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had finished all of Lord of the Rings , and was working his way through The Chronicles of Amber .
    I put my finger under an unfamiliar word and looked up. “What’s a concubine?” Maybe I should mention here that my mother monitored my reading very carefully, so while I was advanced in reading skills, I was also incredibly naïve and overprotected. I now suspect that she steered my interest toward science fiction because it had so little in the way of sexual references. She hadn’t discovered my copy of Dune yet. I’d slipped it into the basket on my last trip to town with the Judge, and since he was so used to my hunger for books, he’d never commented on it.
    Nick glanced up from his book at my question. “I think it’s a woman who’s kind of like a wife, but isn’t really married.”
    Aha! Had I inadvertently stumbled on the answer that would explain Liz Swanner’s six kids? “Can concubines have babies?”
    “Sure.”
    That had to be it, but I wanted to make sure I got this right before I reported back to Jenna. “Is Liz Swanner a concubine?”
    His eyes narrowed. “No.”
    Drat. I’d been so sure. “Well, then how come she has six kids? Jenna says you have to be married to have babies.”
    “Jenna is wrong.”
    27

    Katherine Allred
    A vague tingle of alarm went through me. If you didn’t have to be married, that meant any female could have babies. Including me. And I darn sure wasn’t ready to be a mother yet. When I told Nick as much, he shook his head.
    “You can’t have one alone. It takes a man and a woman together to make a baby.
    Besides, you aren’t old enough.”
    Now this was getting interesting. “How old do you have to be?”
    “I think it’s different for everybody. You’ll know when you’re old enough.”
    “How?”
    His chest lifted in a long-suffering sigh. “You just will.”
    “Are you old enough?”
    Red tinted his cheeks. “Boys aren’t the same as girls.” Well, even I knew that. I’d been around enough mothers who were in the process of changing diapers to determine the plumbing on boys wasn’t like my own. I had even checked once, after my first glimpse of a baby boy, to make sure there weren’t any surprises lurking down there. “But are you old enough?”
    “It doesn’t matter. I’m not gonna make any woman have a baby.”
    “You mean you don’t ever want to have any kids?”
    “It’s not that.” He hesitated, staring across the room. “It’s just that it’s better for the kid to have two parents who are married and who love them. I won’t have a kid unless I’m married to its mother, and I don’t think that’s gonna happen.”
    “Why not?”
    His shoulder lifted in a shrug. “I’m Frank Anderson’s son and I live in a junkyard.
    Who’d want to marry me?”
    “I’ll marry you,” I told him decisively. “That way, we can both have kids someday.” He grinned, those dimples emerging in a blaze of glory. “Yeah, you probably would. But I don’t think you should go around telling people you’re going to marry me.
    They might get the wrong idea.” Draping an arm around my shoulders, he gave me a little shake. “Now shut up and read. I just got to a good part.” I snuggled down next to him, happily sure that our future had been settled. There were still some blank areas in my knowledge of where babies came from, but I knew that together we could work it out. How hard could it be when Liz Swanner had managed it six times?
    Of course, I didn’t pay much attention to Nick’s admonition about telling people I was going to marry him. It was almost a week later when I was sitting at the kitchen table doing my homework while Mama and my aunts cooked. Nick hadn’t used his room since the weekend before and I was constantly jumping up to look out the back door, hoping he’d show up.
    After the last check with no sign of him, I sighed mightily and resumed my seat.
    “Alix, you’re going to wear that chair out if you don’t sit still,”