Marrying Molly. Christine Rimmer

out, was that she must have come up with some new way to rescue the needy—at great expense to the town coffers, of course.

      As he had a million times in the past six months, Tate cursed the day Molly managed to get herself elected mayor of his town. It was the women who’d done it. They all hung out at Molly’s beauty shop. When she’d decided to run for mayor, they rallied around her, making it possible for her to claim fifty-four percent of the vote.

      If you asked Tate, Molly’s mayorship had been a disaster from the get-go. To Tate’s mind—and to the minds of every other red-blooded businessman and responsible citizen in town—Molly O’Dare had been the worst thing to happen to Tate’s Junction, Texas, since a disgruntled contingent of Comanche warriors on the run from the Oklahoma reservation took over the place for three days back in 1886.

      It was a problem of comprehension, Tate thought. Molly refused to comprehend the way things worked. She insisted on thinking independently. A very bad choice, as everyone knew that the job of mayor required no thinking at all. It was so simple. Tate Bravo, like his grandfather before him, decided what needed doing. Tate informed the mayor and the town council. They voted as per his instructions. And Tate got what he wanted for the town’s betterment.

      It had always been done that way.

      Until Molly.

      From her first town council meeting, Molly refused to do things the way they’d always been done. Molly thought independently and came up with a lot of very bad ideas. When Tate wanted a bond issue, she wanted a sales tax increase. When Tate proposed a plan to improve parking access on Center Street, Molly fought him tooth and nail. Making it easier for the townsfolk to spend money on Center Street could wait, she said, brown eyes flashing, those gorgeous full breasts of hers stuck out high and proud. Oh, no, she’d insisted. Top priority should be putting her plan in place for indigent and shut-in care.

      Truth was, Tate had his head screwed on straight when it came to what was best for the Junction—and Molly didn’t. Sure, he was all for helping out the needy. But the priority had to be supporting what kept any town running: business and commerce. Molly, a businesswoman herself, ought to have known that. But as mayor, she’d been all heart and no sense, and that was a plain fact.

      Tate had been seething with fury since the day she won that damned election. And since their constant head-butting struck sparks in more ways than one, he’d also burned to get her into bed.

      And he did get her into bed—a few months back. For a marvelous and thoroughly stimulating three weeks, that ripe, lush body of hers was his. In bed, he ruled her. However, once on her feet and wearing her clothes, Molly O’Dare continued to be the usual sharp thorn in his side.

      Tate leaned forward a little, straining to see her better. No doubt about it. Tonight, those amber-brown eyes had a strange light in them—determined and angry at the same time. Not good.

      “I have debated,” she continued bleakly, “debated for a couple of weeks now, whether to tell you this. I don’t want to tell you this. But I can’t see any way around it in the end, being as how this is not something that I plan to hide. And since you’re bound to know eventually, I’ve decided you might just as well know sooner as later. You can start getting used to it. You can start figuring out how you plan to deal with it—because, one way or another, you are going to be dealing with it.”

      Tate dragged himself back against the hand-hammered copper inlay of his bed’s massive headboard and reached over to switch on the lamp. In the golden spill of light it provided, he could see the sneer on her soft mouth and the dark circles under those pretty eyes. Something warm and uneasy curled through him. It might have been concern for her. She really didn’t look right.

      What the hell was going on? “Spit it out,” he commanded.

      And that was just what she did. “I’m pregnant, Tate Bravo. Over two months along. Sometime next January, you’re going to be a dad.” She stood, leaving the rocker pitching back and forth behind her. “Your mouth is hanging open,” she said.

      And that was it. Before Tate could collect his scattered wits and stop her, she turned, threw a slim leg up over the sill and slipped out the window the way she had come.

       Chapter Two

       “M olly, sweetie, don’t you get those scissors near me with your eyes all glazed over like that.”

      Molly blinked. She glanced at the scissors in her hand and then into the mirror, where she met the wary eyes of Betty Stoops. Red-haired and stick-skinny, Betty sat caped and shampooed in Molly’s styling chair, ready for her monthly cut. “Sorry, Betty. Just thinking…”

      About Tate Bravo, of course. Molly was feeling a tad guilty over the way she’d handled things the night before.

      Okay, so maybe sneaking in through his bedroom window, delivering the big news and then jumping back out the window again hadn’t been the most tactful approach to the problem. But she had said what needed saying. Discussion of the whole mess could wait.

      Molly began snipping at Betty’s thinning hair. “So now, how has Titus been doing?”

      Betty made a low, fretful sound. “Molly, hon, I cannot tell you. I cannot describe…” Betty launched into a blow-by-blow of her husband’s various medical conditions.

      I was right to get out when I did last night, Molly silently reassured herself as Betty chattered away. Once Tate got over the shock, there was just no telling what kinds of things he might have said to her—from questioning whether the baby was really his to calling her ugly names to accusing her of trying to trap him into marriage.

      Uh-uh. Getting the news out had been about all she could manage for one night. Later for the part with the hollering, the accusations and the recriminations. Later still for working out how much of a role—if any—he would be playing in her baby’s life.

      “I was thinking not quite so much off the sides this time,” Betty suggested, eyeing her own reflection appraisingly, turning her head this way and that.

      Molly stepped back and assessed the situation. “Sure,” she said after a moment. “We can do that.”

      Molly trimmed and shaped and wondered for about the millionth time what could be the matter with her. How in the world could she have slept with Tate Bravo—repeatedly? And beyond that, how could she have liked it so much?

      Worst of all, why couldn’t she stop dreaming of sleeping with him some more?

      Especially now, when she knew for certain that those secret nights in Tate Bravo’s bed had produced the typical result.

      Pregnant, she thought, in utter disgust. Knocked up. In Trouble.

      It was the one thing Molly had always sworn was never going to happen to her. And for so long, it hadn’t. The past few years, she’d dared to start letting herself believe that she was safe from ending up like her mom—and her Granny Dusty—before her.

      She only had one weakness, after all, and that was the fatheaded, far-too-handsome man’s man, Tate Bravo. She’d had a hopeless secret crush on Tate for most of her life. But her weakness wasn’t supposed to be a problem, as Tate never seemed to know she existed.

      But then she got it in her mind to improve a few things in town. She ran for mayor. Once she got elected, Tate knew she existed, all right.

      Molly had been sworn in as mayor six months ago, at the first of the year. She and Tate fought tooth and nail through three town council meetings: January, February and March. Then he asked her to dinner—just the two of them, in the massive formal dining room out at the big house on his family’s ranch, the Double T. Tate said they would discuss ways to “work together to get things done for our town.”

      There hadn’t been much discussing that night. They barely made it past the appetizer. He was on her like paint, and she didn’t complain. She fell right into his bed. Heck. Fell? She jumped in and dragged him in after her. All the years without anything remotely resembling a sex life,