If he’d been that furious over the baby, she couldn’t imagine what his rage would be like once he discovered that she’d lied to him from the start. In her entire life, no one had ever made her feel so low. Nor had she ever before wanted to hurt a person so deeply that he would never recover from it. Words were their weapons and they had used them well.

Angela hadn’t waited for tempers to cool. She’d loaded up her car and hit the road before dawn, determined to put Clint Brady and Montana far behind her.

That had been nearly seven months ago. She’d been in a lot of cities since. Few of them had even registered. She had no more than vague memories of cheap hotels and back-road diners.

She wasn’t exactly sure when she’d realized that Clint was following her. It had been almost a sixth sense at first, a nervous knotting in the pit of her stomach, a prickly sensation scampering down her spine. She was too hurt, too sure that she’d been wrong to get involved with him, too ashamed of her age-old predicament to let him catch her. What was the point of one more argument, anyway? It was best to put him in the past, along with all the other mistakes she’d made. A fresh start beckoned from around every curve in the road.

To her surprise, Clint hadn’t given up easily. He’d nearly caught up with her in Wyoming, cutting short the part-time waitressing job she’d taken to get gas money to move on. Warned about the man who’d been in earlier asking questions about her, she’d slipped out the diner’s back door just as Clint came through the front.

The narrow escape had made her jittery for days. She hadn’t felt secure until she’d managed to trade her beloved blue convertible in for cash and a sensible beige sedan so old she hadn’t even been born the year it was made. No car that old should have been expected to survive the kind of journey she’d taken it on.

She had moved quickly on to Colorado, then doubled back north to Cheyenne, looped up to South Dakota, then headed west to Seattle, enchanted by the idea of living by the water.

In Seattle she’d found a one-room apartment in an area called Pill Hill for all the hospitals clustered together. For the first time she had searched until she landed a halfway decent job as a receptionist. She’d found a kindly obstetrician to make sure she was doing all the right things for the baby she’d already learned to cherish. She’d vowed that the baby would never have to pay for the mistakes she’d made. Oddly enough, though being Angela Adams had daunted her, being a single mom did not.