Peekaboo Baby by Delores Fossen Read Free Book Online

something to latch on to so that he wouldn’t fidget. It was either that or stuffing his hands in his pockets. The coffee won out in the end. Too bad it couldn’t stop his mind from fidgeting, but that was asking a lot of mere hot coffee.
    Even though he was in dry clothes—loaner jeans and a T-shirt courtesy of the hospital—the icy coldness of the water had seemed to seep all the way into his bones. It was a cold he’d never forget.
    And he wasn’t about to forget the accident anytime soon, either.
    As he’d already done a dozen times, Ryan went through the events that led up to them being plunged into the irrigation ditch. To paraphrase an old saying, the devil was in the details, and his gut feeling was that something sinister had happened tonight.
    The road leading to the estate was private. Hardly used by anyone but his staff and him. Yet, the other car had been there. At the sharpest curve of the road near the deepest, widest part of the irrigation system. With no headlights on. And on the wrong side of the road. It’d come right at them.
    Then disappeared.
    Ryan didn’t think it was a phantom or a ghost car. Nor was it some illusion caused by the storm.
    No.
    The vehicle had been real. And now the question was to find out who’d been behind the wheel, why they had been on the road, and why the driver had done what he or she had done.
    Ryan would get answers to those questions, and he wouldn’t rely only on the sheriff to help him. He’d call Quentin Kincade, his security guru, and get some investigators on this immediately.
    â€œWe won’t have to be here much longer,” he heard Delaney say. Ryan wasn’t sure if she was trying to convince herself or him. She hung up the phone, scrubbed her hands over her arms and started to pace.
    Yep. She was a pacer.
    Ryan had learned that about her over the past two-and-a-half hours. A pacer, a lip nibbler and a mumbler. He’d also discovered that she wasn’t a coffee drinker, had instead opted for bottled water. Perhaps because she was nursing and didn’t want the caffeine, or maybe because she was already too jittery.
    â€œAre you okay?” he asked.
    â€œSure.” She’d answered too quickly for it to be anything but rote. It did stop her, however. She quit pacing, briefly met his eyes and shook her head. The motion sent a lock of her now-dry dark brown hair slipping down onto her forehead. She raked it away. “I just need to get out of here.”
    Ryan understood completely. The fatigue was quickly becoming a factor, and he wasn’t sure he couldthink straight much longer. As a rule, he never liked to be in a situation where he didn’t have a clear head. “If the sheriff’s not back in a few minutes, I’ll see what I can do to speed things up.”
    Another nod. “Thank you.” She paused a heartbeat. “For everything.”
    â€œYou’re welcome.”
    Because it’d been a while, too long, since he’d said something that genuinely cordial to anyone, Ryan decided it was a good time to shut up and drink his godawful coffee. This forced proximity, and the remnants of the danger had created some kind of weird intimacy between Delaney and him.
    Intimacy that neither of them wanted.
    She folded her arms over her chest and resumed her pacing in her borrowed jeans and the faded blue T-shirt that swallowed her. It was at least three sizes too big, and yet it somehow managed to skim and accent every curve of her body. And she had some curves.
    Something he was sorry he’d noticed.
    Worse, he hadn’t noticed it just once. His attention kept going back to her—her body, her face, those eyes—and Ryan just kept forcing his attention on something else. Anything else.
    Their respective coping behaviors, the pacing, the coffee drinking, the diverted attention worked for several moments. Until the silence settled a little too uncomfortably around