Analise had always known what she’d wanted Letter to Reader Title Page Dedication About the Author 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 Epilogue Copyright

Analise had always known what she’d wanted

Until this trip.

Until she met Nick.

Suddenly everything around her was confusing and complicated and her wants were contradictory. She wanted to make her parents happy, stop their worrying about her, and she could do that by marrying her fiancé, Lucas.

That would make her happy, too, of course.

All she had to do was stay away from Nick, not touch him, not look at him, not think about him, not dream about him at night.

She could do that.

She had to do that.

Dear Reader

The wonder of a Silhouette Romance is that it can touch every woman’s heart Check out this month’s offerings—and prepare to be swept away!

A woman wild about kids winds up tutoring a single dad in the art of parenthood in Babies, Rattles and Cribs... Oh, My! It’s this month’s BUNDLES OF JOY title from Leanna Wilson. When a Cinderella-esque waitress—complete with wicked stepfamily!—finds herself in danger, she hires a bodyguard whose idea of protection means making her his Glass Slipper Bride, another unforgettable tale from Arlene James. Pair one highly independent woman and one overly protective lawman and what do you have? The prelude to The Marriage Beat Doreen Roberts’s sparkling new Romance with a HE’S MY HERO cop.

WRANGLERS & LACE is a theme-based promotion highlighting classic Western stories. July’s offering, Cathleen Galitz’s Wyoming Born & Bred, features an ex-rodeo champion bent on reclaiming his family’s homestead who instead discovers that home is with the stubborn new owner...and her three charming children! A long-lost twin, a runaway bride...and A Gift for the Groom—don’t miss this conclusion to Sally Carleen’s delightful duo ON THE WAY TO A WEDDING.... And a man-shy single mom takes a chance and follows The Way to a Cowboy’s Heart in this emotional heart-tugger from rising star Teresa Southwick.

Enjoy this month’s selections, and make sure to drop me a line about why you keep coming back to Romance. We want to fulfill your dreams!

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A Gift for the Groom
Sally Carleen

www.millsandboon.co.uk

To Paula Stewart, my “blood sister”

and sister of the heart

SALLY CARLEEN,

the daughter of a cowboy and a mail-order bride, has romance in her genes. Factor in the grandfather in 1890s Louisiana who stole the crowd at political rallies by standing on a flatbed wagon and telling stories, and it’s no surprise she ended up writing romance novels.

Sally, a hard-core romantic who expects life and novels to have happy endings, is married to Max Steward, and they live in Missouri with their large cat, Leo, and their very small dog, Cricket. Her hobbies are drinking Coca-Cola and eating chocolate, especially Ben & Jerry’s Phish Food ice cream. Sally loves to hear from her readers. You can write to her c/o P.O. Box 6614, Lee’s Summit, MO 64064.

Chapter One

The bottom half of the scorching sun had disappeared behind the distant mountains when Nick Claiborne strode across the tarmac of the small airport in Rattlesnake Corners, Wyoming. His V-tail plane, N373GY, affectionately known as Ginny, sat waiting patiently for his return.

The June day had been long and hot. He’d left South Dakota early that morning, flown to Wyoming, spent the day looking for a woman who’d moved over twenty years ago, and now he had to fly to Nebraska tonight in search of that same woman.

Once he and Ginny got into the air, free of the earth, up there alone with the stars, he’d unwind and relax. It was always like that when he could find the time to fly. As a private investigator, he didn’t get to do a lot of flying. This case, frustrating in many ways, at least gave him the excuse to travel.

He completed his preflight walk-around check, unfastened Ginny’s tiedowns and climbed up the wing to the door...which stood slightly open. That was odd. He was always so careful to lock it.

He swung the door wide open, preparing to climb in, to settle in the seat that, after so many hours of use, molded to his body perfectly. Already he could feel the tension unknotting in his neck and shoulders as he caught the familiar scent of...no, something was wrong. His plane wasn’t supposed to smell like honeysuckle.

“Hi! I’m Analise Brewster! You must be Nick Claiborne.”

Nick blinked and dropped his foot back to the wing. He wasn’t given to hallucinations, hadn’t drunk anything all day except water and iced tea and he was pretty sure he wasn’t asleep and dreaming. Therefore, the redhead in his cockpit must be real.

“Analise Brewster?” he repeated. “My client Analise Brewster?” As if there could be more than one.

“That’s right! Am I glad to see you! It’s getting so late, I was starting to worry, afraid I’d been waiting in the wrong plane, except this is the only plane parked here.”

She swung out slender feet in turquoise sandals followed by long, golden legs stretching at least a mile from khaki shorts that should have been mundane and ordinary but somehow on this woman were incredibly sexy. She wore some kind of silky, turquoise blouse that draped oh so nicely over her rounded breasts.

He made himself lift his gaze to her face.

Standing in front of him, almost even with his height of six feet, due to the upward slope of the wing where she stood, she smiled tentatively, her lush, generous lips outlining white, perfect teeth.

Lush, generous lips? Where the hell had that come from?

Okay, maybe they were lush and generous, but he didn’t need to be thinking that about some woman who’d ambushed him from his own plane...some engaged woman.

She extended a slim hand, and he accepted automatically, too stunned to do otherwise, his fingers closing over the smooth skin.

“In your fax,” she said, “you mentioned that you thought you had a solid lead on Abbie Prather. Did you find her today? Is she in jail already?”

Maybe one of those ranchers had slipped something into that iced tea after all. This whole scene didn’t bear much resemblance to reality. He rubbed the back of his neck where those tension knots were gathering again. “What are you doing here? How did you get into my plane?”

“I got your fax last night,” she explained, speaking more slowly, as if she thought he might have difficulty comprehending. She was right about that! “Then I called your office this morning and told your secretary that I planned to meet you here, but I guess you didn’t get my message.”

“No, I didn’t get your message. I haven’t talked to my office today.” Nick looked around the deserted airport. “How did you get here?”

“I drove to Tyler this morning and rented a plane—we don’t have an airport in Briar Creek—and when I got here, you weren’t here, but that man inside told me this was your plane and you’d be back since you’d borrowed his truck because there weren’t any rental cars, so I, um, sort of waited. In your plane. So I wouldn’t miss you.”

She was once again talking even faster than he remembered from their phone conversations. But the wires and circuits of the phone lines hadn’t done justice to that voice. Even in fast forward it called up images of cool lemonade sipped under the shade of a big cottonwood tree in the heat of a Texas summer, of warm breezes sifting through the smooth leaves of a magnolia tree.

He cleared his throat and tried to do the same with his mind. “I still don’t understand what you’re doing here.”

For a brief moment confusion creased her smooth forehead. She looked around as if a little surprised to find herself in the middle of nowhere. Then her gaze returned to him and her smile re-formed. “Why, to be there when you find the woman who framed my fiancé’s father, of course.”

He folded his arms across his chest “Why?”

“Why?” Again she looked a little uncertain. “Well, I should think that would be obvious.”

“It’s not, so why don’t you enlighten me? What possible reason could you have for traveling a thousand miles just to see some woman arrested?”

She bit her lower lip, and Nick found himself unconsciously imitating her action, chewing on his own lip as if he could taste hers by proxy. This woman was dangerous.

She twisted around, bent over and reached into the plane. He tried not to look at her rounded rear in those mundane khaki shorts. Tried and failed.

She straightened and hauled out a satchel that was either a very large purse or a small suitcase. From the bag, after some searching, she produced a camera. “I could take a picture,” she said. “As I already explained, hiring you to find that woman is a wedding present for Lucas. That’s my fiancé. But I haven’t told him yet since it’s a surprise, so I could take a picture as sort of physical evidence. Something to put under the tree, so to speak. Not that we’re having a tree at our wedding. But you know what I mean.”

“No,” he said. “I don’t know what you mean. You just now made that up about taking the picture. You still haven’t told me why you’re here.”

She plunked the camera back into her bag, slung it over her shoulder, lifted her chin defiantly and met his gaze head-on. “I need to be here.”

Her eyes were decidedly green, even in the deepening dusk. Not blue-green like the ocean or gray-green like moss, but green like the treetops in full summer when he flew above them. An urge swept over him to dive into their depths, to assure her it didn’t matter why she’d come to him, that he was glad she was there.

He gave himself a mental shake. It wasn’t like him to let his hormones take over so completely. He was upset she was there, not glad.

“Abbie Prather’s not here,” he growled, irritated with himself as much as with her. “She moved in 1976.”

“Oh, no! You mean we’ve lost her? What are we going to do now?”

She looked so forlorn, he had to fight a totally irrational desire to reassure her, to try to make things right...to take care of her.

Been there, done that, he reminded himself grimly.

He was a private investigator, his services for hire. Gather information, get the facts. That was what he did, and all he did. No involvement with anybody’s problems.

“We—I haven’t lost her. I’ve got a new address for her in Nebraska. I’m flying there tonight just as soon as you get back in your chartered plane and return to Briar Creek.”

“Ah, well, you see,” she began, looking over his left shoulder, refusing to meet his gaze, “that’s not exactly possible. My pilot had to turn around and fly back because today’s his son’s sixth birthday, and they’re having a party for him right about now, so I’ll just go on to Nebraska with you and then maybe I’ll be there when you find Abbie after all.”

“You can’t do that!” Nick protested, a jumbled panic prickling him from all sides. He needed his downtime, his time alone. He did not need a ditzy client hanging around...especially not a ditzy client with golden legs nine miles long and lush lips.

“Why not?” she asked.

“Look, Ms. Brewster—”

“Analise. We should certainly be on a first name basis if we’re going to Nebraska together in that itty-bitty plane.”

“We’re not going to Nebraska together in that itty-bitty... in my plane. Or anybody’s plane.” Nick plowed his fingers through his hair and shook his head. “Abbie Prather is no amateur. She stole twenty-five thousand dollars from the bank where she worked, manipulated bank records to frame your fiancé’s father then obtained documentation to change her identity to June Martin. These are the actions of somebody who knows how to play the game. Now you figure she ran to South Dakota, lived there a couple of years and moved to Wyoming, lived here a couple of years and moved to Nebraska. What makes you think she stayed in Nebraska more than a couple of years? She probably moved another six or seven times. I told you when I took this case that it was going to be tough because it’s so old.”

Analise folded her arms, right under her rounded breasts, pushing them up, thrusting them forward, pulling the smooth turquoise silk taut over them, emphasizing every curve. He’d thought the summer evening was cooling off, but that was before Analise folded her arms under her breasts.

“There’s no motel or car-rental place closer than Casper,” she said firmly. “The man inside told me that. There used to be a motel in Thunder Bluffs, but it burned to the ground when lightning struck it four years ago, or maybe it was five, depending on whether you believe him or the cowboy who came in while I was there. So unless you plan to make me spend the night out here on this hard, cold ground where there are probably rattlesnakes—why else would they call this place Rattlesnake Corners?—you’ll have to take me to Nebraska.”

With a sinking feeling, Nick realized she was right His plans for a peaceful, restorative, solitary trip fluttered away into the night. At the moment he had no choice. He lifted his hands in resignation. “All right, all right! I’ll take you to Nebraska and tomorrow morning you’ll make arrangements to get home.”

“Okay.”

“You’re not going with me traipsing around the countryside looking for Abbie Prather.”

“I said okay. What’s your problem?”

He wasn’t sure he believed her. He was both dreading and looking forward to flying to Nebraska with her in that itty-bitty plane. Those were his problems.

“As long as we understand that you’re not going to be present when I find Abbie Prather.”

She didn’t say anything.

“That’s the job you hired me to do. If you hire somebody to paint your house, do you insist on taking up a brush and helping him?”

“I live with my parents. They’re the ones who hired that painter. He had a fear of heights and our house has three stories and sits on top of a hill besides. So of course I helped him.”

Somehow her answer didn’t surprise him.

“Well, you’re not going with me tomorrow, and that’s that.” He climbed into the cockpit and slid into his familiar seat. But it seemed to have developed new contours and no longer fit him so well, as if Analise’s intrusion into his haven had altered it physically.

She got in beside him and closed the door. Odd that he’d never before noticed how small this cabin was, how close his seat was to the passenger’s.

He fastened his seat belt and focused on his starting checklist, making a concerted effort to ignore his passenger.

Just as the engine growled to life, Analise pulled a bag of chips out of that huge purse of hers, ripped them open and began to crunch.

“Could you keep it down? You’re making more noise than the engine.”

“Sorry. Flying makes me nervous, so I eat to distract myself.”

Oh, great! “Do you have a candy bar in there or something a little quieter?”

She stuffed the chips back into her purse. “I hope you’re not going to be this cranky the whole way to Nebraska.”

“I am,” he assured her. “In fact, it’s probably going to get worse. By the way, you never did tell me how you got into my plane. I know I left the door locked.”

She peeled the wrapper off a candy bar. “Picked the lock. I learned how to do it in college.”

“You learned to pick locks in college? Where did you go? Burglar U?”

She lifted an eyebrow at his absurd question. “I went to school in Austin. I dated a guy who taught me to pick locks, among other things.”

“Other things?” He wasn’t sure he wanted to hear those other things, but he couldn’t stop himself from asking.

“We ran together, five miles a day. Physical fitness. Then there was scaling six-foot fences, playing poker and blackjack, dealing off the bottom of the deck, shooting a .38 revolver—”

“Shooting a-you dated a criminal?”

“Of course not! Richard was an undercover cop. Would you like a candy bar? I have plenty.”

“No, thank you,” he muttered. His neck muscles had tied themselves into tight knots again, and he could feel a headache building behind his eyes.

He tried to focus on the things he loved about flying, especially flying at night—the sense of freedom, of isolation and serenity. For the next hundred or so miles, the land below would be totally dark except for the occasional car or house. No city lights. Nothing around anywhere...north, south, east, west, up or down.

Nothing but Analise Brewster with her lush, generous lips wrapped around a candy bar, her long legs tucked demurely to one side and looking anything but demure. Analise Brewster sitting inches away from him, touching him with the combined, oddly compelling scents of honeysuckle and chocolate.

“Put your legs down and fasten your seat belt,” he barked.

She complied so hastily he felt a little guilty for snapping at her.

He taxied to the run-up area and went through his instrument check then took up the microphone to announce his intention to take off to any planes that might be within radio range.

This was going to be a long, long flight

Analise took a large, desperate bite out of her candy bar as she felt the plane lift off the ground, and her stomach gave a corresponding lurch right into her throat. This was the scariest and most exciting part of flying, that moment of actually going up into the air, unsupported by anything but magic. She understood how butterflies flew and how it was impossible for bumblebees to fly even though they did. But the unlikelihood of a bumblebee’s flight didn’t even come close to the impossibility that tons of metal with wings that couldn’t flap should be able to stay aloft.

She ate more of her candy bar, ignored those butterflies . that had taken up residence in her lurching stomach and resisted the urge to chatter, something she was prone to do when she was nervous. Nick had indicated he needed silence while he got everything going and she certainly didn’t want to cause him to do something wrong, something that would break the magic spell and send them plummeting to earth.

She’d done enough chattering tonight, anyway. By the time he’d arrived, she’d been pretty nervous, had begun to think she was going to have to spend the night in the plane. In fact, from the time she’d walked into the airport, her rented plane already on its way back to Tyler, only to find that Nick wasn’t waiting for her, she’d been getting progressively more concerned.

This latest impulsive act, charging across the country a week before her wedding, might not prove to be one of her better ideas. In fact, it would probably go down in the column of incidents that reinforced her parents’ incessant worries about her. It seemed the harder she tried to be the perfect daughter, the worse things got.

Her parents weren’t happy that she’d taken so long to make up her mind about marrying Lucas Daniels. Their wedding was wedged in next Saturday between morning and evening ceremonies and their rehearsal was scheduled for today, a week early, the only time they could get the church.

And the closer it got to that rehearsal, the edgier and more claustrophobic she got. Somewhere around four o’clock this morning, she’d decided that what she really needed to do was come to Wyoming to be certain Nick was able to garner enough evidence to clear Lucas’s father’s name before the wedding so his parents would come. Her concern over that issue had doubtless been causing her distress.

It had seemed like such a good idea at the time, but now Nick’s pointed questions made her wonder about her motivation. It wasn’t exactly logical.

One foul-up after another. The story of her well-intentioned, ill-fated life.

As she desperately devoured her candy bar, she stole a glance at Nick. The shadowy, uneven light from the instrument panel accented the craggy planes of his face, giving him an even more intriguing, dangerous look than when she’d first met him. His shaggy brown hair, just a little too long, touched the collar of his faded denim shirt. The top buttons of that shirt were undone, allowing springy tufts of that same hair to escape.

She twisted the diamond ring on her finger and thought of how lucky she was to be engaged to a nice man like Lucas Daniels. She pictured his handsome face with his kind smile, his immaculately cut and styled black hair that told of his Native American heritage. Lucas was her best friend, her parents’ best friend. When she and Lucas were married, her parents would finally have to admit that she’d done something right. They could stop worrying about her every minute of every day.

She was glad she’d made the last-minute decision to marry him. This antsy, trapped feeling was probably normal for a bride-to-be.

In six and a half days she’d marry Lucas and that would at least keep her out of one brand of trouble. Never again would she run the risk of becoming involved with a man because he had that aura of danger and defiance.

The aura Nick exuded from every pore.

He set the automatic pilot and leaned back.

Analise crumpled the empty candy-bar wrapper and pulled out a bag of chocolate sandwich cookies.

“No wonder you’re so hyper, eating all that sugar,” Nick grumbled.

“I told you, flying makes me nervous.”

“Why do you fly if it makes you nervous?”

“Because it’s the fastest way to get places, of course. Anyway, I have a theory. If you’re afraid of something, you have to do it and then you won’t be afraid of it. Since my parents have made a career out of worrying about me, I could be afraid of everything if I didn’t make an effort to do all the things they think I shouldn’t do.” She offered him the bag of cookies. “Here. You could stand to relax a little, too. Surely you’re not nervous about flying. Although, if you go along with my theory, becoming a pilot would be the logical thing to do to overcome that fear.”

“I love to fly.” He accepted a couple of cookies. “But I didn’t have any dinner.”

That was a good sign. Eating cookies together was always a bonding experience.

“So,” she said brightly, hoping to inspire a bit of brightness in her cranky pilot, “tell me what you discovered today about Abbie Prather.” He didn’t respond immediately. His jaw muscle twitched. Maybe he was still chewing on that cookie. “You can just give me your report verbally instead of faxing it to me since I’m not home to receive the fax,” she encouraged, giving him plenty of time to swallow.

His lips compressed as if the cookie tasted bad or he didn’t want to comply with anything she asked. She knew there was nothing wrong with the cookie.

“I searched the records in Casper,” he finally said, “and talked to people who live in the area where Abbie Prather lived, and I found out two things. She moved to Nebraska in about 1976, and she had a little girl with her.”

Analise stopped with her cookie halfway to her mouth. “A little girl? Where did she get a little girl?”

“I would imagine she got her in the usual way.”

“But she didn’t have a baby when she left Briar Creek! And you didn’t mention any baby in South Dakota, or any husband!”

“No evidence of a husband. My guess would be that she either had the child right before or right after she left Texas. The people I talked to today figured the kid to be about two when she moved here and four when she left.”

“But where was this baby when she was in South Dakota?”

“In South Dakota she lived out away from people, just like she did in Wyoming. If she’d had a baby with her in South Dakota, it would have been easy to hide her. A toddler’s another story, and the people who saw this little girl said she was a pistol. Very visible. Had red hair and was always getting into something. Every time they saw her, the kid was charging around and Abbie was yelling at her, though they said by the time she left. the kid was getting kind of cowed by all that yelling.”

Analise touched her own curls, sadness sweeping over her at the thought of Abbie’s daughter being cowed. “A little red-haired girl, four years old. She’d be about my age. If Abbie hadn’t stolen that money and left town, her daughter and I might have been friends. That’s terrible that Abbie yelled so much at her that she broke her spirit But at least now we know why she stole the money.”

“You think stealing the money to take care of her kid justifies her actions?”

“No, of course not! But it explains why she did it. She must have been pregnant in Briar Creek and the father wouldn’t marry her so she had to leave in shame—”

“Leave in shame? This was 1972, not 1872.”

“Briar Creek can be pretty provincial. Anyway, she managed to hide her pregnancy, but she knew she couldn’t hide the baby ... they make too much noise...so she stole the money and left town. If she’d stayed in Briar Creek and given her child up for adoption, my parents might have taken her and I’d have had a sister. They wanted another child.”

The idea brought an eerie sense of déjà vu, doubtless because she’d always wanted a sister, had even invented one when she was a child, a red-haired sister who looked like her and was named Sara. How sad that she’d missed the possibility. Sad for her and the other little girl. Abbie didn’t sound like an ideal mother, while her own parents were practically perfect...unlike their changeling daughter.

“That’s pretty much the way I had it figured,” Nick said. “However, you should realize that this could mean your fiancé’s father was the father of her baby.”

“No way!”

“Then why did she choose him to take the blame?”

“Because he was the most likely candidate. He’d been in trouble before when he was a teenager. His family was really poor, and when he was in high school he was dating Lucas’s mother, whose family wasn’t poor though they weren’t wealthy, either. Anyway, he wanted to take her to his senior prom but he couldn’t afford to rent a tuxedo, so he stole one. At least, he tried to steal one. They caught him. He got off with probation because he’d planned to return it after the prom and he was an honor student and he’d never been in any kind of trouble before, but when that thing at the bank came up and he looked guilty, nobody bothered to check any further.”

“Which doesn’t mean the man wasn’t the father of Abbie Prather’s child. Why didn’t your fiancé look into this?” He lifted a hand to cut off her protestations. “I just think you ought to know that you may be opening a can of worms here. This may not be the kind of wedding present your Lucas wants. There may be a good reason he never investigated.”

“There certainly is a good reason. Well, a fairly good reason. It’s real good if you understand Lucas’s point of view. He was only four years old when his dad was convicted, so pretty much all he remembers is how people treated the family of a convicted felon. As soon as his dad got out of prison sixteen years ago, they moved to Pennsylvania where nobody knew anything and started over. His parents have told him repeatedly that they have to forget the whole thing, move forward and put it behind them. Give themselves and everybody else a chance to forget. They won’t even come back to Briar Creek for our wedding.”

“If they don’t want to dredge the whole thing up, why are you doing it?”

“So his parents can feel comfortable coming to our wedding and because Lucas really does want to know the truth, deep inside.”

“I see.” Disbelief oozed from the pores of both words.

“He does! Okay, he’s never really said it in so many words, but he says it every day by his actions. He’s a doctor. He could practice anywhere in the country, but he chose to move back to Briar Creek and go into practice with my dad. He tries really, really hard to be an exemplary citizen and show people by the way he lives that his father couldn’t possibly be guilty. If he says his dad’s a total straight-arrow, I believe him. You find that little girl’s birth certificate and we’ll see who the father is and I guarantee it won’t be Wayne Daniels.”

“I fully intend to do that, but this is Saturday night, and the courthouses won’t be open until Monday morning at nine.”

She sighed. “Then I guess we’ll have to wait to settle that point. What’s the little girl’s name? Did anybody remember?”

“Oh, yes. Several people remembered because Abbie yelled at her so much, calling her name. It’s Sara.”

Talk about déjà vu! “Sara,” she repeated. “When I was a little kid, my imaginary sister’s name was Sara, and then I gave the name to my favorite doll when I was six.”

“It’s a common name.”

“I guess so.” But her doll, like her and like Abbie’s daughter, had red hair. In fact, she still had the doll in a carriage in one corner of her room, a part of her childhood she couldn’t seem to let go of.

She sat quietly for a moment, thinking about Abbie’s daughter and the coincidences of their similarity in hair color and age and of having a doll with the girl’s name. If she believed in fate, she’d have thought Sara was destined to be her friend or even her adopted sister, and Abbie’s crime had sent fate awry.

Many times she’d overheard her parents lament that she had no sister and talk tentatively about having another baby. When she was young, she’d believed they’d refrained from having one because she was such a problem, they didn’t have enough worry left over for a second child. Now that she knew more about the process of obtaining babies, she realized perhaps they hadn’t been able to have another.

Or it could be that her original assumption was right. In her zeal to prove she was competent, she usually ended up proving the opposite. Like with this trip.

The plane hit an air pocket, bouncing down and startling her, throwing her forward. Though her seat belt held her securely, Nick swung an arm across her, the way her parents had done when she was a child riding in the car and they’d had to stop suddenly.

But Nick’s touch didn’t feel paternal as his arm pushed against her left breast, his flattened palm against her right. Her gaze darted to the side, to look at him, without turning even her head as if the slightest movement would increase the accidental, forbidden, delicious sensations of his touch. And the horrible part was, she wanted to increase those sensations, to push them to their limits, whatever those limits might be.

She bit her lip. She shouldn’t be having those thoughts while she was engaged to Lucas! Talk about limits—she’d gone over the line already!

And she’d thought getting out of Briar Creek for a while would help her relax! She should have gone to one of those South American countries where they had the Revolution of the Week. That would have been more tranquil than flying to Nebraska with Nick Claiborne.

He was leaning forward, staring at her, and for a moment frozen in time, neither of them moved. His eyes which had been the color of the Texas sky at daybreak when she’d first seen him were now dark like the sky as a storm rolled in, dark from leashed energy and power ready to explode over the land in a wild tempest.

An illusion because of the dim light in the plane, she told herself.

But logic didn’t alter the effect of his gaze, the storm his touch created in her.

As if he’d suddenly noticed where it was, he jerked his hand back to his side and turned toward the front of the plane, to the darkness outside. “Sorry,” he said, his voice strangely husky. “Automatic reflex. I had four little sisters and an ex-wife who refused to wear her seat belt in the car or the plane.”

She swallowed hard. “No problem. I understand.”

She plowed into her handbag and brought out the rest of the cookies then crammed a whole one into her mouth. If eating could distract her from her fear of flying, surely it could distract her from the pilot, from the memory of his hand on her breast, from the tingling, tantalizing sensations that still lingered where he’d touched her and from the guilt of betraying Lucas, her best friend.

He leaned forward and made an adjustment of some sort. His movement stirred the air in the small space, releasing a scent of dusty denim and dangerous, tantalizing masculinity that she’d have recognized anywhere as belonging to Nick.

Only half a bag of cookies, three more candy bars, two packages of chips, a roll of mints and a bag of pistachio nuts remained in her purse. It probably wasn’t going to be enough.

Chapter Two

Nick awoke to the groaning of water pipes. At least he hoped it was water pipes. Otherwise, somebody was being tortured in a nearby room of the Rest-a-While Motel in Prairieview, Nebraska.

He could only hope Analise Brewster had slept half as badly as he had. If she had, she’d surely be ready to go home.

When they’d arrived in the middle of the night, the outside temperature had been cool, but inside the tiny room was another matter. He’d fully expected someone to come in just before dawn and shove in a few loaves of bread to bake. The sleepy owner they’d rousted out of bed had apologized for the fact that the air-conditioning was broken. Nick had his doubts that the place had ever possessed such a modern convenience.

To make matters worse, he’d had no dinner the night before except the cookies Analise had given him. Every thought of the room’s being hot enough to bake bread, fry eggs, boil soup, had been related to food and had sent his stomach into growling frenzies.

However, neither the heat nor his hunger had been the primary reason he’d tossed and turned all night, kicking the sheet into a twisted rope at the end of the lumpy bed.

Analise had been the primary cause of his disquiet. Analise, who’d talked and snacked pretty much the entire trip, including the drive from the small airport to Prairieview in the rattletrap rental car his contact had left for him. She’d talked about her fiancé, his father, his mother, her mother, her father, her friends... She’d filled his plane with so many people, making them so real, he’d halfway expected them to walk out of the plane when they landed.

By the time they arrived at the motel, the last two years of peace and tranquillity had disappeared without a trace and he was back in chaos. He’d grown up with four—count ’em, four—little sisters who’d kept the pandemonium at a consistently high level and regularly dived headfirst into situations from which he had to rescue them. Then, like a man possessed by masochism, when his twin sisters left for college, he’d married a ditzy woman who made his sisters seem staid and reasonable. His twin sisters had left three years ago and the ex-wife four months after he’d married her. Two years of serenity ... until last night. Until Analise.

She was like his sisters and his ex-wife all put together then multiplied. And to make it worse, his hormones didn’t care. They would betray him, sell him down the river, send him into servitude just to have Analise. He wasn’t sure how it was possible, but while his brain told him to get away and save himself while he still could, his body wanted her with an intensity that threatened to overrule his brain.

What little sleep he’d caught in fleeting snatches had been filled with dreams of Analise... Analise talking, eating, offering him candy, taking candy from his fingers with those soft, full lips-

A knock on the door interrupted the thoughts Nick didn’t want to be having but couldn’t seem to stop. He untwisted the sheet from his ankle, retrieved his blue jeans from the worn carpet and went to answer the door.

In the harsh glare of morning sunlight, Nick hallucinated a short, rounded angel with a wrinkled, cherubic face and a halo of snow-white curls. She wore a navy blue dress with white lace on the collar just like the one his grandmother had worn for church and funerals. She beamed up at him and shoved a large tray toward him. “Good morning, Mr. Claiborne. I brought you some breakfast.”

He blinked a couple of times but the hallucination didn’t go away. In fact, his nose was getting in on. the act now, telling him the angel carried bacon, eggs and coffee on that tray.

He stepped back, allowing the angel to enter his room. With any sort of luck, he could get a few bites of those eggs and a couple of sips of coffee before the hallucination vanished.

“I’m Mabel Finch,” she said, shoving aside the lamp on the bedside table and setting down the tray. “My husband, Horace, and I own this place. Horace is the one who let you in last night.”

She lifted the napkin, exposing a plate covered with crisply fried bacon, scrambled eggs, two delicately browned biscuits, a bowl of gravy and a large mug of coffee. Nick was positive then that she was an angel and he was in heaven. He must have died sometime during the night, probably a heart attack from one of those high-voltage dreams about Analise.

“Th-Thank you,” he stammered. “This is great.” Mabel bustled across the room and opened the curtains then leaned back against the dresser, folding her arms across her ample bosom. “Analise wanted you to have a good breakfast. She said you didn’t eat anything last night except a handful of cookies.”

Analise. He might have known. He drew his fingers over his stubbled jaw, needing to feel the slight prickle of reality. “How long have you known Analise?”

“Since about seven this morning. Sit. Eat. You don’t want to be late for church.”

“Church?” He plopped onto the edge of the bed. Damnedest motel he’d ever stayed in. Being served breakfast in his room by the motel owner was nice, but being sent to church was, he thought, a little pushy. However, it was a small price to pay for this kind of food.

He unfolded the napkin, picked up the fork and began to eat.

“Analise told us all about why you’re here, looking for that Abbie Prather person.”

Nick broke open a flaky biscuit, poured gravy over it and crunched another piece of bacon. He wasn’t going to let Analise interfere with this unexpected feast. He wasn’t

“Horace and I bought this place ten years ago from the Claxtons who sold out and moved to Arizona because he had arthritis and they’d heard the climate was better there. We’re from Wisconsin, so this climate seems better to us. It’s all relative, I guess. Anyway, we don’t know Abbie Prather or June Martin, but if she lives out away from everything and keeps to herself, we might not know her since we’ve only been here ten years. I told Analise that the ministers would be the ones to ask because they know everybody.”

Like an embezzler would go to church, Nick thought, breaking open the second biscuit.

“And sure enough, when Analise called Bob Sampson, who pastors the Freewill Baptist Church on Grand Avenue, he told her to come talk to him. Analise said she was sure you wouldn’t mind her borrowing your car and going over there so we wouldn’t have to wake you.”

More gravy on that biscuit, Nick ordered himself Muffle everything this woman is saying with eggs and bacon. Drown it in coffee.

But it was no use. She had his attention.

Analise had borrowed his car? Since he had the only key, that must mean she’d practiced more of her questionable skills and hot-wired it.

“She said to tell you that she’ll be back to get you during Sunday school so you can both go to the service at eleven,” Mabel continued, then shook her head slowly, the action not disturbing her tight curls. “I don’t believe the good Lord will mind if she wears those purple shorts to church, but we’re Methodists. I’m not so sure about those Baptists. I offered to loan her one of my dresses, but she wouldn’t hear of it.”

Purple shorts?

He laid down his fork, drained the cup of coffee and gave up.

Before he was even out of bed, Analise had befriended the motel owners, procured breakfast for him, found a contact who remembered their missing party, stolen his car and gone to church in purple shorts.

And he’d thought he was finished with taking care of, riding herd on and bailing out irresponsible, resourceful females.

Not that his ex-wife, Kay, had ever sent his libido spiraling out of control the way Analise did.

How the heck was he going to keep her out of trouble when he was in major trouble himself?

Analise left the Reverend Robert Sampson’s house and headed back to the motel to get Nick so they could go to church and talk to other long-standing members of the congregation who might remember Abbie Prather—a.k.a. June Martin—and Sara.

A vivid picture was emerging of the woman who’d caused Lucas’s family untold agony, and it wasn’t a pretty one. She’d been so strict on her daughter that even the Reverend Sampson, a by-the-book clergyman, thought she was cruel rather than dedicated.

The decrepit car Analise had borrowed from Nick inched along the asphalt, so slow she wanted to open the door, put her foot out and push. What a difference from her own car, a small red sporty model with five on the floor and enough power to keep her in regular speeding tickets.

But her car was parked at the Tyler airport while she chugged along in this clunker, fighting her impatience to get back to the motel, back to Nick to share her news with him. Not that she was especially anxious to see him again, or that she felt any need to tell him what she’d accomplished, to prove that she wasn’t flaky. It didn’t bother her one bit if he thought she was flaky. And after last night, she’d bet her beloved fast red car that he definitely thought she was.

Yesterday had not been one of her diamond days. More like a lump-of-coal day, actually. And Nick had been the crowning lump, a promise of escalating fiascoes to come if she couldn’t control her obsessive penchant for flirting with trouble.

Nick was the complete opposite of Lucas. Lucas was safety, security, a friend she could count on. Nick was danger, an invitation to the unknown, to taste the exhilaration of a flight into skies that terrified her even as they tempted her, to prove she could do it.

For most of the night she’d lain awake in the hot little room at the motel, trying to forget the way his accidental touch had made her feel, the way the scent of him had invaded her senses and lingered as surely as if he’d been in that bed with her.

She gripped the steering wheel tightly and ordered herself to stop thinking about that. Not only were those inappropriate feelings for an engaged woman, they were inappropriate feelings for a sane woman. Her bad habit of dancing with disaster usually resulted in a catastrophe rather than success.

She’d left her room early and, to her surprise, found a lead, something she could do to be useful, to take her mind off those hazardous-to-her-health feelings. She’d come up with information that would help them locate Abbie...and rescue Sara.

The familiar sound of a siren intruded on her thoughts.

Automatically her foot hit the brake while her eyes scanned the descending speedometer needle.

Damn! Had she been speeding again? What was the speed limit, anyway? She’d been too caught up in her thoughts to notice.

This decrepit car couldn’t possibly be speeding! Maybe the dangling taillight had fallen completely off, or the wire Nick had used to hold up the muffler broke or maybe the car with its three shades of rusty paint and primer violated some law of ugliness.

In her rearview mirror she watched the young officer swagger up to her car.

Swaggering was not a good sign.

She located her driver’s license and held it out the window as the man approached. She didn’t want him to look too closely inside, to see that she’d hot-wired the car rather than wake Nick to ask for the keys, rather than risk going inside that overheated motel room where he slept, probably in the nude, when she was already overheated.

The policeman accepted her license wordlessly then went back to his car to, she assumed, check for wants and warrants. Good grief! The police in Briar Creek never did that! She could be here all day!

Finally he swaggered back and leaned down to look in, dark sunglasses hiding his eyes. She leaned toward him so he couldn’t see the dangling wires.

“Going a little fast, weren’t you, Ms. Brewster?” And she’d have to go twice as fast to make up for lost time after this. “Only a little,” she protested. Why didn’t he give her a clue? Tell her what the speed limit was?

“Oh? How fast do you think you were going?”

How did she know what answer she should give when she had no idea what the speed limit was? “Well, I think possibly the speedometer said somewhere around about the vicinity of fifty-eight.”

He straightened and began to scribble on his clipboard. “The speed limit through this stretch is forty-five. Big sign a mile back.”

Great. An out-of-state ticket to start a brand-new blunder list for today.

“But you see,” she improvised, “this car is eleven years old, and since carbon buildup in internal combustion engines results in a gradual slowing of all exposed parts revolving counterclockwise, it’s necessary to deduct approximately one mile every year, which means I was only doing forty-seven, and what’s a couple of miles between friends?” She gave him her best smile.

The officer stopped writing, lowered his clipboard, raised his sunglasses to his forehead and looked at her. “What?”

“I said—”

“Never mind.” He shook his head and replaced his sunglasses. “It’s not right, whatever you said. You were doing fifty-nine. Slow down.”

“Okay,” she agreed. Had her gobbledygook really worked? Was she going to get off without a ticket?

He raised his clipboard again, dashing her hopes with the action. “You didn’t signal when you changed lanes, either.”

“But there was nobody else on the highway to signal to!”

“You have to obey the law all the time, not just when there’s somebody watching. Anyway, I was watching.”

She sighed. “All right. From now on I’ll signal before changing lanes if it’s two o’clock in the morning and I’m in the middle of the Sahara Desert.”

“You’re not wearing your seat belt.”

“It’s an old car. The belt’s broken.”

“I need to see your vehicle registration.”

Amazing what a quick downswing her luck had taken in the last few minutes. The way things were going, Nick’s contact probably hadn’t left them the vehicle registration.

Fumbling in the glove box, she sent up a silent prayer of thanks when she found the document. She gave it to the policeman, leaned her elbow out the window and smiled as innocently as she could.

“This vehicle’s registered to Fred Smith of Omaha, Nebraska.”

“Yes, it’s a borrowed car.”

He took a step backward and his hand dropped to his gun. “Borrowed?”

Analise froze. Was she going to be shot for taking Nick’s car that wasn’t really Nick’s car? “Yes, borrowed! You see, my friend...well, he’s not really my friend.” Oh, dear! She was getting nervous and incoherent. “My detective,” she said firmly, pleased with herself for finding the right word, “Nick Claiborne, flew into a small airport and it was late and his friend...well, I don’t know if it was his friend or just an acquaintance...anyway, he left him this car and I borrowed it this morning because I had to go to church and find out about Abbie Prather who’s now June Martin and—”

“Turn off your engine and step out of the vehicle.”

Turn off the engine? Dive under the dash and untwist the wires? Not a good idea.

Leaving the car running, she opened the door and slid out “If you’ll just call Nick at the...oh, dear, I can’t remember the name of the motel, but it’s down the highway a couple of miles, which is why I was heading that way except you can’t call him because there aren’t any phones in the rooms but Mabel has a phone...”

Nick stood on the sidewalk in front of his room in the still-cool, bright Sunday morning. From the outside, the old motel with its peeling paint and missing room numbers had a quaint charm. In other circumstances, he’d have considered the day to be perfect, a good omen. But as he waited for Analise. to show up in his borrowed car that she’d so cavalierly reborrowed, he had a bad feeling.

A large, older-model black car pulled up. His gaze flicked over the automobile and returned to searching the highway for any signs of the rust-colored—or covered—vehicle Analise had absconded with.

Mabel’s head popped out the window of the passenger side of the black car. “Analise just called. She needs you to get her out of jail.”

As Nick rode with the Finches to the Prairieview police station, he marveled that these people whom Analise hadn’t known twenty-four hours ago leaped to her defense.

“It’s Frank Marshall’s youngest boy,” Mabel explained. “He’s been watching too many cop shows on television. Nothing ever happens in Prairieview, so he goes around looking for trouble. Gave Mildred Adams a ticket for parking too close to a fire hydrant Took a tape measure and got her at four inches too close. Imagine, taking Analise in just because the car wasn’t registered in her name.”

Apparently Analise hadn’t mentioned in her phone call to Mabel Finch that she’d hot-wired his car. That undoubt edly contributed to the arresting officer’s suspicions.

Ten minutes later they were in the middle of the Sunday-silent town. Mannequins in the department store window stood motionless, gazing from painted eyes at the empty sofas and chairs on display in the furniture store across the street. The movie theater marquee had a couple of letters missing. Even the drugstore was deserted. Anyone needing an antacid or deodorant would, Nick presumed, have to wait until Monday.

Horace pulled up next to Nick’s rented car, in front of the small, weathered-rock building designated as the Prairieview Police Station by the words carved above the door.

Both Horace and Mabel started to get out, but Nick stopped them. “You all go on to church. I don’t want you to be late. I’ll take care of Analise.”

“Well, okay,” Horace agreed reluctantly. “But if you run into any trouble, you call us at the Methodist church and we’ll come talk to Frank’s boy.”

Nick thanked them, exited the car, walked up to the building and grasped the tarnished brass handle to yank open the front door. He’d take care of Analise all right. After he got her out of jail, he’d wring her slender neck.

The door proved to be heavier than he’d thought and reluctant to move, so his dramatic gesture was lost Instead, it creaked slowly open.

Analise and a young man in a blue uniform looked up as he entered. The man sat behind a desk with Analise in a chair in front. In the first instant, his mind registered that she was indeed wearing purple shorts with a scoop-necked, sleeveless blouse with bright flowers of purple, black, yellow and a green the same color as her eyes. She’d wrapped a long purple tie around the neck he was getting ready to wring, and the ends floated down her back. She sat with one long leg crossed over the other, a purple sandal adorning her slim foot. She was as bright and tempting and dangerous as the neon lights of Las Vegas.

In the second instant, he noted that she held five cards in her hand and had a pile of pennies in front of her.

Honour washed over him as he recalled the dubious skills her former boyfriend had taught her. She was playing poker with the cop who’d arrested her and dealing off the bottom of the deck, judging by the size of her pile of pennies as compared to the officer’s pile.

She gave him her dazzling smile just as he charged across the room and snatched the cards out of her fingers, sending the rest of the deck and her ill-gotten pennies flying. It also sent him tumbling into her lap.

How was it possible, in a moment of crisis, that he still noticed she smelled like honeysuckle on a warm summer evening and her skin was as soft and velvety as the petals of a magnolia blossom?

He pushed himself up, endeavouring to get his face out of her midriff and his hands off her thighs, even though his body would have loved to stay right there.

As he struggled to his feet, his gaze met her startled green eyes. Startles, but not horrified, some alien creature in the back of his brain exulted. Startled and maybe just a tittle bit...excited?

“Hold it right there, mister!”

Nick whirled around to see the officer standing with his weapon drawn.

Great. He was going to end up in jail with Analise, both of them growing old and fat together, eating fried eggs and bologna for breakfast every morning. And the way things were going, she’d be in a cell close enough for him to hear her talk all day long but not close enough to touch.

“It’s okay, Joe,” Analise reassured the officer. “This is Nick Claiborne, the man whose car I borrowed. Tell him I didn’t steal it, Nick.”

Joe reholstered his gun but didn’t relax. “Car’s not registered to Nick Claiborne.”

“I told you—” Analise began impatiently, but Joe cut her off.

“You got any proof you rented it from Fred Smith?” He sneered at Nick.

“Have you got any proof I didn’t?” Nick withdrew his wallet, opened it to his private investigator’s license and slammed it onto the desk. “I’m working on a case. Ms. Brewster is my client. I rented the car, and she took it to use this morning.”

“With your permission?”

Nick gritted his teeth but made himself lie. “Yes.”

“Then how come she had to hot-wire it?”

There was a limit to how big a lie he could tell. He avoided the question instead. “What are the charges against Ms. Brewster?”

Joe stood straighter. “Speeding, failure to signal before changing lanes, failure to wear a seat belt and possibly driving a stolen vehicle.”

“Has the car been reported stolen?”

Joe slumped back into his chair. “No,” he admitted grudgingly.

“Then write her tickets for the rest and let her go.”

Joe waved one hand negligibly. “Aw, we’ll just forget about the tickets. Analise explained why she was speeding, there wasn’t anybody around to signal to anyway and the seat belt was broken.”

“Thanks, Joe!” Analise beamed at the officer then bent and started retrieving her pennies.

Nick grabbed her arm and dragged her from the station.

“What on earth is the matter with you?” she demanded, jerking away from his grasp as soon as they were outside.

“Bad enough you were cheating at cards with a police officer, I wasn’t about to let you take your winnings with you.

She fisted her hands on her curved, purple-silk-clad hips. “I wasn’t cheating! How could you possibly think I would cheat?”

“You’re the one who told me your friend taught you to deal off the bottom of the deck!”

“I assume you know how to shoot a gun, too, but you don’t go around doing it for fun!”

Nick threw his arms into the air. “I learned how to shoot a gun when I went through the police academy. The purpose was to save my life. I haven’t shot one since I left the force. Do you want to explain to me how that relates to cheating at cards?”

“I...was...not...cheating!” She bent forward at the waist and ground out each word from between clenched teeth. “And you never know when being able to deal from the bottom of the deck could save your life.”

“How?”

“Well...” Her voice trailed off and she moved around him toward the car, then stopped and faced him again. “You never know until the situation arises. It’s always best to be prepared.”

He unlocked the car door and opened it. “Get in.”

“Not until you apologize for accusing me of cheating.”

“If you weren’t cheating, how did you win all those pennies?”

She shrugged, the movement shifting the brightly colored fabric that covered her rounded breasts in a tantalizing manner. “Beginner’s luck.”

“Beginner’s luck? What about the story of your boyfriend teaching you to play poker?”

“Well, sure, he taught me, but we never really played, just practiced. When I saw a deck of cards on the desk in there, I figured I might as well give it a shot. What did I have to lose? If you hadn’t charged in like some maniac, I was getting ready to offer him double or nothing to drop the charges against me. I had a royal fiush. Joe dealt me the ace, queen, jack and ten of hearts and then I drew the king.”

With a final glare, she turned and slid into the car then closed the door.

Now, how the hell had she managed to make him feel guilty, when she’d stolen his car, gotten herself thrown in jail and he’d rescued her? At least Kay had been grateful when he’d gotten her out of her scrapes.

He strode around to the driver’s side, resisting an impulse to smack the hood as he passed. The car might fall completely apart.

Damn it, she’d hired him to do a job, to vindicate her fiancé’s father and find the guilty party. Nothing in that job description required him to look out for her when she got herself in a mess. He solved other people’s problems from a safe distance. He didn’t get involved, not with the problem or the client. That’s what he liked about this job. No emotions. No ups, no downs, no worries, no losses.

He got in the car and slammed the door...hard The vehicle quivered and rattled but remained in one piece.

“I don’t care what it takes,” he said, “even if it costs me a day’s investigation, even if you decide to fire me, you are, as of this minute, on your way back to Texas.”

Distress clouded Analise’s features. “I can’t do that. Bob—Reverend Sampson—told me that June Martin—that’s the name he knew her by—that her daughter, Sara, not only had red hair like me but also green eyes and she even spelled her name the way I spelled my doll’s name when I was a little girl. With no ‘h’ on the end.” She lifted both hands as if to forestall his protest. “I know, I know. Could be coincidences, but I believe I have a connection with Sara. I believe fate brought me here so I could intervene in her life and help her get over the cruel things her mother did to her. I have to be there when you find her. It’s my destiny. I have wonderful parents, a stable home life, terrific friends, all the material things I could possibly want—I’ve always had life handed to me on a silver platter and now it’s my turn to pass along some of the good stuff.”

There was no mistaking the sincerity, the concern, in her voice and in her eyes. At the same time as a part of Nick raged in protest, another part melted at her misplaced desire to help someone less fortunate.

Her long, golden legs, generous lips and rounded breasts that moved those improbable flowers on her blouse up and down and all around with every breath undoubtedly had something to do with his meltdown, but he couldn’t think about that.

If they did make it to church, he’d most certainly pray that they found June and Sara Martin before nightfall and Analise would be out of his life forever.

“Bob told me that June and Sara moved away right after Sara started school,” Analise informed him, as if her sole purpose in life was to complicate his.

The fact that some rebellious, not-very-bright part of him gave a tiny, embarrassed cheer at the thought of Analise not disappearing from his life forever only proved how desperately he needed to get away from her.

Chapter Three

Analise had always considered herself fairly adept at reading people’s expressions, but Nick’s facial contortions had her totally confused. He was bound to be a little upset at having to retrieve her from jail, and she hadn’t expected him to be thrilled at the news that their quarry had left Nebraska. However, his eyes alternately brightened and darkened as they darted from her head to her feet and back again. His lips compressed tightly even as the corner seemed to be trying to turn up in some sort of smile or grimace.

Finally he looked away and put the key in the ignition. “Can I drive this thing now or do you need to hot-wire it first?”

“I put everything back just the way it was.” She wanted to tell him that she wasn’t real thrilled at the idea of spending more time with him, either...with somebody who thought she was the type who would cheat at cards. But she didn’t think that would be a wise idea right now.

Besides, it wasn’t entirely true. Some part of her deep inside, some self-destructive part of her, was just the tiniest bit thrilled at the idea of spending more time with him. Actually, it was more than a tiny bit thrilled.

Whatever odd thoughts he’d been having as his gaze had raked her from head to foot, one element was always there...the heat. He’d sent her adrenaline surging, poured gasoline on those smoldering lumps of coal she thought she’d doused until he fell into her lap in the police station. Hardly a sensuous action, yet somehow it had been. She didn’t want to even think about the feel of his face buried against her stomach, his hand on her thigh.

Didn’t want to think about it but couldn’t seem to stop.

“Well,” Nick said, his curt tone slicing into her thoughts, “you’ve certainly had a busy morning. So where are we off to now? Church? Back to hear more from the Reverend Sampson?”

“No. Now we need to go to the Presbyterian church.”

“Ah, a conversion!”

“There’s no call for sarcasm. It’s where Sara’s grade-school principal goes. Sampson thinks he’d probably remember where they moved to.”

Nick grunted and mumbled something.

“What?”

“I said, that’s a good lead. Any idea where the Presbyterian church is located?”

“Yes, I have quite specific directions.”

As Nick drove, Analise kept her gaze turned away from his chiseled profile, his tousled hair, his hands that had touched her body. Those thoughts were not only dangerous but also disloyal to Lucas. Instead, she focused out the car window, watching the older houses with their neatly tended lawns roll past. Prairieview had the same sleepy small-town atmosphere as Briar Creek. The only real difference was the terrain, the flat Nebraska prairie instead of lushly green, gently rolling hills. But it had the same quiet, reverent Sunday-morning air of home, and she had the same embarrassed, inept feeling she ended up with so often at home.

Amazing. She’d started out the day so good, doing everything right, then managed to get herself thrown into jail and had to ask Nick to rescue her. And Nick thought she was cheating at cards. That bothered her as much as anything. For as long as she could remember, she’d been a little blunder-prone, but nobody had ever accused her of being dishonest

Until today.

Until Nick.

It shouldn’t matter what Nick thought of her, but it did. And that bothered her. Trying to prove herself to somebody like Nick could only result in major problems. She’d seen proof of that already this morning.

Oh, brother! She’d just admitted to herself that she wanted to prove herself to Nick, to impress him, to fly into the face of the storm and beat back the wind. Fat chance.

“All tight,” Nick said, interrupting her gloomy contemplation. “Tell me in detail about your conversation with the Reverend Sampson.”

She looked over at him. His square jaw was set resolutely, but at least he wanted to discuss the good part of the morning. “Bob Sampson remembered June Martin very clearly. She came to his church every week and she worked at the bank.”

“That’s interesting. Did any money disappear along with her when she left town?”

“I asked him that and he said no. Either she didn’t want to push her luck or she got better at hiding her crimes. He said she was kind of a religious fanatic. She and her daughter went to every service, but they never made friends, never participated in social activities. He said Sara was a very quiet, subdued little girl, that June ruled her with an iron hand and Sara seemed scared of her mother.”

“That’s too bad.”

He sounded disconnected, detached, as though they were talking about the mechanical breakdown of a car or something. “It certainly is too bad! Where were the authorities? Why didn’t somebody help Sara? Why didn’t Sampson do something about it? He’s supposed to help people!”

“Hey, don’t get mad at me. I’m agreeing with you. But you’ve got to be realistic here. That was a long time ago, a small town, and what could the authorities do anyway? Did she beat Sara? Did she hurt her physically?”

“She spanked her. Sampson saw her do that in church. And she probably did worse in private. How else could she subdue her so drastically? Remember you said when she was in Wyoming that she’d been, and I quote, a pistol. June Martin had to do something drastic to break her spirit like that.”

He stared straight ahead through the windshield, his profile calm and unperturbed though his jaw was still set solidly, with one muscle twitching slightly as if maintaining that calm was an effort. “I’m sure you’re right, but that was a lot of years ago. Sara’s grown now, probably has a good job, a husband, maybe a couple of kids. Whatever happened to her as a child is over and done with. We’ll find June Martin and she’ll go to jail for embezzlement and you’re going to have to accept that as her punishment for whatever she did wrong in raising her daughter.”

“I can’t believe you’re so uncaring about this whole thing!”

Nick pulled into the Presbyterian church’s packing lot and turned to Analise. “I can’t believe you’re getting so upset about somebody you don’t even know.”

For a long moment Analise stared into the distant, unreadable blue of Nick’s gaze and questioned exactly why she was so obsessed with Sara’s happiness. Obviously it only added to her instability in Nick’s eyes. On the other hand, she couldn’t accept his total lack of concern.

“I can’t explain it, but Sara doesn’t feel like a stranger. It’s like there’s some sort of a link between her and me. I felt it last night when you first told me about her. Then today when Sampson was talking about her, it was almost like I could feel her sadness and loneliness. Like I was destined to find that little girl who has the same color hair and eyes that I do, find her and rescue her from the awful woman who caused so many problems for so many people.”

Nick lifted one eyebrow skeptically.

“Fine,” she said, turning away and reaching for the door handle. “I don’t care whether or not you believe me. I don’t care whether or not you keep working for me. I’ll do it without you.”

“Analise—” He laid a restraining hand on her shoulder, and those tingles started again, her already warm skin warming in a different way, setting those lumps of coal to blazing again.

She held her breath, paralyzed, unable or unwilling to move. His hand slid slowly down her arm, lighting miniature forest fires everywhere it touched, and he made a sound that was somewhere between a sigh and a moan. Or maybe the sound came from her own throat. Or maybe she only imagined it.

This wasn’t good at all. Okay, it felt good, real good, but she didn’t need some man other than her fiancé making her feel things her fiancé didn’t. Not that she wanted to feel those things from her fiancé, that out-of-control, wildly exciting ride on the Adrenaline River straight over Disaster Falls.

She definitely didn’t need this, didn’t want or need to be attracted to a man who was the embodiment of chaos, guaranteed to create more problems in her life.

Nick took his hand away, and she opened the car door and darted out. He caught up to her as they reached the church steps.

“Analise, I didn’t mean to imply that I don’t believe you. I just have a hard time understanding. I helped raise four little sisters and I was married for four months, so I know what it means to be compelled to take care of someone and worry about them. But—a stranger?”

She stopped and turned back to him. “I’ve always had everything. It’s been great, but I’ve often wondered why I should be so lucky. I didn’t do anything to deserve any of it. And Sara didn’t do anything to deserve so much bad. It’s not fair that I had so much and she had so little. Maybe this is my chance to make things more equal.”

He stared at her for a long moment, his gaze unreadable and veiled. Finally he shrugged. “Whatever. It’s your case.” He looked down at her bare legs. “But are you sure you want to go to church in that getup?”

She lifted her chin defiantly. “Last I heard, God was more concerned with the inside than the outside. Anyway, I don’t have anything else. This bag will only hold so much.”

Nick scowled. “Why didn’t you bring a regular suitcase?”

“If my parents had seen me packing a suitcase, they’d have stopped me from coming. If anybody in that town had seen me with a suitcase, they’d have told my parents, who’d have stopped me from coming.”

Nick’s gaze moved slowly over her body, heating her blood as if he’d physically touched her, then returning to her face. “You’re a grown woman. Isn’t that a little extreme, having the whole town tattling on you?”

“I’ve always thought so. I told you, my parents are really into being overprotective. I’m twenty-seven years old, but you’d think I was still seven the way they treat me. They don’t think I have sense enough to cross the street by myself even though there’s hardly any traffic in Briar Creek, which remands me, I haven’t called them since I got to the airport in Wyoming yesterday and they’ll be worried. I need to find a phone.”

“Do your parents have reason to worry about you?”

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