Delores Fossen - Secret Surrogate

Kylie glanced down at her stomach. The darkness hid a lot of things but not the second trimester tummy bulge. Almost frantically, she loosened the tie of her flannel robe and fluffed up the fabric. It helped. Well, hopefully it did. Just in case, though, she angled her body behind the door when she opened it.

And she came face-to-face with a man who’d sworn never to see her again.

“Lucas,” she said, her throat closing up.

He didn’t acknowledge her greeting and didn’t make eye contact with her. Instead, he kept a firm grip on his lethal-looking Glock and swept an equally lethal-looking gaze around the yard.

“Is your porch light working?” he asked.

He didn’t say it as if it were a request, either. More like procedure. He had to make sure she wasn’t injured. Or that someone wasn’t lurking behind her, threatening her. To do that, he needed light.

Kylie reached over, hesitantly, and flicked the light switch on. If she thought it was tough to cope with Lucas in the dark, it was nothing compared to being able to see him.

He was every bit the rough-and-ready Texas cowboy tonight.

Just over six feet tall. Long and lean. Intense and imposing, with a fierce don’t-mess-with-me demeanor. He was the kind of man who could stop a heart in midbeat. Or send one racing.

He seemed to be doing both to her right now.

The past three years had been hard on him. She could see the stress etched on his rugged, naturally tanned face and in the depths of his eyes. Stress that she was responsible for.

Okay. That made her ache. Made her feel guilty. Worse, it made her want to do something to ease what he was going through. She wanted to reach out to him, to tell him how sorry she was. For everything. But Kylie knew Lucas wouldn’t appreciate the gesture or the words. And while they might make her feel marginally better, gestures and words wouldn’t do anything to help him.

The wind howled, stirring through his slightly-too-long mahogany-brown hair. His firm jaw muscles stirred, too. Moving against each other, as if he were in the middle of a battle about what to say.

Or, more likely, what not to say.

“Don’t make this any harder than it already is,” he mumbled in a rough whisper.

She knew what he meant. He had to come inside, look around. He’d need to put that on the report. Especially this report. Lucas wouldn’t want anyone to question his procedure or accuse him of cutting corners because of the bad blood between them. But he also wanted to do this as quickly as possible so he could get the heck out of there.

Something she totally understood.

Kylie moved back, still using the door as cover. Lucas didn’t say a word. He stepped inside, bringing with him the scents of his well-worn buckskin jacket, the winter frost and the fragrant cedars that he’d no doubt brushed up against to get to her house. His unique scent was there, as well. Something dark and masculine. Something that reminded her that she was a woman.

Oh, no.

That little mental realization shocked her. All right, more than shocked her. It stunned her. Because it had been a long time—years, in fact—since she’d been aware of something like that. This was obviously some by-product of pregnancy hormones. Yes, that had to be it. Because there was no other option. She couldn’t be physically attracted to the one man on the planet who would never be attracted to her.

Stupid pregnancy hormones.

They didn’t have a clue.

“What happened?” Lucas asked, using his cop’s voice to go with the cop’s surveillance of her living room and foyer. “Why the 911?”

Kylie quickly tried to gather her thoughts. And not the ones set off by the hormones, either. Those she pushed aside, and she got down to business.

“Around 11:30, I went to the kitchen to get a drink of water.” Even though she was trying to hurry this along, she stopped when she heard how shaky her voice was and took a deep breath. This wussiness had to stop. “I looked out the window and saw two men dressed in dark clothes in the woods out near that cluster of hack-berries.”

He nodded. “I saw the fresh tracks. Could be hunters.”

“Could be.” And that’s what Kylie desperately wanted to believe. That the men were deer or rabbit hunters who’d accidentally strayed onto her property. Nothing more. “But they weren’t carrying flashlights, or if they were, they didn’t have them turned on.”

Lucas made a throaty sound of contemplation and walked across the living room. His scarred boots echoed softly on the hardwood floor. “It’s a full moon. Maybe they didn’t need flashlights.”

“Maybe, but they weren’t carrying hunting rifles, and they ducked out of sight when they spotted me at the window.”

While he no doubt processed that, Lucas looked around. At the rough stone fireplace. At her seriously outdated furniture. And at her spartan computer desk tucked between two corner windows. He flexed his eyebrows when he noticed an old-fashioned turntable and the stack of equally old-fashioned Bob Dylan vinyl albums.

Lucas gave a you-still-listen-to-that? grunt and walked on through to the kitchen.

Kylie gave a corresponding yeah-I-do grumble and followed him. She hunched her shoulders, hoping he wouldn’t turn that scrutinizing gaze on her.

“Any idea who the two men might have been?” With his back to her, Lucas bracketed his hands on the multi-colored mosaic-tiled counter near the sink, leaned closer to the window and stared out into the darkness. The gesture looked effortless. Casual, even. But she knew differently. Lucas Creed was a dedicated, thorough lawman. He was examining every inch of the woods.

And every word of her account.

“No. I don’t know.” Kylie shook her head. “I mean, not really. But I had an, uh, appointment in San Antonio late this afternoon. Then, I did some shopping at the mall on the Riverwalk. It was already well past nine o’clock before I started the drive back home, and I thought someone might have followed me. Dark blue car. Nondescript. There was dirt or something on the license plate so I couldn’t see it, but I’m pretty sure there were two men inside.”

Sheesh. No being a wuss that time. But her story did have a tinge of paranoia to it. His deep male sound of reflection made her think that Lucas might feel the same way. Hopefully, he didn’t believe this was some kind of ploy for attention. If she’d been the sort to seek attention—and she wasn’t—she wouldn’t have been seeking it from him.

“Have you gotten any suspicious phone calls lately?” he asked, moving from the sink to the back door.

“No.” She wouldn’t tell him about the eerie feeling, though, that something just wasn’t right. While she trusted her instincts and intuition, she didn’t think Lucas would. He was a man who required proof and facts, and she was seriously short of those.

He turned on the back porch light. While keeping his Glock ready and aimed in his right hand, he opened the door slightly, and eased out a few inches so he could take a look outside. The badge clipped to the waist of his well-worn jeans scraped against the wooden jamb. “You think this might be connected to one of the articles you wrote?”

That improved her posture. Kylie automatically stiffened, and her back went ramrod straight. She hadn’t realized that he knew she was a journalist. But then, why wouldn’t he? She had a degree in journalism and had worked briefly for a San Antonio newspaper before becoming a deputy. She hadn’t exactly kept that a secret.

Unlike other things in her life.

For the past three years since she’d resigned as Lucas’s deputy, she’d yet to step foot inside the city limits of Fall Creek, the town she’d once called home. Instead, she’d moved to the tiny country house where her late grandmother had raised her. Added to that self-imposed isolation, she’d been making trips into San Antonio for anything from groceries to doctor’s appointments. That minimized her chances of running into Lucas. And it’d worked. She hadn’t seen him.