She was glad now that she’d lied to him, that she’d faked a whole identity so that she could pretend for just a little while that she wasn’t Luke and Jessie Adams’s little angel. It had been liberating to pretend to be Hattie Jones, a woman with no exalted family history to live up to, a woman who could be as outrageous as she liked without regrets.

The decision to lie had been impulsive, made in a darkened country-western bar where she’d stopped to ask about a waitressing job that had been posted in the window. Clint had had the kind of lazy smile and sexy eyes that made a shy, astonishingly innocent college graduate imagine that all sorts of forbidden dreams were hers for the taking.

The job had been forgotten as she’d succumbed to newly discovered sensuality she hadn’t even been tempted to test with the boys she’d met at Stanford. By the end of the night they were lovers. By the end of the week, she had moved in with him. She supposed that there was yet more irony that after all her running, she’d wound up with a rancher, after all.

More than once in the blissful days that followed she had regretted the casual lie she’d told when they met. More than once she had vowed to tell him the truth about who she was and where she came from, but Clint had been the kind of man who lived in the here and now. He didn’t talk about his own past. He never asked about hers.

As weeks turned into months, it seemed easier to live with the lie. She liked being devil-may-care Hattie Jones, who flirted outrageously and never gave a thought to tomorrow. She liked the way Clint murmured her name in the middle of the night, as if he’d never before heard a word so beautiful.

In Clint’s arms she was ecstatically happy. His ranch was a fraction of the size of her father’s or her grandfather’s, the days were long and exhausting, but none of that mattered, not at night when they made magic together. She found peace on that tiny Montana spread and something she had thought was love.

Then she’d discovered she was pregnant, and all of the lies and secrets between them—most of them admittedly her doing—had threatened to come unraveled.

When Clint had reacted in stunned silence to the news they were expecting a baby, that famous Adams pride had kicked in with a vengeance. She’d shouted a lot of awful, ugly things and he’d responded in kind. Even now the memory of it made her shudder.