The Stranger's Sin

“You’re a very good liar.”

Kelly’s step faltered at Chase’s words, her defenses going up like a brick wall. She’d felt so comfortable with Chase during the drive that she’d let herself forget he was in law enforcement.

She’d let herself become attracted to him.

Who was she trying to fool?

One of the reasons she’d asked him to team up with her had been that she was already attracted to him.

Far too much.

Dear Reader,

Is lying ever justified?

Kelly Carmichael thinks so, especially upon her arrival in Indigo Springs when the truth could land her back in jail. Then she meets and starts to fall for Chase Bradford, who holds the opposite view—and a badge.

That’s the setup of A Stranger’s Sin, the second book in my Return to Indigo Springs trilogy. I thought it would be interesting to pair a woman, who lies when she has to, with a do-the-right-thing kind of guy and see what happened.

Hint: there’s a scene in the book during a Fourth of July fireworks show.

All my best,

Darlene Gardner

P.S. Visit me on the Web at www.darlenegardner.com.

The Stranger’s Sin

Darlene Gardner

MILLS & BOON

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

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.

To the truth, which has a way of coming out.

CONTENTS

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

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER ONE

T HE SWEET PROMISE OF FREEDOM lay just beyond the courthouse doors, a nearly irresistible proposition for a woman who’d spent the night in jail.

Kelly Carmichael longed to rush outside and turn her face to the late-June sun. The Wenona County courthouse was three or four miles from the cozy, one-bedroom town house in upstate New York where she lived alone. She planned to walk the entire way home, no matter how high the temperature climbed.

Then she’d take a long, cool shower. She yearned to wash away the horror of the eighteen hours since uniformed police officers had pounded on her door, shown her a warrant and taken her away in handcuffs.

But first she needed to hear what the attorney who’d represented her at the arraignment advised her to do about the colossal misunderstanding that had gotten her arrested.

The attorney stumbled out of the hall restroom, wiping the brow of his thin, pale face. She’d seen that same look of misery on one of her first-grade students last week. Spencer Yates, she guessed, had a stomach virus.

She rose from the wooden bench outside the court clerk’s window where her ex-boyfriend had posted her bail before leaving as quickly as he could. Spencer Yates was moving very slowly.

“Are you all right?” she asked.

“No, I am not all right,” the lawyer snapped. His wisp of a moustache underscored how young he was, as though he couldn’t yet grow decent facial hair. He put up a hand. “Sorry. It’s just that this stomach thing has hit me pretty hard. So let’s get down to it.”

He indicated that she should precede him into a meeting room not much larger than the jail cell where she’d spent a sleepless Sunday night on a hard cot, counting down the hours until Monday’s arraignment. He moved to pull the heavy door shut and last night’s claustrophobia came rushing back.

“Please, can we leave the door open?” she asked, her voice cracking.

His hand dropped to his side. “Makes no difference to me.”

He sat down heavily on one of the upholstered chairs alongside a meeting table with a laminate wood top and swiped a hand over his damp brow.

“Are you sure you’re all right?” she asked.

“I’m fine,” he said unconvincingly. “Even if I wasn’t, we need to go over a few things.”

He opened her file and removed some sheets of paper he’d had time only to glance at before the hearing. Kelly sat silently, trying to be patient. Yates had explained the district judge was interested in getting through his heavy load of arraignments rather than correcting mistakes. But once the young lawyer looked over the specifics of her case, surely he’d see to it that justice was served.

In short order he put aside the papers, his head lolling slightly as though he had to put forth an effort to keep it up. “My suggestion is to see if the district attorney will go for a plea bargain. I’ll try to get you a deal where you won’t have to serve more than one year.”

“One year! No!” She shook her head vigorously. Like mother, like daughter, she thought before her mind rebelled. “I can’t go to prison. I won’t.”

He looked at her through tired eyes shadowed with heavy, dark circles. “You should have thought of that before the police found that baby at your place.”

“But there’s a perfectly good reason he was there.” Kelly leaned forward, desperate to make him understand. She’d already told the story a dozen times in hours and hours of interrogation. “A woman I met on the playground asked me to babysit.”

“Where is this woman?”

“I don’t know where she is. I don’t know anything about her except her name is Amanda Smith.”

“So you agreed to babysit for a perfect stranger?” Yates put one elbow on the table and tiredly rested his chin in his hand. “The police aren’t buying that story.”

“It’s the truth. Amanda has to be the one who kidnapped Corey.”

“The baby’s name is Eric, and the police think you kidnapped him. Right now you’re facing charges of second-degree kidnapping, which is a felony. If the DA agrees, I might be able to get the charge reduced to endangering the welfare of a child. That’s a misdemeanor.”

Misdemeanor sounded better than felony, but the words still sent dread coursing through her. If she pleaded guilty to either of those charges, she’d have a permanent criminal record and the repercussions that came with it. “If I’m convicted, nobody will ever hire me to teach again!”

He stared at her as though it was of little importance to him whether she lost her job as a first-grade teacher.

“You don’t understand,” she said. “Teaching children is all I’ve ever wanted to do.”

“Yeah, well, maybe you’re not the sort of person who should be around kids.”

It took a few seconds for his meaning to sink in. A shudder raked her from head to toe. “You think I’m guilty, don’t you?”

“I shouldn’t have said that.” He rubbed the back of his neck. “But it doesn’t matter whether I think you’re guilty or not. What matters is whether there’s enough evidence here to win at trial. And there’s not.”

“I don’t believe you,” she said.

He opened his eyes the rest of the way and straightened his backbone. “If you’re not satisfied with my counsel, you can request to be reassigned to another lawyer. With the overwhelming evidence against you, though, another lawyer will tell you the same thing.”

“What overwhelming evidence?”

“Besides the kidnapped baby the police found in your town house? The report says you spend hours watching children at the playground.”

“I don’t go alone,” she countered. “My next-door neighbor runs a business out of her home. I take her son to the playground to help her out.”

“Okay, then. How about the fact that the person who called the police after hearing the Amber Alert said you’re unhappy you can’t have children of your own?”

“Of course I am! What woman wouldn’t be?” she cried. She was sorry she’d ever shared that sad information with any of the women at the playground. “That’s not proof.”

“The baby was taken from a stroller outside a grocery store in Utica on Friday night.” He named a town in New York about an hour away and tapped her file folder, which he’d already closed. “On Sunday the police found that baby with you.”

“I wasn’t in Utica!”

A spark of interest lit his eyes. “Can anyone verify that?”

Kelly thought back to the thriller that had kept her reading Friday night until the last page. Too bad fictional characters couldn’t give alibis. “No,” she admitted.

His eyes went flat again. “There are two eyewitnesses who described the suspect as a woman in her twenties of average height and weight with shoulder-length brown hair.

“That could describe a lot of women,” Kelly said, even as panic started to set in. She couldn’t deny she and the woman at the playground shared a resemblance.

“One of the eyewitnesses picked you out of a photo lineup,” he said. “Do you see the problem here? A jury will believe you’re guilty. We’ll be lucky if we do get a plea, but it would certainly come with a stipulation that you submit to counseling. If we didn’t take it, you could be facing up to eight years.”

She swallowed her panic, making herself think, picking out the hole in his argument. “If the evidence is so overwhelming, why did the judge grant me bail?”

“Quite frankly, given the nature of the crime, it surprised me that he did.” He gestured with his hand. “Who knows? It could be because you have ties in the community and no priors. And bail was high enough he probably thought you couldn’t make it.”

She understood how the judge could believe a defendant who needed a court-appointed attorney wouldn’t have the money to cover the huge amount set for bail. Or even the ten percent a bail bondsman charged. “A friend posted bail for me.”

Yates quirked an eyebrow, but didn’t ask what sort of friend coughed up that kind of money. His face was growing paler by the second. He clearly didn’t want to hear about her relationship with Vince Dawkins, who’d materialized at the arraignment like a benevolent ghost.

Kelly would have preferred not to accept favors from Vince, who worked as a reading resource teacher at the private Edgerton School where she also taught, but the alternative was going back to jail and she’d been desperate.

Vince was wealthy enough that the bail amount would be a trifle for him. Besides, he still felt guilty for the way their relationship had ended.

“Just be thankful you caught Judge Waters in a good mood,” Yates said, “because he’s usually much harsher on people conventional wisdom says are flight risks.”

The lawyer couldn’t be serious. Kelly Carmichael, a flight risk? Despite her mother’s long rap sheet, Kelly had never tangled with the law until yesterday. She’d spent the last two years establishing herself in the community with a town house she’d turned into a home and a career she loved.

A career that, according to Spencer Yates, was in serious jeopardy. She was working as a counselor at the Edgerton School’s summer camp, a position she’d already lost. Vince had informed her the school’s principal said she shouldn’t come back until this matter was cleared up.

“I’ll give you a call after I talk with the DA.” Yates stood, swaying slightly on his feet. He acted as though the matter was all settled, as though she’d agreed to let him work out a deal that would send her to prison.

“But—”

“I really need to go.” Yates turned even more gray. He hurried out of the meeting room, calling over his shoulder, “You have my number if you need me.”

She stared after him, frustrated because she had so much more to say. But Yates was clearly ill—and as disinterested in hearing about the woman at the playground as the police had been. If Kelly retained him as her lawyer, he’d get around to asking the same tough question the police had: Why had nobody else seen the woman?

The reason was both simple and complicated.

Nobody had seen her because Kelly had been the only one at the playground. Late on a Saturday afternoon. Without her neighbor’s two-year-old son.

Kelly hadn’t set out to visit the playground. Her intention had been to enjoy the beautiful summer weather. Her walk took her past the swings and the monkey bars, the place where she spent so many happy hours. The woman—she’d given her name only as Amanda Smith—had been trying to get her baby boy to stop crying. Kelly’s first mistake had been stopping to talk to her.

Kelly shook off the memory and stood up, suddenly desperate to be outdoors. She hurried out of the courthouse and into the brightness of the summer morning. She gazed up into the cloudless blue sky, watching the flight of a hawk that was free to go wherever it pleased.

So was she, but not for long. The police weren’t searching for the real kidnapper. Kelly was headed for prison unless…

Unless she found Amanda herself.

The idea took root and sprouted. It was crazy, but it was her only option.

There was the not-so-minor detail that she wasn’t allowed to leave the state of New York under the terms of her bail, but if she was back before her next scheduled court appearance, Vince might not even lose the money he’d posted for her bail. If she wasn’t, she’d find a way to pay him back, even if it meant selling her town house.

But she couldn’t think about that now. She needed to remember something—anything—Amanda might have said that would provide a clue on where to look.

Their conversation had revolved around the baby. Amanda hadn’t talked about where she’d grown up or where she lived but it seemed to Kelly she had mentioned a place.

Yes. That was right. She’d said something about there being no more to do in Wenona than in…what? The name of the town floated in Kelly’s brain, just out of reach of her consciousness.

Green Water? No. That was wrong. It hadn’t been Water, it had been…Springs. But Green Springs wasn’t right. Neither was Blue Springs.

Indigo Springs.

The name hit her with such certainty that she rushed down the courthouse steps, eager to get to a computer so she could figure out where Indigo Springs was.

Because that’s where she was headed.

CHAPTER TWO

C HASE B RADFORD SET DOWN the car seat that doubled as a carrier, acting as if it made perfect sense for the invited guest at the Indigo Springs library’s Summer Speaker Series to bring along a sleeping year-old baby.

“Dream on, buddy,” he whispered, squashing an urge to kiss one of Toby’s flushed, chubby cheeks. “Please, please dream on.”

He wouldn’t have called himself soft-hearted before Toby came into his life, but it had taken Chase about ten seconds flat to fall in love with the little guy.

He’d fallen pretty quickly for Toby’s mother, too, but that turned out to have nothing to do with love. He wasn’t usually impulsive when it came to women. After Mandy, he wouldn’t be again.

“You sure that baby will be okay there?” asked Louise Wiesneski, the big-boned, florid-faced librarian who’d set up the talk.

“He’ll be fine, Louise,” Chase said with more confidence than he felt.

Her eyebrows formed an inverted V and her mouth twisted. “If you say so.”

She turned to the small group of people milling about the meeting room. Chase recognized a few faces, but the group consisted mostly of the outdoor enthusiasts who descended on the town in summer to hike, bike and ride the white water down the Lehigh River.

“Please take a seat,” she commanded. “We’re about to start.”

The people who weren’t yet seated pulled chairs out from the tables facing the front of the room, the legs scraping on the linoleum floor.

Toby promptly woke up, his baby blues opening wide.

His tiny face crumpled, he kicked his short legs and he opened his little mouth. Chase bent down before he could scream, filling the baby’s field of vision with his familiar face. Toby closed his mouth, his lips forming into a pout, and stretched out both arms.

As timing went, Toby’s couldn’t have been worse.

Unbuckling the baby from the carrier, Chase resigned himself to having a partner during his presentation. He picked up Toby, smoothing his blond hair back from his flushed face, hoping the baby would be a silent partner.

A few dozen faces stared up at him while he said a silent prayer of thanks that he hadn’t opted for a slide show. The way things were going, he’d have a hard enough time passing around the oversize photos he’d brought along.

“Tonight we have Chase Bradford, a wildlife conservation officer whose talk is titled: ‘That Wasn’t a Mountain Lion.’” Louise’s voice sounded amplified even without a microphone. “Chase will speak about some of the species of wildlife that can be spotted in the Poconos.”

Doing his best to pretend he didn’t have a baby in his arms, Chase held up a photo of a man kneeling beside a large, dead animal. “Can anybody tell me what this is?”

The hand of a freckled-faced boy sitting in the front row shot up. He was no older than ten, the youngest person in the room. Before Chase could acknowledge him, the boy asked, “Are you a policeman?”

“Not exactly,” he said just as Toby covered his badge with a chubby hand. “Think of me as policing the woods and waters. I help hunters, fishermen and outdoor enthusiasts enjoy our state’s resources responsibly.”

Chase repositioned Toby and asked again, “Now does anybody have a guess about this animal?”

“It’s a mountain lion,” answered a man wearing hiking clothing and a sunburn.

“That’s right,” Chase said. “A big one, too. Probably somewhere in the two-hundred-pound range. So now you’re probably wondering about the title of my talk.”

Toby squirmed, obviously still out of sorts from being awakened so abruptly. The baby almost never napped in the early evening but had fallen asleep on the drive over. His routine was seriously messed up.

“This photo made the rounds on the Internet a while back, with the text claiming the animal had been hit by a truck in a number of locations, including right here in Pennsylvania.”

Toby whimpered, and Chase bounced the baby the way he’d seen mothers calm their fussy children. Unfortunately motion wasn’t usually the key to soothing Toby. The baby was the ultimate outdoors enthusiast. Take him outside and he instantly quieted.

Louise crossed her arms over her chest, her lips flatlining.

“But there are no mountain lions in Pennsylvania and haven’t been since the late 1800s,” Chase said just as Toby let out a lusty wail. He bounced the baby some more, with no success. “This big cat was killed in northern Arizona.”

The volume of Toby’s cries increased. The freckled-faced boy in the front row covered his ears.

“Over the years, people have claimed mountain lions are roaming our hills.” Chase spoke louder to be heard above Toby’s cries. “But then some Pennsylvanians also claim to have seen Sasquatch.”

Nobody laughed.

Louise straightened from where she’d been leaning against the wall, marched over to Chase and held out her arms. “I’ll take him.”

Chase’s grip on the baby tightened, but he couldn’t continue the presentation over Toby’s howls. “Sorry about this. He’ll calm down if you take him outside.”

He had a moment’s doubt before handing the baby over, but the librarian’s entire body softened when she took him. She headed for the door, whispering soothing words, and Chase relaxed.

The freckled boy’s hand raised, bringing Chase’s attention back to the group. “Do you bring your baby on patrol, too?”

Considering its inauspicious beginning, the talk went over well. Chase showed the group photos of black bears, coyotes, red foxes and bobcats. The young boy was particularly interested in what Chase had to say about timber rattlers and copperheads, which was basically “Poison—stay away.”

The talk finally over, Chase picked up the baby carrier and went in search of Toby and the librarian. He found them on the sidewalk outside the library, with Louise balancing the baby on her hip as she pointed out the things around them in a soft, pleasant voice.

Sky. Tree. Grass. Bench.

“We just finished up,” Chase said as he walked toward them. “Thanks for watching Toby for me, Louise.”

The librarian’s demeanor instantly changed, her whole body turning rigid and uncompromising. She handed Toby over, but not before Chase saw her press a quick, furtive kiss to the back of the baby’s head.

“What were you thinking bringing a baby with you?” she demanded.

He was thinking he needed to talk his retired father into carrying a cell phone. Then he could have reminded him of his promise to babysit.

“My dad and I got our signals crossed.” Chase should have mentioned the talk when he got home from work, but figured whatever errand his father needed to run wouldn’t take long. He’d figured wrong.

“Your dad?” Her voice had a hard, suspicious edge. “Isn’t he a widower?”

How had she known that? Tourism had arrived in Indigo Springs years before Chase’s parents bought the vacation home where Chase now lived with his father. While Indigo Springs still had a small-town feel, it wasn’t so insular that residents automatically knew everyone else’s business.

“Yes, he is.” Chase bent to lower Toby into the carrier and started buckling him in, making sure the straps went over the baby’s shoulders and between his legs. “My mother died nine months ago.”

“I was sorry to hear about that,” she mumbled, then added in a clearer voice, “So if your father’s watching Toby for you, that must mean Mandy’s still out of town.”

Chase looked up at her sharply at the mention of Toby’s mother. “How do you know Mandy?”

“She was a regular at the library. She mentioned once she was living with a wildlife conservation officer. That’s how I got the idea to ask you to speak.”

Chase turned back to Toby and finished buckling the gurgling baby into the carrier. He squashed an impulse to demand Louise immediately tell him what she knew about Mandy. Picking up the carrier by its sturdy plastic handle, he forced himself to sound casual.

“Were you and Mandy friends?”

“Oh, no,” the librarian said. “She just came in here to read her magazines— People, Vogue, Cosmo. Never touched Parents magazine or American Baby, though she had this little one and told one of the other librarians she was pregnant. She had a miscarriage, didn’t she?”

Chase kept his expression stoic, determined that Louise not guess she’d hit on a sore spot. “Yeah, she did.”

“Wasn’t that about three weeks ago?” Louise didn’t wait for confirmation, suggesting she’d been downwind from some serious gossip. “I heard she left town right after. Where did she go anyway?”

That was the million-dollar question.

“Nowhere in particular,” he said carefully. “She just needed to get away.”

“From her baby?” Louise arched a skeptical eyebrow. “When will she be back?”