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was not comfortable in a man’s house where she was terrified of tripping over another woman’s lingerie. She had an attack of vertigo the minute she stepped outside, and the awkwardness she felt around Rafe was increasing instead of letting up.
    Relax? Maybe… maybe by the next century.

Chapter Three
    Zoe sank into bubbles up to her chin, closed her eyes, sighed…and immediately tensed. Something had dropped with a deafening clatter in the twins’ bedroom. She heard the thundering of little feet, then Rafe’s firm, quiet voice, then the sound of the boys’ bedroom door closing.
    Silence. Relaxing again, she tried out another blissful sigh, languidly raised a washcloth and let the water dribble over her raised knee. Laziness felt sublimely wanton, even if she only had in mind a five-minute bath. After dinner, Rafe had insisted that she disappear and let him handle the boys for a while, but she didn’t want to push that. Until he formed a really strong attachment to them, she figured she’d better shield him from discovering they weren’t quite the well-behaved angels she’d led him to believe.
    Still, she had absolutely nothing to do for a few minutes but watch steam rise from the blue bathtub. She liked her baths wrinkle-hot and pore-opening. Leaning back against the cool porcelain, she felt her tense muscles gradually loosen in the hot water.
    Through half-shuttered eyes, she studied her body. All the parts, however distorted by water, looked basically female, basically normal. Exercise gave her skin a healthy tone and suppleness. Her breasts were firm, white, proportionate. Her stomach was flat, and when not exposed to chocolate-chip cookies, her hips behaved. Her thighs were slim; she had terrific calves; and except for her big toes—both of them annoyed her—she had nice small feet.
    It was a darn good body, and her pelvis was never going to have stretch marks, her breasts were never going to sag from nursing a baby, and her stomach was never going to turn into Jell-O from carrying a child.
    The problem was that she wanted the stretch marks, the sag, the Jell-O.
    She squeezed her eyes closed, furious with herself. After all this time, she should have gotten over it. And exactly when was she going to manage to completely forget Steven?
    Being around the children had brought it all back. Aaron and Parker were the image of the kids she’d wanted to have with Steven—a mixture of scamps and innocents, love and trouble. Loving a man, she’d discovered, meant desperately wanting to bear his children. If that was basic human instinct, Zoe had learned it as basic pain.
    She should have told Steven when she first met him that she couldn’t have kids. She hadn’t. Maybe because she’d met him at that vulnerable time right after the operation. A time when she’d desperately needed to know that she could be loved, that she was still a whole woman capable of filling a man’s life. She’d loved him so much! And when she had told him, when he’d walked out of her life, she’d died inside. It wasn’t Steven’s fault. All the blame was hers, for not telling him earlier, for hurting him, for being less than adequate as a woman…
    The emotional scar still hadn’t healed. But she would never make the same mistake again. Falling in love meant ramming her head against the steel wall of all the natural biological urges she could no longer fulfill. And the very thought of falling in love still left that taste of acid in her mouth. Zoe, the woman, wasn’t enough for Steven. It wasn’t that she didn’t understand, but it hurt.
    An image of Rafe’s face rose up in her mind and stayed there. He repeatedly insisted that he couldn’t tackle the kids alone. At first, she’d understood—his lifestyle had never included kids, and the sudden responsibilities of being a single parent were overwhelming and threatening—maybe especially for a man. That was all still true, but Zoe could see how firm and caring and