Adam by Joan Johnston

choose having children over having him. And he refused to offer marriage while his awful secret lay like a wedge between them.
    â€œI want you in my bed, I won’t deny it,” Adam said. “But you’ll have to settle for what I’m offering.”
    â€œWhat’s that?” Tate asked. “An affair?”
    Adam shrugged. “If you want to call it that.”
    â€œAnd when you’re tired of me, then what?”
    I’ll never get tired of you . “We’ll cross that river when we get to it.”
    Tate was shaken by the revelation that Adam had been married. She wished she knew more about what had gone wrong to make him sound so bitter. Her pride urged her to leave while she still could. But her heart couldn’t face a future that didn’t include Adam. With the naïveté of youth, she still believed that love would conquer all, that somehow, everything would work out and that they would live happily ever after.
    â€œAll right,” she said at last. “An affair it is.”
    She snuggled up to Adam’s back. He took her arms and pulled them around his chest.
    â€œIt’s a good thing my brothers can’t see me now,” she teased.
    â€œI’d be a dead man for sure,” he said with a groan.
    â€œJust thank your lucky stars that I’ve been using a false last name. They’ll never find me here.”
    â€œLet’s hope not,” Adam muttered.
    The conversation ended there, because Adam turned and pulled Tate around onto his lap. He still didn’t quite believe that she hadn’t stalked out in high dudgeon, that she had chosen to stay. He straightened her legs around his lap and slipped inside her.
    Tate learned yet another way to make love in the morning.
    It was a mere three weeks later that their idyll came to a shocking and totally unforeseen end.

CHAPTER 8
    T ATE WAS PREGNANT. At least she thought she was. She was sitting in Dr. Kowalski’s office, waiting for her name to be called so she could find out if the results of her home pregnancy test were as accurate as the company claimed. She was only eight days late, but never once had such a phenomenon occurred in the past. Who would have thought you could get pregnant the first time out!
    It had to have happened then, because after that first time she had gone to see Dr. Kowalski and been fitted for a diaphragm. She had managed to use it every time she had made love with Adam over the past three weeks—except the time she had seduced him after spending the night at the river with Buck. So maybe it had happened the second time out. That was beginner’s luck for you!
    â€œMrs. Whitelaw? You’re next.”
    Tate sat up, then realized the nurse had said Mrs . Whitelaw. Besides, she had given her name as Tate Whatly. So who was this mysterious Mrs . Whitelaw?
    The tall woman who stood up was very pregnant. The condition obviously agreed with her, because her skin glowed with health. She had curly blond hair that fell to her shoulders and a face that revealed her age and character in smile lines at the edges of her cornflower-blue eyes and the parentheses bracketing her mouth.
    Tate found it hard to believe that it was pure coincidence that this woman had the same unusual last name as she did. Jesse had been gone for so long without any word that Tate immediately began weaving fantasies around the pregnant woman. Maybe this was Jesse’s wife. Maybe Jesse would walk in that door in a few minutes and Tate would see him at long last.
    Maybe pigs would fly.
    Tate watched the woman disappear into an examining room. She was left with little time to speculate because she was called next.
    â€œMs. Whatly?”
    â€œUh, yes.” She had almost forgotten the phony name she had given the nurse.
    â€œYou can come on back now. We’ll need a urine specimen, and then I’d like you to strip down and put on this gown. It ties in front. The doctor will be with