Kiss in the Dark by Jenna Mills Page B

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