Shades of Twilight

She smiled a private little smile as she remembered how he’d made love to her the night before, and again that morning, after the pregnancy test had shown positive. There was no doubting his physical reaction to her, any more than he could doubt her desire for him.

"I saw that," he said from where he lounged in the kitchen doorway. She hadn’t heard him open the door.

"You’ve been standing there daydreaming for five minutes, and you just got a mysterious little smile on your face. What are you thinking about?" Still smiling, Roanna walked toward him, her brown eyes heavy lidded and filled with an expression that made him catch his breath.

"Riding," she murmured as she walked past, deliberately brushing her body against his.

"And woofs."

His own eyes grew heavy, and color stained his cheekbones. It was the first seductive move Roanna had made toward him, and it had brought him to a full, immediate erection. Tansy was behind him in the kitchen, cheerfully going about her daily baking and concocting. He didn’t care if she noticed his aroused state. He turned around and silently, purposefully followed Roanna.

She glanced over her shoulder at him as they went up the stairs, her face glowing with promise. She walked faster. The bedroom door was barely closed behind them before Webb had her in his arms.

Getting married involved running a lot of errands, Roanna thought the next morning as she drove down the long, winding private road. The guest list for the wedding was much smaller than the one for Lucinda’s party had been, with a total of forty people, including family, but there were still details to be taken care of.

She and Webb were to have their blood tests later that afternoon. This morning, she had arranged for the flowers and the caterer and the wedding cake. Normally wedding cakes took weeks to prepare, but Mrs. Turner, who specialized in wedding cakes, had said she could do an "elegantly simple" one in the eleven days left until the chosen wedding date. Roanna understood that "elegantly simple" was a

tactful way of saying less elaborate, but that was what she preferred anyway. She had to stop by Mrs. Turner’s house and pick out the design she liked best.

She also had to shop for a wedding gown. If she couldn’t find anything she liked in the Quad Cities on such short notice, she would have to go to Huntsville or Birmingham.

Fortunately, Yvonne had been ecstatic about the prospect of Webb’s second marriage. She had tolerated Jessie but never really liked her. Roanna suited her to a T, and she had even said that she’d always wished Webb had waited for Roanna to grow up rather than marrying Jessie. Yvonne had thrown herself into the preparations, taking over the onerous chore of invitations and volunteering to handle the logistics of everything else once Roanna had made her choices.

Roanna reached the side road and stopped, waiting for an oncoming car to pass. Her brakes felt mushy when she applied them, and she frowned, experimentally pumping the pedal again. This time it felt fine. Perhaps the level of brake fluid was low, though she kept the car well maintained. She made a mental note to stop at a service station and have it checked.

She turned right onto the side road, traveling toward the highway. The car that had just passed was at least a hundred yards ahead of her. Roanna gradually accelerated, her thoughts drifting to the style of gown she wanted: something simple, in ivory rather than pure white. She had some gold hued pearls that would look gorgeous with an ivory gown. And a fairly slim skirt in the Empire style would suit her far better than a full-skirted, fairy princess gown.

There was a curve in the road, then a stop sign where the road intersected with Highway 43, a busy four-lane highway, with traffic continually zooming past. Roanna rounded the curve and saw the car ahead of her halted at the stop sign, left turn signal blinking, waiting for an opening in the traffic to enter the highway.

A car turned onto the side road, coming toward her, but the traffic was too heavy for the car stopped at the intersection to make it across to the other side, Roanna put her foot on the brake pedal to slow down, and the pedal went to the floorboard without any resistance at all.

Alarm shot through her. She pumped the pedal again, but there was no response the way there had been the first time. If anything, the car seemed to pick up speed. She had no brakes, and both lanes of the road were occupied.

Time warped, stretching like elastic. The road elongated in front of her, while the oncoming car loomed twice its normal size. Thoughts flashed through her mind, lightning fast: Webb, the baby. A deep ditch was to the right, and the shoulder was narrow; there was no room for her to swing past the car stopped at the intersection, even if there hadn’t beer, the danger of shooting across four lanes of traffic.

Webb! Dear God, Webb. She gripped the steering wheel, anguish almost choking her as the seconds churned past and she ran out of time. She couldn’t die now, not now when she had Webb, when his child was just beginning its life inside her. She had to do something … But she already knew what to do, she realized, memory gleaming like a bright thread through the terror that threatened to engulf her. She’d been a terrible driver, so she had taken a driving course when she was in college. She knew how to handle skids and lousy road conditions; she knew what to do in case of brake failure.

She knew what to do!

The car was shooting forward, as if it were on a downhill course and the roadway was greased.

The driving instructor’s voice sounded in her head, calm and prosaic: Don’t take a solid hit if you can help it. Don’t let yourself hit anything head on, that’s when the worst damage occurs. Turn the car, slide into a collision, dissipate the force

She reached for the gear shift. Don’t try to put it into park, she thought, remembering those long-ago lessons. The instructor had said it likely wouldn’t go into park anyway. She could hear his voice as clearly as if he was sitting beside