Kiss in the Dark (10 page)

“You think I’m running?”

“You stocked up on clothes at the mall. You didn’t go back to your hotel room. You’re pregnant and scared and you told me yourself you’d do what it took to protect your child.”

Shock stole her breath. “You’ve got it all wrong.”

“Do I?”

“I don’t owe you any explanations,” she said, and started to push past him.

She might as well have tried to move a prehistoric boulder. Dylan’s hand closed around her upper arm. And his eyes caught fire. “If you think I’m going to let you walk out of here by yourself, you’re out of your mind. I can’t risk you driving up into those mountains and never coming back.”

Beth gaped at him. She heard the warning in his voice, saw it in every rigid muscle in his body. She just didn’t understand. “Why? You really think I killed Lance?”

The thought pierced deep, proving that the man she’d once loved with every corner of her heart didn’t know her at all.

“You’re pregnant,” he said.

The memory came, hard and fast, of the only other time she’d carried a child. His. The one she’d lost. “I appreciate your concern, Dylan, but I’m not some fragile flower, and I don’t need you playing bodyguard or bounty hunter or whatever it is you think you’re doing.”

Even if for a few dangerous moments, only a few hours before, she’d wanted to feel his arms close around her more than she’d ever wanted anything.

His expression darkened. “I’m not playing anything.”

“Then what would you call it?”

“Father. I’d call it father.”

Everything inside Beth went very still. Even her heart. She stared at Dylan, trying to understand the gravity in his eyes, the hard line of his mouth. “W-what?”

He released his hold on her arm and slid his hand to her stomach, where his fingers splayed wide. “This child you’re carrying, Bethany. This child
is
mine.”

Chapter 7

«
^
»

T
he
bottle of
orange juice slipped from her fingers and shattered against the dirty tile floor. Cold liquid splashed against her legs, but Beth didn’t move, didn’t look down.

“What did you say?” she asked in a thready voice she barely recognized as her own.

Dylan grabbed a wad of napkins from the coffee bar by his side. “You’re bleeding.”

Beth looked at the feathery cuts on her calves, the streaks of orange juice and blood racing toward her ankle. They were nothing compared to the gash left by his words.

He went down on a knee. “Here let me—”

“Don’t touch me!” she practically shrieked, knowing she’d come unglued if he did. “I don’t care about my legs. I care about my baby, and what you just said.”

Slowly, Dylan pushed to his full height, towering over her by a good six inches. His eyes were hard. Hot. “Not here,” he said, reaching for her. “Come on—”

“No.” She yanked her hand from his and backed away, her sandals crunching on shards of glass. “I’m not going anywhere until you tell me what you meant.”

His jaw tightened. “Damn it—”

“Excuse me,” the clerk said, pushing past them with a bucket of water and a mop. “Let me just—”

“Go away,” Dylan said, but didn’t move, didn’t look away from Beth.

The clerk scurried away, not needling to be told twice that the tall man with the angry jaw meant business.

Beth swallowed hard. She wanted to scurry away, too. At least part of her. The rest of her, the dominant part, wanted to put her hands to Dylan’s impossibly wide chest and shove. Hard. He’d always rocked her world, but this time he’d gone too far.

“I mean it,” she said. “Tell me what you meant.”

A small muscle in the hollow of his cheek began to thump. “I meant what I said. The child you’re carrying is mine.”

Beth swayed, reaching a hand behind her to brace herself against the refrigerated glass. “That’s not possible.”

“I’m afraid it’s more than possible, sweetheart. Don’t tell me you’ve forgotten about that night in the mountains, how we—”

“Stop it,” she practically shouted, then tried to shove past him.

He didn’t move. “Just asking an innocent question,” he said with a grim smile.

She glared at him. “You haven’t been innocent since the day you were born.”

“Be that as it may, I took biology and went to law school. I know how to put facts together, and the cold hard truth is that Lance was sterile.”

The busy minimart started to spin. Beyond Dylan, the cartons and cans along the cluttered aisle blurred and fused, whirled away. “W-what are you talking about?”

“How many years did you try to have a baby? How
many years did the doctors tell you they found nothing
wrong with you?”

She just stared at him. “They never found anything wrong with Lance, either.”

“Did the doctor tell you that himself, Bethany? Or is that what Lance told you?”

Memories came crashing down like towering spruce snapping in a thunderstorm, all the different times they’d been tested, the procedures they had done. Lance had always gone to his own doctor. A guy’s doctor, he’d said. She couldn’t expect a man to feel comfortable seeing a woman’s doctor. She remembered laughing at the time…

Now an entirely different emotion clogged her throat. Betrayal cut like a fine-edged paring knife, slicing clear to her bones. “No,” she whispered. “No.”

Dylan stepped closer, practically pinning her between his very hard, very angry, very hot body, and the cold glass
behind her. “Why
would I lie?” he asked in a
dangerously quiet voice.
“What do
I have to gain?”

Her hand slid protectively to her stomach. “My child.”

His expression twisted. “Funny, that’s exactly what Lance said.”

The sense of vertigo accelerated, dipping wildly like a roller coaster out of control and carrying her to an alternate universe she didn’t understand. “W-what are you talking about?”

Dylan gestured to the next aisle over, where a trio of ponytailed and bearded truckers watched the two of them like a tennis match. “This isn’t the time or the place, Bethany.”

“I don’t give a damn,” she said, and realized she didn’t. For the past six years she’d lived in a carefully constructed world, working hard to make sure her life never blew up around her like her mother’s did on a regular basis. That’s all she wanted. Normalcy. Simplicity. A husband she loved, who loved her back. A few kids. A couple of dogs and cats. Goldfish.

But that life, that illusion, was gone now. Shredded. She could never go back.

And for the first time in her life, she flat didn’t care. “Tell me what you know about Lance, and tell me now.”

Dylan stepped closer. “He was scared,” he said. “Ashamed. For the first time in his life, the St. Croix prince had come up against an opponent, a challenge, he couldn’t defeat. He couldn’t make his own wife smile. He couldn’t make you pregnant.”

“How do you know this?”

“He told me.”

“You?”

“Me.”

“But … why didn’t he tell me? We could have adopted—”

“And shatter that pretend world the two of you lived in? Lance? You must not have known the man you married as well as you thought you did. He was a St. Croix, for God’s sake. Appearances were everything to him. It was bad enough that he knew he couldn’t fulfill a basic, human function. He’d have sooner cut off both his hands than admit the truth to you.”

“Even if what you’re saying is true, which I’m not sure it is, this child has nothing to do with Lance. I did the insemination on my own.”

“Ah, Bethany. Do you really think Lance would let you get pregnant mere months after he walked out on you? Do you really think he’d let you emasculate him like that?”

“It wasn’t his decision.”

“Once you step foot in his house of cards, you can never leave. I know this is my child, Bethany, because I know Lance made damn sure your artificial insemination wouldn’t work.”

Horror shuddered through her, leaving a chill in its wake. “I’m not listening to this,” she said and tried to shove past him, but he easily caught her wrist.

“Running away won’t change anything.”

She glared up at him, slowly shaking her head. “You don’t know what you’re talking about,” she insisted, but deep, deep inside, she was very afraid that he did.

* * *

Dylan looked at Bethany standing there, her eyes wide and dark, her skin flushed, her mouth mutinous, and wished to hell and back he
didn’t
know what he was talk
ing about. But he did. Painfully so. In excruciating detail.

“Hate to shatter your illusions, sweetheart, but I know exactly what I’m talking about. A man. A man I grew up with. A man who broke down in front of me and cried. A desperate man. A man who couldn’t accept his own failings and didn’t think his wife would, either.”

Bethany winced.

“The truth ate him up inside,” Dylan told her. “Messed him up bad.” The lies Lance had told were hideous and indefensible, but she deserved to at least understand why. “Failure wasn’t an option for Lance. Success meant everything to him. And that included giving you a child.” Dylan could only imagine what it had cost his cousin to approach him, the horrendous proposition he’d outlined, the humiliating admission that Dylan could give Bethany what Lance couldn’t. No one would ever know, he’d promised. Lance would love the child as his own. Dylan would be nothing but a sperm donor.

The suggestion still made Dylan cringe.

“He couldn’t look at you without knowing he couldn’t function as a man.”

Bethany wrapped her arms around her waist and cradled her child.
Their
child. Her loose, light blue shift concealed
all traces of her pregnancy, except a slight fullness at her breasts.

“You’re saying he admitted this to you?” she asked. “The two of you barely spoke.”

Dylan had been surprised, as well. “We’re genetically close,” he said, repeating his cousin’s rationale.

“Genetically close?” she repeated, and her voice cracked.

Dylan hated what he had to say, but he wouldn’t lie. “He wanted me to be a sperm donor.”

Beth just stared at him. “He what?”

“I told him no.” Had exercised every molecule of restraint he possessed not to lunge across the table and slam his fist into his cousin’s jaw. “I told him I wasn’t playing in his house of cards, and if he wasn’t careful, he wouldn’t be for much longer, either.”

Now, the memory, the obscene prediction, chilled.

Slowly, Bethany’s eyes met his. “You threatened him?”

“I warned him.”

She lifted a hand to her forehead. “But … that was before the divorce. This child had nothing to do with him!”

Clearly she hadn’t really known the man she married. “Lance’s penchant for playing God didn’t end with legal documents, Bethany. I went to the fertility clinic this afternoon.” Being a St. Croix definitely had its advantages. So did being a private investigator. Especially when a murder hung on the line. “Our boy Lance paid a technician there twenty-five thousand dollars to make sure you didn’t get pregnant.”

She looked alarmingly pale. “Dear God, I … this is just … how could Lance do this?”

That, Dylan could answer too well. “He would have done anything, Bethany. Anything to present the image he wanted the world to see.” It had never occurred to him that he would be caught, that his lies would catch up with him. That he would one day lie dead on his living room floor.

And it hadn’t occurred to Dylan that he’d be the one left to pick up the pieces.

But he wasn’t a man to walk away from responsibility, even if that responsibility seared him like a hot poker into a fresh wound. Playing hero wasn’t his shtick, and fatherhood hadn’t been in his immediate plans.

But as he looked at Bethany standing there so rigidly, her chin lifted in defiance, her arms wrapped protectively around her waist, he saw only the trusting girl she’d been, the future she’d once dreamed of. And he knew his greatest battle still lay ahead. This woman who’d been betrayed in the most heinous way imaginable was suspected of murder. She might be going to jail.

He could well be raising his child alone.

Or, if she slipped across the border and into Canada, not raising his child at all.

“Come on,” he said, reaching for her hand. “Let’s get out of here.”

She stepped back. “I’m not going anywhere with you.”

“Sure you are,” he drawled. “Just think of it as an early family vacation.” That had a much better ring to it than abduction.

She wouldn’t give him her hand, so he draped an arm around her stiff shoulders and steered her toward the front of the store. More customers stood watching now, not just truck drivers, but the clerk and the manager and a family of four wearing T-shirts extolling the virtues of Idaho.

A warm breeze lifted the ends of her silky hair the second they walked outside. The sky was darker, more ominous. The sun had slipped behind a bank of heavy clouds, only a few meager rays slipping free. A storm threatened to break soon.

Bethany headed toward her car, but Dylan caught her wrist.

“You can’t keep me here against my will,” she gritted out.

“I can’t let you walk away and drive into the sunset, either.”

She lifted her chin. “Pregnancy doesn’t make a woman unable to drive.”

“You’re a suspect in a high-profile murder case,” he reminded. “You’re carrying my
child, and you’re scared. If ever anyone had the motivation to slip across the border into the wilds of Canada and conveniently get lost, it’s
you.”

Her eyes flared. “I’m not running.”

“I know you’re not,” he said, taking her hand and leading her to his Bronco. “I’m not letting you.”

Opening the door, he gestured for her to slide in. Instead, she looked up at him, the strangest look swirling in her eyes. Wisdom and understanding and sorrow. Regret. Acceptance. “This is why you followed me to the police station and showed up at my hotel, isn’t it? This is why you’ve been pretending to care.”

He’d be a fool to think he heard hurt in her raspy voice. He’d be an even bigger fool to remind her that pretenses were her forte, not his.

“I had to know,” he said simply.

Those fabulous eyes of hers darkened, blue turning black. “You should have told me the truth all along,” she said, and though the words were soft, almost broken, they cut to the bone.

Because they were true.

A distorted laugh broke from his throat. “I should have done a lot of things. But it’s too late for second-guessing.”

“It was too late a long time ago,” she corrected, then slid into the Bronco and closed the door.

* * *

Beth gazed out the window, watching the darkened landscape of towering trees rush by in a blur of shadows. Slowly, to the sound of mournful blues, her eyes drifted shut and she began to drift. A warm fire awaited her, the oddest sensation of homecoming. She stretched out before the flames, sure there was some reason she shouldn’t relax so completely, but unable to remember why. The fire maybe. The heat. But rather than burning, they beckoned.