Darlene Gardner - The Secret Sin

Not when the baby she’d given up had grown into a young girl with a face and a name and a penchant for sleeping late.

Annie’s lungs strained for air and her breaths came in short gasps as she approached the crest of the hill. Her mind whirled as much as the bike wheels while she tried to come to terms with her decision not to tell Ryan about Lindsey.

She was rotten at keeping secrets and always had been. Her father maintained that she was the most straightforward person he knew.

Her father.

He’d phoned minutes after she’d awakened, full of apologies for keeping the truth about Lindsey’s adoption from her all these years.

His excuse was that he couldn’t bear to lose all contact with his granddaughter.

As though it had been his decision to make.

It seemed her father wasn’t the only one who’d kept secrets. He reported that the late Helene Nowak had had so much trouble persuading her husband, Ted, to agree to adopt that she hadn’t told him she knew the birth family. Lindsey had been told she was adopted but given no further details.

All of which put Annie in the uncomfortable, uncharacteristic position of hiding the truth.

She crested the hill, the burning sensation in her thighs finally easing. The tough part of the ride was over. The rest of the way was downhill, with the dirt trail cutting a path through a thicket of trees and emerging near the field Indigo River Rafters used for a parking lot.

Air whooshed over her face, cooling her skin and blowing through her hair as the bike jostled over the slightly uneven ground.

She glimpsed base camp in the distance, her signal to ease up. Intending to coast the rest of the way, she stood up, resting her weight on the pedals.

The left pedal snapped off with an audible click.

Annie’s foot touched air and then the sole of her shoe scraped along the dirt of the path.

The bicycle skidded sideways, sliding out from under her. She pitched forward, her upper body going airborne. The ground rushed up to meet her.

Desperately fighting the impulse to tense up, she let herself fall. The right side of her body smacked the ground, with her rear end absorbing the brunt of the impact.

Then she was half sliding, half rolling down the hill.

“Annie!” Someone was calling her name. She was too stunned by the fall to figure out who it was.

She smelled grass and saw stars. She blinked a few times and her vision cleared enough for her to realize she was sprawled in a soft patch of grass to the side of the trail.

“Annie!”

She heard the same voice, closer this time and jarringly familiar.

She groaned, not so much in pain but in dread. Sitting up, she struggled to gather her scrambled wits for the confrontation she couldn’t avoid.

“Are you okay?” Ryan Whitmore’s face entered her field of vision, his handsome features full of concern. He bent over, looking as though he intended to determine the extent of her injuries.

She raised a hand, dismayed to find it shaking. “I’m fine.”

“Are you sure?” He didn’t touch her but still hovered over her. “That was quite a fall.”

She didn’t yet know how badly she was hurt, but wasn’t about to admit to anything. She brushed the leaves and the grass and the dirt from her arms and legs, taking stock of her injuries. A bad scrape on her right thigh. A sore spot on her hip that would turn into a bruise if it hadn’t already. A banged-up elbow.

And severely wounded pride.

“Like I told you,” she said, “I’m fine.”

Before he could insist on helping her up, she got to her feet. Various body parts screamed in protest. The world went momentarily black, the stars returning before they performed another disappearing act.

“Let me help you down the hill.” Ryan’s eyebrows were drawn together, and his mouth was pinched. She ignored his outstretched arm.

“You can carry the bike if you want to help.” She doubted she’d be able to lift it, not when she’d yet to recover her wits fully. She took a step, relieved when her leg supported her weight. She might be bruised and stiff, but she’d live.

He seemed about to protest, but then crossed the path to where the bike had come to rest against a bush. He righted it, then frowned. “It’s missing a pedal.”

“That’s why I fell,” Annie said. “When I stood up and put my weight on it, it came off.”

“Odd,” Ryan said.

“Not so odd,” she said. “Things like that happen.”

Too bad it had had to happen while he was watching. Annie trudged ahead of him, silently cursing her bad luck. If she’d stuck to the original plan to guide the early group down-river, she could have at least avoided one-on-one time with him.

“I thought you were going rafting,” she said.

“I thought you’d be the guide.”

She looked down at the trickle of blood running down her leg instead of at him. The scrape on her thigh smarted so she doubled her efforts to walk as though she was injury-free.

“All our guides are capable,” she said.

“Yeah, but only one of them has been avoiding me for almost fourteen years.”

She kept walking, determined not to let him know his comment had thrown her, irked that it had. “I haven’t been avoiding you. I just haven’t had anything to say to you.”

“If I was the kind of guy who took advantage of the injured,” he said in a conversational tone, “I’d take exception to that comment.”

“I’m not injured,” she denied.

“I’d disagree with that one, too.”

She increased her pace, which should have been enough to put distance between them. She was in hiking shape, and he was rolling a broken bicycle, but the fall had slowed her down. The sun was shining brightly overhead, heating up the August morning and making her feel even more uncomfortable.

“You should let me take a look at you when we get back to your shop,” he said as though she hadn’t already refused him. “Then there are a couple of things I want to talk to you about.”

Before alarm took hold, the rational part of her brain kicked in. He sounded too cool and calm to have figured out the volatile secret about Lindsey.

“You can’t always get what you want,” she said.

It was a childish retort, one she immediately wished she could take back. She was a grown woman who successfully dealt with men in both her business and personal lives. She’d had a serious romantic relationship, even though it hadn’t worked out in the end. It bothered her that she became a quivering mass of nerves in this man’s presence.

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