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nickname he’d taunted her with because of the way she constantly blew hot and cold whenever she was pregnant:  Hurricane Rose.
    With Luke, virtually from the moment of conception through the end of the first trimester, she’d suffered constant morning sickness.  When she wasn’t barfing, she was sleeping.  And when she wasn’t doing either, she’d kept herself busy frightening children and small animals.  It was amazing how little had changed in fifteen years.
    Eddie was going to laugh his ass off.  Devon was going to disown her.  And her mother was going to die from the shock.  She supposed she would have to verify it with a doctor, but she didn’t really need the verification.  She’d been through it twice before, and this was all too sickeningly familiar to be anything else.  Rose MacKenzie Kenneally was thirty-six years old, unmarried, and knocked up by a man she didn’t even know.
    Where the hell was Dr.  Kevorkian when you needed him?
     

chapter four
     
    Jesse Lindstrom sat with his feet up on his desk, toying idly with a rubber band while Amanda Ashley haltingly read word-for-word her oral report on Last of the Mohicans .  Judging by the glassy eyes of her fellow students, he wasn’t the only one who found her treatise as stimulating as a cubic zirconia marathon on the home shopping channel.  He shifted position, cleared his throat, and glanced at the clock, wondering if seventh period would ever be over.
    Outside the window lay fresh air and sunshine.  Inside, the odors of fricasseed chicken and dirty gym sneakers mingled with raging teenage hormones. 
    Jesse loved teaching, loved working with teenagers, who alternated between sullenness and a sponge-like eagerness to learn.  But these warm September afternoons seemed to exist in some alternate dimension, where time moved at the rate of snow melting uphill.  And on a Friday afternoon at two-ten, not a soul in the room gave a flying fig about Last of the Mohicans .
    Lulled by Amanda’s voice, he let his mind wander to a pleasanter place, the same place it had been traveling on a regular basis since Rob and Casey’s wedding:  Rose Kenneally.
    He’d wanted her the moment he saw her, with that mass of red curls tumbling about the shoulders of the green dress.  She wasn’t pretty.  Her mouth was too wide, her nose too straight, her chin too determined for prettiness.  Instead, Rose was striking.  Stunning.  Light years beyond pretty, with its fixation on shallow attractiveness.
    But it wasn’ther looks that had made him follow her out onto the dance floor.  It was her laugh.  Much too big a laugh for a woman that small, it had buoyed up out of her as her uncle swung her in dizzying circles.  She’d kept up with the old rascal, hadn’t missed a step, had thrown back her head in delighted laughter as she did so.
    And the oddest thing had happened.  For a fleeting instant, some internal voice had told Jesse that this was the woman he’d waited for all his life.
    Celibacy , he told himself.  Too damn much celibacy .  It made a man crazy after a while.  In the years since his divorce, there’dbeen only one woman, a divorcee who had filled in for a year as the high school librarian.  They had provided each other with an outlet for twice-monthly, extremely civilized sex.
    Sex with Rose Kenneally was not civilized.  Making love with Rose was like coming face-to-face with a tornado and being swept up inside its swirling vortex.  Jesse closed his eyes, the better to relive that Saturday afternoon, the way she had looked in the green dress.  The way she had looked out of it.  The way she had wrapped herself around him and closed her eyes in ecstasy.
    A loud bang at the back of the room brought him abruptly back to reality.  Amanda stopped reading.  Jesse opened his eyes and located the perpetrator, and leveled a long, cool stare at Richard Boucher, who was bending to pick up the book he’d dropped on the floor.  “Sorry, Mr.