Contents

      Prologue

      Chapter One

      Chapter Two

      Chapter Three

      Chapter Four

      Chapter Five

      Chapter Six

      Chapter Seven

      Chapter Eight

      Chapter Nine

      Chapter Ten

      Chapter Eleven

      Prologue

      Be careful what you wish for…it just might come true. The old adage whirled through Melanie Jenkins’s mind as, with trembling fingers, she removed the pregnancy test from the drugstore sack.

      Six weeks ago she had made a wish and prayed that she’d get pregnant and have a baby. With no romance in her life and no Mr. Right on the horizon, she’d come up with a plan to ensure that she would attain her wish.

      Once she took the home-pregnancy test, she’d know within three minutes if her wish had been granted. The only problem was that she was no longer certain she wanted her wish to come true.

      If she was pregnant, then she lost the man she loved. If she wasn’t pregnant, she got to continue to live with the man she loved but wouldn’t have her dream of a baby.

      She took the test instrument out of the package, wishing she could go back and change all the rules. But she couldn’t. She was the one who had set the rules, and it wasn’t fair to change them now, after the fact.

      So, what did she wish now? It didn’t seem to matter. No matter what the results of the test revealed, ultimately she’d lose something.

      “Well,” she muttered to herself, “let’s see if the stick turns pink….”

      Chapter One

      Melanie Watters would never have thought about it had she not seen him naked. “Him” was Bailey Jenkins, her very best friend and confidant.

      Every day for the past few weeks she and Bailey had met at his pond after work for a late-afternoon swim. Today she was earlier than usual. There had been no school that day. Instead, the day had been scheduled for parent-teacher appointments. By two o’ clock Melanie had met with all her little students’ parents, and her work was finished until later in the evening.

      She’d changed into her bathing suit in the school rest room, then had driven directly to Bailey’s.

      His familiar maroon pickup truck was parked in front of his attractive white ranch house, but instead of going to the house, she headed for his office in the barn.

      As the only veterinarian in the small town of Foxrun, Bailey could usually be found in the barn either sitting at his computer doing paperwork or caring for an animal who’d been brought in to him.

      He wasn’t there, nor was he in the house, so she headed down the lane toward the pasture and the pond that had for the past several weeks provided cool relief against the unusual heat of early summer.

      As she drew closer to the pond, she heard the sound of splashing, but the thick blackberry bushes directly in front of her obscured her view of the water.

      She worked her way around the blackberry bushes and froze as Bailey came into view. He stood on the end of a small, wooden pier. His back was to her and it was obvious he’d been skinny-dipping.

      The late-afternoon sun played on his broad, tanned shoulders and slim waist and emphasized the musculature of his buttocks and legs. Melanie gasped and ducked back behind the bushes, her heart pounding a strange rhythm in her chest.

      She’d always known, someplace in the back of her mind, that Bailey had a decent physique, but she’d never realized quite how utterly fine it was.

      “Stop it,” she commanded herself. This was Bailey…Bailey, the best friend who had held her head while she’d thrown up when she was sixteen and learned about sloe gin fizzes the hard way.

      This was Bailey, the confidant who had heard all her fears when her mother had been diagnosed with cancer a year ago, a cancer that thankfully was now in remission.

      Okay, she had just gotten a startling reminder that Bailey was not only her best friend but pure male, as well. She drew several deep breaths to steady her suddenly racing pulse, then cried out, “Hey, Bailey, are you out here?”

      “Mellie…hang on a minute, I’m not decent,” Bailey’s deep voice returned.

      “You’re never decent,” she replied, striving for the teasing tone that had always marked their relationship, trying desperately to forget what she