“I’ve told you and told you,” Parker said testily. “Mommy is in heaven. She’s with Daddy. I don’t know why you’re so stupid.”

“I am not stupid.”

Zoe leaped out of bed in time to grab Parker. Rafe took Aaron. En route to averting the slugging match, her T-shirted fanny bumped into his jeaned thigh. Both jumped. Zoe was startlingly, disastrously, sinkingly aware of the one critical drawback to all their carefully argued-out plans.

She couldn’t possibly live with a man she barely knew.

Slinging one kid over his shoulder and carrying the other on his hip, Rafe called from the doorway, “Want me to make coffee, Snookums?”

“Zoe,” she corrected him irritably, but he was already gone from the door.

She tried to convince herself that everything would be all right when they got to Montana. Rafe was so sure he wasn’t single-parent material, so sure he couldn’t handle the urchins alone. But he’d be wonderful with them; she knew he would.

And as soon as he saw that, she could get out of their lives. Away from the children, and the pain and helplessness that being around kids always brought on her. And away from a man who already disturbed her far too much.

As soon as her teeth unclenched and her stomach dropped back down from the roof of the Jeep, Zoe unfastened her seat belt and turned to the boys. “Wasn’t that an exciting ride?” she said heartily.

“Yeah! All those bumps.” Aaron giggled. “I thought one time we were going to drop off the mountain for sure!”

So had Zoe. Her nerves still did. The last zigzag of jagged road was enough to make geographical shock sink in. Montana was supposed to be flat, wasn’t it? With a few buttes and lots of cows?

Rafe’s square of Montana was entirely vertical. The snow-covered slopes were a blaze of diamonds under a brilliant winter sun, and the pine woods looked weighted down under swirls and whorls of white cotton candy. A pale-blue sky stretched on forever, and the air was so fresh it burned her lungs. Silence, solitude and space stamped the area as a man’s country. Rafe had told the kids they’d see elk, deer, fox and an occasional cougar or wolf if they were lucky.