His Secret Son

He’d gotten a quick glimpse of blond hair, glasses too big for a narrow face and a skinny body. After that, Ryder’s attention had been claimed by the woman trailing behind.

After his marriage to Brittany and their turbulent on-again, off-again relationship spanning back to high school, Ryder had learned to keep his awareness when it came to the opposite sex well under wraps.

That didn’t mean he didn’t notice beautiful women. Hell, he was still a guy. And the woman who’d been standing on the sideway was definitely a beautiful woman. Her dark blond hair had been pulled back from her delicate features and wide blue-green gaze. At first glimpse, her eyes had widened with concern, then surprise as her warning to the boy died on her lips. Pale pink lips that had glistened with a hint of expertly applied makeup.

She hadn’t had the look of a local picking up pizza for the family. Jeans and T-shirts were the typical dress code for almost every eating establishment in town, and her beige linen slacks and pale green blouse guaranteed she’d stand out—as if her beauty alone wasn’t enough to set her apart from the crowd.

His instant attraction had caught him off guard. The ink on his divorce papers was barely dry, so even looking at another woman felt as smart as hitting himself in the head with a hammer. For the second time.

Only as he’d walked away did he realize that the woman looked familiar. Something in the not quite blue, not quite green of her eyes. In the expressive eyebrows a shade darker than her hair. In the heart-shaped contours of her face.

If the woman had indeed been Lindsay Brookes and if she’d ignored him as he’d called out her name, well, that was one smackdown he definitely deserved.

When he thought of the way he’d treated her after that one night their senior year, Ryder cringed. He tried hard not to think about the way he’d so pointedly dismissed her. He’d had his reasons at the time, good reasons, though Lindsay couldn’t have known that. She couldn’t have thought anything other than the obvious—that he’d slept with her on the rebound during another breakup with Brittany, used her and tossed her aside.

“Hey, why the frown?” his older brother, Bryce, asked as Ryder stepped into the kitchen. “Don’t you know pizza’s happy food?”

“It’s...nothing really.” He set the boxes on the granite island as he accepted the bottle of beer Bryce handed him with a nod of thanks. He couldn’t help smiling as his brother moved around the kitchen with an ease that caught him a bit off guard.

Sure, all Bryce was doing was chopping a quick salad to add some veggies to their “guy night” dinner, but it was still strange to see him in his role as a dad. At times, when one of the boys called out “Dad,” Ryder still expected his own father to be the one to answer, not his brother.

Though Ryder had tried to visit once or twice a year, getting together with Bryce’s family over the holidays or taking a trip over summer break to Disneyland hadn’t clued him in to how hands-on his brother was in his day-to-day dad duties. Since moving back the previous fall, Ryder had gotten a real chance to see Bryce, and his wife, Nina, in action.

The couple worked well together, their conversation filled with lighthearted teasing, respect and a love that had stabbed him with a sense of envy—even before his divorce.

“Do you remember Lindsay Brookes?” he asked. “She was in my grade in school.”

“Think so. Real bookworm, right? Kind of a know-it-all?” Bryce asked as he made quick work chopping a green pepper.

“Yeah, but she wasn’t like that. Not really.”

“I don’t recall the two of you being friends back then.”

“She helped me out our senior year.” He’d always prided himself on getting decent grades, despite his jock status, but that year he’d done more partying than studying and his test scores had started to reflect that. “She tutored me in calculus.”

“Sounds like a brain to me.”

“Oh, yeah, she was supersmart.” Ryder gave a short laugh. “And she couldn’t seem to stop herself from pointing out when someone made a mistake. She thought she was being helpful. She never seemed to get that the other kids didn’t see it that way.”

“Right after graduation...she surprised everybody when she started hanging out with that Pirelli cousin, right?” Bryce asked over his shoulder as he opened the fridge and pulled out a small carton of tomatoes.

“Yeah, I guess they’d gotten to be friends over the years when he came to town to visit his family, but then that summer...” Everyone else might have been surprised to see the shy, quiet girl hook up with the brooding Tony Pirelli, but all Ryder had felt was relief. He couldn’t have broken her heart too badly if she’d immediately fallen for another guy. Lindsay and Tony had been inseparable that summer.

“I don’t know what a hunk like that sees in a book-brain like her,” Brittany had scoffed when the two couples ran into each other at the Fourth of July picnic in the town square.

Ryder had made some sound of agreement, but he’d known then that he’d done the best thing—if not the right thing—in breaking things off with Lindsay. Though he and Brittany had broken up during that brief period when he slept with Lindsay, his girlfriend would have made Lindsay’s life a living hell had she found out about the two of them.

“That’s right. And then—” Bryce cut off, and he made a face as he put down the knife. “When did we turn into a couple of women gossiping in the kitchen?”

“Probably about the same time you put on that apron,” Ryder said with a tip of his beer bottle in his brother’s direction.

Bryce looked down before defensively saying, “Hey, these tomatoes are juicy.”

Ryder’s grin faded away as he thought of what his brother hadn’t said.

And then Lindsay got pregnant.

He and Brittany had already moved into their dorms by then, but the Clearville grapevine traveled long-distance. When he first heard the news, for a panicked, “what the hell am I going to do?” moment, he’d wondered even as his brain rejected the very idea.

Couldn’t be mine.

It was just one time.

We used protection.

No way. There’s no way...

And then Brittany had quickly filled him in on the details—how everyone knew Tony Pirelli was the father, how his family was in an uproar because Tony refused to marry Lindsay, how Lindsay’s family had left town in disgrace. All of it as juicy as Bryce’s vine-ripe tomatoes.

“Why the trip down memory lane anyway?”

“I heard she’s in town for a few weeks to help out her grandmother, and I thought I might have seen her when I was picking up the pizzas. She looked...good.”

“Her grandmother?” Bryce asked, an incredulous note filling his voice.

“No, not—” Ryder caught sight of the smirk his brother was trying to hide a split second too late and tossed a nearby towel into Bryce’s grinning face. “Very funny.”

Catching the towel with ease, he draped it over one shoulder. “I’d say Lindsay’d have to look spectacular to catch your eye. Haven’t you sworn off all women since the divorce?”

“I didn’t mean it like that.” Although the hell of it was, Lindsay had looked spectacular. But more than that, she’d had an air of confidence, of success. A woman who’d found her place out in the big wide world and a far cry from the girl who’d struggled to fit in at tiny Clearville High. “I was glad to see that she’s doing well.”

In a small way, it eased the burden of that old guilt he’d been carrying around. Sure, he’d been a stupid, horny teenager, but that was no excuse for treating Lindsay the way he had. He owed her an apology and an explanation at the least and, maybe if he was lucky, a way to make up for his behavior at best.

Thanks to the phone call he’d received earlier that day, he knew he’d get his chance soon enough.

Chapter Two (#ulink_e493db00-6025-587f-a366-a9a9480340ad)

She’d survived.

Her first run-in with Ryder Kincaid on only her second day back in town, and she’d survived.

Lindsay blew out a breath, still more shaken by the split-second encounter than she liked to admit. Ten years. Ten years! She was supposed to be over him. She was over him. Just not quite over the shock of seeing him, that was all.

Glancing around the pizza parlor play area, she felt her heartbeat settling as her gaze landed on Robbie. She’d quickly agreed to his request to play the video games while they waited for their order. She needed a moment to herself, and she’d hoped he might have a chance to talk with some of the other kids racing between newer video games and older throwbacks from when she was a kid—foosball, air hockey, even a tiny basketball hoop and net. But Robbie had locked in on conquering alien invaders and had barely done more than lift a skinny shoulder in a halfhearted shrug when one of the other boys stopped to talk to him. Within a few seconds, the boy wandered off and Robbie hunkered down over the joystick, his bangs falling over the frames of his glasses.

Her heart ached for her son. For the all-too-familiar shyness that made something inside him shut down when he tried to talk to kids his own age. Lindsay remembered the feeling so well. The fear, the panic of doing the wrong thing, saying the wrong thing. And the self-consciousness that made it seem that no matter what she did or what she said, it was always wrong.

She knew she couldn’t expect too much. She and Robbie would be in town for a few weeks—just long enough for her to convince her grandmother that it was time to sell the house and move to Phoenix to be closer to Lindsay and her parents. But during that short time, she hoped Robbie would find some kids to hang out with. Clearville was a tourist town, always filled with summer visitors—most of them families with children. It would do him so much good to make new friends, and maybe the short time frame would help him be more open to the possibility. It was something she’d encouraged on the trip up from Phoenix, not that her suggestion was well received.