Barefoot in the Sun (Barefoot Bay)(3)

She didn’t laugh. Instead, she bit her lower lip and cast her eyes down. “I was in the Texas foster care system as a child.”

“Really?” He tried to wrap his head around that. Why would she keep something so big from him? “You never told me.”

“Because I never tell anyone.”

On his belt loop the cell phone he was required to carry rang, jarring both of them.

“Whoops, I forgot to tell you that you’re supposed to turn that off up here,” she said. “FCC rules.”

He glanced at the phone. “It’s not a call, it’s one of those new SMS messages the hospital put us on instead of pagers.”

“Are you on call today?”

“No, but there’s one patient who started a new treatment yesterday and I asked the shift nurse to shoot me a message on his status.”

She nodded toward the phone when it rang again. “Then you’d better check it.”

“Hold your thought.” Pulling out the new hospital-issued flip-phone, he snapped up the cover.

Must talk. Very important!

He peered at the message, then the number, recognizing it instantly. Of course Adele would have access to every resident’s number. And use it to stalk him. She wasn’t going to let go of him that easily, was she? She’d been hounding him for four weeks, even though he’d broken up with her as civilly as he could and had stopped taking her calls.

He shook his head. “Not important.” He focused on Zoe and this conversation, since everything the woman he loved said was far more important than messages from the one he did not. “Why were you in foster care if you have your Aunt Pasha?”

“She’s not my aunt.”

“Great-aunt,” he corrected.

“Not that either. She was my next-door neighbor.”

Now he really scowled. “And she adopted you?”

“She…took me.” She gnawed at her lip and forced herself to meet his gaze, even though, he could tell, that wasn’t easy. “She saved me. I was in trouble when I was ten years old, I was in…” She searched for a word, then shook her head in frustration. “Trouble. And I had to get away from the trouble. So Pasha, the next-door neighbor, took me and—”

“Wait.” He didn’t understand. “The neighbor took you? How?”

“She ran away with me. I needed help and she…” Zoe reached for his arm. “Pasha saved my life, Oliver. She kept me and changed our names and we moved constantly from town to town, and she got fake IDs made so we could manage and we stayed off the grid and under the radar.” The words spilled out, each one a little harder to believe than the one before. “If you want to get technical about it, she kidnapped me.”

The basket buffeted by a gust of wind, the balloon suddenly dropping at least five feet while Oliver’s stomach felt like it plummeted another two hundred.

Zoe whipped around to adjust the valve.

“She kidnapped you?” How was that even possible? “And no one ever caught her?”

“Not yet.”

The phone, still in his hand, rang again. While Zoe worked the valves and the balloon bounced, Oliver read the next message.

I’m serious, Oliver! This is an EMERGENCY!

He stared at the words but didn’t really see them, his whole being waiting for Zoe to finish, his brain trying—and failing—to squeeze this new information into what he knew about her. She’d been kidnapped?

“That’s why we move so much,” she said, finally turning back to him, her cheeks pink from the wind. Or maybe that was shame. Which was crazy because she hadn’t done anything wrong.

Except go along with the insanity, bouncing through life with her crazy aunt-neighbor with as little stability as this balloon.

“Zoe, you have to fix this problem. It’s been, what? Fourteen years?”

“There’s no statute of limitations on kidnapping,” she said, her tone full of the authority of someone who’d done her research. “She could still go to jail.”

“What about you?”

“Me? I didn’t do anything, but I have to protect her.”

“What you have to do is—is fix this.” How could she not see that?

“Oliver, didn’t you hear me? She could go to jail. There’s nothing to fix.”

Of course there was. “How about your life and your future?” Didn’t she see that? He reached for her to make his point, the steps already clear to him even if the problem wasn’t. “Zoe, you get a good lawyer and you work out a deal, maybe pay a fine or—”

“No!”

Her vehemence shocked him. “What are you going to do, hide your whole life?”

For a long, silent moment, she stood uncharacteristically still. As each second ticked by, her eyes filled. “I don’t know, but I’m not going to do anything that’s a risk to her. I’m not going to do anything official.”

The phone rang again. “Damn it,” he muttered. “Let me turn this off.” He opened the cover to find the button, but the words on the screen assaulted him.

OLIVER I AM PREGNANT!

He snapped the phone closed with a crack, making Zoe startle.

“You’re angry,” she said.

“Not with you.”

Adele was pregnant? Seriously? He couldn’t even think straight enough to do the math, but he didn’t have to. They’d broken up four weeks ago. Adele could easily be pregnant.

Or she could be lying, just as easily.

Zoe backed away, her eyes already filled with tears. “I knew I shouldn’t have told you. I’ve never told anyone, and this is why.”

“No, no, Zoe. That’s not—” His logical brain felt like it was short-circuiting. “First things first,” he said, as much to himself as to her. “We get a lawyer and get her cleared.”

Her jaw opened. “It isn’t that easy, Oliver.”

“You can’t live your life like this, Zoe. You have to go to the authorities and—”

“Are you nuts?”

“Are you?” he fired back.

For a second she froze, staring at him. Then she turned back to the valves. “I’ll take us down.”

“Good,” he said, taking out the phone to make sure he’d read Adele’s message right. What would he do if she really was pregnant? He wouldn’t abandon her, but he sure as hell wouldn’t mar—

“Shit,” she muttered, twisting a knob with a grunt.

“What? A problem?”

She whipped around to him, the balloon falling a little too fast. “Yes, Oliver. There is a problem.”

“We’re going to crash?”

“We just did,” she said.

“Zoe, come on. Be smart about this. If Pasha—”

“No,” she said sharply. “You be smart about it. Do you have any idea what it took to tell you that? Any idea at all how I guard that secret? I’ve never told my closest friends, my college roommates. I’ve never told anyone but you.”

“I appreciate that, but—”

“No buts!” Tears splashed now, each one a little kick in his gut.

“Zoe, what did you think I’d say?”

“I thought you’d understand. I thought you’d step forward and tell me you love me anyway, despite my past. I really thought you’d be the one person I could trust.”

“Did you think I’d say ‘Oh, that’s cool, no big deal—we’ll live on the run the rest of our lives and that’s fine?” He hated himself for taking his anger at Adele out on Zoe, but how could he walk away from a baby? He wouldn’t, of course, he’d—

“I don’t know what I was thinking. It was crazy to think I could ever…stay.”

He reached for her, but she snapped out of his touch.

“Zoe, you can stay. You can do whatever you want. You have to clear up this problem.” And so did he.

“Sure.” She nodded, swiping her eyes. “I’m sorry.”

“For what your aunt did when you were a kid? How can you be sorry about that?”

“I’m not sorry about that. She saved me, Oliver. I wasn’t going to survive that situation and she knew it. She swooped in and risked everything for me. She gave up her life for me.”

He didn’t understand how making Zoe disappear and live the life of a tumbleweed made everything all right, but this wasn’t the time to argue about that. His own life was falling apart faster than this balloon was heading for the ground. “Then what are you sorry for?”

Zoe manipulated the balloon, her hair flipping over her face. “For telling you. For being honest. For falling in—bed with you.”

“You were going to say love, weren’t you?” The phone rang again and he didn’t even bother to look at this message. “Weren’t you, Zoe?”