Her Fill-In Fiancé

by Stacy Connelly

  At his words, an image formed in Sophia’s mind of a quiet, solemn-eyed boy longing for a father figure and ending up with a cold-hearted stepfather who denied his very existence.

  “What about your mother?”

  “She’d had a tough time since my father left, and she was willing to do whatever it took to keep my stepfather happy.”

  Even if it meant making her son miserable. “Jake—”

  “I didn’t tell you so you’d feel sorry for me,” he interrupted.

  “Then why did you tell me?”

  Was he hoping to warn her off? To keep her from foolishly starting to believe something real might come out of their pretend relationship? Sophia only wished that had been the result. Instead, she longed to reach out to him, to heal the pain of the past.…

  “I want you to understand that the closeness your family shares, that’s something I stopped believing in a long time ago. But it’s the kind of love and caring I want for you and your baby.”

  Fierce determination shone from Jake’s golden eyes, nearly overshadowing the loneliness of his childhood. Almost, Sophia thought, as if by protecting her and her baby, he could give her the same love and caring he still wanted but refused to go after for himself.

  “Jake…” Reaching out, she placed a hand on his arm. His muscles were rock-hard with the tension radiating from his entire body.

  If they went back to the house now, Sophia knew Jake well enough to realize he’d bury all those emotions even deeper. He’d smile and charm her parents the same way he’d smiled and charmed her in St. Louis. But it would all be pretend, and Sophia wanted more. So much more.

  “Stop here,” she instructed when he would have continued on to her parents’ house. At his questioning glance, she said, “I want to show you one of my favorite places. It’s where I used to go when I needed to think or to relax.”

  Jake pulled over to the side of the road but kept the engine running. “And you think I need to relax?”

  “Actually, I was thinking you might like to talk.”

  Sophia waited, expecting Jake to reject her offer the same way he had when she tried asking about his expertise with baby seats…and babies. How did that experience fit in with his certainty that he wasn’t a family man? Her heart sank when Jake reached for the gearshift. Whatever had happened, he wasn’t about to share it with her.

  But instead of putting the car back in gear, he shifted from neutral into park and pulled the keys from the ignition. When he circled the car to open her door and took Sophia’s hand in his, she realized what serious danger she was in. How natural it felt to have his fingers entwined with hers and how she didn’t want to let go. Ever.

  “You said your parents divorced when you were young. Did you see your father much after that?” Sophia asked when they’d walked a few minutes, with the crunch of gravel beneath their feet and the whisper of wind through the trees the only sounds.

  “No. He pretty much disappeared.” Jake gave a rough laugh. “It’s ironic though, seeing how much my stepfather hates my job, but if it hadn’t been for him, I never would have become a private investigator.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I don’t know where the idea came from, but I got it into my head that my stepfather was somehow keeping my dad out of my life. I’d watched it happen with my mother’s friends from our old neighborhood. As far as Philip was concerned, they weren’t the right kind of people. By the time he and my mother married, she had cut off contact with all of them.”

  Sophia hated to think what he’d been through as a boy—losing physical contact with friends as well as the emotional connection with his mother.

  “It was a stretch, since my dad hadn’t been around even before Philip came into the picture, but I was sure he was at fault. I told myself that story for so long, it—it was real, you know. Concrete. Absolute. I just knew it. All I had to do was find him.”

  “Did you? Find him?”

  “By the time I turned eighteen, I swore to myself I would. No matter what. But it didn’t take me long to figure out I had no idea where or how to even start. And that’s when I found Cliff.”

  Genuine affection filled Jake’s voice, far more so than when he spoke of his stepfather or mother.

  “Who was Cliff?”

  “A PI I hired out of a phone book.” Jake shook his head. “He was nothing like what I thought a PI should be. He looked more like an accountant—thinning brown hair, glasses, slight build. But that’s what made him so good at what he did, and Cliff was one of the best. But the work takes time, and I must have bugged the hell out of him, constantly after him for updates, waiting for the break in the case that always takes less than forty-five minutes on those TV shows. Finally he got so sick of me, he gave me a job.”

  “And that’s how you became a detective?”

  “Eventually, yeah. At the time, I was only trying to do whatever I could until we found my dad.”

  Finality tolled in his words, and Sophia hesitated to ask, “And did you?”

  Jake nodded. “He died a few years after my parents divorced. Hit-and-run accident.” He stopped short and met Sophia’s gaze. “My mother knew, of course. But she was married to Philip by then and thought it best not to mention it since I had a new father, after all.”

  It was, in a way, the ending she’d expected, but hearing the words was so much worse than Sophia anticipated.

  “Jake, I am so sorry.” She wondered if the words felt as inadequate as they sounded to her, but she didn’t know what else to say.

  “Anyway.” Jake cleared his throat and shrugged off her sympathy as if his father’s death and his mother’s silent betrayal had had little effect, but Sophia knew it wasn’t true. “While I was helping out Cliff, one of his cases involved a little girl who’d been taken by her father during a custody battle. When he reunited his client with her daughter…seeing the two of them together, the way they were meant to be, I knew then that it was what I wanted to do.”

  To give other people the happy ending he’d been denied. The lump in her throat lodged even more firmly until Sophia thought it might become a permanent fixture.

  “And my stepfather is to thank.”

  “Sounds to me like Cliff is the one you really should give the credit to,” Sophia argued.

  Jake and his mentor clearly had a connection anyone else would see as a surrogate father-son bond. But she wasn’t surprised when Jake shook his head, denying the ties he so obviously longed for.

  “I worked cheap. That was reason enough for Cliff to keep me around.”

  “And how long did that last?”

  “I bought out the business a few years ago when he retired. He was tired of the job and ready to walk away.”

  “Or maybe Cliff knew you were ready to take over.”

  “If that’s what he thought, I’ve done a bang-up job of proving him wrong.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “The reason—one of the reasons—I agreed to investigate you was because it was supposed to be an easy job. Just what I needed while I was recovering from getting shot.”

  Jake winced, hearing too late his poor word choice. “I didn’t mean easy as in easy. I meant—” He cut himself off. The hole was getting deeper by the second and yet he couldn’t seem to stop digging. “It was supposed to be the kind of job where no one got hurt.”

  Sophia didn’t ask the question; instead, she walked silently at his side, letting him set the pace for the conversation rather than pushing ahead. It was a tactic he’d used before, and an effective one at that.

  Only with Sophia, it didn’t feel like a practiced technique. Her caring and concern reached out, easing the words from him without dragging him through the darker memories.

  The suspicion he’d almost grown accustomed to was missing. He didn’t know what had changed, but the openness in her brown eyes was like a welcome home after a long, hard trip. Jake wanted nothing more than to pull her into his arms, to lose himself in
her soft smile and slender curves and forget a world outside the two of them still existed.

  Jake hadn’t asked where they were going, but he knew they’d arrived when the towering redwoods opened to a small meadow and a sparkling creek. Sprigs of wildflowers dotted the grass, dabs of color flicked from a master’s paintbrush, and the sky overhead was a bright enough blue to hurt his eyes.

  It was hard to believe that a few months ago he’d been locked in a dark, dank room without so much as a window to hint at freedom outside. Hard to believe, too, that only days ago he’d been in L.A., surrounded by traffic and crowds and noise.

  Here was the kiss of sunlight through the clouds, the bubbling of water, and the lazy hum of a bumblebee. Jake took a deep breath of the same fresh air ruffling Sophia’s short, dark hair and flirting with the edge of the sundress skirt tucked beneath her knees.

  “Mexico was supposed to have been an easy job, too.”

  “The kind where no one gets hurt,” she added softly.

  “Yeah. Only I screwed up.”

  “What was the job?”

  “Bring back a kid who’d been having a little too much fun south of the border during spring break.” Jake grimaced. “Piece of cake, right?”

  He’d assured Ryan Nording’s parents it would be just that. After all, Jake knew where the kid was staying thanks to the charges he’d put on his parents’ card. So it was a simple matter of crossing the border, finding the kid and dragging his underage-drinking butt home.

  Only when he reached the beachside hotel, Ryan wasn’t there. The kid had flashed a little too much money around the wrong people. He might as well have painted dollar signs on his back. By the time Jake reached the hotel, the kid was long gone. He’d asked around, listening more to everything not being said, and discovered that the friends Ryan had made turned on the kid the moment his parents cut him off from their gold card. “I found out he’d been kidnapped.”

  “Kidnapped?”

  Jake nodded. “The guys holding him were amateurs. They hadn’t sent any ransom demands, probably because they were still trying to work out the details of how to deliver the note and where to set the money drop.” It was a clumsy operation at best, but the captors’ nerves had been Jake’s greatest concern. If they panicked, Ryan could end up paying with his life.

  “But you found him, right?”

  “I called Cliff for backup, but I found where they were keeping Ryan before he arrived.”

  The memory of the dark, airless hovel where Ryan had been held—where Jake had also been imprisoned—had him struggling for breath despite the wide-open space around him.

  The soft touch of Sophia’s palm against his cheek broke through the dark memories. “It’s all right,” she said, her concerned gaze searching his face. “You don’t have to talk about it.”

  Reaching up, he took her hand and held on like a lifeline grounding him to the present. “It’s okay,” he insisted. “I’m okay. And yeah, I did find the kid but not before he tried to take matters into his own hands.”

  He couldn’t say much about Ryan Nording’s brains, but the kid had guts. “I was keeping an eye on this middle-of-nowhere shack where they were holding him while I waited for my backup. Suddenly, I heard this commotion from inside. Next thing I know, Ryan’s squeezing through an open window and making a break for it. Within minutes, three guys were chasing him down, and I knew what I had to do.”

  The question filled Sophia’s eyes, but Jake had immediately recognized at the time there was only one logical course. “I had to let them take him.”

  Shock widened her dark eyes, and her lips parted. “You mean—”

  “I was still waiting for Cliff, but he didn’t even know where Ryan was being held since my plan had been to meet up with him in town. My car was a good mile away. We were outnumbered and unarmed and didn’t stand a chance if we tried to fight…”

  Sophia swallowed. “So did they take Ryan again?”

  Jake shook his head. “No, I saw the fear on that kid’s face and I rushed in even though I knew better. Even though logically it was the stupidest thing I could do.” He’d let emotion overrule intelligence and the results had been disastrous. But he’d been lucky. “I caught the first kidnapper by surprise and disarmed the second, but then…”

  “That’s when you got shot?”

  Jake automatically reached for his leg, but Sophia still held his hand, her gentle touch keeping him in the present and keeping the darkest moments of the past at bay. “Yeah, that’s when it happened.”

  “And what about Ryan? Did they take him, too?”

  “No.” Jake gave a rough laugh. “Crazy enough, the kid got away. Ryan made it back to town, somehow. Cliff found him and got him out of the country, then started turning over every rock he could find looking for me.”

  “Sounds like a lot of effort to go through just for some cheap labor,” Sophia pointed out.

  “I’m sure in a way Cliff felt responsible.”

  “Jake, stop. Stop fighting so hard. It’s okay to let someone close enough to care about you.”

  He’d been hesitant to call his mentor for help, still feeling he had something to prove and still reluctant to count on anyone for anything. But despite the bullet in his leg and the fever burning through his body, Jake had clung to one thought. “I knew as long as I stayed alive, Cliff would find me.”

  “And he did, right? Everything worked out okay, thanks to you.”

  “No thanks to me is more like it. I made a stupid decision, and I’m damned lucky I didn’t get us both killed.”

  “But Jake, for all you know, they might have killed Ryan after he tried to escape.”

  “Odds are, they wouldn’t have.” At least not until the ransom drop had been made. “The logical thing to do would be to keep him alive just like they did with me.”

  “You can’t be sure of that. Instead of thinking of your decision in terms of right and wrong, you need to realize you made an impossible choice, and in the end, you and Ryan both survived. Call it luck, call it crazy, but you’re alive. And I’m very glad you are and that you’re here with me now.”

  The hint of vulnerability in Sophia’s expression and the simple connection of her hand in his wrapped around Jake. At first it was like a warm embrace, but soon awareness of the secluded, romantic setting and the temptation of Sophia stretched out beside him turned up the heat. He’d tried to keep his distance, but as they’d talked, he’d instinctively moved closer. Close enough for Jake to catch the scent of her skin, mingled with wild flowers and lush grass beneath them.

  Her dark, shiny hair framed her face, emphasizing her wide eyes, high cheekbones and softly parted lips. The strap of her sundress was caught on the point of her shoulder, a whisper away from falling to the side and leaving the bodice held up by nothing more than a single strap and a prayer.

  Her breath caught beneath his gaze, an answering desire as she murmured his name. The husky sound broke the restraints holding Jake back. He’d wanted her from the very first moment they met. Refusing to give in to that want, that need, was the hardest thing he’d ever done. He’d been operating under false pretenses then, but she knew the truth now. And when Sophia ran a hand through his hair and cupped the nape of his neck, drawing him closer, there was nothing that could keep him from taking the kiss she offered.

  She tasted sweeter than the sugar-coated French toast they’d shared that morning, sitting side by side, trying to make conversation with her parents when what they—well, what Jake—really wanted was this—to press Sophia into the lush, green grass, and feel the curves of her body beneath his own.

  Desire pounded through his veins, heightened by Sophia’s soft sounds of pleasure and the almost frantic tug of her hands at the hem of his shirt. He broke away from the kiss for a much needed breath even as Sophia’s palms skimmed over his naked stomach, stealing the air right out of his lungs all over again.

  His gaze locked on the gravity-defying strap, but the thin slip of mate
rial was no match for him as he brushed it and the bodice of her dress aside. He cupped her breast in his hand, running his thumb over the peak, and felt her whole body rise to his touch. As he kissed her again, his hand drifted lower…and for the first time, Jake felt the slight swell to her belly.

  The baby…Sophia’s baby.

  He’d known for weeks that Sophia was pregnant, but the reality of it sucked the breath out of him. With Mollie, he hadn’t had the chance to see or feel the life growing within her, yet he’d loved Josh as strongly as if the boy had been his flesh and blood.

  You aren’t thinking like a real father would! How can you when you never had one of your own?

  Mollie’s harsh words bit as deeply in memory as they had that day in the hospital when she’d hurled the accusations. Fear of failing again closed in around him like the time he’d gone surfing in San Diego—he’d lost his balance, been struck by the board, and the undertow had sucked him under. His only chance of survival had been to fight against that pull, to kick and claw his way to freedom.

  That same urge rose up in him now, just as it had when Mollie blamed him for Josh’s accident. He couldn’t take that chance, couldn’t risk disappointing Sophia or hurting her child.

  He made the decision in a split second, the brief hesitation long enough for Sophia to pull away from him and scramble to her feet as she righted her clothes. The flush in cheeks and the telltale reaction as she crossed her arms over her stomach hit like a sucker punch. As he slowly pushed off the ground, everything inside him screamed to reach out, to drag her back into his arms.

  “Sophia, I’m sorry.”

  “Why? It’s my fault, really. After all, it’s not like we haven’t already played this scene. Only this time, you can’t pretend it was surprise that made you pull away, and I can’t pretend you didn’t warn me.” Her voice trembled on the words but then found firmer footing as she echoed, “You’re not a family man.”