Tara Quinn - The Sheriff's Daughter

“Based on what I’ve already seen, I know that you can be kind. Compassionate. Gentle. You’re working in an admirable profession and obviously have lived your life in such a way that allowed you to pass the rigorous background checks necessary to be a law enforcement officer.”

“Just like your father was.”

She drew back, frowning. “Just how much do you know about me?” It was disconcerting, having this perfect stranger, this flesh of her flesh, aware of facts of her life—while she, who’d been yearning for even one word of him for more than twenty years, knew nothing.

He glanced down, his cheeks turning red, and when he sought her gaze again, his expression was pleading. “Can we start over? Or at least go back a little bit? I honestly had this whole thing planned and… I don’t know…” He shrugged. “Being here, meeting you. It’s not at all like I thought it would be.”

He was a planner. Just like she was. Except that she hadn’t been—until that awful night so many years ago.

“How did you think it would be?”

He made a face. “Businesslike.”

Her heart dropped. “Is that what you’d like it to be?”

“No!” Ryan sat forward, his hands on his knees, as if ready to push off. She expected him to stand, but he turned to look at her instead.

“I… Can I start at the beginning?”

Pleased by his strong need to stay, Sara smiled. “Of course. Especially if you’re going to tell me about you. It’s strange having you know things about me, when I don’t know anything about you beyond the fact that you made me sick to my stomach for three months straight, kicked like a soccer player and were so eager to be born I barely got to the hospital in time.”

And she also knew that he’d been a perfect baby boy. That he’d weighed seven pounds even. Been born at 3:58 a.m. And had a full head of sandy-colored hair.

“Really?” He grinned. Sat back. “I never knew that.”

“How could you?” Not even her parents knew that. They’d been out of town for the weekend, leaving Sara home alone with a neighbor on call next door. She hadn’t been due for another three weeks.

She’d taken a cab to the hospital. And called them after her son had already been whisked away.

Having Ryan had been something she’d had to do on her own.

Right now, he looked as if he was waiting for her to elaborate. She wasn’t prepared to go back there. Not yet. She’d spent twenty-one years running in the opposite direction.

“You were going to start at the beginning.”

Ryan told her about the youthful rebellion that had ended with his parents encouraging him to pursue finding her, if that was what he needed in order to have a sense of identity.

“I was shocked,” he said, one knee up on the couch as he turned to face her. His arm stretched along the sofa back until he was almost touching her shoulder.

Sara relished the closeness, the warmth of his fingers nearby. She wished she had the right to hug him, to fill the emptiness she’d felt in her arms since the day he’d been born.

“I knew I was adopted. I’ve always known. But I never asked about my birth parents, figuring it would hurt my real parents’ feelings.”

He stopped. Sara raised her brow.

“I was going to apologize.”

“They’re your real parents, Ryan. Never doubt that. I played a biological role in your life, nothing more.” The words just came out.

“How can you say that?”

“It’s what I’ve been telling myself more than half my life.”

It was the only way she’d survived without him.

“Do you really believe that?”

They were traveling backward again—to places that hurt a great deal.

“I believe I want to hear the rest of your story.”

He studied her a moment longer and then, to her relief, he continued.

“My mom called the adoption agency for me and a couple of weeks later I came home from school to find a letter waiting. It told us your name, and that you lived in Maricopa.”

A town just outside Montgomery County, near Dayton. A little over an hour from Columbus. She’d grown up there.

Ryan had been born there.

He pulled a document out of his back pocket and handed it to her. “And there was this.” A copy of his birth certificate. The official one with her name on it, next to the words Baby Boy Lindsay. That piece of paper would only have been released to one person—her son.

“I came to Columbus to go to Ohio State, got married and never left,” she said inanely, so disoriented she couldn’t think straight.

He nodded. “I know.”

There it was again. That knowledge he had.

“You never wanted to contact me?” God, she sounded pathetic. And the question was completely unfair.

He grimaced, shrugged. “Sure I did—some of the time. But I knew you were married. I didn’t know if he knew about me, or if you’d welcome the idea of a potentially painful reminder from your past showing up on your doorstep.”

“I would have welcomed you. Instantly. Any time.”

She couldn’t speak for Brent. Wouldn’t speak for him. They didn’t share the same feelings about children.

Hers. Or anyone else’s.

Though, for years, she’d thought they had.

“I also didn’t want to hurt my folks,” Ryan admitted next. “They were completely open about finding you, but I could tell my mom was a little worried, too.”

Understandably. Sara had a strong urge to meet the woman who’d been such a good mother to the boy she’d birthed. To tell her thank you. And to tell her not to worry.

To find out if the woman could accept her—or if she hated her. To find out if some of the jealousy she’d avoided acknowledging all these years could be put to rest.

But what if it intensified?

“Do they know you’re contacting me now?”

She’d jumped ahead. There was so much in between.

“Yes.”

That was all. Nothing more.

“I was kind of geeky growing up,” Ryan said then, obviously sensing that they had to go back to go forward. “I played Little League and high school football….”

“Were you good at it?”

“Good enough.” He shook his head, as if his sports successes were inconsequential. “I enjoyed playing, and my father encouraged it, but what I loved most was reading. And surfing the Net.”

“AOL would have been in full swing by the time you were in high school.”

“I was a junkie on Genie,” he said, naming an Internet connection source that had been out of business for several years.

“I’m assuming you know what I do for a living?”

“You’re executive director for NOISE, a national nonprofit organization that teaches Internet safety to kids, which your father, Sheriff John Lindsay, founded after his first book on the subject was published. You’re not supported by taxpayers’ money, but you get more than half of your funding through state-paid programs that contract your services.”

“Is there anything about me you don’t know?”

He glanced away and, for the first time since he’d come into her house, Sara felt uneasy with him there.

She realized she hadn’t called the office.

CHAPTER TWO

“EVERYTHING OKAY?” Ryan asked when Sara came back into the room and sat. He was sitting on the couch, right where she’d left him when she went to phone Donna. “Do you have to leave? I can come back another time.”

She shook her head, wondering how she was going to answer the questions her executive assistant was sure to ask when she finally did make it in to work. “I had an early flight from California this morning, so my schedule is clear until one.”

Everyone who knew her at all would find it odd that she wasn’t in the office, anyway—she’d been gone for three days.