Nighthawk's Child

She made it all sound so simple. All he had to do was marry a Kincaid, and his life would magically return to normal. His name would be cleared, people would look at him in a different light, and he could go on with his life as if Christina’s death and the subsequent murder charges leveled against him had never happened. And the price of a ticket to this fairy tale was only a one-year marriage of convenience to a woman who didn’t love him any more than he loved her. And his help at her clinic, he reminded himself. After all, it was only fair that she get something out of the arrangement, too.

Stunned, he should have laughed in her face. That was what any sane man would have done. He was already in enough trouble—he didn’t need to take on more by agreeing to a marriage that by its very nature was doomed to failure. And what would it really accomplish, anyway? True, the Kincaids were a powerful family in Whitehorn, but it wasn’t the family that was on trial. It was him, and few people seemed inclined to cut “that Indian boy from the wrong side of the tracks” any slack. He didn’t think marriage to a Kincaid would change that.

But can you be sure of that? a voice in his head wondered. Summer Kincaid is well liked and respected. If she pretended to be in love with you and married you, people just might start to wonder what she saw in you and if they might have misjudged you. Granted, it’s a long shot, but at this point, it’s the only chance you’ve got. You’d be a fool to turn your back on the only person who’s helped you from the very beginning. Thanks to her intervention, her uncle hired Elizabeth Gardener to represent you, and now she wants to help you again. Why are you hesitating?

That was a good question. Aside from himself, he also had to think of Alyssa and how this might benefit her. If, through some miracle, he was able to actually clear his name, he still might have to fight to get his daughter back. He’d have a much better chance of winning that fight if he had a wife the likes of Summer Kincaid by his side to act as Alyssa’s mother. And he wasn’t losing his daughter, damn it!

Considering all that, he should have jumped at her offer like a drowning man being thrown a lifeline. But if the events of the past year had taught him anything, it was to look a gift horse in the mouth. Not everyone who appeared to have his best interests at heart did.

“I’ll think about it,” he said stiffly, “and get back to you.”

She nodded. “Just don’t take too long. For this to work, we’ve got to convince people that we’re really in love, and we can’t do that overnight. With your trial only a few weeks away, we don’t have a lot of time.”

No one was more aware of that than he. Ever since the trial date had been announced, he’d felt as though there was a guillotine over his head, waiting to fall. And it scared the hell out of him. “I should have an answer by morning.”

That was the best he could do, and she had no choice but to accept it. “Then I guess I’ll talk to you tomorrow,” she said stiffly. “You can reach me at the hospital until two, then I’ll be at my clinic.”

She walked out without another word, leaving Gavin staring after her with a frown. He’d thought he’d known who and what Summer Kincaid was, but now he wasn’t so sure. Why was she going out of her way to help him? What did she really want from him? Would she really go to such lengths to get help at her clinic or was that just an excuse to get involved in his life? Until he had some answers, he wasn’t making a decision about anything.

Self-doubt didn’t hit Summer until later that night when she was getting ready for bed and had nothing to distract her from her own thoughts. She’d actually asked Gavin to marry her. Dear God, what had possessed her? He must think she was desperate, or out of her mind, or both, when nothing could have been further from the truth. When she’d made the suggestion, she hadn’t thought of anything beyond helping him out of the awful bind he was in. But now she had to wonder what she was going to do if he actually agreed to marry her. She’d made it clear that there would be no sex, but they would still have to live together, still have to act the happily married couple. She’d never been an actress, never had much use for pretense. How in the world was she going to pull this off if he said yes?

He wouldn’t, she assured herself quickly. His back was already to the wall—if he’d thought marrying her would help him, he would have said yes in a heartbeat. Probably he was trying to find a way to let her down easy and spare her feelings. He’d call in a few days, thank her for the offer, and politely tell her he didn’t think it would work. And that would be the end of that.

She’d done everything she could to help him, she told herself as she pulled on her pajamas and turned back the covers to her bed. If he insisted on going through this all alone, there was nothing she could do.

Resigned to the fact that she would, in all likelihood, watch him be escorted off to prison, she was about to crawl into bed when her doorbell rang. At nine-thirty at night she seldom had visitors. Unless it was someone who didn’t have a phone coming from the reservation with a medical emergency.

Concerned, she hurriedly pulled on a robe and rushed to the front of her small, two-bedroom house, flipping on lights as she went. She hoped it wasn’t Hannah Eagle. Six months’ pregnant, she’d had three other pregnancies that had ended in miscarriages. It would kill Hannah if this one did, too.

But when Summer quickly unlocked her front door and pulled it open, it wasn’t Hannah’s husband John standing on her porch. Instead, she found herself face-to-face with the last man she expected to seek her out at that hour of the night. Gavin Nighthawk.

“Gavin! What are you doing here?”

“I need to talk to you,” he said huskily. “I apologize for showing up without calling, but I was driving around and somehow just ended up here.” His eyes dropped to the thin material of her gown and robe. “I didn’t wake you, did I?”

She was respectably covered—there was no reason for her to be embarrassed—but in the harsh glare of the porch light, she could feel a painful blush climb into her cheeks. Instinctively, before she realized just how telling the gesture was, she started to reach for the overlapping neckline of her robe to check to see how low it was. But his gaze followed the movement and with a silent curse, she dropped her hand and forced herself to not fidget.

“Actually, I was just going to read for a while before I went to bed,” she replied, standing stiffly in front of him. “If you’d like to come in, I’ll change into something more suitable and make some coffee—”

“I’m not staying that long,” he said quickly, stopping her before she could push the door wider. “I just wanted to let you know that I’ve been thinking about your proposal all evening, and I’ve decided to accept it.”

Stunned, Summer blinked, unable to believe she’d heard him correctly. “You have?”

Nodding grimly, Gavin could well understand her surprise. He hadn’t realized he’d made a decision until he’d found himself pulling up in front of her house. “I have to admit, I’ve had my suspicions of you. I don’t know why you offered to do this—or why you believe I’m innocent when no one else does. But I don’t have time to worry about whether you’ve got some kind of hidden agenda or not. My only concerns are clearing my name and getting my daughter back. I have a better chance of doing that with you as my wife than I do standing alone. So if your offer is still good, I’d like to accept.”

For a second, he thought she was going to say she’d changed her mind. She hesitated, and he couldn’t say he blamed her. Their arrangement—if she went through with it—was strictly a business one, but he was the one who stood to gain the most. If things worked out the way he hoped, he’d get not only his life, but his daughter back. All Summer was getting out of the deal was a hired hand at her clinic for a year.

“Summer? If you’ve changed your mind—”

“No,” she said quickly, silently cursing the betraying color in her cheeks. It wasn’t that she’d actually changed her mind—she’d just had her own share of self-doubts. But that wasn’t something she intended to share with him, not now that he’d decided to accept her offer. It would only cause misunderstandings and awkwardness, and there was enough of that already. “I’m just surprised, that’s all. When you said earlier that you needed some time to think about it, I really thought you were going to turn me down.”

“So did I,” he replied. “But to be perfectly honest, you’re the only chance I’ve got. And if we’re going to carry this off and convince people that you trust me enough to fall in love with me, we’ve got to get busy.”

“You mean, we’ve got to start dating.”

“Not just dating,” he corrected her. “If we’re going to get married before the trial starts, this has to be a whirlwind courtship. Fortunately, we’ve known each other all our lives, so there’s a history between us that should make it easier for people to believe we’ve suddenly found each other. Now we just have to give them some public displays of affection and every romantic in town will think we’ve really fallen in love.”

He made it sound so easy. They’d hold hands, gaze into each other’s eyes, and fool the world. For another woman that might have been a piece of cake, but Summer’s experience with men was practically nil. Oh, she’d dated some when she was in college and medical school, but she’d never met a man who made her heart turn over, so there’d been little hand holding, let alone romantic evenings where she gazed into someone’s eyes over a candlelit table for two. She didn’t have a clue how she was going to pull it off.

She didn’t, however, tell Gavin that. She was the one who had come up with this idea in a moment of madness, and she’d find a way to hold up her end of the bargain. After all, how difficult could it be? They had a world of things in common—medicine, their Native American heritage, hospital politics. They could spend hours talking about those things and anyone who saw them together would think they were totally wrapped up in each other.

Telling herself she could do this, she faced him squarely, all business. “Then I guess tomorrow night is as good a time as any to start. I’m usually home from the clinic by six unless I have an emergency. Just to be on the safe side, why don’t you pick me up at seven?”

As pragmatic as she, he nodded. “Wear something nice. We’ll go to the Wild Boar. We should cause quite a splash.”

They would do that just by walking in the door, Summer thought privately. The Wild Boar had just opened and was one of the nicest places in town. She hadn’t been there herself, but she’d heard the decor was rich, the wine list extensive, and the clientele the upper crust of Whitehorn society. The second they stepped foot inside the place, they’d set tongues wagging.

Which was exactly what they wanted, Summer reminded herself. The sooner people noticed they were dating and started talking, the quicker the locals would hopefully change their opinion of Gavin and look at him in a different light. “Then I guess I’ll see you at seven,” she said simply, and prayed she wasn’t getting into something she couldn’t handle.

When Gavin rang her doorbell promptly at seven the following evening, Summer thought she was prepared for their “date.” She’d spent most of the day psyching herself up for the part she had to play, and she was sure she could get through it without making a fool of herself. After all, how difficult could it be? They were just going to share a meal together in public, and they’d already done that at the Hip Hop.

But the man she opened her door to looked nothing like the one she’d approached that day in the diner. Dressed in a navy-blue suit that emphasized his broad shoulders, he was incredibly handsome. Caught off guard, Summer let her gaze slowly travel from his shoes to his freshly shaven square jaw to his neatly trimmed black hair, and felt her breath catch in her lungs. She’d never seen him in a suit before. She had to admit, he was something to see.

Standing in front of him in a dress that was at least three years out of date, she felt decidedly frumpy and old-fashioned. And she had no one to blame but herself. Her aunts had been telling her for months that there was more to life than medicine and she needed to update her wardrobe and get out in the world more. She should have listened.

Smoothing the skirt of her red silk dress, she said self-consciously, “I hope I’m dressed all right. I don’t go out very often, so I didn’t have much to pick from.”

“You look fine,” he replied roughly. “Just fine.”

She did, in fact, look fantastic. He’d always thought that she was an attractive woman, but she did her best to hide it. She usually wore her black hair pulled back in a severe bun that wasn’t the least bit flattering and she wore glasses that were the wrong shape for her face and hid her eyes. Tonight, however, her glasses were nowhere in sight, and she’d left her hair loose so that it fell past her shoulders in a waterfall of black silk that his fingers itched to touch.

For the first time in recent memory she was wearing makeup, and he was amazed at the difference in her. He’d never noticed before how beautiful her brown eyes were or just how sexy her mouth was. Unable to drag his gaze away from her, all he could think of was that red was definitely her color. With the red silk sensuously draping her slender, lithe body, she looked as though she’d just walked out of a dream.

But she wasn’t his dream, he reminded himself grimly. Just the woman he was going to give a year of his life to, hopefully in exchange for a not-guilty verdict at his trial. Their arrangement was strictly a business one, and he’d do well to remember that.

“If you’re ready, we should be leaving,” he said coolly. “Our reservation is for seven-fifteen.”

“Of course,” she replied in a voice as cool as his. “Let me get my purse.”

They walked out of her house like two strangers who didn’t know what to say to each other, and without a word, Gavin opened the door of his Chevy sedan for her and helped her into the passenger seat. Moments later, he buckled in beside her and headed for the Wild Boar. The drive took all of ten minutes, but neither of them spoke the entire way.

Then, before Summer was quite ready to play the role of Gavin’s infatuated girlfriend, he braked to a stop under the restaurant’s portico. A valet was there to park the car for them, but before he could open Summer’s door for her, Gavin was there first. Taking her hand in his, he closed his fingers around hers and gave her a slow, intimate smile as he helped her from the car. Reeling from the kick of that smile, she’d hardly recovered when he linked his fingers with hers.

She’d known that they would hold hands, that he would touch her when the opportunity presented itself, and it was all for show. But it didn’t feel like much of a show when his hand squeezed hers as they stepped inside and the maître d’ showed them to their table. Heat climbing in her cheeks, Summer felt the touch of dozens of pairs of eyes on them and knew Gavin had to feel it, too. But he gave no sign of it. Not sparing a glance for anyone but her, he seated her at their table, then took the chair across from her. In the glow of the candle that burned between them on the table, he gave her a smile that was slow and intimate and should have been outlawed in all fifty states.

Hit with the full impact of his sex appeal, Summer forgot to breathe. All around them, people began to whisper, but she never noticed. Her heart pounding in her breast, all she saw was Gavin.

“Miss?” Standing at her side, the waiter cleared his throat. “Would you like a menu?”

Transfixed, Summer hardly heard him. Then Gavin smiled in amusement, and the spell that had fallen over her broke and she realized she’d been staring at Gavin like a star-struck teenager who’d just stumbled across her favorite rock star. That was, of course, exactly what she was supposed to be doing. The problem was, she’d completely forgotten it was the role she was playing when Gavin smiled at her. And that horrified her.

“Miss?” the waiter said again, this time with exaggerated patience. “Your menu?”

Jerking back to awareness, she blushed. “Yes, of course. Thank you.” Ignoring Gavin, she grabbed the oversize menu and quickly buried her hot cheeks behind it.

Chuckling, Gavin ordered champagne—to celebrate, he informed the waiter. When Summer finally lowered her menu, he was there waiting for her with a heart-stopping smile. “See anything you like?”

How was she supposed to answer that? she wondered wildly. When he forgot to brood and turned on the charm, he was a very attractive man—which every woman in the place had already noted, if the feminine glances he was getting were anything to go by. And that was exactly why they were there, she reminded herself. To have people look at him in a new light.

Remembering her role, she forced a smile that didn’t come nearly as easily as his did. “Actually, I do. How about you?”

“Oh, yeah,” he drawled, leering at her teasingly. “But it’s not on the menu.”

“It could be,” she replied, flirting for the first time in her life. “If you’re lucky.”

Chuckling, Gavin reached across the table for her hand, and that set the tone for their evening. They touched and flirted and made no attempt to keep their voices down or to be discreet. And they accomplished just what they set out to do. By the end of the meal, everyone in the restaurant thought they were falling in love.

Exhilarated, exhausted, stunned that she’d actually been able to pull off her role, Summer didn’t know whether to laugh or to sigh in relief as Gavin escorted her outside and they left their audience behind. Grinning as he took her hand, she said in triumph, “We did it! Did you see the way people were looking at us? I can just hear the gossip tomorrow.”

“So can I,” he replied. “Especially after everyone hears about this.” And with no more warning than that, he stopped and tugged her into his arms for a hot, sizzling kiss in full view of the diners sitting by the restaurant’s large picture windows.

Caught off guard, Summer could do nothing but close her eyes and helplessly kiss him back. And all the while, her heart was slamming against her ribs. Dizzy, her knees weak, she tried to cling to the knowledge that this was just another act of the little play they were putting on, but her mind had a tendency to fog over with pleasure and she found it impossible to think straight. Unable to stop herself, she melted against him, boneless in his arms.

Later, she couldn’t have said how long he kissed her. It could have been mere seconds or hours. She just knew that when he finally let her up for air, she could do nothing but stare at him in bemusement. Why hadn’t anyone ever told her that the man could kiss like that?

“Smile,” he said huskily.

Still standing in his arms, her thoughts all jumbled, she frowned up at him in confusion. “What?”

“Smile,” he said again. “Everyone in the restaurant can see your expression.”

Disgruntled, she immediately turned the corners of her mouth up in a slow, sultry smile, but inside she was more than just a little miffed. He’d practically knocked her out of her shoes with that kiss, but he didn’t seem to be affected at all.

“How’s that?” she asked through her teeth, gazing up at him like an infatuated teenager.

“Perfect.” Chuckling, he released her, but only long enough to take her hand. “I think we’ve done enough damage for one night. C’mon, I’ll take you home.”

Any fears she had that he might try to kiss her good-night ended the second they reached her house and he followed her inside. Refusing the coffee she offered, he immediately began analyzing the evening. “Did you see the mayor? His eyes nearly popped out of his head when he saw the two of us together! It was great. By lunchtime tomorrow, everyone in city hall will be talking about that kiss in front of the Wild Boar. But that’s just the start. Tomorrow, I’ll order you flowers and have them delivered to you at the hospital. That’ll really get the gossips going. Then we’ll go out again tomorrow night.”

She’d expected as much. “How about the movies? It’s bargain matinee night, and there’s bound to be a crowd.”

“Good idea,” he agreed. “We’ll grab a burger first, then go see something romantic.”

Not surprised, Summer said dryly, “Of course.”

Lost in his musings, he never noticed. “You know, it was really clever of you to join me for lunch that day at the Hip Hop. It started people wondering about the two of us, and now, less than a week later, we’re going out and kissing in the parking lot.”

Pleased with himself, he impulsively hugged her. “This is great. Just great! I don’t know how to thank you for all your help.”

“Don’t thank me yet,” she cautioned. “We just started, and we still have to get through the trial. We might be able to convince everyone in town, but that doesn’t mean the jury will return with a not-guilty verdict.”

“They will,” he said confidently. “I’m sure of it.”

Satisfied that he had everything worked out, he promised to pick her up the following evening at six, then wished her a quiet good-night and left. And he never knew that the real reason she’d joined him at his table at the Hip Hop that day wasn’t because she was trying to be clever but because she’d thought he needed a friend.

Summer had never dated much. But even if she’d had a wealth of experience with the opposite sex, she didn’t think anything could have prepared her for dating Gavin.

Over the course of the next week, they went out every night, and she had to give him credit. When he set out to show a woman a good time—even if it was all a pretense—he spared no effort. He sent her flowers and brought her gifts that he made a point of giving her in public. Sweet, inexpensive romantic gifts like a book of sonnets, a pair of heart earrings, a ceramic frog for her kitchen windowsill. And even though she knew it was for show, she couldn’t help but wonder what it would be like to receive such attention from a man who really cared about her.

For a while, though, she could pretend, and she had to admit, she enjoyed herself. They went dancing and roller skating and had a candle-lit picnic at the town park in full view of anyone who chose to drive by. Anywhere there were people, they showed up, and everywhere they went, whispers followed them.

For a woman who considered herself an introvert, she should have been extremely uncomfortable. She wasn’t used to being on public display, and there were times when it was awkward. But they were causing a stir, which was the whole point of their going out, and she couldn’t help but be pleased. When she overheard people questioning her sanity, she knew they were making progress.

“I think she’s lost her mind.”

“Maybe it’s one of those midlife crisis things. Though come to think of it, she’s not that old, is she? Maybe she’s having a breakdown from working so hard.”

Stopping in at the Hip Hop for a quick sandwich before heading out to the reservation, Summer inadvertently stepped right into the middle of a gossip session in which she was the main topic of conversation. And not surprisingly, Lily Mae Wheeler, holding court in her booth, was leading the discussion. When she saw Summer, she did have the grace to lower her voice, but only to a hoarse whisper that carried the length and breadth of the café.

“The girl obviously needs therapy. Any woman who would voluntarily spend any time alone with that murderer after what he did to that poor Montgomery girl can’t be all there. I think she needs her head examined.”

Taking a seat at the counter instead of in one of the booths, Summer didn’t so much as wince, but Janie Austin shot Lily Mae a reproving frown as she set a glass of water and the menu in front of Summer. “I’m sorry about that, Summer,” she said quietly. “Don’t pay any attention to Lily Mae. You know how she is.”