"I can't believe I did that!" Lori Parker Bains moaned, wishing she could hide under the closest bale of hay.

When Lori had set out that chilly November morning, stoically determined to attend Kane Hunter's wedding, she never dreamed she'd end up in the church basement along with the stored props for next month's Christmas pageant, rolling in the hay with…

"We both did it," her ex-husband, Travis, languidly murmured from right beside her.

"It was a mistake," Lori declared, her voice as unsteady as her fingers as she sat up and hurriedly sought to redo the button front of her deep purple dress, which Travis had so recently undone.

There was a moment of utter silence. Then Travis muttered, "Damn right it was a mistake." His curt statement was punctuated by the sound of him angrily zipping his slacks, the noise adding an emphatic exclamation point to his words. Cursing under his breath, he sat up and jammed his feet into his expensive gray snakeskin boots.

Staring at him, Lori saw Travis as if for the first time, as if he were a seductive stranger who'd just taken her innocence. The teenager she'd married had matured into a hard man, and she was struck dumb by the sheer physical impact of him—tall, strong, mysterious. A woman's fantasy of a cowboy lover. His rippling muscles were formed by hard work on his ranch, not by any workouts in a fancy gym.

She blinked, willing herself to remember that this man was her ex-husband and therefore not suitable material for her fantasies.

"We're divorced, for heaven's sakes," Lori stated in that logical tone of voice she used on her patients. "Have been for five years."

"And six months, but who's counting," he said.

"It was the wedding," Lori insisted, tugging loose bits of hay from her short blond hair. "And the champagne they had at the celebration beforehand."

"Which you barely touched."

"You had enough for both of us," she retorted.

"Sure, blame it on me. You're real good at that, Lori," Travis mockingly noted. He wasn't about to admit that the reason he'd been so pleased to toast Kane Hunter's wedding was because the good doctor was marrying Moriah and not Lori. Travis was all too well aware that Kane and Lori had been more than just working associates—the two had been dating before Moriah had returned to Whitehorn. The one time Travis had seen the doctor kiss Lori on her front porch, he'd wanted to tear Hunter's tongue from his throat.

For her part, Lori ignored Travis's accusation. As a certified nurse-midwife, she was used to assisting with new beginnings, new life. But she didn't want a new beginning with Travis. There was no new life to be had in their relationship.

So why did you just make love with him? a persistent voice in her head demanded.

"It was just sex," Lori muttered.

"Damn good, incredible sex!" Travis retorted.

She couldn't argue with him there.

"Besides, you were the one who started this by crying," he reminded her.

"It's not my fault," she said, defending the teary-eyed state that had sent her scurrying down the steps into the empty basement while all the other guests boisterously took off with the happy couple for the reception being given elsewhere. All the guests except for Travis. "I always cry at weddings," she added. But she'd cried more at this one.

Because Kane's wedding to Moriah put a final nail in the coffin of Lori's dreams—her dreams of settling down and raising a family with Kane. Deep down, Lori knew she was crying more for the lost dream than for Kane. She knew he belonged with his first love, Moriah.

But it was hard—damn hard—to be sensible and to maintain a stiff upper lip when you saw the wave of reality sweeping away the sand castles you'd so lovingly built. The future she'd thought she'd have was gone, her plans washed away. She'd been alone again. Until Travis had taken her into his arms and comforted her and kissed her… and made love to her.

"You didn't cry at our wedding," he reminded her.

His words made her pause. Her hesitant gaze settled on Travis's face. The only illumination in the crowded basement came from the exit sign over the door leading to the steps, and from the single frosted window high up on the wall.

The winter sunlight coming in through that window transformed his face into a study of shadows and angles. His jaw was as uncompromising as the nearby snow-covered mountains. His hair had been recently trimmed and just brushed the top of his ears on the side, falling to the collar of his shirt on his back. In the summer his light brown hair was streaked with blond, turning it golden, but now that winter was beginning to grip the countryside, the color was a little darker. She knew he'd been a towhead as a kid; his dad had shown her boxes filled with photos.

A beam of watery sunlight landed on his hand as he reached for his sheepskin jacket. She knew that hand as well as her own. She knew he'd gotten the scar between his thumb and index finger at the tender age of six, when he'd tried to rope his first calf. Those lean fingers of his had been the first to ever touch her intimately.

Looking at his broad back, Lori wondered where she and Travis had gone wrong. They'd been high school sweethearts. He'd sat next to her the first day of her freshman-year English class, and when he'd turned those incredible blue eyes of his her way, kabang! She'd fallen for him like a baby grand piano pushed out of a tenth-story window.

To her amazement, he'd seemed to fall for her, too. They'd dated steadily until graduation and gotten married in early August. It had seemed meant to be. Fate. Her destiny.

Travis was absolutely right; Lori hadn't cried at her own wedding, which had taken place in this very church. She'd been too euphoric, too excited. Her dreams were coming true. It had been the happiest day of her entire life. A perfect ten.

Less than six years later, her happily ever after was over— done in by reality. Not by infidelity, or any other momentous rendering. No, it had been done in by things like overwhelming workloads, lack of money, lack of time together. They'd grown apart.

Lori had always hated that phrase. She was a firm believer in fixing things that went wrong. But how could you fix something too vague, too ethereal to put your hands on? She only knew that the love she and Travis had shared had somehow melted like the winter snows in the spring, leaving emptiness behind.

Immediately after the divorce, Lori had moved away from her hometown of Whitehorn to the big city of Great Falls, Montana. There she'd continued her work as a registered nurse, in the delivery room of one of the city's larger hospitals, while also going on to specialize in clinical midwifery skills. She'd stayed in Great Falls almost three years, and by the time she'd left, she'd passed the rigorous certification process that made her a CNM—certified nurse-midwife—and was working at a well-respected birthing center in the city.

Almost three years ago she'd returned to Whitehorn to join the small medical team at the Whitehorn Family Practice. In addition to that, one day a week she worked with Dr. Kane Hunter out at the Laughing Horse Reservation, doing prenatal clinics. She'd returned to her hometown because she'd felt needed here.

She'd known she would run into Travis; Whitehorn was too small for her not to. But she'd managed. Quite well. Until now. Now she'd fallen off the wagon big-time. And they hadn't even practiced safe sex. Her face burned at the memory. After all the speeches she'd given to young women, after all the pamphlets she'd handed out… "I can't believe I did that," she repeated, her moan even more distraught this time.

"We did it, and which part can't you believe?" Travis countered. "The part where you came apart in my arms or the part where you dug in and demanded more?"

"The part where you didn't use a condom," she snapped back furiously.

"There was never a need when we were married."

That was true. They'd both been virgins when they'd gotten married. And the threat of AIDS wasn't something they'd worried about. For birth-control purposes, Lori had taken the pill in those days. "We aren't married anymore," she curtly reminded him.

"I didn't come down here expecting this to happen," he growled.

"We should have stopped."

Her eyes caught his intensely blue ones and she looked away. There were too many memories in his eyes for her to deal with now, memories of the passionate explosion they'd just shared. Things between them had ignited faster than a brush fire.

"Twenty-twenty hindsight is useless," Travis stated. "And if you're worried about communicable diseases," he added bluntly, "there's no need. I got a clean bill of health a few months ago at the hospital's blood drive."

"Same here," she said.

"I'm not in a high-risk category," he told her curtly.

"Neither am I."

"You mean you haven't… you and Kane didn't…?"

"I'm not talking about that with you," she said.

"You talk about sex-education stuff with half the population of this county," he reminded her.

"You're not asking for factual information, you're asking for personal information."

"We just made love, Lori. I think that gives me the right to get personal—"

"You think wrong," she interrupted. "You often did," she angrily tacked on. Her emotions were a jumble of contradictions, too mixed-up to untangle at the moment. She only knew there was no going back. First and foremost she felt the need to protect herself, to reduce her vulnerability. "I've got my own life now. My own dreams. And they don't include you."

Shooting her a look fiery enough to incinerate the entire building, Travis grabbed his black felt Stetson, turned on the heel of his custom-made boots and walked out.

Two weeks later, Lori grimaced as she approached the White-horn County Hospital staff room. Her period had come, along with the attendant cramps, and she'd been feeling weepy all day.

Why? She turned thirty today, but that wasn't the reason for her emotional state. The weepiness was caused by the fact that, with her period coming, she now knew she wasn't pregnant. There had been a good possibility that she might have been after her interlude with Travis.

It was only now that she realized how much she'd been secretly contemplating the idea of having a baby, savoring the possibilities since she and Travis had made love. Not the possibilities with Travis; she knew better than that. But to have a little baby of her own to love… The tugging appeal of that had crept up on her and stolen into her heart.

Since becoming a midwife, Lori had helped and guided more than two hundred mothers in delivering healthy babies. She'd seen the miracle of birth firsthand and up close. But she'd never experienced it herself. She'd always had to hand the baby over—into its mother's loving arms. She'd never been able to keep any of the infants herself. She'd never had an infant nursing at her own breast. And she wanted that. Wanted it badly.

Blinking away the threat of tears, Lori took a deep breath before entering the hospital's staff room. A nice, calming cup of hot tea was called for here….

"Surprise!" a dozen people shouted all at once, swarming around Lori. "Happy birthday!"

Lori knew she had to look as stunned as she felt. The staff lounge, so recently decorated for the upcoming holidays, had additional birthday decorations festooned from the walls.

Molly, a nurse who worked with Lori at the Whitehorn Family Practice, hurried to her side. "I guess you thought we forgot about your birthday, huh?"

"I'd just as soon have forgotten my thirtieth birthday," someone in the group good-naturedly noted.

"We wanted to surprise you," Molly continued excitedly.

"You certainly did that," Lori noted with a wobbly smile.

The next fifteen minutes were filled with laughter and the mocking black humor so often found among those in the medical profession. It was reflected in their presents to Lori— a pair of bifocals, a T-shirt that said Thirty Isn't Old… for a Tree! and a funeral wreath with the words May your youth rest in peace, Lori! written on the black-ribbon banner.

Dr. Errol Straker put a temporary damper on the celebration when he made an appearance. He carried a lot of weight in the small hospital and he never let Lori forget that fact. He also disapproved of nurse-midwives, and his subtle and not-so-subtle verbal cuts reminded Lori that her professional battle for equity wasn't over by a long shot.

Some might actually consider Dr. Straker, with his silvery hair and brown eyes, to be a fairly good-looking man, albeit an unbearably superior one. He was in his mid-forties and wore power as if it were indelibly starched into his white lab coat.

"I heard you girls were having a party back here," Dr. Straker noted with a joviality that Lori knew to be fake. He often used that tone when preparing to deliver a real zinger. Boldly walking over and cutting himself a piece of cake, he then turned and asked, "So who's the lucky birthday girl?"

"Lori," someone replied.

Straker's laser gaze settled on her, his expression one of indulgent condescension. "Ah, our little rebel midwife. Well, enjoy things while you can, Lori." He patted her on the shoulder. "The future is always filled with uncertainty, isn't it?" He smiled again, this time like a wily ferret, and then thankfully was gone, taking his pilfered piece of cake with him.

"Imagine Straker the Streaker putting in an appearance," one of the nursery nurses murmured, using the supercilious doctor's nickname.

"He probably just wanted to sample the air we poor peons breath," someone else replied.

"Not to mention sampling the cake," the secretary from Admissions added.

With much laughter, everyone hurried to sample some of the delicious devil's food cake provided by Molly, who possessed a chocolate thumb where baked goodies were concerned. The intricate holiday gingerbread house on display back at the Whitehorn Family Practice was another of her creations.

"You look depressed," Molly noted as she joined Lori in a relatively quiet corner of the room. "I hope the presents didn't make you feel too bad. You know how this gang is…."

Lori shook her head. "It's not that."

"What then?"

"I know it sounds like a cliché, but I'm starting to feel my biological clock ticking. And it's sounding like a time bomb about to go off," Lori said a bit morosely, while brushing a crumb of chocolate cake from her trademark lavender lab coat. "I'm thirty already. A lot of my patients have two kids or more by the time they're my age."

"And they look twice your age. You may be thirty, but you look like you're barely out of high school."

"That's not an advantage in my profession. It's a little difficult to inspire trust in my patients when they keep asking me how old I am," Lori noted.