Page 67 of Bachelor Cop Finally Caught? (Hot off the Press! 2)

The cabin was very small. Cozy. The lights dim and intimate. “I’d rather stay out here.”

“You look cold.”

“It isn’t any warmer inside. What do you want to say?”

He studied her expression for several moments before speaking. “You aren’t being very encouraging.”

“You expected me to blush and giggle like the silly schoolgirl you think I am?”

For a moment she thought he was going to accuse her of being unfair again. Maybe she was—but she felt she deserved a few shots in return for the terrible unjustness of his doubts about her.

Instead he drew a deep breath and stepped past her, stopping at the water’s edge. Gazing at the mountains in the distance, he spoke without looking around at her. “You’re still pretty mad at me, huh?”

It was such a typically dense, utterly male thing to say that all she could do was stare at his back in wholly feminine exasperation. “Yeah,” she said finally. “I’m still mad.”

“I hurt your feelings.”

A fist-size rock lay right beside the toe of her sneaker. She considered picking it up and throwing it at him—just for the satisfaction of it. But since she wasn’t really a violent person, she contented herself with saying simply, “You broke my heart.”

“I wasn’t trying to break your heart. I was trying to keep mine from being broken.”

“Oh, please,” she muttered, stiffening. Was he going to try to convince her now that he’d really cared? After the things he’d said to her that night?

“Lindsey—”

She shook her head forcefully. “Do we have to go through this again? Didn’t we say everything there was to say when I left your house?”

“No. There were a few things that didn’t get said.”

“You wanted to tell me then that you were trying to keep your heart from being broken again?”

“I didn’t say again. Melanie bruised my ego. Humiliated me. Infuriated me. But she didn’t break my heart—it was never hers to break.”

He had refused to talk about his ex-wife before. Why was he suddenly willing to do so now? Just what was he trying to tell her? How much was he willing to share, now that he’d brought the subject up? “If you weren’t in love with her, then why did you marry her?”

“Because she told me she was pregnant.”

Stunned, Lindsey reached up slowly to brush her breeze-tossed hair out of her eyes. “I never knew that.”

He shrugged. “She told me the night of your birthday party. On our way back to her place, actually. She convinced me to elope with her, and I stupidly agreed it was the right thing to do. A couple of weeks later I realized we’d made a mistake. Several of them, actually.”

“She wasn’t pregnant.”

“No.”

“But she told you she was—the night of my party?” She remembered how angry Melanie had been that Dan had danced with Lindsey, that he’d given her that birthday kiss afterward. Surely Melanie hadn’t decided then to…

“Yeah. That night.” Dan turned a stone over with the toe of his boot. “I tried to make it work. But maybe I didn’t try hard enough. Maybe if I’d worked as hard at my marriage as I did at my career, Melanie wouldn’t have been so bored and dissatisfied that she turned to having affairs and pilfering cash to keep her entertained.”

“That wasn’t your fault. Melanie had a reckless streak. B.J. always said so.”

“Maybe that’s what drew me to her initially. The old opposites-attract principle. But I don’t think I would have let that attraction lead to marriage if it hadn’t been for…well—”

“If she hadn’t told you she was pregnant.”

He nodded, still without looking around.

“Were you very disappointed?” she asked quietly. “About the pregnancy, I mean.”

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