers as an excuse for the ketchup.

      She grimaced at the sorry-looking flowers, half of ’em all burned up and papery around the edges. Why was she even bothering? Wasn’t like she’d planted them herself, since they were here already when she’d rented the house two weeks ago. Like as not, unless they got some decent rain sometime soon, they were all gonna die, anyway—

      Icy fingers squeezed her heart until she just about couldn’t breathe. She clamped shut her eyes, waiting it out, wondering why, instead of lessening, the pain only seemed to get worse with every passing day. After more than six weeks, it still made no sense, even though she’d reminded herself of Jeff’s death a hundred, a thousand times in a desperate attempt to assimilate the truth. Since the race had only been a practice session, there’d been no tape made of it, which she’d at first thought a blessing. Now she wondered if maybe witnessing her husband’s death might make it any more real.

      Except she knew, deep down, that this was the good Lord’s way of sparing her and Chase from even more sorrow. Intellectually she knew the raw agony of loss would fade, that grief would eventually yield to acceptance….

      The flowers blurred, the last bite of burger turning to cardboard in her mouth. Deep in her womb the baby stirred, sweetly oblivious. Luanne skimmed her fingers over her belly, almost reverently. She loved this child, who had taken so many years to conceive, with all her heart.

      And she’d never resented anything so much in her entire life as she did being pregnant right now.

      Guilt swamped her as she lunged for the spewing hose, jerking it up and across the yard, praying Odella didn’t get it into her head to come outside—

      A movement out of the corner of her eye made her spin clumsily around, nearly tripping over the dog. She didn’t recognize him at first, what with his hair being shorter and him being older and the way he’d caught her off guard like that. On a cry of alarm she hurled the remains of the cheeseburger at his chest, then turned the hose on him, those being her only means of defense at hand.

      “Luanne!” Alek tried to dodge the spray, as well as the dog who had dived for the burger before anybody might notice. “What the hell are you doing?”

      Jerked back to her senses, she jettisoned the writhing hose and took off for the house, wanting to hide, wanting to die, wishing, wishing, wishing the nightmare would end—

      Except Alek cut off her flight before she even hit the steps, whipping her around to face him. She could see little rivulets of water meandering down his just-shaved cheeks, dripping off a sharply defined jaw rigid with anguish; she flinched, even as her hands balled into fists of their own accord and began pummeling his chest.

      “Why are you here?” she cried, flailing and beating and sobbing like a dadburned fool, dimly aware this was the first time since Jeff’s death she’d given her emotions their head. Ketchup streaked the drenched shirt, she noticed, sending a perverse trickle of satisfaction through her fury. “You are the last person I want to see right now!”

      “You think I don’t know that?” His clipped, not-quite-British accent sent a herd of unwanted memories stampeding through her already muddled brain. She let out another sob, of frustration mostly, then suddenly Alek was holding her, stilling her hysteria, one gentle hand stroking her hair. “I’m so sorry,” he whispered, and she shut her eyes, realizing he smelled like ketchup and pricey cologne and, after all this time and much to her extreme annoyance, a lonely twenty-one-year-old girl’s fantasies.

      She wrenched out of his arms, scrubbing the tears from her face, not sure which of them she was more angry with. Shame ripped through her that she should let another man—this man—touch her like that when she hadn’t been a widow but a few weeks. “Then why’d you come? And why now?”

      Lord, but she sounded like a bitch. Which was not like her, not at all. Mama had always said there was little point in letting the bad stuff get you down, that a person’s outlook on life went a long way toward shaping his or her experiences. And Luanne, who had had more than her fair share of opportunity to put that philosophy to the test, had found it a useful one, more times than not.

      Until now.

      It was ungodly hot, she was pregnant, and her husband had died less than two months ago, leaving her with a devastated child who looked to her for bolstering when she could barely keep from drowning in sorrow herself. And then this man, whom she didn’t ever figure on seeing again, shows up without so much as a by-your-leave at eight-thirty in the morning and with her looking like…well, like someone without much reason for fixing herself up anymore.

      Luanne swiped a stray hair out of her face, trying not to shake. “You could have at least given me some warning, instead of scaring me half to death like that.”

      “I didn’t know where to find you at first,” Alek said, which she had to admit was a valid excuse, since she’d gone into seclusion with Chase immediately after the accident. But then he added, “And after I found out where you were, I was afraid…”

      Luanne narrowed her eyes at that, straining to catch his meaning. “Afraid of what?”

      Alek swept a trembling hand through his damp hair, not looking at her at first. And when he did, his eyes begged forgiveness.

      “I want to meet my son.”

      And Luanne marveled, in a stuttering, not-quite-focused kind of way, that there had been enough of her heart left intact to now be crumbling into a million pieces.

      Even as short as she was, there was no avoiding the bitter, brittle heat of those impossibly blue eyes as Luanne backed away, her arms laced over her unborn child. The pup circled her feet, worried.

      “Jeff swore to me he wouldn’t tell you.”

      Alek swallowed down the acrid taste of guilt, hating this moment more than he’d ever hated anything in his life. “I haven’t known for long.”

      He watched as her eyes squeezed shut, as she drew in a shuddering breath, opened them again. Resolve now flickered in their bright-blue depths, if not ameliorating the panic of moments before, at least fortifying it. “And I don’t suppose you’d consider pretending you’d never found out, would you?”

      It was as close to begging as he imagined she’d ever come, and it nearly broke his heart. He dragged an arm across his wet face, then shook his head. “I think it’s time we all stopped pretending, don’t you?”

      The prick to his conscience