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think you were so hurt by that S.O.B. you’re afraid to spend time with any man who might actually turn you on.
    Kara couldn’t let Galen define her life forever. “We’d have to agree not to discuss our work.”
    “Darling, work is going to be the last thing on my mind. Would this Friday work?”
    Momentarily speechless, she felt her heart literally skip a beat. “Friday would be fine.”
    “I’ll pick you up at 6:30.”
    “Okay, 6:30.”
    She said good-bye, hung up the phone, and wondered if she’d just done something incredibly stupid. A date with Reece Sheridan? She hurried back to pull Connor from the tub.
    She was so distracted as she got him ready for bed that she forgot to have him brush his teeth until he reminded her and her tongue got tangled a dozen times while reading Fox in Sox . Finally, she tucked the blanket under his chin. He was drowsy, his eyelids heavy.
    “Mommy, will you be late tomorrow?”
    Kara sat down beside him on the bed and stroked his downy hair. She savored the smell of baby shampoo. “I don’t know. I’ll try very hard not to be late. I love you, and I want to be with you as soon as I can every day.”
    “If I had a daddy, would he pick me up so I didn’t have to be last?”
    Kara felt a pricking behind her eyes and swallowed. How could she tell him that he did have a daddy, that his daddy lived in the same town but didn’t want to have anything to do with him? “Maybe, but daddies have to work, too.”
    “Will you come with us to see the dinosaurs?”
    “Yes, pumpkin.” She vowed silently to work it out somehow. She bent down and kissed the baby-softness of his cheek. “Sweet dreams.”
    She quietly slipped out of Connor’s room and into her own, where she took off her still-damp sweat pants and sweatshirt and slid into her nightgown and bathrobe. Then she stepped into the bathroom and began to brush her teeth.
    She could lie. She could simply tell Tom she had an interview that morning. There’s no way he’d know she was chaperoning a preschool field trip instead.
    But she didn’t want to do that. She was in the business of telling the truth—that’s what being a journalist was all about. Lying to her editor didn’t seem right. Yet if she told Tom the truth, he would surely begrudge her the time.
    Though Tom knew she put in more than forty hours a week, he’d never really accepted the fact that she was a mother and needed to leave work to pick her son up from day care every evening by six. He’d never actually verbalized it, but Kara knew he felt motherhood had compromised her as a reporter. His idea of a good journalist was someone who routinely worked until 1 A . M . and had no personal life to interfere with the job.

    Not that Tom was a complete jerk. He put as many demands on himself as he did his staff, and he knew the Denver metro area like no one else. A consummate journalist, he’d taught Kara the ropes and encouraged and berated her until she’d found her investigative legs and a coveted spot on the I-team, the paper’s investigative team. The result was a slew of state and national journalism awards with her name on them.
    She’d never been able to explain it to anyone—had never even tried to explain it to Tom—but she’d fallen in love with her baby from the moment she’d learned she was pregnant. And though she hadn’t enjoyed the constant fatigue and nausea that went with pregnancy, she’d cherished the thought that someone new, some little person, was growing inside her.
    For a time, her condition had been her special secret. She’d hidden it from everyone at the paper—everyone except Holly, who’d found her sick in the bathroom and had guessed immediately—until she was five months along and Tom had finally noticed the growing bulge of her belly.
    He hadn’t taken it well. Though he tried hard to act like a feminist, his idea of liberation was acknowledging every woman’s inalienable right to work long hours and to have sex with