Chapter One

Isabella Spencer pulled her wool hat down over her ears, trying to ignore the wintry glaze forming on the scarf that covered her neck and mouth. Pushing back a mounting sense of worry, she closed the door on the remaining warmth inside her lifeless car and stepped out onto the deserted road. She was two hours outside Minneapolis - and thirty miles from the small town she wanted so desperately to return to.

But fate seemed to have other ideas. It was barely November, yet the frigid morning wind whipped at her face like tiny knives, batting her from side to side as though she were nothing more than a crumpled ball of newspaper.

Flares. Go get the flares. Someone will be by soon. Her center of gravity newly broadened by several inches, she trudged carefully through a foot of snow to the trunk of her car, cursing the imbeciles at the weather station for their false predictions, cursing her cell phone with its short-lived battery. And as she rooted out several orange flares, lit them and laid them in the snow, she cursed the car that her husband had assured her was in fine working order.

Of course, that had been more than seven months ago. Before Rick had left her for the freedom divorce provided, before he'd gotten drunk, plowed into a telephone pole and died just a few hours later.

The shiver that ran through her had nothing to do with the cold this time. Her husband was gone. He hadn't wanted her and he hadn't wanted the child growing inside her, and the sooner she put that stinging piece of knowledge behind her the better. She was g