The Secret Sin

by Darlene Gardner

  He was a tall, handsome boy who swaggered when he walked. He grinned at her. “Only because you look cute when you’re wet.”

  Ryan nearly told the boy how old Lindsey was, then Lindsey stuck her tongue out at him, showing her age. The boy laughed, lifting a hand in farewell as he walked to the exit.

  “My son’s a good kid, but he can be a little obnoxious.” The adult man who’d been in the raft with the two boys was still in the shop, probably to pick up his keys, which rafters could leave behind the counter for safekeeping so they didn’t have to worry about losing them in the river.

  “It was all in good fun,” Ryan said. “No need to apologize.”

  “That wasn’t an apology.” The man had the same tall, strong build as his son. “Our raft got slammed. Your family gave back as good as it got.”

  Lindsey glanced up sharply from petting Hobo. “Ryan and Annie aren’t my parents.”

  The man’s brows drew together, his gaze moving between them, his mouth slightly agape. “I’m sorry. I just assumed he was your dad.”

  Lindsey went back to petting Hobo, muttering something under her breath that sounded like, “I wish.”

  At her comment, a dozen scenarios ran through Ryan’s head, a hundred questions buzzed in his brain about Lindsey’s situation at home. After the other man left the shop, Ryan was plotting how to get Lindsey alone to talk when Hobo barked.

  “Good dog!” Lindsey said. She fastened the leash on his collar, remarking to Ryan, “He’s telling me he needs to go outside. Isn’t that great?”

  He followed her out past the picnic tables, glad he’d bought a leash with a fifteen-foot retractable cord. He didn’t want any distractions, not even from Hobo.

  He couldn’t think of a way to casually bring up the subject so came out with it. “What’s your dad like?”

  She’d changed out of her waterproof sandals into tennis shoes. She scuffed one of them in the grass. “He’s okay, I guess.”

  “Okay? I thought you two were close.”

  She made a face. “Where’d you get that idea?”

  Why had he assumed Lindsey and her adoptive father were close? He supposed from the bits and pieces Annie had told him about Lindsey’s life. She’d said there was friction between Lindsey and her stepmother, and he’d automatically assumed she had a better relationship with her father.

  “Don’t you get along with him?” he asked.

  “More or less.” She scraped her feet some more. “When I see him.”

  “Does he work a lot?”

  “Not so much.” She lifted her head, her eyes on Hobo, who had found a convenient tree to shower. “He’s a manager at the post office. He goes in early so he can come home early.”

  “Then why don’t you see him more?” It felt like he was pulling the answers from her.

  “I used to,” she said, “but now Timmy and Teddy are old enough that they play some stupid sport or other all year long. My dad’s always with them.”

  “You don’t play a sport?”

  She snorted. “I hate sports.”

  “Then what do you do for fun?” he asked. “Besides shop and sleep, that is.”

  She didn’t react to his teasing. Neither did she pay attention to Hobo, who was running in circles, apparently chasing his tail. “I want to get into modeling. One of the girls at school is in those glossy store ads that come with the newspaper. I want to do that.”

  Modeling wasn’t as much of a pipe dream as it seemed. Ryan had seen it work out for somebody who used to look a lot like Lindsey. “My sister did some modeling when she was a teenager.”

  “Really?” Her voice spiked with interest. “What kind?”

  “Print ads mostly,” he said. “My mom sent her photos to some talent agencies in Philadelphia. The one that signed her got her a few jobs. Mom used to take her into the city for photo shoots, usually on weekends.”

  “Do you think she’d talk to me about it, maybe give me some tips?” Lindsey asked, completely focused on the subject. Behind her, Hobo had stopped going around and around. He wasn’t traveling in a straight line, either. He was weaving as if he was dizzy.

  Ryan hesitated before answering. It would be awkward for Sierra and Lindsey to get together with neither of them realizing there was something similar about them. “It’s still tough for Sierra to get around with that broken leg. You might not like what she has to say, either. She got tired of modeling pretty fast.”

  “I’d never get tired of it,” Lindsey said dramatically. “But that doesn’t matter to my dad.”

  “He doesn’t want you to try it?”

  “He doesn’t care what I do,” she said bitterly.

  It was a cloudless day with the sun illuminating every nuance in her dejected expression. “He just doesn’t want to miss any of my brothers’ stupid games.”

  “Did he tell you that?”

  “He didn’t have to. A couple of weeks ago I asked that girl at school who her photographer was. I finally got my dad to let me make an appointment. At the last minute he couldn’t drive me because he had stuff to do. Do you know what that stuff was? He took my little brothers fishing!”

  “How about your stepmother? Couldn’t she have taken you?”

  “She’s busy all the time. Cooking and cleaning and working.”

  “Do you get along with her?”

  “She’s not so bad.” A sad expression crossed Lindsey’s face. “But she’s not really my mother. She’s Timmy and Teddy’s mother. My mother’s dead.”

  Except that wasn’t precisely true. Lindsey’s adoptive mother, to whom he and Annie owed a world of gratitude, was dead. Lindsey’s birth mother was very much alive. Her birth father was, too.

  Hobo, apparently recovered from his dizzying antics, bounded toward them. Lindsey bent down to pet him.

  “Have you asked your dad to spend more time with you?” Ryan asked.

  “It wouldn’t do any good,” she said, burying her face in the dog’s fur. “He’s not the one who wanted me.”

  “Who told you that?”

  “My grandpa. He’s my mom’s dad. He said she wanted a baby worse than anything and that she loved me more than life. It didn’t matter to her that I was adopted.”

  “That doesn’t mean your dad didn’t want you, too.”

  “Not in the same way he wanted my brothers. He’s always saying how much they look like him when he was a kid. They’re even all left-handed.” She sniffed. “I know he loves them more than me.”

  Ryan cast around for something reassuring to say. “Your dad doesn’t love your brothers more than you because they’re all lefties.”

  Lindsey stood up. She hadn’t touched up her makeup and her hair was messier than he’d ever seen it, but the childish quality that had hung over her all afternoon had vanished.

  “I know that,” she said. “He loves them more because they’re really his.”

  QUIET FILLED the house, which happened every night when Lindsey retreated to her bedroom and shut the door. She took Hobo with her, having convinced Annie that the dog was better off sleeping at the foot of her bed than beside the sofa. Annie suspected Hobo sneaked into bed with her, but didn’t make an issue of it.

  Annie usually straightened the house, then settled down with a book until her eyelids got too heavy to read and she went to sleep. Tonight she did neither because of the man in her living room leafing through a copy of Outdoor Women.

  Ryan looked up at her when she entered the great room. “You’re an excellent writer. I’m reading your story about backpacking through Glacier National Park. I’ve never been to Montana, but I can see those vast stretches of green pasture and that big blue sky.”

  Annie didn’t let his praise sidetrack her because she suspected that was his intent. She’d dropped a half-dozen broad hints for him to leave since the rafting trip had ended. “Why are you still here, Ryan?”

  He closed the magazine and set it on the coffee table. “I needed to talk to you alone.”

>   “We already talked at the river.”

  “Not about what Lindsey told me this afternoon about her family,” he said in a soft voice.

  The girl hadn’t confided in Annie except to make passing comments suggesting she wasn’t happy at home. Annie had lost sleep at night trying to figure out how to get her to open up, yet Ryan seemed to have done it effortlessly. She wanted to hear what Ryan had discovered more than she wanted him to leave.

  “Come on,” she told him. “We can’t talk here.”

  Although it probably would have been safe to talk on the porch, Annie wasn’t willing to take the chance. She descended the porch steps and walked with Ryan over the expanse of lawn between the house and the business.

  The trees near the river didn’t grow as thickly, letting in the glow from the moon. Day had turned into night, bringing clouds that obscured most of the light so they couldn’t make out the river.

  The collection of tables outside the shop was mostly in shadows. She chose the farthest one and sat down, her knees facing outward. Ryan remained standing, the moon’s faint light silhouetting him so he looked almost ethereal.

  “Lindsey’s problem isn’t with her stepmother,” Ryan said. “It’s with her father. He wasn’t the one who wanted to adopt her.”

  Annie’s mind rebelled, even though the information jibed with what her father had told her over the phone about Helene Nowak Thompson pushing for the adoption. “How could you possibly know that?”

  She listened with growing distress while Ryan repeated what Lindsey had shared, then desperately searched for a reason to explain the girl’s perception that she wasn’t wanted. “Her brothers are young. They need more attention than she does.”

  “If Lindsey was unhappy enough to run away from home,” he reasoned, “there has to be something to what she says.”

  Annie hadn’t called Lindsey’s visit to Indigo Springs “running away.” Surely that was an exaggeration. “Her stepmother said she’d never done anything like this before. If she’s been so unhappy, why wait until now?”

  He rubbed the back of his neck. “I think not taking her to the photographer was the final straw.”

  Annie shook her head. She didn’t want to hear this. The mental picture of Lindsey as a happy, well-adjusted child with an ideal home life had comforted her over the years.

  “I think we should approach her adoptive father about letting her come to Indigo Springs for regular visits,” Ryan stated.

  The river water was gurgling, the cicadas were singing, the wind was rustling the leaves in the trees and an owl was hooting. She wanted to believe she hadn’t heard him correctly, but none of the ambient noise had gotten in the way.

  She shook her head, refusing to consider his suggestion. “That’s crazy! Lindsey doesn’t even know who we are!”

  “Then we’ll go to Pittsburgh to talk to Ted Thompson and his wife. We’ll explain why we gave Lindsey up and make a case that we should be part of her life.” He continued talking even though she was shaking her head back and forth. “We’ll make them understand how much we love her.”

  “That won’t fly,” she said. “We don’t have any legal claim on her.”

  “If it’s what Lindsey wants, we might not have to,” Ryan said. “She’s thirteen. She’s old enough to have a say in this.”

  Annie put her hands to her head. She felt as if she was on a merry-go-round that wouldn’t stop, her thoughts swirling. The notion she kept returning to over and over was that maybe it could work. Maybe they could keep Lindsey not only in their hearts, but in their lives.

  Before hope took hold and blotted out reason, she tried to think, grasping for the hole in his argument. The carousel crashed to a stop when she found it because the flaw in his plan was as big as a crater.

  “Lindsey’s family life might not be perfect but it’s stable. She has a father and a stepmother and brothers. Add us and it’s like saddling her with a set of divorced parents.”

  “Not if we’re together,” he said.

  The moon peeked out from behind a cloud, illuminating his face. She’d never seen him look more serious.

  “I’m not saying this only because it would help our case with Lindsey.” He moved a step toward her. She sat very still. “I meant what I said on the river today. I want to give what’s between us a shot.”

  “There’s nothing between us,” she denied, jumping to her feet, intending to return to the house. Instead of backing away, he took a step forward, trapping her between the picnic table and his body.

  “You know that’s not true.” He laid a hand against her cheek. “You can feel it, the same way I do. There’s always been something there.”

  The pain she’d suffered as a sixteen-year-old bubbled to the surface, nearly choking her. She knocked his hand away.

  “No,” she said. “It wouldn’t work.”

  “It’s already working,” he argued, his eyes steady on hers. “Haven’t you noticed what a good time we have together? Lindsey doesn’t even have to be around. She wasn’t there at the Blue Haven.”

  “No,” she said again, more emphatically.

  “I keep hearing the word but not a reason you’re saying it.” He sounded exasperated, frustration tugging at his features. “Why? Tell me one good reason you won’t give us a shot?”

  “Because I could never trust you.”

  He ran a hand over his lower face. “I’m not a kid anymore, Annie. I’d protect you. I’d never screw up like that again.”

  He’d misunderstood her, but that wasn’t surprising. They’d never talked about his betrayal. It was possible, even likely, that he thought he’d pulled one over on her. She hadn’t intended to discuss this with him, but it was the only way she could make him understand. She took a deep breath.

  “I know about the bet, Ryan.”

  He blinked, confusion crossing his face. Was it possible it had been so long ago that he’d forgotten? That thought was almost as mortifying as the revelation had been.

  “I know you and your friends challenged each other to see who could be the first to sleep with the girl with the birthmark.” She willed her voice not to crack, for her hand not to cover her port-wine stain. “I know you won.”

  “No!” he denied. “That’s not true.”

  “But you did sleep with me. You won the bet.”

  “You’ve got it wrong. Look, I knew about the bet. But I wasn’t part of it.”

  How gullible did he think she was? Her stomach heaved and she felt as though she might be sick. “You just happened to see me leaving that party by myself and offered me a ride home? That was just a coincidence?”

  “No,” he admitted. “I followed you because—”

  “You saw your buddy Jim Waverly hitting on me.” She finished the sentence for him, forcing herself to get everything in the open. “You were afraid he’d win.”

  Understanding dawned on his face. “That’s why you asked about Waverly when we left the Blue Haven.”

  “Can you blame me?” she asked. “He knows we slept together. He could know about Lindsey.”

  “How would he know we slept together?”

  “You told him.” She could barely believe he was making her spell it out and came close to hating him. “To collect on your bet.”

  “Except I didn’t.” He appeared pained that she could believe anything of the sort; it was a performance worthy of an accomplished actor. “Like I told you, I didn’t take any bet. I followed you from the party to make sure nobody else tried anything.”

  She had a mental flash of her and Ryan lying on the blanket he conveniently kept in the trunk of his car, gazing at the stars. She saw him turning to her, kissing her. She steeled herself against his feeble explanation. “You mean the way you did?”

  “I only meant to take you home.”

  “Oh, please.” She injected a wealth of sarcasm in her voice. Maybe she was the good actress because she managed to speak even though her chest was tight, the pain making it difficult to
breathe. “Next you’ll say you were only trying to get to know me better.”

  “That’s the truth,” he said. “Don’t you remember how we connected that night?”

  “You wanted to have sex with me,” she accused, both her lips and her voice trembling.

  “I was a sixteen-year-old boy. Of course I did.” He placed a hand on her upper arm. “But if I’d planned it, don’t you think I would have been smart enough to have a condom with me?”

  Annie had wondered that exact thing and never come up with a satisfactory answer. As he said, though, he’d been sixteen years old.

  “Teenage boys aren’t known for thinking ahead.” She shook off his hand and shouldered past him so he had to get out of her way.

  “Isn’t there anything I can say to make you believe me?” he asked, his voice laced with what sounded like desperation.

  The birthmark seemed to sear the side of her cheek.

  “No,” she choked out and walked away from him into the house, refusing to look back.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  RYAN KNELT in front of the bookcase in his late father’s basement study, pulling books off the shelves, opening them, then shoving them back into the slots.

  “Try The Teetotaler’s Guide to Healthy Living.” Sierra stood at the entrance to the office, dressed in a short sleeveless nightgown, the walking cast on her left leg making her right one look thin and pale. He must really have been banging around not to have heard her approach.

  “Excuse me?” Ryan said.

  “Take my word for it and try it,” she said.

  He stood up, located the thick hardback book on the shelf, slipped it out of its niche and checked inside. The hidden compartment was there, the pages hollowed out. He reached inside and pulled out an empty flask. He held it up to Sierra. “How did you know this was here?”

  “Probably the same way you did. I came down here once to ask Dad something and saw him taking a nip.”

  “How do you know he didn’t tell me he had a flask hidden in one of his books?” Ryan said.