It wasn’t until she arrived at White Pines that she discovered the reason for Cody’s calm acceptance of her edict.

“Where’s Harlan?” she inquired suspiciously the minute she stepped into the too silent foyer of the main house.

Cody’s expression was pure innocence as he gazed back at her. “Oh, didn’t I mention it? Daddy’s gone to spend a few days with Luke and Jessie.”

With Sharon Lynn already happily ensconced in her father’s arms, with a huge stack of ribs just waiting to be barbecued, Melissa bit back the urge to turn right around and flee. This round, it appeared, had gone to Cody.

14

For the next two months, Cody won more rounds than he lost, much to Melissa’s chagrin. Though she’d turned down his proposals every time he made them, he took the rejections in stride. He just redoubled his efforts to change her mind. Her resistance was in tatters. Her senses were spinning just at the sight of him. She was clinging to the last shreds of pride and determination she had left.

There were moments, she was forced to admit, when she couldn’t even remember why she was so staunch in her conviction that marrying Cody was positively the wrong thing to do. He had done absolutely nothing since his return to indicate that he wasn’t thoroughly absorbed in his relationship with her and their child. He was sweetly attentive to her. He doted on Sharon Lynn.

And still, for reasons she was finding harder and harder to fathom, she kept waiting for some other woman to come between them, for some blowup that would send Cody racing away from Texas, away from them. It didn’t seem to matter that his roots at White Pines ran deeper than ever. He’d left his home and her once before. She never forgot that, wouldn’t let herself forget it.

She put more obstacles in their path to happiness than championship hurdlers had ever had to jump. Cody, just as determinedly, overcame each and every one, without criticism, without comment. He just did whatever was asked of him.

The truth of it was that his thoughtfulness and consideration were beginning to wear on her. She figured it was an indication of the depths of her perversity that she longed for a good, old, rip-roaring fight.

She was already working herself into a confrontational state when she reached her mother’s after a particularly exhausting day at work, only to find that Sharon Lynn wasn’t there.

“What do you mean, she’s not here?” she demanded, staring at her father. Her mother was nowhere in sight, which should have been her first clue that her life was about to turn topsy-turvy.

“Cody came by,” her father admitted. “I let him take her.”