She had no business thinking of Dylan St. Croix, period. “Take me back to the hotel, Dylan. Please.” Before she did something she’d regret, like ask him to hold her.
Fire and ice, she reminded herself, never mixed.
* * *
“You’ve got everything you need, right?”
Standing in the open doorway of her hotel room, Bethany glanced in the bag in her right hand. “Prenatal vitamins, yogurt, five books on pregnancy.” She rustled a little deeper. “And bubble bath.” Looking up, she attempted to smile. “What more could a girl need?”
A whole hell of a lot, Dylan answered silently. Like a father for her child. “And you’re going to take a nap, right? The doctor said you should get some rest.”
Her smile slipped. “I’ll try.”
Dylan hesitated. He knew he should turn around and walk away. Walk far. He had no business lingering over Bethany like she’d suddenly become a delicate flower, fragile and in need of care. Fire burned flowers. Fire destroyed. And anyway, if he knew anything about Bethany St. Croix, he knew she was no fragile flower. She was strong and enduring, like the perennials growing wild at the base of Mount Hood. The ones that came back every year, bolder and prettier than ever. Bethany didn’t need anyone—him, especially—hovering over her like a mother hen.
And yet, he didn’t know how to walk away.
Despite the path he’d chosen, he’d never been a man to shuck responsibility. He’d never been a man to turn his back on trouble. He’d never been a man to pretend.
That was Bethany’s modus operandi.
She watched him expectantly, her long glossy hair loose and sweeping across her face, hiding the pale scar and making her dark blue eyes look even more mysterious than usual. She wore little makeup, but there was a glow to her cheeks. He wondered if she realized she had a hand against her stomach, her fingers splayed against the cotton of her dress, gently caressing.
Damn the urge to put his hand there, too.
Bethany was pregnant. Pregnant.
Pregnant.
And she might be going to jail.
The thought, the truth, burned. And for the first time in Dylan’s life, he flat didn’t know what to do. Decisions had always come easily to him. Something was black, or it was white. He turned left, or he went right. He never waffled. He never wavered. But now … he didn’t trust himself to be around her right now. Didn’t know how to tell her the truth that would destroy that slumberous, serene look in her eyes. The words that would shatter the calm they’d stumbled upon.
He would confirm first, he decided. Then he would shatter.
“You should go,” Bethany said, moving to close the door.
“Yes,” he agreed, backing away. “I should.”
So he did.
* * *
“How is she?”
“Give me that,” Dylan growled, taking the freshly lit cigarette from Zito before the detective could draw it to his mouth. He brought it to his lips and took a long, long drag, savored the bite. Years had passed since he’d kicked the habit, but damn, a man could only deny himself for so long.
“That bad?” Zito asked.
Dylan exhaled a plume of smoke, took another drag. He wanted to draw the whole damn thing into his lungs. He wanted the burn. The blur.
“How the hell do you think she is?” he asked.
The detective stopped in front of a retro art gallery. “If I knew, I wouldn’t ask.”
Dylan dropped the cigarette and with his foot, ground it into the concrete. The late afternoon sun bore down on him. He knew what Zito was asking, what any good detective would. Had Bethany cracked? Had she slipped up and revealed anything?
“She’s fine.” The words aiding and abetting jeered him on. “Must have been standing a little too straight, that’s all.”
“That’s all?”
“That’s all.” Bitterness seared through him. Irony laughed. He’d steered clear of Bethany for nine years, but only a matter of days, she had him keeping secrets for her. Him, the man who abhorred pretenses. Keeping secrets. For Bethany.
It didn’t take long, did it?
That was always the hell of the matter, how quickly he could slip into her world. Fall. Plummet. Because of those damn slumberous eyes.
She had no reason to kill Lance, he reasoned. Not unless she discovered his extracurricular activities and horrifying lies. The shock, the betrayal, could have sent her over the edge.
But she showed no signs.
Then again, Bethany never did. It was impossible to know what dwelled beneath that beautiful, placid surface. Still waters, he reminded himself. They ran too deep.
“I hear you’ve been poking around.” Letting him off one hook, Zito snared him with another. The detective lit another cigarette. “You’re not trying to do my job for me, are you?”
“Would I do that?” Dylan asked.
“In a New York minute.”
“He was my cousin.”
“And she used to be your lover.”
Dylan plucked the cigarette from Zito’s fingers and dropped it to the ground. This time, when his boot came down, he didn’t just grind, he destroyed.
“Nasty habit,” he said. “Could kill you, if you’re not careful. You really ought to kick it.”
* * *
Pregnant.
Five hours after Dr. Audrey Lyons dropped her bomb, the word still echoed through Beth. Pounded. Drilled. Floored.
Elated.
She stood in a small dressing room at a local department store and stared in the full-length mirror. Wearing only the bra and matching panties Dylan had purchased for her, she pressed a hand to her stomach, marveling at the pooch she hadn’t noticed just that morning. The smile started in her heart, but quickly spread through her like liquid sunshine, curving her lips.
A child. She was carrying a child.
The ache came next, a sweet ache, one of melancholy and irony. Of regret. Destiny. Bone-chilling fear.
For years she’d longed to be a mother, mourning each month when her period came. The doctors never could find anything clinically wrong with her. Stress, one decided. Just one of those things, another said.
But Beth never accepted those answers. She’d conceived once—Dylan’s child—and longed to carry another child, not just in her body, but in her arms. Her heart. She tried everything, starting with charting her temperature, ovulation kits, then graduating to hormone pills, followed by injections and artificial insemination. Romance and dreams had given way to medical science.
By the last year of her marriage, she and Lance had become more like lab partners, than lovers.
As Beth’s sorrow grew, Lance withdrew from her emotionally, physically and every other way imaginable. Passion had never been their hallmark, but in the early days, a genuine fondness had flowed between them, an easy, undemanding friendship that helped her heal after Dylan. But Lance didn’t understand her sadness, didn’t understand her pain. He told her to quit obsessing. He told her maybe she wasn’t meant to be a mother.
She should have seen the writing on the wall then. She should have realized the marriage really was over, that Lance, her friend, had become a stranger.
Instead, she’d convinced him to try one last time. For her. For their future. And Lance had reluctantly agreed.
When she began spotting twelve days after the artificial insemination, Lance caught her crying. And he’d exploded. He said he’d tried to warn her, but she just didn’t listen. He told her he couldn’t live with a woman who lived in a pretend world. He couldn’t live with a woman who wouldn’t accept reality.
And with that, he’d moved out.
The pain, the sense of failure, had been blinding. At first. But as the shock receded, she’d realized living without her politically ambitious, workaholic husband wasn’t much different than living with him. Somewhere along the line they’d gone their separate ways, but neither of them had noticed. Beth hadn’t seen Lance since, until five days ago, when she came to on the living room floor, next to his body. Whether she’d loved him anymore or not, the horror of that would never leave her.
Tears burned the backs of her eyes. She spread her fingers wider against the warm skin of her stomach, letting her pinkie touch her panties, her thumb her bra. It felt uncomfortably intimate wearing underwear Dylan had purchased, touched. Picked out just for her. For nine years she’d worked to keep him and his out-of-control passion from scorching her life, if not her dreams, but now she was wearing lingerie he’d chosen.
And he knew her most precious secret.
The cramped dressing room closed in on her. Breathing hollowed out. There could be no more secrets between her and Dylan St. Croix. No more intimacies. She had to forget about that alarming night in the mountains, the intensity in his dark green eyes just that morning when she’d come to in his arms. She had to forget the feel of his fingers drifting through her hair, the fleeting awareness that she wasn’t alone. His insistence that she see a doctor. She had to forget all of that, and remember only the way he’d retreated when the doctor made her announcement. The way Dylan’s eyes had hardened. The way he’d looked at her as though she’d somehow betrayed him.
With one last, awed glance at her stomach, Beth finished trying on clothes, selecting several loose-fitting outfits to purchase. She didn’t want anything that remained at the house she’d shared with Lance. She wanted to start new.
And that included underwear, bras and panties she could
slide onto her body without thinking of Dylan.
The baby clothes stopped her cold. She was heading to the checkout when she saw them, and warmth immediately flooded her. Her throat burned. Her heart thudded erratically. She stood there a long moment, just touching the soft little onesies. Closing her eyes. Imagining. And again, a hand found her stomach.
But then the hair on the back of her neck prickled, and the rhythm of her heart changed. Accelerated. She’d had the feeling since leaving the hotel, but when she turned, she found only two pregnant women, laughing over a miniature designer dress.
Paranoia, she reasoned. Shock.
Twenty minutes later, she stepped into the blinding sunlight and headed for her car. Heat radiated from the asphalt, but the chill hit her again,
the sensation of being
watched. She stopped, looked around. Nothing. Just a sea of cars and SUVs, mothers pushing strollers toward the mall, laughing teenage girls.
Uneasy, Beth found her car, slung her purchases in the back seat, and eased in with traffic. But when the turn came for her hotel, she didn’t take it. Nor did she take the exit to the exclusive neighborhood she’d once called home. Instead, she headed north on I-5, checking her rearview mirror every few minutes to see if someone followed her.
Until she reached the gorge. The second she turned east on I-84, she realized where she’d been headed all along. It was impossible to think dark thoughts while driving through the verdant valley of the Columbia Gorge. Between dark basalt cliffs, the winding river sparkled in the midafternoon sun. As always, rainbows greeted her, stretching over the highway in a shimmering array of colors.
Beth smiled, started to hum “Somewhere Over The Rainbow,” and headed toward starkly beautiful Mount Hood. Snow still blanketed the higher elevations like a melting ice cream cone, but springtime wildflowers tangled across the foothills.
The craziness of the day caught up with her just before four o’clock. She blinked rapidly and inhaled, but the fatigue crawled deeper, and when she saw the crowded truck stop, she counted her blessings. After a quick trip to the not-so-clean ladies’ room, she wandered over to the refrigerated section, and wondered just what a pregnant woman drank to stay awake. She’d have to read those baby books Dylan insisted she pick up, but figured caffeine was not an option. Maybe orange juice, she thought, opening the door and absorbing the blast of cold air, then reaching for a chilled bottle.
“What in God’s name are you doing?”
The angry voice sent her heart jackhammering through her chest. Adrenaline surged. She spun around, found him blocking the aisle. Late afternoon sun glinted in through the store windows and distorted his features, but she didn’t need details to recognize him. Not when the hum rumbled, deep, deep inside.
“Dylan.”
He stood there, as bold and unmovable as Mount Hood, staring at her through eyes as hard and cold as the snowcapped peeks. “Running, Bethany?”
She thought about telling him not to call her that, but realized that would only guarantee he continued to do so. “Following me?” she asked instead.
“I’m sure as hell not out for a Sunday drive.”
The sense of freedom she’d found on the scenic highway crumbled, reminding her why she’d started driving in the first place. She’d been right all along. Someone had been following her. “I don’t need an escort.”
He stepped closer. “You’re a suspect in a high-profile murder investigation. I’m sure Zito told you not to leave town.”
God help her, for a few hours there, she’d actually forgotten. “I’m not going anywhere.”
“You’re seventy miles from Portland.”
He had her there. “I’m just taking a drive.”
“Straight toward Canada.”
Warning signs flared everywhere. Just a few hours before, when he’d dropped her off at the hotel, he’d been … tentative. Now mistrust emanated from every pore of his body.