“I’ll do it for the baby.” Letter to Reader Title Page Dedication PROLOGUE CHAPTER ONE CHAPTER TWO CHAPTER THREE CHAPTER FOUR CHAPTER FIVE CHAPTER SIX CHAPTER SEVEN CHAPTER EIGHT CHAPTER NINE CHAPTER TEN CHAPTER ELEVEN CHAPTER TWELVE CHAPTER THIRTEEN CHAPTER FOURTEEN CHAPTER FIFTEEN CHAPTER SIXTEEN CHAPTER SEVENTEEN PROLOGUE Copyright

“I’ll do it for the baby.”

Tara placed the infant Laura in a sling against her chest. “Here’s a man who needs a wife. And I need a husband so I can get a home study to adopt Laura.”

“Tara, you can’t...”

Tara laughed. “Just kidding, Mom.” But she wasn’t.

She wanted to adopt Laura legally and she knew the other midwives at the birth center in Texas would help her. But Tara also knew that in her case, the authorities . would insist on a prerequisite. A husband.

Tara didn’t have time to “fall in love,” as her mother had suggested the other night. It would take a century. But a “suitable” man to marry lived two miles away, and she had the tool to bribe him. Herself. She would care for his children and she would clean his house.

Are you crazy, Tara? What made her think Isaac would marry her because he needed child care—or a housekeeper?

But she needed him. Isaac McCrea, M.D. She needed him so she could keep Laura.

Dear Reader,

Why write about midwives? First, because my son was born at home with a midwife, and I quickly became an admirer of midwives. Second, because although midwives attend most of the births in the world, they attend fewer than five percent of U.S. births. Third, because In meeting and studying midwives, I have found almost as much diversity as in the population as a whole. What these women have in common is their commitment to be “with woman” (from the Old English med-wyf) in labor and birth.

In You Were on My Mind, you met Ivy, a certified nurse-midwife, dealing with amnesia and a forgotten husband and daughter in rural West Virginia. Talking About My Baby is her sister Tara’s book

Tara is a different kind of midwife—trained in Third World settings, committed to being a midwife with no other tide attached. She is spontaneous and passionate, an outlaw who is sometimes hard to understand. But the outlaw is changed irrevocably by an abandoned baby, and a man who does understand her—Isaac McCrea, M.D.

I hope you’ll enjoy this story and look forward to reading about Tara’s parents and a missing Alaskan midwife in There Is a Season, in December ’99.

Best wishes and happy reading.

Margot Early

Talking about My Baby
Margot Early

www.millsandboon.co.uk

The Midwives...

for

Marina of the Sea

Many people have offered their assistance in my research for

this book. Also, I have used several references, including

Philip Gourevitch’s We Wish To Inform You That Tomorrow

We Will Be Killed with Our Families, Hanny Lightfoot-

Klein’s Prisoners of Ritual and a host of midwifery articles,

books and conference tapes. I would also like to thank

Maureen Matthews and William Dwelley, MS, LM, WEMT-I

for their help. An unnamed thanks to the other midwives

I have known, who have inspired me with their dedication

and courage. My greatest debt is to Marina Alzugaray,

MS, ARNP, CNM, and director of the CoMadres Institute,

dedicated to enhancing the health of women and their

families through the art and science of midwifery. Long

before she answered extensive research questions for this

book—and allowed me to use her wonderful analogy to

wild hens and her thoughts on the chicken-and-the-egg

question—Marina was midwife at the home birth of my son.

This series, THE MIDWIVES, is dedicated to her.

I am unfamiliar with adoption law in Texas. Direct-entry

midwives may become licensed in the state of Colorado, but

this law was passed years ago. Midwives in many states,

including Colorado, have faced legal action for pursuing

their trade; they have won and lost lawsuits. I have never

practiced medicine, nursing or midwifery. All technical

errors in this fictional work are mine.

PROLOGUE

I always want to control the future, but controlling the future is an illusion, and this is painful to accept. Only the present is ours and not to control but to live.

—Karen Anthony, age 35, written after Elijah’s birth at Precipice Peak Hospital in Precipice, Colorado

Maternity House

Sagrado, Texas

DECEIT COULD BE BOTH survival and a way of life, and so it was for the girl who called herself Julia, who had come across the river to have her baby in the clinic, Maternity House, on the United States side of the river. Tara Marcus knew this about Julia soon after meeting her. The lies were a survival mechanism, and there was no point in arguing with survival.

“I saw the owl,” Julia said. “I flew over the river as we were crossing. I am going to die. Having the baby will kill me. I know it.”

Spanish had become automatic to Tara; she understood it as readily as English, and she followed the teenager’s words effortlessly.

“An owl came to me the day my mother died, too,” Julia continued. “But this one was for me.”

The border taught respect for superstition. If Julia had seen an owl, Tara would have worried; owls portended death. But there was something about Julia’s eyes.... Living the way Julia probably lived on the other side of the river made a person lie; it was better to invent a fiction, even a name. Truth had no purpose down there, while lies did; they increased the odds that the person who told them would live to see the next morning.

Now, even glowing in the first stage of labor, Julia’s eyes were desperate, and they did not distinguish lie from truth. Every word from this woman’s mouth would be a lie, perhaps even into transition, perhaps through the birth of her child.

She was not afraid, either.

Tara held her hand because it would have been natural for a girl this young, maybe sixteen, to be afraid—but where Julia had come from was so much worse.

“Promise me,” said Julia. “Promise me that if I die you will take my baby and raise it. Swear on your mother’s grave.”

“My mother isn’t dead.”

“On your father’s grave.”

Tara grinned. “He’s around, too—and so will you be.” She sobered. “Julia, there are adoption services. Are you worried you won’t be able to care for your baby?”

“I would never give my baby to someone else! Not unless I was dead! I will take care of my baby. This baby’s father is a diplomat. He is descended from Pancho Villa. My mother... My mother’s family was very wealthy in Mexico City.”

“Relax,” murmured Tara. She smoothed Julia’s hair. “I’m on your side.”

The touch electrified Julia. Eyes round and dark, she clutched Tara’s fingers, tightly enough to make the bones crunch. “Then, promise. Swear you will keep my baby.”

“I’m divorced. No man. Always broke. Midwives make no money.”

“You’re rich.”

You’ll lose this argument, Tara. Where she comes from you’re filthy rich, like all Americans. Just drop it. She grabbed a blood pressure cuff and fit it around the girl’s arm. There had been no protein in her urine, but Tara checked for edema anyway. Julia’s hair looked dry and dirty, without luster.

“Promise, please, that you will care for my baby.”

I have to get away from the border. And she was going, going north to Colorado to help her mother—at least that was how Tara saw it. In any case, she was going just in time. The desensitization was happening. Another midwife at the clinic had told her, You give and give and give, and then suddenly it’s gone. It wasn’t gone yet, but...

But I look in this girl’s eyes and see only deceit.

Only pointless lies instead of survival lies.

“Okay. Okay, I promise.”

“Swear.” She radiated strength, powerful already in labor. “Swear on the names of your mother and father.”

“I swear on the name of my mother, Francesca Walcott, and my father, Charlie Marcus, that I will care for your child in the event of your death.” The words sent a chill over Tara.

Especially because Julia still squinted at her with dissatisfaction.

TARA STAYED AT THE birth center for forty-eight hours, catching sleep when she could in the sleeping nook off the staff room. She attended eight births; four of the mothers had arrived with preeclampsia. These were not the uncomplicated births that her mother, Francesca, saw in her midwifery practice in Colorado. Even working in rural West Virginia, Tara’s sister, Ivy, had the opportunity to give prenatal counseling.

But when women crossed the Rio Grande and arrived at the birth center to have their babies, they were often visiting the United States for the first time. They had risked their lives to cross so that their children would be born in the U.S.—and become citizens.

Like Julia.

Julia had left the clinic that evening, with her baby daughter, Laura Estrella. She had departed without telling anyone, as though afraid she’d be held to pay for the services she’d received.

You couldn’t allow yourself to wonder where she’d gone or if she and her child would be safe.

The sky was starry, and as she walked to her car, a rusty dark-green Safari station wagon bought from a local rancher, Tara could make out the lights of the border patrol stations just a mile away—as well as the neon from the bars in town. In Colorado, it would be cold now. But October on the border—balmy.

Her car looked just the way she’d left it when she came out the day before to throw soiled clothes in the back seat. Bats fluttered near the parking lot’s lights. One winged close to her ear as she casually checked the station wagon and got in.

Music... Rock and roll to take her home.

Jackson Browne. I love you, Jackson. Her fantasy man. She sang with him as she backed out of her space, ready to head home to the trailer. Her heart pounded the lonely rhythm of her nonworking hours:

I wish the best for Danny and Solange; I do not resent their love for each other, I do not resent that they have a baby. Little Kai...

It was two years since he’d told her. It didn’t help that he and Solange hadn’t consummated their desire for each other at the time, that they hadn’t physically betrayed her. Sometimes, she wished they had. Instead, they both expected her to appreciate their selfrestraint.

Now they were living in Hawaii—where Tara and Solange had practiced together, where Tara had married Danny, where Tara had been born—with their new baby.

The road to the trailer court was dark and poor and unpaved, and as she reached the turn, a low-rider spun out of the drive, spitting dust in the night. It backfired, and a cat meowed.

No, not a cat. Not a meow.

The short hairs under Tara’s ponytail lifted.

She should pull over.

The baby cried again.

The baby was in her car.

And she didn’t have to look over her shoulder at the back seat to know whose baby it was.

CHAPTER ONE

In Hawaii, I kept chickens. I had free-roaming

chickens that came into the pen to roost at night

or if they had problems outside. Once in a while,

one of the free-range chickens—never a rooster,

always a hen—would not want to roost in the

pen and would find herself in a tree. If she was

not lured back into the pen and retrained to come

in at night, she would never return; she would

go wild. She would join the group at a safe dis-

tance in the daytime, hide her nest from every-

one, and climb higher and higher in her own

roost so no one could get her. Somehow, in Tara,

I have raised a wild hen.

—Francesca Walcott, CNM

On the road again

IT WAS PAST MIDNIGHT. Driving north, out of Texas, Tara chased off night memories and twilight ghosts, excluding everything but the road and Laura. In slumber, Laura opened and closed her soft tiny hands, holding them close against her blue sleeper.

Almost safe.

She had made it out of Sagrado. In Colorado, she would live with her mother, Francesca—and maybe make ends meet as a midwife. She wouldn’t enjoy living with Francesca. But she had to give Laura the best life possible.

She was trying.

No one at Maternity House had questioned her buying a supplemental feeding system or taking donated breast milk from the breast bank. The birth center sometimes helped an adoptive mother get started inducing lactation. But Tara had told no one about Laura Estrella. Not then, not during the two weeks that followed. Laura would have been given to social services, and...

No way. She’s mine.

Hours after finding the baby in her car, Tara had returned to Maternity House for the things she needed. Then, she’d put Laura to her breast, providing the milk through fine, flexible tubing taped to her nipple. A disposable bag hanging between her breasts, beneath her clothing, held the donor milk. She was massaging her breasts nightly and, with the help of herbs... Yes, maybe months from now, her own breasts would produce milk. But she would always need to supplement.

I’m lucky. I’m so lucky.

She had Laura. She had Laura, and she would do what she must to keep her. Anything at all.

Precipice, Colorado

THE TURNING SEASONS sprayed the mountainsides red, orange and yellow. The leaves flashed gold on red and black rocks, contrasting with the dark pitch of evergreens. Driving home at six-thirty that night, Isaac told the kids, “That whole ridge used to be green.”

It was Wednesday; another babysitter was gone from his life—late getting back from a mountain bike ride. The children had been at the clinic since four-thirty. Keeping tabs on three children, ages five through thirteen, and seeing patients, and dealing with his staff... He felt the stress, readjustment to the cold and the mountains and the U.S.

Danielle cried out in Kinyarwanda, begging his help against David, who was dismembering one of her Barbie dolls.

Isaac took a breath. “English, Danielle.”

She burst into tears, and both her brothers began to soothe her—in the language she’d chosen. Oliver turned around in the passenger seat to speak to her. The doll was reassembled.

“Dad,” said David, behind him. “I have the coolest idea for tonight.”

For D&D, Dungeons & Dragons. Isaac’s brother and mother had brought the game to Rwanda years ago, along with a television and VCR that had later become bargaining chips, buying lives. In Colorado, David had discovered D&D accessories—books, boxes of dice with any number of sides—eight, ten, twelve, twenty, one hundred. David was a wizard at probability. He had written his first seventh-grade essay on chance, and his teacher had sent it to a national contest.

Isaac would have to play Dungeons & Dragons tonight. He’d enjoy it, but his life was full of have-tos, and each day he tried to unload more of them, usually at the clinic. The nurses were always dropping hints—like today. Dr. McCrea, we’re two hours behind schedule! Then he’d heard her tell the receptionist, Guess we’re on African time again.

He’d called an office meeting on the spot and encouraged everyone to air their feelings. They had. In a nice way.

In a nice way, he’d explained that his office wasn’t an emergency room. What most of his patients needed was someone to talk to. He liked to find out what was bothering them and try to get across how they could become well.

Everyone in his office needed to relax about the clock. Precipice had one physician for every five hundred residents; Rwanda, one for every forty thousand. He worked well at great speed, but here, why race the clock?

No one had relaxed. He’d heard about the crying babies and the elderly people on oxygen, and...

There were more have-tos at the clinic. Perhaps he should record his own perceptions of time, as David had recorded his vision of chance.

Looking west at the ski lifts, hanging motionless above the rocks and grass and trees, he weighed the price of season passes against discount ski cards. Oliver and David wanted snowboards. When Isaac had left Colorado, snowboards hadn’t existed. Fourteen years he’d been away.

The face of Precipice Peak bordered one side of the town. Rust-red mountains rose on the other at a gentler angle. He headed that way, east toward Tomboy, and at the top of the road, when he turned left, Danielle exclaimed, “La sage femme! Et une dame et un bébé.”

French now.

Isaac said, “The midwife. And a lady and a baby.”

“Say it, Danielle,” suggested twelve-year-old David. “The midwife. And a lady and a baby.”

“Yes,” Oliver encouraged. “Practice!”

Another have-to. Isaac had to tell the midwife, Francesca Walcott, when the new owners were taking occupancy of her rented Victorian. Two years ago, when Isaac was still in Rwanda, his mother had dispersed most of her assets between him and Dan, his brother. A year later, Dan had negotiated the purchase of the Victorian and Isaac’s own place—as well as empty acres and abandoned buildings sprawled over one side of Tomboy—as a package deal, acting for Isaac. Now Isaac was turning over the Victorian at a profit.

He had to.

PRECIPICE HAD ONCE been a mining town. Since then, log homes and glassy condominiums had sprung up around the turn-of-the-century painted ladies. Yet Tara still saw alpine meadows beneath the grim-faced peaks. The wildflowers were gone, the heavy snows late this year. Aspens dropped golden leaves on her mother’s twenty-year-old Jeep Eagle in the gravel drive.

The sign in front of the Victorian read, Mountain Midwifery. Francesca Walcott, CNM. The name Ivy Walcott, CNM, had been painted over; Tara’s adopted sister had moved back to West Virginia, reunited with her husband and daughter.

Tara had considered turning to Ivy rather than face their mother with Laura. Too late now.

Before she could unfasten her seat belt, Francesca stepped outside and hurried down the walk toward the Safari station wagon, picking her way on stones set in the mud and gravel between naked flower beds. Her gray-tinged auburn curls cascaded over her shoulders. To Tara, Francesca always looked like the Icenian queen Boadicea, who had avenged the rape of her two daughters by waging war against the Romans.

Francesca suited the role.

Tara cranked down her window and smelled snow, unfallen.

Her mother saw Laura.

When Tara released the buckle on the infant car seat and lifted her, Laura didn’t wake, just curled her knees up to her chest. You are so sweet. I love you. I love you.

As Tara unfolded herself from the car with Laura, a blue Toyota Land Cruiser beat its way up the road, rocking over the bumps. The road led up to Tomboy, a ghost town recently turned real-estate speculation-ground. Though several properties were listed, her mother said only one resident had settled on the high alpine tundra, buying up half of what was there. So this must be Francesca’s troublesome landlord. But first Tara saw the children, with luminous skin shades darker than the Rio Grande and wavy, shiny, black hair. A boy, a little girl, another boy.

Finally, she caught an impression of black hair, granite cheekbones and fair skin behind the steering wheel. No one had ever mentioned his looks—only that he was an obstetrician and difficult. Now, there was a real-estate sign in the yard. Was he selling the Victorian?

Where will Mom go?

Where will Laura and I go?

Evicting Francesca so that he could rent out her house to skiers. So why was there a real estate sign on the front lawn?

Francesca plastered on a grin and waved.

The driver nodded, and Tara noted the careless scrape of his eyes, eyes some murky shade of dark gray or green. The children were speaking to each other, ignoring everything else.

“Friends?”

“Shut up and smile.” The hiss of a sigh escaped Francesca’s lips, saying plainer than words, What have you done now, Tara? Whose baby is that?

The Land Cruiser halted in the rocks and mud alongside the road, beneath evergreens. As the dust settled, a car door slammed, and the driver strode toward them.

“Great,” muttered Francesca.

“What?”

“Please, Tara. Let me do the talking. This is my landlord.” She added, “And Dan McCrea’s brother.”

Dan McCrea. The other creep in her life who’d been christened Daniel. Why did she have so much trouble with people named Dan? There was Danny Graine, her ex-husband—

And Dan McCrea, M.D., OB/GYN.

His brother was six foot three or four. Tara rocked Laura, singing softly, “Hush a-bye, don’t you cry, Go to sleepy, little baby....” Under the pine trees, she adjusted the receiving blanket over the tiny head in a cotton hat. She’d found the hat at Wal-Mart in El Paso, along with the infant car seat—everything but the cotton diapers she’d bought from a supplier, also in El Paso.

“Hello, Francesca.”

Tara thrust out a hand. “Hi, I’m Tara. Francesca’s daughter.”

“Isaac McCrea.” He shook her hand, then ignored her. “The buyers signed the contract today. Occupancy is set for November twenty-fourth.”

His eyes were hazel, with black lashes and eyebrows. Yeah, the resemblance to Dangerous Dan was there, alongside the differences. Great chin, nice jaw, straighter hair, more interesting eyes... In Tara’s arms, Laura stirred, made a soft crying sound.

She would have to get the milk and supplemental feeder from the cooler in the car. Her plan was to link up with some of Francesca’s nursing moms, see if any would donate breast milk.

“Is there something I can do to change your mind, Dr. McCrea?” asked Francesca.

“No.” He shook his head.

“Is it because I’m a midwife?”

Tara liked the direct question, the only relevant question. Relevant to everything when one’s life was midwifery—in the United States.

“Of course not.”

“Then, perhaps, when I find a new place for my home and office,” Francesca suggested, “you’ll be willing to serve as backup physician.”

Gutsy, Mom! Incision Dan’s brother serve as backup for the local midwife?

“I have no maternity insurance. I don’t do births.”

Didn’t do births? Tara broke in. “Aren’t you an obstetrician?”

“Family practice. You’re thinking of my brother.”

She blushed. On the phone, months and months ago, Francesca had said he was an obstetrician; but that was when he was new to town. Or maybe there was confusion with his brother, who’d lived in Precipice for years. In any case, Francesca had been getting flak from the hospital about her homebirth practice, and she always assumed the worst.

From the corner of her eye, Tara glimpsed motion. “Your car is rolling.”

The Land Cruiser connected with a house-sized boulder behind it and stopped.

“Not anymore.” Unconcerned about his children releasing the parking brake? Backing away, he murmured, “Enjoy your visit,” and he was partway to his car before he turned and looked at Tara.

She felt to her bones what he saw.

A woman with a newborn and a slender body and flat stomach. Quelling panic, fear of discovery, she grinned. “Bye, doc.”

“TARA. YOUR ETHICS!”

“Ethics, schmethics. This has nothing to do with being a midwife.”

“You attended that child’s birth! You can’t just keep the baby! And you can’t raise a child alone.”

“What would you have done?”

Francesca thought, We’ve been here a hundred times before. Butting heads. “I would have driven straight back to Maternity House. What possessed you to do anything different?”

“I told you. I swore—”

“The mother is clearly not dead.”

“Maybe, maybe not. But her wishes were obvious. She considered herself dead—to this child. And now, Laura can grow up knowing that her mother and I made a pact, rather than that her mother abandoned her, which is the story she’d hear if she was adopted by strangers.”

Francesca pressed her lips together. The baby was darling, with her thatch of dark hair and huge dark eyes. I don’t dare hold her. But Tara... Tara was nursing her with supplemental milk. Ten to twelve times a day. What was she thinking? “Tara, that baby is stolen. From the next couple in the state of Texas waiting to adopt a child.”

Tara had already considered that. “I disagree. Julia fostered her out—informally—to me. People have done it forever, everywhere. Uther Pendragon handed Arthur to Merlin, who gave him to Sir Ector to raise. Dad told me about an Eskimo lady giving her second son to a woman who had none, for the strength of the community—”

Francesca rolled her eyes. She’d once heard Charlie convince a man that moose turn into caribou when they cross the Arctic Circle. “Things have changed, Tara.”

“But remember how it was in Hawaii? Lots of adoption within families. Fostering and adoption are ancient traditions—”

“And this is the dawn of the third millennium.”

Tara lifted the infusion of fenugreek she’d brewed. “To a bright new century. Here we are. And I can help you. I’ll do the homebirths. You do the hospital births.”

“I’ve already told my homebirth clients that I can’t attend homebirths anymore. I can’t risk losing hospital privileges, and there’s simply too much pressure from the medical community.”

“Tara to the rescue. I’ll start a homebirth practice to fill in the gaps. After all, I have no hospital privileges to lose.”

“You should not be practicing in the state of Colorado, Tara. It’s not legal. In January—” Francesca began.

“Not an issue. These hands caught more than eight hundred babies just last year.”

“In Texas. I know your credentials, Tara. But the answer is no.”

The infant in her arms ceased sucking at Tara’s nipple and the tube from the supplemental feeder. Her head dropped away in slumber, and Tara carefully turned her to burp her.

Pretending not to see the bonding between her daughter and the newborn, Francesca watered pots of cacti in the solarium. The muscles in her shoulders ached. How could Tara have done it?

Only Tara would have done it.

And Tara was fragile as a cactus. Cacti seemed hardy, but if you ignored what they were and watered them too much... Was Tara really over Danny, over his running off with her partner, having a child with her partner? Now ex-partner.

How can I turn her away? Wandering to the kitchen, Francesca touched the soft cheek of the sleeping newborn. Skin so fine. The smell of her so new. “Do you even have her birth certificate?”

“No.” The solution—the last-gasp, avoid-losing-Laura solution—confronted Tara again. Surely it wouldn’t come to that.

“How do you plan to adopt her, Tara?”

“I’m working it out. Don’t worry. If I’m not worrying, why should you?”

Francesca folded her arms across her chest. Lines in her forehead deepened as she returned to the solarium. After a bit, she shook her head and muttered, “That man.”

“Isaac the Greedy? His kids are cute.” Releasing the parking brake.

“His children are in dire need of a mother.”

In dire need of a mother?

Tara came alert. “Where’s their mother?”

“I understand she’s dead.” Reluctantly, Francesca added, “In Rwanda. That’s where they came from.”

Rwanda?

Tara saw the terraced slopes, felt the heat and humidity, smelled the scents, the unique scents of that country, the faces of the people. She had read the newspapers and books in ’94 and since, and cried for Rwanda.

She placed Laura in a sling against her chest, a style she’d learned in South America, and went to the sink. She removed the feeding system and emptied the remaining milk, then prepared for next time. Afterward, she took flour, cinnamon and nutmeg from the cupboard. “I’m going to make a couple of pies and take them up to your nemesis and his motherless children.”

Francesca’s eyes rounded. “You’re going to do what?”

“It’s for Laura. Here’s a man who needs a wife. And I need a husband so I can get a home study and adopt Laura.”

“Tara, you can’t—”

Tara laughed. “Just kidding, Mom.”

Francesca reminded herself to breathe. It sometimes occurred to her that Tara had been conceived in a turbulent year—oh, in how many ways—and that she’d been born on the fifth anniversary of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination, and that maybe all of this was to blame for her having turned out as she had. But no. Charlie Marcus’s genes—and personality, if you could call it that—were responsible.

“I’m going to try to talk him out of selling this house,” Tara explained, almost as though reasoning with herself.

Francesca studied her daughter. Was Tara lying? She’d learned from the best—her father. “The house is a done deal.”

“Not till closing.”

“He’s not going to back down, Tara. I’ve known him longer than you have. Not to say that I do know him, only that I know how he feels about selling this house. I always get the same answer.”

Her daughter’s smile made Francesca uneasy, as if Tara actually planned to marry Isaac McCrea. “Then maybe someone else should do the asking.”

SHE DROVE SLOWLY, yet the low-slung station wagon hit rocks in the four-wheel-drive road. Her mother had offered to watch Laura, but Tara had declined. She didn’t want to be apart from her. You’re so precious. Blowing bubbles in her car seat.

Twilight bathed Tomboy. The ghostly skeleton of an uninhabited mining structure rose against the far rock walls. Closer by stood another deserted building, the Columbine, which had once been a bordello. Now the windows were boarded, like those of the houses across the road where miners had lived, but Tara drove with one elbow in order to direct an X made with her two index fingers toward the house of prostitution.

Had he bought that, too? Her mother had said “everything north of the road.”

Lights shone from a house set alone at the edge of the tundra. Decades ago, the mine owner had resided there, in a two-story cabin set eight feet above the road, at winter snow level. Subsequent owners had built onto the sides and back, adding the steep rooflines of a chalet, with outdoor shutters and balconies. A snowmobile near the side porch awaited the first storms.

Isaac McCrea had chosen a high and desolate paradise for his home, and Tara envied him the alpine wildflowers that would poke through the tundra, the grasslike slivers ice formed at that altitude, the alpenglow which would turn the peaks pink each night.

He must have heard her car. A tall shadow darkened a downstairs window, then moved away.

She parked, and when the motor died, she could hear music. Drums and singing.

HIS DOORBELL RANG, and he crossed the pine floor in his wool socks, calling over his shoulder to David, “I’m going to steal the scroll.”

Dice rolled on the kitchen table as he opened the door.

It was Francesca Walcott’s daughter with her newborn. He remembered an observation earlier that day. She didn’t look like a woman who’d recently given birth.

A black cat shot between his feet and leaped to the porch railing. Arching its back, it hissed.

“Don’t take it personally. She always acts that way.”

Tara heard a trace of an accent. How could she have missed it earlier? She held out a cardboard box. “I made you some pies. The bottom one might be a little crunched. I had to stack them. There’s cardboard in between.”

“Smells great. We’re not picky.” Pumpkin. Like his mom’s. “Come in.”

“Thanks.” Her grin was raw and unbridled, radiating sexuality. When she stepped inside, he noticed she was tall, five-ten maybe. Long straight hair the shade of a walnut fell down her back, and her eyes were almost the same color. They swept the foyer, the great beams, the ancient floors, the loft. Isaac realized what she must see—the laundry heaped on a chair, the dishes in the sink, Barbie dolls and Micro Machines on the rug, a cat’s kill. He grabbed a snow shovel from the porch and scooped the last outside.

The three children gathered at the table were neater than their surroundings. The little girl wore blue flannel pajamas, her long thick hair in two braids. Dirty dishes covered two counters. The music came from upstairs.

“You steal the scroll,” one of the boys said to Isaac.

“Okay, I’m going to read it.” Isaac remembered his manners belatedly. “Hold up, gang. We have a visitor. This is—”

“Tara.” She grabbed a chair at the table and surreptitiously brushed off crumbs before sitting. In Mexico, out in the country, the women’s homes had dirt floors. She’d loved visiting each home for prenatal visits and births. Years ago. “Who’s who, here? And what are you playing?”

“Dungeons & Dragons,” David said. As the boys dove in with answers, Isaac shut the door. Why was she here? The eviction? She couldn’t possibly think this would sway his decision about the Victorian.

And that couldn’t be her baby.

“Dad’s a thief. We just found this scroll, and he stole it.”

Isaac’s thoughts drifted back to the game, and he winced. “I forgot to ask Oliver to identify it.”

“That’s true.” David, his younger son, held their destinies in his hands. “And when you read the scroll, you begin to grow a beard. It grows at a rate of one foot per hour.”

Isaac and his fellow adventurers groaned.

“It’s okay, Daddy,” said Danielle. “Oliver has les ciseaux. La magique!” Her heavily accented English turned to French, then Kinyarwanda, until she covered her mouth to keep the words inside. The gesture stabbed Isaac. He’d been too intense about her speaking English.

Daddy was easy. She’d known him as Daddy all her life. Having the children call him Dad or Daddy had been his and Heloise’s main concession to the obvious fact that he was not Rwandan, not Hutu, not Tutsi, not Belgian. American.

Tara stared at Danielle with brilliant, admiring eyes. “You know more languages than me!”

“Not English.” Danielle sighed.

“You shouldn’t have read the scroll, Dad,” said Oliver, their magician. “We’ll try the magic scissors, but I think we’re going to have to pay someone to remove the curse.”

“Your English is very good.” Tara saw something dart across the shadows in the kitchen. A mouse. Someone should let the cat back in.

You sure made yourself at home, Isaac thought. “Everyone who wants a piece of pie needs to wash a plate.”

Three chairs moved in unison.

Another cat, dark gray, stalked toward the corner. Get him. Get that mouse. Tara glanced up at Isaac. “You have a great family.”

“Thanks. Shall I wash a plate for you?”

“Oh, I can wash my own.”

She began to rise, and he waved her down. “You’re a guest. Dishes just aren’t a high priority around here.”

“They never have been with me, either.” But someone better get a handle on the crumbs.

“And guys,” he told the children, “that’s a wrap for tonight. After the pie, go to bed.”

None of the children chose to eat at the table, instead settling all over the rustic furniture and the tattered rug that covered the center of the distressed-wood floor. In the kitchen, the mouse had become a toy for the charcoal cat.

Isaac set a piece of pie and a fork in front of Tara. “Something to drink?”

“Water, please.”

He brought it, then his own, and they were alone at the table while the kids carried on their own conversation about the game, lapsing into Kinyarwanda—then, with a glance at him, returning to English. Rules for guests.

Tara tried to kick off the conversation. “How do you like being a doctor in Precipice?” She tucked a finger into the newborn’s tiny hand.

“It’s nice.” Calling himself to the conversation, Isaac shrugged.

Tara thought he sounded as though he was just visiting.

The baby began to wake, and she lifted the child from the sling. “Hello, Laura. Hello, hello, sweet princess.”

Laura. A coincidence that this baby should share a name with one of his dead children, one of the triplets. Only Danielle had survived the birth, to become his brother’s namesake three days later, when he had named her sisters, too, the sisters he’d dug up from the dirt in which they were buried. As he’d dug to find Heloise. His hands itched to hold this Laura. Could holding her be part of healing?

He reached out.

So the doctor likes babies. Tara filed the thought away. What was his story? What had happened to the children’s mother? Was she Hutu or Tutsi? One or the other, surely.

“This is Laura Estrella,” she said. Her hands to his. Big, long-fingered hands, man hands, beautiful hands.

The baby was all eyes. She was also wet, Isaac observed, and Tara hadn’t brought a diaper bag inside. “How many days old?”

“Two weeks.” Two weeks of finishing business at Maternity House—without letting anyone know about Laura. Then, packing her birth records and midwifery texts, settling into a routine with Laura. But this man would know, would know she hadn’t given birth to the child. I’m looking after her for her mother. Sure. Why not? Tara said the words, then followed them up. “I was working at Maternity House in Sagrado, Texas. Her mother was from Mexico and came up to have the baby. She’s young and doesn’t want to take care of Laura yet.” A lie. It was the worst kind of lie, partly true.

Isaac’s eyes belonged to Laura now—so they’d stay off Tara. A woman was a complication he didn’t need, unless she liked babysitting. He’d ask her about that in a minute, seeing she’d appeared on his doorstep like Mary Poppins. “What’s Maternity House?”

“A birth center. I’m a midwife, too.”

“Oh.”

She wanted to know what he thought. Whose side was he on? Between doctors and midwives in the United States, there were always sides. She asked, “And do you approve?”

He glanced up. “Why should it matter?”

Only analysts should answer questions with questions; in other people, it seemed like evasion. “The medical community here. No one will provide physician backup while my mother’s doing homebirths.”

Not my problem, Isaac thought automatically, as automatically as he had once known no sense of “other,” always seeing himself in another’s eyes, always looking for the global solution. But not now and not homebirth.

With fifteen hospital beds for every ten thousand Rwandans, he and Heloise had both attended births in homes. But his boys had been born at the hospital, Danielle the only gift in a disaster at home.

When Dan visited, they’d listened to his stories of obstetrics in Precipice and sometimes of “the midwives.” Dan could make you laugh.

Especially in a country with so little to laugh about.

The midwives! Isaac remembered. Dan visiting Kibuye, talking about Francesca Walcott, Ivy the Babe, Tara the... Oh, yes, he’d heard all about Tara, hadn’t he?

She was the one who said “yoni” instead of “vagina,” YBAC instead of VBAC... Isaac wished he could remember more. That night, Heloise had said, “Yoni. I love that word. Yes, you must call my garden my ‘yoni’ from now on.” And he had. Except when he called it her garden.

He didn’t want Tara watching his kids, after all.

Noticing that Laura had soaked the front of his shirt, Tara shoved her pie plate away from her. “Hold her, okay, while I run out to the car?”

As Tara left, Laura began to cry, and he lifted her to his shoulder and stood. Precious baby.

Oliver and David headed upstairs. The music went off.

Danielle came over to squint up at him and the newborn. “La bébé est—”

She stopped midsentence.

Crouching beside her, he smiled, teasing. “C’est pour votre bien.”

She laughed, then tried. “You are—funny!”

“You are smart. My favorite girl.”

Danielle touched the baby and told her, in Kinyarwanda, to stop crying, Mama would be back. Laura was momentarily silent, but by the time Tara returned, her screaming had driven even Danielle to her room.

“Sorry,” Isaac apologized. “She’s mad.”

“There’s not much you could’ve done. Hungry and wet.” Taking the infant, Tara moved to his kitchen to warm some milk, set up the feeder. Minutes later, she sat on his couch and began to nurse, banishing any shyness about the feeder. I’m so lucky, Laura. Lucky to have you.

The cat dropped mouse guts at Isaac’s feet. He disposed of the remains, then sat opposite Tara, on a longer, more tattered couch. “How are you doing that?”

Tara’s face felt fiery for the second time that day.

He said, “Clinical interest.”

She tried to forget he was Dan McCrea’s brother. “Sure. It’s a supplemental feeder. There’s a tube. I’m not even producing milk yet.”

“I’ve never known a woman to do that. Induce lactation.” He brought Tara a fresh tumbler of water.

“Thank you.” His wife must have nursed. “Actually, I’d like to see if I can get a breast-milk bank going here. And a support group for nursing mothers.”

Good ideas. None of her attitudes shocked him. Heloise’s sister had nursed Danielle.

The cat rubbed his legs.

Isaac fetched their pie plates and set them on the big footstools. Between bites of apple pie, he asked, “Will you be practicing midwifery with your mother?”

“We haven’t worked that out yet.” Play it cool, Tara. It was one thing to practice as an unlicensed lay midwife in Colorado; it was another thing to confess the fact to a physician. Laura watched her. “I can’t stop looking at this baby. She’s irresistible.” Time to get a hundred miles away from the topic of midwifery. “My mom says you’re absolutely set on selling that house.”

“Right.” It wasn’t her business why. Raised Quaker and practicing into adulthood—right up to Heloise’s death in a country where priests had slayed or betrayed their own flocks, where anyone seemingly would kill anyone—Isaac had little trouble controlling what came out of his mouth.

“You know, my mom could probably pay a little more rent.”

“Then she shouldn’t have trouble finding a new place.”

“You don’t know Precipice.”

Isaac finished his piece of pie. He didn’t like turning a woman out of her home, but he had obligations. He yawned conspicuously.

Tara seemed not to see it. She was preoccupied, her forehead creased in a frown.

Her question made him jump in his skin.

“So, you’re...not married?”

CHAPTER TWO

I’m praying hard, praying I can do it.... I know

I can’t last much longer, that I’ll end up going

to the hospital, except for we have no money, no

insurance. Rowdy’s applied for a job at a gas

station in Logan, but he doesn’t think he’ll get

it. Gabriela talks to me, says I’m doing good.

She’s just a kid, younger than me, but she helps

her mom with midwife stuff. She’ll never do

what I did, though I’ll never call this precious

baby a mistake. Anyhow, when Ivy checks me

again the baby’s coming....

—“Alison Angelina’s Birth,” Devon Workman, age 16, Guyandotte, West Virginia

TARA SWITCHED BREASTS, moving the feeding tube as well. Her nipples already protruded from nursing. He noticed one of them was malformed and circled by shiny, puckered tissue. Burns?

With difficulty, he kept from staring. “Widowed.”

“I’m sorry.”

“It’s been five years.”

Silence folded in on them.

She juggled Laura and her piece of pie, trying to eat and paying more heed to the baby than to covering her breasts. If she’d been Heloise, he would have fed her bites between kisses.

As it was, he found her sexy, prodding, earthy. She’d descended on him like a forest spirit and made herself comfortable in his disordered home. Mouseridden—a haven for hantavirus. He shuddered slightly. Wishing her quick exit from his life, he asked, “How long will you be visiting your mother?”

“We’re moving here. Need a babysitter?”

“No.” He’d already decided. There was a school bus. The kids could handle it. In some ways, Oliver was older at thirteen than the adults of Precipice.

But tragedy and bloodshed didn’t really mature a child.

And what to do with Danielle in the mornings?

“I have references. I went to junior high and high school here.”

He pictured her employed as nanny to Sleeping Beauty and other fairy-tale children. Not his kids. Time for this day to end. The children would be spending the weekend with his mother in Silverton; he’d drive them over Thursday night. Friday was his extra day off before the weekend, and he’d told the schools this would be an educational absence. Only six months in the U.S.? Everything was education.

On the kitchen counter, his pager buzzed, and he found it between pie plates. “This is new for me.” He eyed the device. “Can’t say I love it.”

Tara turned on the couch and laughed. “I love mine. A baby on the way is good news. Oh, no—I mean, I just dumped the pie on your couch.”

Blood awakened his penis. Her voice? Another glimpse of her breasts? Or just having a woman in the house? “Don’t worry about it. I’ll clean it up.” He gazed at the number. The answering service. “Excuse me.”

While he was out of the room, Tara dabbed at the couch, then laid out a protective pad to change Laura. “We need to get you more clothes, kiddo.” The baby watched Tara’s eyes, and Tara smiled back, her mind on Isaac.

He was gone long enough to give her more chance to study the chalet. There were two primitive masks on one rough wooden wall, with a photo of a mountain gorilla between them. On the table beneath was a woven blanket.

When he returned, she asked, “What took you to Rwanda?”

“Doctors Against Violence. I was an intern and resident with them, then worked for them till last year.” They’d paid his way through medical school, too, in an accelerated program starting just after high school. And they’d gotten him and his children out of Rwanda on twelve hours’ notice.

Briefly, he remembered his fellow intern in Kigali fourteen years ago—twenty—four-year-old Heloise Nsanzumuhile. In three days, he’d known he was in love. With Heloise, her country and medicine.

He curtailed the conversation. “I have to go to the hospital.”

Doctors Against Violence. Back in the late ’80s, Tara had spent three weeks in Rwanda with her father and one of his friends, a biologist, and the mountain gorillas. On the way back to Kigali, Tara had seen the massacre of a Tutsi family. She was nineteen and had already lived in Chile for eighteen months, training in a hospital there as a matrona, a midwife—and reaching out, trying to create a link between the classes, between the few rich and the many poor, stirring the wrath of her friend Matilde’s patrón.... That day in Rwanda, her father had clapped his hand over her mouth and wouldn’t let her move. He knew her too well.

Weeks later, back in Chile, she landed in prison.

Not something she wanted to think about.

Feel the hope. Feel the possibilities. Isaac had wanted to hold Laura. Marry a doctor, adopt Laura. “Would you like me to stay and watch the kids?”

“We manage.” There was an intense, private protectiveness in his words. Tara gathered her things hurriedly, not meeting his eyes. Okay, he doesn’t want me for a sitter.

Which meant he wouldn’t want her for a wife, either.

LAURA’S CRYING penetrated her dreams later that night. Tara’s eyelids struggled open. How could any woman do this after a long labor? She’d started in great physical condition, yet she was exhausted.

She changed the infant’s sodden diaper. Precious little legs. Cuddle her in a blanket. But Laura cried all the way to the kitchen. Francesca had called some other new mothers earlier that day, and the freezer and refrigerator were stocked with fresh milk. It would keep for 48 hours in the fridge, two to four weeks in the freezer.

“I’ll hold her while you warm the milk and set up.”

Tara hadn’t even noticed her mother entering the kitchen. I’m dead on my feet. But it seemed important to manage alone.

As Isaac did.

“I’m fine.”

Francesca was already reaching for the baby.

“Mom, you really don’t have—”

“Don’t be so stubborn, Tara. You don’t need to prove anything to me.”

Why did people always think she was trying to prove something? She’d been told the same thing before—by Danny, especially. What are you trying to prove, Tara?

Danny, Dan McCrea, Danielle McCrea. The little girl must be named for her uncle.

Reluctantly, Tara let her mother hold Laura while she put the kettle on for fenugreek tea. Maybe she didn’t have anything to prove to Francesca, but she had much to prove to herself, especially where Laura was concerned.

Her mother turned in a slow circle, Laura against her shoulder. Gently, Francesca patted the crying newborn’s back. “Tara, how are you going to handle her records? You can’t just pretend this child dropped from space.”

“I’ll homeschool her.” Ready to nurse, Tara took the baby from her mother and settled in a chair at the kitchen table. The immaculate house contrasted with the chaos at Isaac’s.

“Eventually, someone will want to see a birth certificate.” Francesca perched on the edge of another chair. Tara rarely saw her mother relax, rarely saw her sit back and just be. Even now, she seemed poised to spring up, to try to make Tara more comfortable.

But Francesca was right about Laura. “It’ll work out,” Tara promised. Laura’s soft cheek was curved, her little mouth suckling hard. Long ago, Tara had adopted the philosophy that things work out. She’d been jailed in one Third World country for defending the poor and in another for—bad luck. She never spoke of those times, seldom looked back.

Look forward, Tara.

Laura’s birth certificate, birth certificate... Oh, good grief! Why hadn’t she thought of it sooner? “You could write a birth certificate.”

“That would be fraud.”

Tara heard. Francesca hadn’t said, Not on your life. She hadn’t refused.

“It’s the perfect solution, Mom.”

“No. I won’t do it. I wouldn’t even consider it, Tara.”

She had considered it. Tara knew but didn’t argue. Instead she began singing softly. “Golden slumbers kiss your eyes. Smiles await you when you rise. Sleep, pretty baby, do not cry....”

Francesca had rocked Tara to that song in Hawaii thirty years ago. Tara had been born in a homemade birthing tub beside a dolphin lagoon. She’d been born with the sac intact over her head, a symbol of good luck and strength. Francesca knew her daughter’s strength—but good luck?

More than a decade ago, Tara had survived a Chilean prison. Two years later, it was Mexico. In the United States she’d been arrested for protesting a nuclear waste dump and for protecting a palm grove in Hawaii from bulldozers. Francesca could scarcely conceive of what her daughter had survived in those instances. Especially Chile. But Tara’s eyes always shone, overflowing with enthusiasm, never betraying fear.

Francesca was afraid on her behalf. Always.

Tara never talked. She’d married Danny Graine, a contractor, and Danny had left her for her partner, for a fellow midwife. Francesca knew Tara couldn’t be held wholly innocent in the desertion. But all Francesca’s sympathies rested with her daughter.

Tara and Ivy. Besides midwifery, her vocation, they were her life. With Ivy, it was a little different. Ivy had joined their family as an adult. Brain damage, permanent amnesia, had robbed her of her past. She’d found it now. But back when Tara had suggested adopting Ivy, it had seemed natural. Francesca loved Ivy as a daughter. She is my daughter, like Tara and unlike Tara. Ivy’s levelheadedness was a counterpoint to Tara’s Charlie Marcus ways.

Ivy lived in West Virginia now. She was reunited with the husband and daughter she hadn’t been able to remember.

Fake a birth certificate for little Laura, precious Laura with her mouth latched so hard to Tara’s nipple? Francesca had seen her daughter wince while nursing Laura Estrella. I’ve already helped her round up more milk. So many generous mothers willing to help. Was the birth certificate so much more?

Yes.

And it was just what Charlie would have suggested. No interest whatsoever in obeying the law. Francesca abided by rules and regulations, had seldom found it difficult to do otherwise.

But Tara...

Nursing a child someone had abandoned in the back seat of her car. Holding inside the consequences of flouting the law in other lands.

I don’t want her hurt again. Not by another Danny Graine. Not by authorities who would take little Laura from her arms.

There must be a way to make the adoption legal. First, a home study. But where was Tara’s home? She couldn’t be legally employed as a midwife in Colorado until she became licensed. Maybe it was time to convince her to take that step, if not for her own sake then for Laura’s. “Tara, the law has changed. It’ll come into effect next year.”

“What law?” But Tara knew. Midwives would no longer be required to qualify as nurses. Instead, they’d have to verify that they’d attended a certain number of live births and take a test... “Oh, I know about it.” Just as she knew there were eight or nine different titles for midwives, titles with little meaning to the consumer. Professionally, she was direct-entry, meaning she’d come into midwifery without pursuing nursing school. By choice, she held no credentials.

As far as Tara was concerned, midwife would do.

Matrona.

“As of January, you can be licensed. It’s just a matter of paperwork and passing the test.”

“We’ve covered this one, Mom. No test, no certification. Sleep, pretty baby, do not cry...”

“Why not? Tara, the certification process will be nothing to you.”

“This isn’t about me. Birth is a natural process, and women should be able to have their babies however and with absolutely whomever they choose. That is a basic human right, and that is why I’ll never certify—to uphold that right. Not my rights. The rights of mothers and fathers who want homebirths. The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists is out to take away their rights.”

“Becoming licensed won’t keep you from homebirths.”

“You want me to go on? We could talk about how, in some states, CNMs can’t attend homebirths and licensed midwives can, and how Colorado is becoming one of those states—”

“This isn’t about me, it’s about you.” Francesca was a certified nurse-midwife. “And no one’s asked you to become a CNM.”

“Okay, me. I’m against regulating midwifery. Word of mouth is the best regulation there is. Word of mouth and community, something this country needs to relearn.”

Francesca kept her voice even. “I can’t let you do homebirths out of this house, Tara, or under my business name. It compromises my reputation, my position in this community. And I refuse to risk your going to jail when you have that child to raise.”

“Ah, we’re getting somewhere,” Tara told Laura. “She admits you’re mine.”

Francesca sighed.

She might as well have said, You’re just like your father, which Tara had always known wasn’t really an insult, just something to be accepted. Like her parents’ divorce, her father’s desertions.

“Tara, I don’t see how you can legally adopt her. You’re single. You’re poor. You’re unemployed—”

“And I’ve just moved to the perfect place for finding a rich husband.” She tried to banish Isaac McCrea from her mind. Isaac and his family, their cats and their mice.

Francesca looked thoughtful. “I suppose if you fell in love with the right man, the two of you could adopt. -Not that I’d favor marrying for money—”

The phone rang.

Millie Rand was due. This must be it.

“A birth,” exclaimed Tara. All thoughts of marriage and adoption fled. While Francesca answered the phone, Tara gathered up Laura and filled a new bag for the feeder. She would accompany her mother to the hospital, though she wouldn’t be allowed to assist as a midwife—with or without certification. But she could help in other ways. She eavesdropped on the conversation, and when Francesca got off the phone, Tara said, “Fill me in. I’m coming along.”

Her mother’s lips pressed shut. Shaking her head with a rueful smile, she held Tara’s head between her hands and said, “When are you going to make things easier?”

“That’s why I’m here, Mom!”

Her mother’s sigh could have reached the back of a stadium.

FRANCESCA’S CLIENT AND her family hadn’t yet arrived when Tara and her mother reached the hospital’s small labor and delivery suite. Francesca and Tara and Ivy, her sister, had provided the toys and books for the children’s corner with the help of former clients whose children had outgrown the toys.

Laura was restless, so Tara walked her through the hospital. Isaac McCrea rounded a corner from the cafeteria, and they both started, between giant oil paintings of elk in the aspens.

“Hello, Tara.” Uncomfortable, Isaac recalled Tara’s visit to the chalet—as he had every hour since she’d left.

“I hope your emergency had a good outcome.”

His emergency had been a battered wife. He and two ER nurses had talked her into going to the shelter in Montrose. It had taken four hours. Danielle, who’d begged to come to the hospital with him, was asleep on the floor of the playroom on the maternity unit; the boys were at home. He’d been about to collect his daughter, but suddenly he was in no hurry.

He nodded ambiguously as his brother, Dan, paused beside him in the hallway.

“Well, well, well. Look who’s back.”

Tara held Laura toward Isaac. “Help me out, doc.”

A second later, he was holding the infant while Tara embraced Dan, exclaiming, “Hi, Dr. McCrea! The other Dr. McCrea,” she added, beaming as though at a long-lost friend.

Better friends than enemies, Tara told herself. If her sister, Ivy, had been there, Ivy would have accused her of insincerity. Tara and Dan weren’t friends; friendly adversaries was the best you could call it. But Tara believed you caught more flies with honey than vinegar. The midwives and Dan McCrea had often clashed over a patient’s care; no doubt it would happen again tonight, at Millie Rand’s birth.

Dan eyed the baby in Isaac’s arms and addressed Tara. “Surely, that’s not yours?” His gaze swept up and down her body.

Subduing an inner twinge of hurt, rising to it, Tara grinned. “Surely, you’re not implying that it couldn’t be.”

“No one would imply that,” Isaac cut in—and wished he hadn’t.

Tara’s expression was...mollified. He wanted her in a purely physical way; every man she met must want her. He couldn’t forget about her nursing that child who wasn’t hers. He couldn’t forget her.

Tara saw a pregnant woman passing in the hall, her hand linked through her husband’s arm. Was that Francesca’s client? Trembling, she reached for Laura, carefully taking the infant from Isaac’s arms.

It felt more intimate to him than it should.

“Thanks, doc. I’d better go.”

Dan’s eyes had followed Tara’s—then drifted to her ass. “In that case, I better go, too, to oversee this delivery.”

“My mother will have this labor and delivery well under control.”

“But I love to watch you in action.”

Isaac’s throat knotted. His brother’s girlfriend of five years had moved out last winter. Still, the word “unprofessional” came to mind.

She invited it She can deal with it.

Yet the situation violated some sanctity of mother and child—woman and child. Tara held that infant like it was her own. Checking the baby’s face, tucking the blanket around her, her own eyes so involved in the child. Vulnerable.

“You know, I’m hungry,” she murmured. “I think I’ll get something to eat.” She started in Isaac’s direction, toward the cafeteria, then tossed a glance at his brother. “Join me?”

A wolf smile creased Dan’s face. “I think I can spare the time.”

They like each other. Fine. Isaac was glad to write her off.

Then she said, “And you?”

“Sure.” So much for writing her off, Isaac.

Now, Dan was looking him up and down. “Damn, you’re tall.”

They loaded their trays scantily, no one genuinely hungry, and found a table at the side of the room. Realizing they’d forgotten napkins, Isaac went after them, and Dan smiled at Tara over a cup of coffee. “You know and I know that you’re really trying to keep me out of the delivery room.”

“The birthing suite.” Tara tried some iceberg lettuce, the hospital’s finest. “Whatever gave you that idea?”

“You’re going to fail. You know your problem, Tara? And I mean you and—” with his fingers, he indicated quotation marks “—‘midwives’ like you. Everything is black and white.”

As her jaw dropped, Isaac returned to the table. When he sat down, his leg touched hers, and they both scooted back their chairs.

“In your eyes,” Dan continued, “all obstetricians are bad, and we all want to burn you alive. This isn’t the Dark Ages. You’re the ones who want to stay in the dark. Why won’t you let us guide you instead? What gets you so riled up about technology?”

Tara felt sweat droplets gathering on her forehead. Birth was sacred. What could she say about a roomful of people staring at the Broncos instead of a woman having a baby right before their eyes? How could she make Daniel McCrea, M.D., see the difference between a vibrant, powerful woman, laboring beautifully in the peace of her own home, and a woman on an epidural, plodding indifferently through the birth of her child? These were the images she saw. And others—from her time in a Chilean hospital. In Chile, like the U.S., traditional midwifery was all but destroyed. It needed a comeback.

But all she said was, “Because technology, in my experience, leads to unnecessary cesarean sections.” Not to mention that you can’t catch a baby without causing genital mutilation.

Well, okay, that was putting it strongly; everyone had to do episiotomies in certain circumstances. But every time, Dan?

Isaac sipped his coffee, a Quaker silence keeping him out of the fray. He pictured births in Rwanda. Went far away, into himself. No, think about something else. Mice. When it turned cold, they’d flocked inside, and the local vet had given him two homeless cats. But there were too many mice for his cats to kill. He needed exterminators.

“Do you know that some women prefer C-sections? And some women prefer painless births.”

Try vacuuming once in a while, Isaac. If the mice have nothing to eat... Right. Orkin. Pest control. That was the answer.

Tara wanted to scream. Dan was right. And probably some women had great memories of the baby arriving at halftime, and who was she to say that wasn’t best? Hey, the Broncos were great. Besides, how many times had Francesca and Ivy reminded her not to judge one birth experience over another? Again and again, they’d said, It’s not your birth, Tara.

Oh, she hated hospitals almost as much as jails—and for similar reasons. “I acknowledge the necessity for some cesareans, and I support the right of women who want painless births to have them, Dr. McCrea. But I also support the right of women who want homebirths to have homebirths.”

“Don’t get me started.” With an uneasy glance at Isaac, Dan changed the subject. “Tell me about this little tyke. You seem more suited to motherhood than the role of crusader. Especially, since you’re still not legal.”

Dan McCrea’s eyes gleamed, and Tara knew it was all about power, about establishing power over her. Good luck. Dan McCrea wasn’t scary, and she would stall him here in this cafeteria as long as she could and count on his wanting to get some sleep before office hours tomorrow.

Homebirth. Isaac had tired of the company before his coffee cooled to drinkable. He got up. “I’ll see you later.”

Both seemed surprised.

But he’d barely left the table before his brother said, “You know, Tara, there’s such a thing as being too natural. Too earthy. Too Eastern. Taoist, Zen, whatever you are. Ultimately, too folksy and backward. You’re all of the above.”

Isaac shook his head as he left the cafeteria. Homebirth. Have at her, Dan.

HE LEFT! DAN McCREA finally left.

After forty-five minutes of innuendo, a litany of the latest peaks he’d bagged, and a genuine invitation to dinner—no chance—he finally said, “Well, Tara, till next time,” and departed...for the hospital doors.

Folksy and backward. She’d thought it was a compliment before he said that.

Waving at Pilar Garcia, a labor and delivery nurse, who had just filled a tray, Tara rose to speak to her old friend.

Pilar glanced at Laura, then toward the doors. “Not a new romance?”

“No. I was trying to keep Millie Rand from an unnecessary C-section. An epidural, anyway. How’s she doing?”

“Just fine.” Pilar’s expression was mildly disapproving. Of Tara’s methods? Again, her eyes drifted to the baby, almost as though she knew the state of Tara’s womb.

Tara thought deliberately of other things.

There were so many Dan McCreas in the world, she was used to meeting them on their own terms, flirting right back or treating them like flies. But Ivy had told her several times that she was courting trouble.

Pilar’s response made her feel worse things—that she’d teased Dan and somehow let down every woman at the hospital. She wondered how Isaac had reacted to her performance with his brother, if he saw her as Dan did—that she viewed things as “black and white.” That she was a hotheaded “crusader” for a trivial cause?

Damn it, it wasn’t a trivial cause, and she’d been trying to do the right thing.

“Okay,” she told Laura as she carried the baby toward the maternity unit, “so maybe I’m a little folksy and backward. I can live with that.”

DAN McCREA HAD BEATEN her to the labor and delivery suite, and he and the anesthesiologist were busy trying to talk Millie Rand into an epidural. “You know, I just think you’ll be more comfortable if you try the epidural, Millie. Maybe dilate faster.”

Tara wanted to step in, to say, This woman wants a natural childbirth. No drugs, no epidural, Too black and white for you, Dr. McCrea?

Francesca said, for perhaps the tenth time, “My client has expressed her desire for natural childbirth.”

“Francesca, what if I can’t do it? I never have before.”

This was Millie Rand’s third child; the other two were staying with a friend. Her husband had gone to childbirth classes with her. Compared to what Tara had seen daily in Sagrado, this birth promised to be a piece of cake. If the boys would just get out of the room.

Millie’s adrenaline must be pumping now. Who could have a baby with someone terrifying her? And all this chitchat is stimulating her neocortex, just when she needs one of the older parts of her brain to take over. Time to get primal. Why hadn’t she had this conversation with Dan when she had the chance? As her buddy Star in Sagrado always said, Don’t fight—engage.

Millie’s husband put in, “Millie, I know what you’ve been talking about since you knew you were pregnant, and an epidural wasn’t it.”

“She’s in pain,” Dan exclaimed.

Tara tried to evoke some feeling of compassion for Dan McCrea. A flicker was as good as it got. The man sent her straight into radical midwife mode; Ivy called it “RMM,” as in “Tara, you’re in RMM.” So be it. Dan, I bet your brother was born at home and you weren’t. Your mother must have been drugged, because you can’t tolerate pain now. Circumcision wouldn’t have helped, either.

There. She felt better. The man suffered from hospital birth.

“You’re five centimeters dilated, Millie,” Francesca encouraged. “You’re doing great. How about walking some?”

Millie’s husband gave her an encouraging smile, and she began to climb out of bed, just as another contraction came. She moaned through it, and Francesca said, “That’s right. Keep your mouth loose.”

“I’m going to order a monitor, Millie. I’ll feel better about your baby if we know how it’s doing all the time,” said Dan.

“I can use the fetoscope, Dr. McCrea.”

“We don’t want a monitor.” Millie’s husband supported his wife’s body as she labored.

Tara watched his tenderness for only a moment. It was all she could stand before unwanted emotions bubbled up. Just a man to love her like that, to want her to have his children. Down on the border, she didn’t see this—just women alone, women like her.

She paused in the doorway. As the doctors in the birthing suite pressed their case, two people approached from the end of the hall.

Isaac. And Pilar, her musical laughter preceding her. Tara’s heart thudded, and Laura stirred against her, then began to cry.

Isaac’s gaze avoided Tara’s as he peered in the door of the playroom, and the nurse continued down the hall without him.

“Back to work.” Squeezing Tara’s arm affectionately, Pilar sailed past, into the birthing suite.

Laura fussed, rooting for the nearest breast. There were too many people in the room, anyway, another labor-wrecker. Tara left. Noting Isaac’s new coolness, she hurried by him, to sit in the waiting area and nurse. She wished she didn’t care what Isaac McCrea thought of her. She didn’t care.

Isaac checked on his daughter. Danielle was fast asleep, her braids against the green nylon of his North Face bag. He could hear a woman moaning in labor. Francesca Walcott’s voice came from a room several doors down, the birthing suite. “You’re doing wonderfully. Millie. You’re such a good mom.”

Sometime, Isaac hoped to ask Francesca how her daughter had gotten so screwed up, but he reminded himself it was 1:00 a.m. And what had Tara really done except come on to an attractive man and talk too much about homebirth?

There were things about her he liked. Her simple clothes—corduroys, T-shirts and sweaters. Her nursing that baby. And the quality he’d once found in all beings—nobility of spirit.

Leaving Danielle, Isaac went out to the waiting room, found Tara and joined her.

He sat forward in the next seat, long forearms on long thigh bones.

Laura had not been nursing well, crying most of the time. Tara wondered if maybe the baby wasn’t really hungry. Ignoring Isaac, she moved the tube away and put Laura to her nipple. As the baby latched on, she felt a strange tingling, new and unfamiliar. She was lactating! Her breasts were producing milk. Probably just drops, but... “This is incredible! I think I have milk.” And much sooner than she’d ever dreamed.

Isaac felt the miracle, shared her pleasure. Inducing lactaction wasn’t easy. But his breath was shallow, his stomach muscles tight, as she switched the baby to the other breast, reached under her shirt and sweater, and brought out a sticky drop of milk on her finger, then licked it off. He said finally, “When is the mother going to take over?”

“What?” Tara recalled what she’d told him, that she was raising Laura for Julia. She’s not going to take over. “I’m not sure.” Why the sudden urge to level with him, to blurt the truth?

The appearance of her own mother, obviously steaming, forestalled any confession.

But Laura was still nursing, and Isaac lingered. “I didn’t mean to insult you,” he said. “About babysitting. We could talk about it more.”

Could we talk about marriage? Oh, Tara, get real. “Yes. Yes to everything.”

His eyes never left her face.

Knowing Francesca wouldn’t say what was on her mind in front of Isaac, Tara used her finger to break Laura’s contact with her nipple. “Okay, pumpkin. Let’s go see your grandma.”

“Grandma?”

Tara flushed. “Sometimes I forget she’s not mine.” She had brought Laura’s car seat inside, and she settled and strapped the newborn in it.

When she stood and lifted the car seat, he stood, too, but Tara didn’t raise her eyes again until she reached her mother.

FRANCESCA SPOKE IN a low voice to Tara. “If I have to see another woman deliberately frightened by those men...” Francesca knew she was overstating the point. It was hard for physicians like Dan McCrea to see women in labor and not want to relieve their pain. Dan wasn’t a drug-pusher, he was just trying to help, in the way he believed was best.

But it’s just unnecessary interference. If Millie had asked for pain relief, had asked for a monitor... Francesca had seen a few women stuck at seven centimeters dilate to ten in an hour on an epidural. But most of the time she felt it slowed labor.

If only obstetricians and midwives could truly coordinate their efforts. But the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists said homebirth was unsafe. All over the country, midwives were attending homebirths with no physician backup—because there was none to be found. Ivy’s situation in West Virginia was unusual; her backup physician, Mata Iyer, saw the need for a midwife who would visit homes in her impoverished rural area—and undoubtedly, Mata had never said the word “homebirth” to her insurance provider. Francesca’s own backup physician had retired a year before, after battling endless hospital politics.

Francesca appreciated the risks. For years, she’d kept all homebirths within five minutes of the hospital, attending women at the Victorian if they lived too far from town. The more she saw, the less sorry she was to work in the hospital.

Until she actually worked in the hospital.

I am so tired of all this. Maybe it was time to quit, or take up nursing full-time.

“Did they leave?” Tara asked, knowing the answer.

“He’s ordered the epidural and monitor. I’m going back to see how she’s doing.”

“We’ll come with you.” She and Laura.

“Tara, it won’t help. Please go home and sleep. You need it. And Laura needs you.”

“If Millie doesn’t mind, I’d like to stay. I’ll wait till the boys have done their thing and left, so we won’t crowd the room.”

Tara’s dark eyes were eager, yet failed to hide her fatigue. Francesca knew this aspect of her daughter too well. Tara relied on births for some kind of spiritual recharge. But now she needed physical recharge.

“Tara, you’re trying to produce milk, and you need rest for that.”

Her mother was right. But Tara longed to see Millie’s labor through to its magical conclusion. There was nothing more intense, more complete, than birth. It fulfilled something in her that nothing else ever would. Except, perhaps, Laura.

“I’m really wide-awake, Mom.”

Francesca knew that was untrue. But Tara was an adult. “Millie asked where you went.” She sighed. “Let’s go see how she’s doing.”

THE BABY’S HEAD crowned four hours later. Francesca caught the head when it emerged, and Tara guided Millie’s hands toward her child. She remembered Laura’s birth, Julia’s apathetic eyes. But there was nothing like this joy. The experience of meeting a person never met before.

No cord. More pushing.

“Ahhh... ahhh... ”

“Hey, you handsome guy.” Admiring the newborn—and double-checking Francesca’s quick suctioning—Dan smiled at Millie and her husband. “This one’s going to play for the Broncos.”

“My baby! Oh, sweet baby!”

In the bliss of seeing mother and child, Tara could even feel warmth for the obstetrician, could even appreciate that he was smiling over the newborn. She settled in a chair at the edge of the room and savored the experience of the birth.

But her eyes dropped shut.

Snow...

Walking with Isaac. He asked her why she’d become a midwife.

It’s what I am. It’s all I am.

There are other parts of you.

They’d stopped, and he touched her.

“Tara.”

Her eyes opened. It was her mother. Laura slept in the car seat at Tara’s feet, while Millie Rand dozed on the bed, her newborn in a bassinet beside her.

No Isaac.

Just herself, aroused by a dream of him.

Francesca spoke softly. “Time to go home.”

Silently, Tara gathered her things. As she lifted the car seat, Laura’s eyes opened. Don’t cry. Carrying the baby and her diaper bag, Tara slipped through the door with her mother. Outside the suite, in the bright lights of the hall, Francesca said, “I didn’t want to waken you.”

While Tara paused to transfer Laura to the sling, Francesca collected the car seat.

The clock at the nurses’ station read five-thirty, and Pilar was talking to the nurse on the next shift. Moving on, Francesca and Tara waved, and she waved back.

“Thank you for the sleep, Mom.” Tara covered her yawn with her hand.

Francesca caught her peering up and down the halls. “What are you looking for?”

Tara hid any reaction in drowsiness. “The way out.”

BY THE FOLLOWING afternoon, her plan was set in stone.

She wanted to adopt Laura legally, and she knew the other midwives at the birth center in Sagrado would help her. But in her case, the authorities would insist on a prerequisite. A husband.

Tara didn’t have time to “fall in love,” as her mother had suggested the other night. It would take a century. But a “suitable” man to marry lived two miles away, and she had the tool to bribe him. Herself. She could care for his children, and she could clean that chalet. Isaac wouldn’t be likely to toss his new mother-in-law out in the street, either.

Are you crazy, Tara? What made her think he’d marry her because he needed childcare—or a housekeeper? As far as she knew, he didn’t even like her. His brother was a better choice.

No.

It had to be Isaac. He’d said they could talk again....

And, in some way she couldn’t define, he seemed safe.

Stretching out with Laura on the downstairs couch, preparing for a half-hour nursing session, she said, “Yes, kiddo, I’ve got it figured out.”

Francesca, who’d been working on an article for a midwifery journal at her computer, asked, “What have you figured out?”

“How to adopt Laura.”

When Francesca turned her chair and waited, Tara realized her mother expected the whole story. “I’ll explain after I know it’s going to work.”

“Why do I have a bad feeling about this?”

“Because you’re a pessimist. Millie Rand’s baby could have been born at home, and we both know it.”

“That was a smooth change of subject, Tara. How are you planning to adopt Laura?”

“You’ll feel better about it once it’s accomplished. Hey, do you care if I carve those pumpkins on the counter?”

Francesca hid her alarm. “More pie?”

“Pumpkin bread.”

“Not for Isaac?”

“The way to a man’s heart.”

Francesca was aghast. When she’d imagined Tara finding a husband, it was something that would happen slowly. Friendship blossoming to love. But not with—

This was a disaster. She didn’t know why, but it was. That reserve of Isaac’s was strong, as strong as Tara’s outgoing passion. He had lived in Rwanda, and his wife had somehow died in Rwanda—and Tara was so...heedless. She and Isaac McCrea were loaded freight trains that ought to pass on separate tracks. Instead, they were going to collide.

When she abruptly remembered Tara and Isaac sitting together in the waiting room at the hospital, Francesca realized something had already begun.

And there was nothing she could do to stop it.

“ISAAC, ARE YOU really all right?” Dan asked for the second time since Isaac had called, after his return from Silverton.

“Sure. Mom’s giving me a breather this weekend. I’m stronger than I look.”

“Yeah, right. What stunted my growth anyway?” Dan was six-one.

“I’ll die sooner.”

“I think Tara prefers you.”

Well, he hadn’t had to say her name first.

“You know, I can’t stand her,” Dan added. “I hate her clothes. I hate her politics. I hate the way she uses her body. She flirts with me for an hour, and then, I ask her out, and she says no.”

“That makes my ears hurt.” All of it.

“No kidding. She’s a thorn in my side. I thought if we got it on, things might improve. What about you? Do you like her?”

Isaac traced the inside of his cheek with his tongue. “I don’t know her.”

The doorbell rang, and Isaac headed to answer it, the cordless in his hand. “Hey, Dan. I’ll see you in the morning.”

“I was getting around to that. I’m on call. Rich had something come up.” Rich Scarborough, the Chief of Obstetrics.

They’d planned a climb, but Isaac wouldn’t mind the solitude.

He opened the door, and the black cat, the one Danielle called Meow, shot in from the cold. She found the tabby kitten he’d adopted outside the market and began hissing.

Tara, with Laura in a sling against her breasts, held two foil-wrapped packages. The night had sprouted stars behind her.

Isaac spoke into the phone. “I’ve got to go.”

The alpine cold was numbing, and he let her in. She handed him the still-warm loaves of bread and continued into the living room with its rustic furniture.

“What’s the hurry?”

“I have a visitor.” He shut the door behind her. The tabby had retreated to a recess beside the broom closet. Meow rubbed Isaac’s legs, but he knew better than to touch her. They all did.

“You’ve got to be kidding.” Dan found the chalet beautiful but lonely. His own place was actually farther from town, in an enclave. The locals called it “on the mountain.”

“Bye.” Isaac switched off the phone.

“Sorry,” he apologized and sniffed the foil-wrapped loaves. Pumpkin. “What did I do to deserve this?” My brother likes you. Even if he says he doesn’t.

“Nothing.” Tara’s smile was mischievous. “Yet. Where are the kids?”

“Silverton. Spending the weekend with my mother.”

Tara helped herself to a seat on the ancient couch. The disarray had worsened, if anything. Lunch boxes, probably not empty, sat in various places, and the laundry mound now extended to the floor. She spotted a bread crust under the opposite couch. “He sold both houses furnished, didn’t he?”

The former owner. “Yes.”

Tara sensed his impatience with her visit. It gave her a bad feeling, but it was too late to stop. She couldn’t stop—and couldn’t think of a better approach. Not here, in his presence, under that gaze. “I have a proposition for you.”

Isaac’s eyes darkened. He pulled a footstool toward him and dropped down on it.

It would be easier to speak without that hot feeling in her chest, the feeling that wouldn’t let her stop, the feeling that made her tremble. “I’d like to propose—” she waited a beat, trying to read his face “—a marriage of convenience.”

CHAPTER THREE

The midwives at Maternity House treat us with respect. Tara, she holds my hand; her brow creases when I feel the pain. “Your baby will be here soon,” she says, and she embraces me. She is like my oldest, Elana. I tell her she is like my daughter, and she gives more hugs.

—Inez Martinez, age 44, Maternity House, Sagrado, Texas, after the birth of Juan Diego

ISAAC HAD HEARD perfectly and didn’t ask her to explain.

But she tried. “I need a husband, you need a wife. We treat it as a business decision and a business partnership—”

“Slow down. I need a wife? And that’s a business decision?”

The only way to save face was by never lowering her head. Anyhow, what kind of reception had she expected? She’d known she would have to persuade him. “I’m thinking of a temporary arrangement. You can bail when you find someone you like better. You don’t have a girlfriend, do you?”

He only stared.

Tara forced out the words. “I can take care of your children.”

“This seems like an extreme suggestion.” She knew his brother’s desire for her—and she doesn’t know me at all. He smelled sexual abuse or an absent father or both. Heloise’s younger sister Dominique, the midwife, had shown similar traits. A girl loses her father when she is ten, Heloise had explained, she looks for him her whole life. Maybe with her sexuality, she tries to call him, to retrieve what she lost.

Isaac asked, “Why do you want this?”

Tara counted the chances that he would agree to her plan. Slim. In which case she shouldn’t reveal the truth about Laura. “A male father figure for Laura.”

“You said temporary. How will it help the bébé?” His control was slipping. Anger, fear, emergency. Under any of these emotions, he became le docteur en médecine of Kibuye, Rwanda. He was angry. “Who is her mother?”

Tara heard the change in his voice, the lapse into French followed by carefully enunciated English. She heard the anger, too, and her pulse quickened. In the past ten years, she’d learned to stand up to her fear and to anyone who frightened her. Birth had taught her that. “Calm down.”

Her eyes were on his, unblinking.

Isaac returned her stare, measure for measure. “Who is the mother?”

Still angry. It was the emotion men did best, one reason she and men were a bad combination. Intimacy always led to this.

But if she wanted to adopt Laura, with Isaac McCrea, the story would have to come out. Trust. That he won’t tell his brother or the police. Trust that he’s not a law-and-order kind of guy. He couldn’t be—not after the things he must have lived through.

Trembling, she began the story. She told him about the border and about Maternity House. Then, Julia. Finally, Laura.

Outside, a screech owl called. A floor lamp with holes cut in the metal shade flushed the huge room in shadowy wood tones.

When she’d finished, Isaac still waited.

“That’s it.” Tara eyed Laura, now asleep beside her on a plastic-sided changing blanket laid over his couch.

His head spun. She’d just...kept the baby. In other cultures, in other places, it wouldn’t be an issue. For Isaac the man, it wasn’t an issue. But for Isaac McCrea, M.D., it must be. He didn’t even want to know about this situation.

But now he knew. “What’s your plan?”

“Get married. Get a home study. Go back to Maternity House with every single thing we need in hand. I’ll level with them, tell them the whole story. From that point on, I’m counting on friends, and it’s a prayer, but at least I know people in the system.”

“You should have talked to them before now.”

“Then Laura would have gone to another home.”

“That may happen anyway.”

His words made her shiver. No chance. No way. He could help! His children needed a mother, needed her. Especially the little girl, Danielle. Kids shouldn’t live...like this. She could clean up. She’d known a guy who worked for Orkin. She knew how and where to place bait and seal up a house, and she could get rid of these mice.

And she needed Isaac so she could keep Laura.

“I don’t even know you, Tara.”

Before he could formulate more words, she said, “Let’s have a few dates. I’ll even try to find a sitter for Laura.”

Her smile was full of affection, compassion for his anger. She didn’t know his anger. Like grief, it was bigger than a man. Were all emotions the same? Isaac wondered. Could all heal with time? Lost love and rage and...

“But do I need to point out that mutual attraction isn’t necessary?”

He blinked. Was she saying she wasn’t attracted to him? Isaac squeezed the bridge of his nose. “This is supposed to tempt me?”

“I came prepared to offer you money.”

Money? That was how much she valued herself as a potential mate? For him? “I need to think about this, Tara.” And about Dan.

He was going to say yes. Tara knew it.

Isaac wished he wasn’t curious. And suddenly aching for the body across from him. Just the fact that she’d chosen him, even with rodents. “What’s with you and Dan?”

Regret. The cafeteria. Dan had asked her to dinner. Had he told Isaac? A lie wouldn’t be smart. “We flirted. He asked me out. I didn’t want to go. Look, I’m a friendly person. That was about my mother’s client. And unnecessary medical intervention.”

“So you flirted with the obstetrician on call?”

“He knew it. He told me so when we sat down.” It had the ring of truth; they’d gone from flirtation to argument in a heartbeat.

“I hate people interfering needlessly with women in labor. It’s oppression.”

“I appreciate the sentiment. I don’t like your tactics.”

Shame overtook her. She wasn’t going to stick around someone who made her feel like this. So much for Isaac McCrea. Tara moved to pick up Laura. “I’m sorry to take your time.”

Everything whirled, flooding. A baby in the car. Inducing lactation. Isaac held it off. This should be the end. He didn’t like her ways, didn’t like women—or men—who threw their arms around people at random. But she was in a bind and so was he, handling the second-to-second immensity of caring for his children without the help of Heloise’s family. And the grief and guilt. Who was he to throw stones? At anyone? “I’m sorry.”

She hadn’t yet lifted her child, and she faced him. “Don’t be. Not everyone likes me. I can take it.”

He couldn’t. “Tara—” Searching for words, he covered his face with his hand. When he removed it, she was holding the child and slinging her diaper bag over her free shoulder.

He stood and took the bag from her. “I’ll walk you to your car. The steps are frosty.” You might trip over a cat.

“You’re going to have six feet of snow up here before you know it.”

Her voice never shook.

The alpine air was frigid. Isaac would return inside alone and try to find sanity in the company of cats and mice.

Unconsciously, he steadied Tara on the steps.

She seemed unaffected by the touch. “You ever lived in the mountains before, doc?”

“Dan and I grew up in Silverton. Our father drove the snowplow on the Million Dollar Highway.”

Avalanche country. “Boy, I bet he was a local hero.”

“Yes.” His father had been dead three years, and his mother preferred to stay in Silverton, among her friends and neighbors.

They took his frosty path to Tara’s car, and he opened the passenger door for her, so she could settle Laura in her car seat and bundle her up. Not a sound stirred the night. Tara finally backed away from the infant, and he shut the door and followed her to the driver’s side.

When she was in, he crouched beside the door, close enough to feel the heat of her body. He didn’t want her to leave, especially not after some of the things he’d said. Eyes on the steering wheel, he spoke from his heart, the way he’d been trained all his life. “You’re too special to do what you did tonight.” Any woman was.

“At the hospital—or here?”

“Both.”

She laughed. “I love being alive. I love helping women have babies. I love this kiddo here, and I could love your kids, too. What can I say?”

The words sounded brittle, and he glanced at her face. She was defending who she was. He’d slandered who she was.

Standing, he tried to make his smile an apology. “I think you just said it. Good night, Tara.”

BY THE TIME SHE turned the car around, to head back to the Victorian, she was crying. And it wasn’t because she hadn’t found a husband to help her with Laura’s adoption.

It was because she’d offered herself to Isaac McCrea.

And he had kept her at arm’s distance and said, “No, thanks.”

ISAAC COULDN’T SLEEP, and finally he rose and dressed for winter cold, and when he went outside the stars were gone. He knew the paths around the property and above the trees, the old mining trails that wouldn’t disturb the fragile tundra, and he chose one of them to take him to the talus beneath the far ridge. An unnamed trail led to an unnamed peak, and he followed it, his eyes sharp for the mountain lion whose dried scat and scratch marks he’d found weeks earlier.

Cold, he zipped his parka higher. As the rocks clinked beneath his feet, the first snowflake wet his cheek. Then another.

He was thinking of her body. She was leggy and narrow-hipped, with pretty breasts—A burn on her breast? He shut his eyes, wondering.

She’d offered to marry him, offered to keep house, offered him money! How much money did she think he was worth, seeing that she was willing to buy a spouse?

Undoubtedly, she’d give her body, too, in order to adopt that child. But he wanted her to want him—more than desire. Much more.

He reached the peak, and a dusting of snow covered the top. Isaac tried to see the distant mountaintops and couldn’t. He waited in the wind.

He’d hurt her tonight.

And she’d hurt him.

But it was less painful than hurting his own flesh and blood.

“HOW DID ISAAC like the pumpkin bread?”

Tara knew her mother didn’t mean to be cruel, but she was fragile right now, still feeling the sting of rejection. “Fine. I’ve got to nurse Laura. Excuse me.”

Francesca trailed after her to the kitchen. “You know, he might think you’re throwing yourself at him, Tara.”

Great. Tara didn’t answer. Wordlessly, keeping her thoughts focused elsewhere—away from Isaac and her recent humiliation—Tara began the process of making fenugreek tea, getting ready to nurse. Turning suddenly, she held one hand at knee level and snapped, “You make me feel about this high, Mom.”

Francesca winced. It was the last thing she’d meant to do. “Tara, I didn’t mean to imply that you were throwing yourself at him. I’m just saying that Dr. McCrea is a little standoffish. Not everyone likes to be hugged.”

“I didn’t hug him.”

Laura began to cry. “It’s all right, sweetie,” Tara murmured. “Oh, I love you.”

Regarding the two of them, Francesca frowned. Had Isaac discouraged her? Was there nothing to worry about from him? “Have you looked up any of your old friends in Precipice? Tim?” Tim with his waistlength blond dreadlocks? “Scooter?” Who was thirty-two and still rode a skateboard. “Jack?” Whose claim to fame was having made the “Bartenders of Precipice” calendar.

“No, haven’t had time, Mother.”

But time for two rounds of baking for Isaac McCrea. Well, he was several grades above Danny Graine as husband material, several grades above anyone Tara had set her sights on before—at least, from what Francesca knew about him, which was scant. Unfortunately, Francesca couldn’t see the reserved Dr. McCrea appreciating her lively, sensual daughter.

I’m imagining all this. He’s not Tara’s type.

The way to a man’s heart?

Francesca went to the stove and hugged Tara and kissed both her and the sweet new baby. “I wasn’t putting you down, Tara.”

“Not intentionally, I’m sure.”

What had she said? Francesca reviewed her words and saw what she’d implied, that Tara chased men.

“I just want to keep you from being hurt.”

Tara cast her a sharp look. “Why don’t you start by not hurting me yourself?”

WITH LAURA AGAINST her shoulder, Tara crept out of the house just after six the next morning. It was snowing, and she hurried to the Safari station wagon and prayed it would start.

It took five tries and assorted prayers.

Now, to stay on the road.

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