Kiss in the Dark (8 page)

He hadn’t let her fall at the police station, a small part of her pointed out. He’d stepped in like some menacing force when Yvonne Kelly had gone for the jugular. Of course, he’d plied her with questions of his own after that. Maybe that had been his goal all along, catch her off guard and see what secrets he could unearth. No one believed she didn’t harbor any.

In truth, she harbored only one.

The fire poker. It had been in
her
hands.

“Mrs. St. Croix?” Dr. Audrey Lyons, the attending physician who’d spoken with her earlier, entered the cubicle with a file in her hand, several pages on top. “We have the results back.”

Beth started to smile, but then caught the odd expression on the older woman’s face. “I’m fine, right?”

Dr. Lyons glanced at Dylan. “Is he your husband?”

“No,” they answered in unison.

“Then perhaps he should leave for a few minutes.”

Beth went very still. She recognized the look on the doctor’s face, the caution in her voice. She’d heard it before, that cold night so long ago, when she’d lost Dylan’s baby. Now, panic backed up into her throat, making it impossible to breathe.

Something was wrong.

“Don’t ask me to walk away now,” Dylan said, striding toward the hospital bed. “I have a right to know what’s wrong.”

Beth looked at him standing beside her, noticed the tension in his body. His eyes were somber, his mouth a grim line. He looked somewhere between fierce and alarmed.

But he also looked solid, steady, and with him standing there, she didn’t feel quite so alone.

“He can stay.” The words came out strong, but deep inside, she started to shake. Looking back, she’d been feeling off-kilter for a few weeks, but had attributed it to the stress of the divorce. “What’s wrong with me?”

Dr. Lyons glanced at the folder in her hand, and her brow furrowed. “When was your last period?”

Beth’s heart started to pound. Hard. “Just a couple of—” she started, but stopped abruptly. She thought back on the whirlwind of the last several weeks and months, and realized that for the first time in three years, she didn’t know the date of her last period.

“I’ve spotted off and on,” she said, “but I’ve been under a lot of stress and haven’t had a full period for a while. That’s happened before.”

By her side, Dylan tensed.

“It’s not stress,” Dr. Lyons said.

The blade of fear was ridiculous. “Endometriosis?” she asked. She’d battled the nasty condition before.

The older woman smiled, and finally the bomb Beth had been waiting for ever since Dylan blazed back into her life exploded. Except he didn’t detonate it.

Dr. Audrey Lyons did. “You’re pregnant.”

Chapter 6

«
^
»

O
nce, a long time ago, while hiking along the Rogue River, Beth stepped too close to the edge. The ground crumbled from beneath her, sending her scraping down the rocky embankment and splashing into the racing current. Icy water cut into her like knives and sucked the breath from her lungs. She thrashed for something to hold on to, a boulder, a stick, anything, but the current ran too swift. Unusually hot weather was melting the snowcaps off the mountains at a faster than normal pace. The runoff literally raced down the mountainside.

And Beth didn’t know how to swim.

Panic welled within her. She remembered opening her mouth to call out, but numbness took over with brutal quickness, and the words froze in her throat. The water turned rougher. White water, they called it. Perfect for rafting.

Deadly for anything else.

Her body started shutting down with terrifying speed, and darkness pushed closer. Her arms and legs grew leaden. The effort to breathe choked her.

Much as she felt now. Shock crashed in from all directions, paralyzing as it went. Irony tortured. She could barely move a muscle, not even her heart.

You’re pregnant.

The words reverberated through her with the punishing force of the raging mountain river. She’d heard them before. Once. A long time ago. For years she’d dreamed of hearing them again, rejoicing in them. To hear the words now, and know they weren’t true, amounted to cruelty.

She started to shake, from the inside out. “That’s not funny,” she whispered.

Dr. Lyons frowned. “Pardon?”

“I can’t have children,” Beth said, grasping on to a rock and bracing herself against the current. “I’m … infertile.”

“Not according to these tests,” the physician said, looking at the file in her hands. “You’re most definitely pregnant.”

The current knocked her free and slammed her further downstream. Debris cut into her. Coldness permeated her heart.

But then she saw him. Dylan. Running along the riverbank, shouting out her name. The roar of the water stole his words, but in the ferocity of his eyes, she found strength, and calm.

He towered over her now, tall and strong and uncompromising. But he didn’t touch. “How far along is she?”

The doctor cut him a curious look, then glanced at Beth, clearly seeking permission to discuss her condition with a man other than her husband.

“I can’t be pregnant,” she whispered. “I would have felt something.” But then it hit her, the dizziness she’d attributed to fatigue, the nausea she’d attributed to shock. The light, irregular period she’d blamed on stress.

“Why did she faint?” Dylan asked, diving into the boiling stream and swimming toward her. A hand, on her shoulder. Steady. Strong. “Is everything okay?”

Beth looked up abruptly, saw the doctor nod. “Everything’s fine. It’s not uncommon for pregnant women to black out, particularly if they’ve not been sleeping or eating properly.”

“My God.” Beth whispered, but then Dylan was there, wrapping an arm around her waist and swimming against the current, bringing her with him. She quit fighting and wrapped her arms around him, let him pull her from the water. They collapsed on the muddy bank, soaking wet and breathing heavy. But alive. The sun fought with the wind, one to warm, the other to chill.

Reality overrode both.

Dylan filled her line of vision now, dominating the cubicle and obscuring her view of the doctor. His eyes were dark and more than a little wild. His breathing was as hard as it had been that day by the rapids. And his expression … the intensity glittering in his eyes.

It was as though she’d betrayed him all over again.

She felt the stab of pain deep, the regret, but knew history could not be rewritten.

“Lance moved out months ago,” he said. His normally commanding voice was so tight she barely recognized it. “Has there been someone else since then? Has someone else been in your bed?”

Beth struggled to breathe. Jagged emotion jostled around inside her. Once, she would have thrilled to the possessiveness underlying his questions. Once, she would have hurt at the pain. Now, she could only find confusion.

“Nobody,” she whispered. “Nobody.”

Dylan swore softly. He looked like he wanted to touch her, put his hands to her shoulders. But he didn’t move. She wasn’t sure he could.

“Lance? Did you let him into your bed after he walked out?”

“No.” The mere thought sickened her.

“Then—”

“No!” she said, realizing he was trying to link her pregnancy with the night in the mountains. The thought rocked her even harder. “No. I can’t conceive naturally. If I’m pregnant, it’s from artificial insemination.”

His expression hardened. “What are you talking about? You and Lance are divorced, for crissakes.”

“Not Lance,” she whispered, emotion ripping through her. “I … I saw no reason to quit trying just because I was suddenly single. I—I wanted a child.”

“Whose?”

She put her hands to her stomach. “Donor.” She hadn’t really expected it to work, not after all the years trying, but her doctor had encouraged her. The memory of that day cut deep, how alone she’d felt. How bittersweet and nostalgic. That’s why she’d driven to the mountain retreat.

And found Dylan.

He stepped from the bed, as though he’d been standing too close to the edge of some place deep and dark. The planes of his face tightened, paled. His body was tense, his hands balled into tight fists. He looked angry, shocked, like she’d just confessed to killing Lance in cold blood.

“Why?” he asked in an oddly hoarse voice.

“Why what?”

“Why didn’t you tell me you might be pregnant?”

Her throat thickened. “Why would I?”

“Because it changes everything.”

She couldn’t dispute that. For days now she’d been suspended in an alternate world where time held no meaning and feeling brought only pain. But now a few rays of sun had broken through the clouds, and whispers of warmth overrode the chill.

“It changes
my
life,” she said softly. “Not yours.”

She might as well have slapped him. He recoiled visibly, his eyes going even harder.

“I had no idea,” she added. Had long since given up hope. “I took a test after the last procedure. It came back negative. And then I started to bleed.”

“Many women spot during their first trimester,” Dr. Lyons put in. “It’s just the body’s way of adjusting.”

Dylan stood back from the bed, but he’d yet to look away from her. It felt odd having him there, listening to her and the doctor discuss intimacies such as bleeding, but the look on his face made it clear Special Forces would be required to make him leave.

After issuing a few more instructions, including the recommendation that Beth see her ob-gyn, the physician left.

There was just her and Dylan now, but the cubicle seemed smaller with the two of them than it had with three.

Silence pushed in from all directions. Her throat and chest were tight, breathing hurt. So did looking at Dylan. Looking at him crushed nine years into nine minutes, and too easily she saw him staggering out of the bathroom, pale and dark-eyed, holding the plastic wand of the home pregnancy test in his hand.

“Bethany?”

She looked from his trembling hand to the hard line of his mouth. “Oh, God. Dylan.”

“When were you going to tell me?”

His expression mirrored that of so long ago, prompting
her to draw her hands to her stomach. “Don’t look at me like that,” she whispered.

He didn’t move, didn’t change expressions. “How?”

“Like I’ve—” betrayed you “—done something wrong.”

Swearing softly, he crossed the room and with a simple touch, shattered her. “You’re crying.”

She blinked rapidly, but the tears kept coming, spilling over her lashes from eyes long dry. She hadn’t been able to cry for years now, not after all the failed attempts to become pregnant, not when she realized Lance was involved with another woman, not when he moved out, not when she realized she really didn’t care. Not when she found him dead.

But God help her, the tears wouldn’t stop now. And more than anything, she wanted Dylan to pull her into his arms and hold her. Just hold her.

“I’m pregnant,” she whispered. “I’m going to have a baby.” Her throat closed up on the words.

“Bethany. It could be mine.”

“No,” she said again, and this time the word came out sharper. Harder. Then came the blade of sorrow. “I can’t conceive spontaneously. This child is someone else’s.”

Dylan’s hand fell away. “I don’t understand,” he ground out. “Why would you do this alone?”

She drew a deep breath. His tone, the hardness of his eyes, told her exactly what he thought of her decision. “The divorce didn’t change my desire for children,” she told him. Actually, it had increased her sense of urgency, the awareness of the time sweeping by. “Lance and I tried for years, but never could. Intimacy,” if it could be called that, “turned into clinical procedures.” The mere thought of making love had turned painful, and gradually, Lance quit coming to her bed.

She’d never invited him back.

But she didn’t tell Dylan that, didn’t want him to figure out the shameful secret that drove home she really was her mother’s daughter. That sometimes when she lay in the darkness, she’d closed her eyes only to find images of Dylan awaiting her.

“We tried artificial insemination twice,” she revealed, sticking to facts and ignoring lingering feelings. “When my period came after the second, Lance fell apart. Said he couldn’t make me happy, was tired of pretending he could. Said he couldn’t live with a wife he couldn’t make smile. Then he walked out the door.”

Emotion clogged her throat. She’d always known irony had a cruel sense of humor, but this went beyond mere
cruelty. In less than a week she’d gone from a childless divorcée to a pregnant woman facing charges of murder.

“If I’d conceived, he might not be dead.”

Dylan’s gaze sharpened, signifying the return of the investigator. “Why not? What are you saying?”

“I’m not confessing, if that’s what you’re asking.” His willingness to believe the worst shouldn’t have hurt. But did. “I didn’t kill Lance in a fit of rage. I didn’t kill him, period.”

“Then what?”

“I don’t know,” she said honestly, trying to fit the pieces together. “I can’t stop thinking that Lance moving out tipped something into motion, something dark, something that cost him his life.

“But I have no idea what went on in his life after he moved out.” Longer than that, if she was honest. “I don’t know why he was at the house that day.” Didn’t understand what she saw in Dylan’s eyes—she refused to label it longing, but for the first time, she wondered what his life was like.
Really
like. Dylan the man, not the whirlwind. What went on when no one else was around? What did he think about? What did he want? How did he feel? Did the shadow of regret follow him like it did her?

No way, she answered silently. A man like Dylan St. Croix didn’t have regrets. He had causes. He had crusades. And for him, that was all that mattered.

“I don’t know why I’m pregnant now,” she whispered, with the child of a man she would never know, when God had taken Dylan’s. “After all these years. It doesn’t seem real.”

He lifted a hand as though to touch her, but didn’t. “Life has a strange sense of humor.”

And an even worse sense of timing. “Don’t tell anyone.”

“It’s hardly a secret.”

“About the baby. Don’t tell anyone about the baby.”

The small muscle in the hollow of his cheek began to thump. “This isn’t a secret you can hide.”

“But I can protect. I can
protect
my child.” In the midst of a nightmare, she’d been granted a dream. No way would she let anything happen to this child.

His gaze dipped to her stomach, where her hand remained splayed. “Protect from what?”

“Everything.” From the horror of the past few days, the frightening possibilities that loomed ahead of her. The truth about the fire poker. Standing trial. Prison. “I feel like there are dark storm clouds on the horizon. Gathering. Boiling. That if I’m not careful, the sky will crack open and all hell will break loose.”

He cocked a brow. “You’d hit me, wouldn’t you, if I said you sound like your mother?”

Beth just stared. Her breath caught. She didn’t know how the man did it, made her want to laugh when minutes before she’d been crying. “Yes,” she said. “I would.”

“That’s what I thought.”

She looked at him for a long moment, marveling at the strange paths life took. Their child would have been eight years old now. She tried to imagine Dylan as a father, and though she didn’t want to see the image, she knew he would have made a great dad. The kind of man to play with his children, spend time with them. Laugh. Make messes. Teach. Raise. Love.

The wash of longing swirled deep, way deep, journeying beyond her heart to that place she’d walled off. She had no business thinking of Dylan St. Croix as a father.