The breath stalled in her throat. “Why are you telling me this?”
“I needed you to know.”
She quirked a smile, because deep down, she wanted to cry. Who was this man, she thought again. Who was this man who shattered her with gentleness every time she braced herself for passion?
“True confessions?”
she asked with a wry humor she didn’t come close to feeling.
His lips, those full, tempting lips of his, curved into a wicked little half smile. “Something like that.”
But it was one confession she didn’t want. Knowing hurt. Knowing ripped down one of those walls she’d thrown up between them, the wall of pain caused by thinking of Dylan making love to another woman, in the bed where Beth had given him her virginity. Where’d they’d loved and laughed, conceived a child.
But that wall was gone now, and without it, Beth felt like she stood in his arms, naked.
Through a
foggy tunnel of time and space, she saw him lowering his head toward hers, felt
the hand at the small of
her back press her closer. Longing curled through her,
hot, liquid, eager. She wanted to feel his mouth on hers again, wanted to
drink
of him, taste him,
thank
him for the
precious, precious
gift of his confession. And the child in
her womb.
“You should go to bed now,”
he murmured, his lips cruising over her forehead.
She blinked, confused. She’d felt his body pressed against hers. His hard body. She knew how aroused he was, what he clearly wanted.
“Bed?” she whispered.
He nodded, turning her stiff shoulders toward the darkened hall. “Sleep,” he said. “You’ve got a big day tomorrow.”
Her body was hot and liquid and on fire, and he was sending her to bed, alone. But he was also grinning, the dark green of his eyes glinting with a promise she wanted to trust. “What’s happening tomorrow?”
“A surprise.”
She smiled despite herself, the ancient banter flowing from her as naturally as a spring bubbling from the earth.
“I hate surprises,” she said, as she always did.
And he laughed. As he always did. “You’ll like mine.”
Chapter 11
T
he young elk looked up from the riverbed, startled. Nearby, a large female surveyed the dense pine forest.
Dylan stopped abruptly, taking Bethany’s hand and pulling her to his side. He pointed toward the opening, where the small male once again drank from the edge of the crystal clear water.
“He’s wonderful,” she whispered, her voice barely carrying above the sound of
rushing water. The Rogue River
was running fast today, the warm temperatures melting off snow quicker than normal.
Further down the mountain,
Dylan felt sure the
white-water rafting outfitters were in
full swing.
He eased forward, bringing Bethany with him. Her hand
felt small in his, soft, much like her
body had felt in his
arms
the night before. The mountains always had that
effect on her, helped her relax when nothing else could.
Sending her to bed last night, alone, had taken every ounce of strength he possessed. If she’d lingered one second longer, if she’d looked at him with those startling blue eyes of hers, if she’d touched him, he might have surren
dered to need and carried her to the king-size bed
instead.
But Bethany didn’t need that from him. She didn’t need
blazing, in-your-face passion. She needed time. She needed space. She needed tenderness.
And even if it killed him, he was determined to give her what he’d been unable to nine years before.
Deep inside, he could no longer deny what his heart had been trying to tell him all along. No matter how damning
the evidence, Bethany had not killed Lance. She was a
compassionate, caring woman. Yes, she’d carved Dylan out of her life with brutal precision, but he’d broken her heart first by not sharing her immediate happiness over the child they created.
This time, he vowed, would be different.
The years separating them had given him a maturity and insight he’d not possessed as a rebellious twenty-one-year-old. He knew what was important now. What mattered.
And
even
though the child Bethany carried had
been con
ceived by accident, Dylan found himself excited about being a
father.
“It’s so beautiful,”
she whispered.
The smile in her voice warmed deeper than the sun glinting through the pines. He looked at the softness in her eyes, the glow to her cheeks, and knew he’d move heaven and earth before he let this woman go to prison.
She tugged on his hand and led him to the water’s edge. They were far enough away from the elk
now that they
posed no threat.
Bethany stepped onto a boulder and tilted her face toward the blue sky,
where a few fat white clouds drifted
lazily across the horizon.
“Almighty winds which blow on
high,” she said with a low laugh, “lift me now so I can fly.”
Dylan just stared. She looked like a goddess standing
there against the old-growth forest and the impossibly blue sky, her white shirt and khaki shorts the only hint she
belonged in
this world, and not mythology.
She tossed a smile over her shoulder. “Isis,” she said.
“When
I was a kid, I watched the show every Saturday morning.”
He laughed—he
hadn’t been that far off.
Bethany eased down on the
boulder and pulled her knees to her chest, gazing upstream, where
two more elk
drank from a tributary leading into the river.
Dylan forced himself to remain where he was and not slip behind her on the rock, ease his arms around her and pull her against his chest. But for a moment there, he found himself wishing that make-believe world she talked of really did exist. That they could stay here and raise their child.
Their child.
The thought stirred something deep inside. Something primal. Something unbearably soft.
He was going to be a father.
He picked up a flat rock and slung
it into the water,
watching it skip twice before sinking. He should already
be a father. He should have an eight-year-old son or daughter. It was impossible not to wonder about what could have been, what would have been if he’d not stormed out of the cabin that night. If Bethany hadn’t followed.
He looked at her
now, at the faraway
expression on her
face, and
felt his chest tighten. He’d once accused her of
being a
coward, but now he knew how remarkably brave
she was. How strong.
Being a suspect in Lance’s murder
was bad enough. But to be carrying Dylan’s child, the
child of a man she wanted to obliterate from her life, he couldn’t begin to imagine what that did to her.
“Penny for your thoughts,”
he
said before he could stop
himself.
She glanced over her shoulder and slayed him with a
smile. “A little over a week ago I was at the center, fi
nalizing a seminar for planned parenthood. Now
I find that
by the end of this year, I’ll have a baby of my own.”
My own.
Not his, not theirs. Hers.
She shook her head. “It’s hard to believe how quickly life can change.”
He picked up another rock, flung it into the river. “Some things,” he acknowledged. “Others never do.”
She frowned. “For six years Lance let me believe our
inability to have a child was my fault. My problem. He lied to me, Dylan. In making himself feel like more of a man, he made me feel like less of a woman.”
Anger blasted through him, ridiculously directed at a dead man. “I can’t defend him, Bethany.”
“But why you?”
she asked, much as she had that afternoon in the convenience store.
“Why
would he think
you’d go along with such a huge
deception?”
Because he almost had.
The truth ground through him as viciously now as it had then.
“Because he knew me.”
“He knew you?
Don’t be ridiculous. If he’d known you
at all, he’d have known how
much you hate lies.”
Yes, Lance had known that. But he’d known more, as well. He’d known how to play his trump card. And he’d known how to send marbles scattering.
“Lance asked me, because he knew
I never forgave myself for the miscarriage,”
he admitted in a voice suddenly tight and strangled with emotions he’d tried to destroy. “Giving you a child was a way to
atone for the past and
give you
back the dream I
destroyed.”
For a
moment, Bethany said nothing, just
stared at him like he’d just admitted
masterminding a plot to clear-cut
old-growth forests. Then, slowly, she stood,
shoving the
flyaway hair from her face.
“Forgive yourself for the miscarriage? What are you talking about?”
The point of no
return had long since been crossed and violated. Only the
truth remained.
“The ambush.”
Pain flashed across her face, darkening her eyes and stealing the color from her cheeks. “That wasn’t your fault,” she whispered above
the roar of the water.
Dylan couldn’t stand it one second longer. Couldn’t stand being apart from her, not when she stood there on
that boulder,
no longer looking like a goddess, but a woman who took penance too far.
He strode toward her, joined her on the rock, lifted a
hand to her face. The sun blared down and a warm
wind
rustled the pines, but her skin was alarmingly
cold.
“I walked out the door,” he said. “I walked out that door when you needed me to stay.”
He saw the moisture flood her eyes as she looked away from him, further upriver
where the
elk no longer lounged.
“It just
all happened so … fast,”
he said, but the words sounded as lame as they
felt. He’d been ill-prepared and
overwhelmed. Scared. “I needed some time to think. To get used to the idea.”
She looked back at him now. “And I just needed you.”
He wasn’t sure how he remained standing. “I didn’t know about the ambush,
Bethany.
I swear to God I had no idea they were on to me.”
“There’s no point beating yourself up,” she said with a punishing
measure of acceptance. “It’s over and done
with.”
“It will never be over and done with. Because of me, our child
died.”
Tears spilled over, streaming down her cheeks like snow melt down the mountain. “I was the one who raced after you,”
she whispered, “even though you asked me not to. I was the one not thinking clearly, running on blind need
and fear.”
“Because of me.”
He’d been investigating a string of
drug overdoses for the college newspaper, closing in on a meth lab selling a lethal concoction. Somehow
they’d
caught on to him, and had sought to eliminate him before he eliminated them.
They’d eliminated him, all right. They’d killed the best part of him, leaving the rest of him to live with the aftermath. For as
long
as he lived he’d
never forget the flash of headlights and the
screech of tires, the shouting. The blood.
If the cops hadn’t arrived when they had, Dylan would
be dead or serving time for
manslaughter.
“My mother always told me everything happens for a reason,” he said, wiping the tears from beneath Bethany’s eyes. “She said every life
event prepares us for the next,
but I’ve never figured out what the hell that night prepared
us for.”
An odd light glowed in Bethany’s eyes. “This,”
she
said, drawing his hand to her stomach. “Now.” A soft smile touched her lips. “I’m
carrying your child, Dylan. Again. We were too young before, too caught up in a
fantasy we didn’t
realize couldn’t come true. I let
passion blind me. I
didn’t think straight.
I didn’t put the
child first.
I won’t let that happen again.”
The words of resolve hammered
through him. “I wanted to tell him yes,”
he ground out, and the admission hurt as
badly coming out
as when he’d shoved the truth down
deep. “I wanted to accept the devil’s offer and erase the scar from your heart. But not
through lies. Not through
lies.
”
He paused, swallowed hard. “I’m not going to let anything happen to you this time,”
he said, sliding the flyaway hair behind her ear. “So
help me God, not to you,
or our child.”
Our
child.
She closed her eyes, opened them a moment later. Sorrow no longer lurked in her gaze, but something harder. Darker.
“There’s something you need to know.”
Dylan’s heart started to
pound more violently than the
water crashing
against the boulders.
His chest tightened. He’d been a private
investigator long enough to know
nothing good ever followed
those six words. They usually
represented the other foot falling.
“What?”
Possibilities surged and shattered. She hated him. She never wanted to see
him again. She would go to
court to prevent him from being a father to their child.
“What?”
“The fire poker was in my hands.”
Dylan went very still. “W-what?”
“The f-fire poker,”
she repeated. “It was in my hands when I woke up next to Lance.” The fear in her eyes deepened. “I was holding it.”
Horror replaced shock, and finally he understood the terror he caught in Bethany’s gaze when she thought he wasn’t looking. Why she’d tried to run. “Jesus, Bethany,” he muttered, taking her shoulders in his hands. The thought
of her killing Lance in cold blood, of her going to
prison,
twisted him up inside.
“What the
hell happened that day?”