Bliss ignored the jab in her heart and shook her head. “No. At least not yet. Never been married.”

“Neither have I, but I’ve got a boy—Josh. He’s hell on wheels and the most wonderful thing that ever happened to me. I always say kids are the biggest blessing and curse of your life. You love them so much you worry about them day and night.” She bit her lower lip and stared out the window, but Bliss guessed she wasn’t seeing the horses grazing in the field grass or one of the ranch hands shoring up the ramp to the back of the barn. No, Katie was in her own private world—a world that seemed to revolve around her son.

Bliss felt the same tug on her heartstrings that had become a regular feeling whenever she thought of her own childless state. Ever since coming to Bittersweet she had been conscious of her biological clock. This wasn’t a new experience. For the past few years as her friends and coworkers had become mothers, she’d felt her maternal instincts awakening, and she’d only wished she could have given her mother a grandchild while she was alive.

“Lately, Josh—he’s ten going on sixteen—has been getting into a powder keg of trouble. I’m telling you, when school’s not in session, look out!” Katie flung her arms wide, as if they’d been blown apart, before she finally turned away from the window and met Bliss’s uneasy stare.

“Oh, I guess I came on like gangbusters, didn’t I?” With a smile, she added, “I’m glad to finally meet you, Bliss, even though this is kind of weird for both of us. You know, I didn’t know John was my real dad until just after his heart attack. For all those years I thought Hal Kinkaid was my biological father.” She shook her head as if at her own folly and chewed on a bite of pecan roll. “He and I were never close. Never. But still, finding out that he wasn’t the guy whose genes are running around in my body was a shock.”

“I imagine it was,” Bliss replied, though, in truth, she couldn’t imagine anything of the sort. The whole conversation was surreal in a way. What could she say to this forthright woman who seemed to have no qualms about talking about any subject under the sun, including her own conception, illegitimate though it was?

Katie propped one foot on the brace of one of the empty chairs scattered around the table. “It’s really an odd sensation, you know,” she admitted, “growing up believing one thing and learning that you were lied to and that everything you believed in is bogus.”

Bliss only nodded. Her entire life, it seemed, had been a lie.

“Hal Kinkaid—the guy I thought was my dad—was a real jerk. I mean, a first-class bastard. Why Mom connected with him, I’ll never know. He drank too much, always ran around on my mom, left her with a pile of bills. Strange as it sounds, I was relieved that he wasn’t related to me.”