Read Online The Secret Sin by Darlene Gardner - Free Book Online

in his heart, “but I sure am glad he was.”
    “Excuse me?”
    He grasped for the right words to explain. “Haven’t you ever passed a girl of the right age and wondered if she could be our baby?”
    Until he asked the question, he hadn’t consciously acknowledged he’d ever done anything of the sort.
    “All the time,” she answered slowly.
    He felt the corners of his mouth lift. “I accepted a long time ago I’d never know where she was or who she was or whether she was happy. But now…” He shook his head at the improbability of it all. “…now everything has changed.”
    He rose from the log, eager to get back to river raft headquarters. To get back to their daughter.
    Their daughter!
    “Let’s go.” He strode down the path, excitement fueling his steps.
    “Wait!” she called. “We have more to talk about.”
    That was an understatement. They still hadn’t discussed his culpability in the night that had changed both of their lives. Once again, however, the present was infinitely more important than the past.
    “We’ll talk later,” he said. “Let’s go see Lindsey.”
    He heard the crunching of leaves and her inhale and exhale, and then her hand wrapped around his arm, startling him into stopping. It was the first time she’d touched him in years, and the contact felt electric. She dropped her hand almost immediately as though she’d felt it, too.
    She gazed up at him, her eyes pleading. “You can’t tell Lindsey who we are.”
    He usually considered a situation from every angle before acting, but he had been so impatient to see their daughter he hadn’t thought past this minute. “Doesn’t she know she’s adopted?”
    “She does, but her father and stepmother don’t evenknow I’m her birth mother. Only Lindsey’s mother knew and she’s dead.” Her eyes beseeched him. “Don’t you see? Telling her would only confuse things. She has a life that has nothing to do with us. In a couple of weeks, that’s what she’s going back to.”
    The idealist in Ryan wanted to protest that the truth was never wrong, but the realist conceded they were discussing a minor. Neither he nor Annie had the right to make decisions for her.
    “What do you know about her home life?” he asked.
    “She lives in a suburb of Pittsburgh. She has two brothers and a stepmother who says she can be sullen and unhappy. I don’t know anything about her father.”
    “If we tell him we’re her birth parents,” he ventured, thinking aloud, “he might decide that Lindsey should know, too.”
    “What if he cuts her trip short instead?” she asked. “These next two weeks could be all the time I ever get to spend with her.”
    He understood her position even though he didn’t fully agree with it. “I won’t tell her who I am, but I want to spend time with her, too.”
    Annie exhaled, her shoulders visibly relaxing. “We can work that out.”
    But could they?
    Ryan didn’t speak on the walk back to raft headquarters; a question rattled around in his head. How could a thirty-year-old man legitimately spend time with a teenage girl who nobody besides Annie knew was related to him?
    The potential roadblock slid into the background when they came upon Lindsey where they’d left her, examining the bicycles with Jason. Ryan barely afforded the teenage boy a look, his attention completely focused on Lindsey.
    She jiggled a pedal, her long hair tucked behind her ears, her lower lip thrust slightly forward as she concentrated. The clock rewound a decade and he realized he could have been gazing at his sister as a teenager. Sierra’s hair was darker, but she had the same oval-shaped face and delicate features.
    Lindsey looked up. Her eyes weren’t green like his sister’s, or hazel like Annie’s. They were blue like his.
    “We didn’t find any more broken pedals,” Lindsey said, “but some chains are loose and a lot of the tires are low.”
    Ryan could barely think of anything except Lindsey but found it