Darlene Gardner - The Secret Sin

Annie 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.”

Dear Reader,

As a reader, nothing pulls me into a story more effectively than a secret. That’s probably why my own books tend to be full of them. It’s great fun to uncover the mystery along with the characters. It’s almost as enjoyable when one character keeps something from another.

In most books with a plot involving a secret baby, the father is the one who’s in the dark. In The Secret Sin, it’s the baby herself, who’s grown into a lovely thirteen-year-old girl.

Lindsey Thompson has no idea she’s on a collision course with her birth parents when she runs away to Indigo Springs to visit a family friend—or the effect she’ll have on the two former lovers who haven’t spoken in fourteen years.

I hope you enjoy the third book in the RETURN TO INDIGO SPRINGS series, with the couple who will do anything to keep their birth daughter from getting hurt.

All my best,

Darlene Gardner

While working as a newspaper sportswriter, Darlene Gardner realized she’d rather make up quotes than rely on an athlete to say something interesting. So she quit her job and concentrated on a fiction career that landed her at Harlequin/Silhouette Books, where she wrote for Harlequin Temptation, Harlequin Duets and Silhouette Intimate Moments before finding a home at Harlequin Superromance. Please visit Darlene on the Web at www.darlenegardner.com.

To Kurt, Paige and Brian—the loves of my life.

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

EPILOGUE

A NNIE S UBLINSKI gulped down the last bite of her turkey sandwich and scooped her sunglasses off the kitchen counter before grabbing the receiver on the ringing telephone.

This was the third time she’d had to answer the phone in the last ten minutes, proving that her father was right. He did need her to take time away from her magazine-writing career to be in charge of Indigo River Rafters while he was away.

She didn’t bother with a hello. “What is it this time, Jason?”

She’d instructed the teenager her father had hired for the summer to prepare the next group of white-water rafters for the one o’clock run down the Lehigh. He was a nice enough kid, but she wouldn’t be surprised if he couldn’t locate the paddles. So far he’d phoned asking first where to find the liability forms and then the sunscreen they sold in the shop.

The silence that carried over the line was uncharacteristic for Jason, whose weak point wasn’t lack of communication.

“I was calling my uncle Frank.” The voice, young and female, was not one Annie could identify.

Annie’s father’s first name was Frank. If the girl had spoken with a Polish accent and called her father Wujeck Franek, she’d conclude it was one of his nieces. But wouldn’t they know he was visiting their family in Kraków?

“I must have the wrong number,” the girl continued, providing an explanation; the call was a mistake.

“No problem.” Annie hung up and headed for the door, instantly putting the girl out of her mind.

From the porch of her father’s modest home, the warehouse-type building serving as company headquarters was visible, with the wide blue ribbon of river beyond it. The rafting trip she was leading wasn’t scheduled to leave for another fifteen minutes, but she needed to brief her customers on the dos and don’ts of spending the afternoon on the rumbling river.

The phone sounded again, the shrill noise stopping her in her tracks. It was probably the girl trying the number a second time. She debated ignoring it.

It continued to ring.

On the other hand, it could be Jason with a real crisis.

Just in case the few minutes it would take her to reach the shop mattered, she reversed course and plucked the receiver off the wall mount. “Yeah?”

“Oh. You again.” It was the same young voice. “I thought I got the number right this time.”

Annie twirled the stem of her polarized sunglasses in her free hand. She didn’t have time for this. If she hadn’t returned to her father’s house to empty the dehumidifier and decided to wolf down lunch, she wouldn’t even be here.

“What number are you calling?” she asked impatiently, then listened to the girl rattle off familiar digits.

“I’m positive that’s the number Uncle Frank gave me,” the girl said. “Are you sure this isn’t the Sublinski residence?”

Annie stopped spinning her sunglasses. “This is the Sublinskis,” she said slowly. “Who is this?”

“Lindsey Thompson.”

The name meant nothing to Annie. Her mind reeled with possibilities of who the girl might be, none of which made sense. “How do you know my father?”

“Uncle Frank’s your father?” It was the girl’s turn to sound surprised. “He never said anything about having a daughter.”

“He never told me about you, either,” Annie said. “But you can’t be his niece. All my father’s nieces live in Poland.”

“I’m not his real niece. I just call him Uncle Frank. He’s friends with my grandpa Joe.”

“Joe Thompson?”

“Joe Nowak.”

The tension left Annie’s coiled muscles. Her father often talked about his friend Joe. They’d known each other as boys in his native Poland. She seemed to recall that Joe lived in western Pennsylvania and had an adult daughter who’d died of breast cancer years ago. Her name had been…Helene. She searched her memory, certain her father had never mentioned Helene having children, but who else could this girl be? “Are you Helene’s daughter?”

“Yes,” the girl said. “So can I talk to Uncle Frank?”

“He’s out of town,” Annie said.

“You’re kidding me?” She sounded distressed. “Now what am I going to do? He said I could come visit him anytime.”

Visit him?

In the ensuing silence, Annie heard distant voices and what sounded like a train whistle. She got an uneasy feeling that Lindsey Thompson wasn’t phoning from home.

“Where are you?” Annie asked.

“In Paoli.” The town was on the westernmost edges of the Philadelphia suburbs, almost a ninety-minute drive from Indigo Springs. “At the train station.”

“Alone?” Annie asked.

“Yes.” The tone of her voice spiked the way a very young child’s might. She no longer sounded as poised and self-assured as she had a few moments ago.

“How old are you?” Annie asked, her stomach clenching in preparation for the answer.

“Fifteen.”

Damn. That was way too young to be alone at a train station in a strange city, even if Paoli wasn’t exactly an urban metropolis. “Can you get on a train and go back home?”

“I don’t know,” Lindsey said. “Probably not. I’m kind of short on cash.”

“You need to phone your parents.”

“No! That’s a terrible idea.” She sounded on the verge of panic. “Oh, God. What am I going to do?”