Read Online A Daughter's Perfect Secret by Kimberly Van Meter - Free Book Online

eliminated, and that was the only reason Rafe could think of that would’ve put her in danger.
    But then her pregnancy would’ve shown at some point, and he highly doubted Samuel would’ve been aroused by a pregnant woman. Was her pregnancy the reason she’d incurred his wrath? For all his matchmaking and supposed, professed love for families, he was particularly averse to children and babies. Of course this was something only his closest inner circle knew, and Rafe had only discovered this fact from a seemingly innocuous statement a patient had made one day.
    “You know what I like most about Samuel Grayson?” Melissa Pedersen had stated one day during a wellness check for her pregnancy. Melissa was a mother of four already, with the bun in the oven making six because she was carrying twins. “He doesn’t pretend to be something he’s not,” she said, smoothing her hand over her large belly. “You know how politicians are always hugging and kissing kids that aren’t theirs, just to give off the impression they’re everyday kind of guys just like you?” Rafe nodded, curious as to where this was going. “But I think he’s perfectly fine admitting babies—or pregnant women—just aren’t his thing.”
    Rafe pretended to listen to the babies’ heartbeats with his scope, but in truth, he was trained intently on what Melissa was blithely sharing. “And why do you say that?” he asked.
    “Oh, because he gets this look on his face, almost like he’s scared or something of a pregnant belly.” She laughed as if that was either the cutest or the darndest thing, but the revelation gave Rafe chilling clarity. Melissa continued to prattle on, completely missing the sudden tension in Rafe’s body. “The look on his face was one of someone afraid an alien was going to jump out at him or something. It was funny watching this confident, sexy man get so… I don’t know, it wasn’t that he was freaked or anything—he’d never do something so rude—but you could definitely tell, he isn’t cut out to be a father. But that’s okay,” Melissa defended as if she’d realized someone might find what she’d said offensive. “Not everyone is cut out to do the work that he does. I imagine it takes a whole lot of concentration and time to keep a town like Cold Plains operating like a well-oiled machine, so it doesn’t bother me any that he’s not a family man.”
    Rafe had nodded and murmured assent, but his mind had turned a few cogs forward. If Abby had been Samuel’s girlfriend and then gotten pregnant with another man’s child, that would be sufficient enough cause to enrage Samuel.
    Of course it’d been only a theory, and one he hadn’t been able to prove, but he’d logged his findings in his cloud network files for future reference.
    The quiet of the small house pressed on him until he couldn’t stand it any longer. He wanted to go to bed, but as tired as his body was, his mind refused to shut down. He felt so helpless, so ineffectual in that he hadn’t been able to find his son or find out who had killed Abby. It was times like this that he had to admit he was out of his element. He wasn’t a cop, for crying out loud, yet here he was, trying his damndest to solve a crime even the FBI was having difficulty in nailing. His chest tightened and he took a few deliberate breaths to shake loose the tension. Sometimes he wondered if that tight feeling was the need to scream his rage, grief and whatever else he had locked in there so he didn’t lose it on Main Street and get carted off by one of Samuel’s goons. Hell, that was probably the best way to find the infirmary, except he had an inkling that if he went down that road, he wouldn’t be coming back. He took a few more swigs and then dumped the rest down the kitchen drain.
    The answers he sought weren’t in that bottle. He was beginning to despair that the answers weren’t to be found anywhere.
    He tossed the bottle into a recycle bin and shut off the