Clint McPherson in the flesh.

He straightened suddenly, and she knew his instinct had warned him he was no longer alone. He swung around.

Brandy sensed two things immediately.

Her father had been right. Something was wrong. The light that had always flared in Clint’s eyes, brilliant and fierce, had an element in it she did not understand. It was as if ice and fire battled within him, and ice was winning.

And the second thing she could not ignore was that her skin was tingling treacherously. She loved Clint McPherson in some primal way she was not sure she could ever tame.

Nonsense, she told herself, utter hogwash.

She had been taming the untamable her whole life!

She was here on assignment for her father. And herself. She would lay her childish heartbreaks and hopes to rest. She would see Clint McPherson through the eyes of a mature woman…and tame that thing inside her that wanted him.

Dear Reader,

Just as the seasons change, you may have noticed that our Silhouette Romance covers have evolved over the past year. We have tried to create cover art that uses more soft pastels, sun-drenched images and tender scenes to evoke the aspirational and romantic spirit of this line. We have also tried to make our heroines look like women you can relate to and may want to be. After all, this line is about the joys of falling in love, and we hope you can live vicariously through these heroines.

Our writers this month have done an especially fine job in conveying this message. Reader favorite Cara Colter leads the month with That Old Feeling (#1814) in which the heroine must overcome past hurts to help her first love raise his motherless daughter. This is the debut title in the author’s emotional new trilogy, A FATHER’S WISH. Teresa Southwick concludes her BUY-A-GUY miniseries with the story of a feisty lawyer who finds herself saddled with an unwanted and wholly irresistible bodyguard, in Something’s Gotta Give (#1815). A sister who’d do anything for her loved ones finds her own sweet reward when she switches places with her sibling, in Sister Swap (#1816)—a compelling new romance by Lilian Darcy. Finally, in Made-To-Order Wife (#1817) by Judith McWilliams, a billionaire hires an etiquette expert to help him land the perfect society wife, and he soon starts rethinking his marriage plans.

Be sure to return next month when Cara Colter continues her trilogy and Judy Christenberry returns to the line.

Happy reading!

Ann Leslie Tuttle

Associate Senior Editor

That Old Feeling
A Father’s Wish
Cara Colter

www.millsandboon.co.uk

To Krista Casada, with thanks for all the “bubbles” you blow my way: friendship, inspiration, laughter.

Books by Cara Colter

Silhouette Romance

Dare To Dream #491

Baby in Blue #1161

Husband in Red #1243

The Cowboy, the Baby and the Bride-to-Be #1319

Truly Daddy #1363

A Bride Worth Waiting For #1388

Weddings Do Come True #1406

A Babe in the Woods #1424

A Royal Marriage #1440

First Time, Forever #1464

*Husband by Inheritance #1532

*The Heiress Takes a Husband #1538

*Wed by a Will #1544

What Child Is This? #1585

Her Royal Husband #1600

9 Out of 10 Women Can’t Be Wrong #1615

Guess Who’s Coming for Christmas? #1632

What a Woman Should Know #1685

Major Daddy #1710

Her Second-Chance Man #1726

Nighttime Sweethearts #1754

†That Old Feeling #1814

Silhouette Books

The Coltons

A Hasty Wedding

CARA COLTER

shares ten acres in the wild Kootenay region of British Columbia with the man of her dreams, three children, two horses, a cat with no tail and a golden retriever who answers best to “bad dog.” She loves reading, writing and the woods in winter (no bears). She says life’s delights include an automatic garage door opener and the skylight over the bed that allows her to see the stars at night. She also says, “I have not lived a neat and tidy life, and used to envy those who did. Now I see my struggles as having given me a deep appreciation of life, and of love, that I hope I succeed in passing on through the stories that I tell.”

Dear Reader,

My life partner, Rob, is an adventurer. He knew how to use a rifle before he knew how to spell Mississippi. I, on the other hand, was raised with swimming lessons, story time at the library and meat that came in nicely wrapped packages from the grocery store. Because of having Rob in my life I have found myself in places where it is possible to be charged by a grizzly bear—and I was! Quite frankly, I’m happier at home with a book, but being thrown completely into an alien world, where I’m uncomfortable, awkward and frightened, forces me to be more than I was before.

This series, A FATHER’S WISH, begins with a delightful what if. What if three young women, who had been indulged their entire lives, were put in situations that required more of them than had ever been required before? Though my three heroines don’t leave civilization (though they might argue that point) the challenges they face are grizzly bears to them! And, of course, they have the most remarkable heroes to antagonize them, challenge them, protect them and guide them.

I invite you to come with me as Brandy, Jessie and Chelsea—one brave, one brainy, one beautiful—find out life and love have plans for them that are beyond their wildest dreams….

Sincerely,

Cara Colter

Contents

Prologue

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Epilogue

Prologue

Two letters sat on his desk, both unopened, both marked Personal and Confidential. One was typed, the return address familiar to him. The second was addressed in handwriting, the feminine script of one not yet mature. He did not recognize that name or the return address. His hand hovered, and then he chose, hope and dread mixed within him.

Moments later, Winston Jacob King put down the typed letter and pinched the bridge of his nose between bony fingers. He felt shocked, all over again, though the letter only confirmed what his doctor had told him earlier in the week.

Dying.

He shouldn’t be shocked. He was eighty-three years old. Had he really thought he was going to live forever?

The short answer? Yes.

Jake got up from behind his desk. A fire roared in the hearth, though it was a mild day. He was always cold, now.

He crossed the room, which was furnished in an eclectic mix of antiques. A thick Persian rug covered the aged oak floor, and Degas, Pissaro, Monet hung on the walls. But he noticed none of what it had taken him a lifetime to collect. Instead, he looked out the huge bay window.

His Southampton estate, Kingsway, lay before him. Tulips and daffodils splashed the spring beds with color. A gardener pruned the rosebushes. Beyond him were lush pastures and a Hanoverian mare, muscled and shiny, grazing contentedly while her foal frolicked.

The doctor had said he might have a year left, if they managed everything perfectly.

For some reason, as Jake looked out over his fields, a line from that haunting Johnny Cash song, played in his head.

“My empire of dirt,” Jake murmured out loud. Once upon a time it had made him so proud that he—a man who had begun as a mechanic from the backwoods—had accomplished all this. In a recent issue of Success Magazine, Jake’s company, Auto Kingdom, had been called the Costco of the automobile aficionado. Ridiculous, since he predated Costco by forty years.

Jake did not feel afraid of dying. No, what he felt was a sharp sense of sadness for his children, his three daughters. None were married, and he longed for the miracle of a grandchild.

“That’s what you get for marrying so late in life,” he berated himself. He’d been fifty-seven when his first daughter was born.

He went to the wall that was hung, window to window and ceiling to floor, with photographs of his princesses. His true treasures.

The wall documented the lives of his three daughters. Wasn’t it just yesterday he had stood in front of the hospital, beaming so proudly, with Brandgwen, his firstborn, in his arms? Wasn’t it just a moment ago that Jessica had sat on that fat Welsh pony? Didn’t only a breath separate him from the day he’d stood in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower with his baby Chelsea’s small hand in his?

He felt such a rush of tenderness looking at their faces, the stamp of their personalities surviving the march of time. Brandy always looking faintly mischievous and lovely as a leprechaun, Jessica, looking studious, her green eyes huge behind those glasses, and his baby, Chelsea, twenty-two already, gorgeous and self-assured, always posing.

Brave, brainy and beautiful, his three daughters. Long ago, playing on his name and the American public’s yearning for royalty, the press had dubbed his daughters princesses, and it had stuck for all these years.

The photographs showed lifestyles that might have been envied by real royalty. His throat ached as he looked at all his efforts to make them happy. The wall documented his daughters, at various ages, jumping their ponies, riding gondolas on the canals in Venice, skiing the slopes of the Alps. It documented the cars, the lavish birthday parties, the trinkets, the diamond tiaras, the gowns.

Oh, yes, Jake had gone into overdrive trying to insure the happiness of his daughters, after the scandalous death of his very young and very beautiful wife, more than twenty years ago.

There was no picture of Marcie on this wall. She had died when Brandy, their oldest daughter, had been six.

Brandy did not have her mother’s looks—her face had always been impish rather than gorgeous. Dark sapphire-blue eyes were her only inheritance from her mother. She had hair as his own had once been—brown, thick, and just wavy enough to make it impossible to tame. Who knew where the freckles had come from? She had never outgrown them. She had been, to her mother’s distress, happiest in overalls down at the stables. Brandy had a reckless streak in her, and it glittered in her eyes. The press had dubbed her the tomboy princess.

She was twenty-six, now, still as lithe as a young boy. And still a thrill seeker. Her bravery was legend. The King fortune had allowed her to pursue one adrenaline rush after another, and he had indulged her.

A mistake. Her latest “hobby” was BASE jumping. Her last jump had been from the top of the highest waterfall in the world, Angel Falls in Venezuela, every heart-stopping moment of it recorded by her faithful press. She’d always been like that, reckless.

But in light of his own news, he seemed to be seeing Brandy differently. She risked everything—except her heart.

Behind the dancing darkness of her eyes he could see the wariness in her.

Well, why wouldn’t she be wary of love? She would have some memory of her mother’s colossal indifference to her, the storminess of her parents’ relationship.

He shifted his attention from Brandy to his other daughters, and with newfound depth, he felt the cruel weight of failure.

For all his efforts, were any of his princesses really happy? Not one of his daughters seemed to have a goal, a dream, a quest. Not one of them seemed to understand that love was everything.

Jessie, Jessica, his second daughter. She had hurtled through high school and entered university at seventeen. She was twenty-four now, and he had lost track of what degree she was working on. She talked of things he did not understand. Jessie seemed to be intellectual and disconnected. Despite having some kind of boyfriend—a fuddy-duddy professor who seemed about as exciting as day-old porridge—Jake saw heartbreaking loneliness in the lovely green of her astonishing eyes. Eyes hidden behind hideous glasses, and her gorgeous wheat-colored hair tucked into a prim bun that made her look like a spinster.

And then there was his baby, Chelsea. Ah, she was the darling of the press. Her picture was in some paper or magazine every time he went by a newsstand. She was the most like Marcie in looks, her beauty absolutely breathtaking. Her eyes were hazel, an exact mix of Marcie’s blue and his own brown. Her hair floated nearly to her waist in a shiny wave of platinum blond. Her features were perfect, her mouth wide and generous.

She had her own staff—a hairstylist and a dresser who were so important to her she traveled with them. She kept such a high profile she had to have a bodyguard. Jake had indulged her, too, her every whim satisfied.

And yet he had the disconcerting feeling, when he was around Chelsea, that she wasn’t able to see real beauty, that her world had become so superficial it had blinded her to what was real and good and genuine.

Jake kissed his fingertips and touched the images of his daughters’ cheeks. His heart swelled within his chest, feeling as if it would break for loving them.

One year. Would that be enough to help his daughters discover what life was really all about? He wasn’t going to play matchmaker. That would be disgraceful and manipulative.

But he had successfully created and run one of the largest corporations in the U.S. He knew that sometimes bringing the correct combination of people together, then leaving them alone, made remarkable and magical things happen.

Surely, a man who knew power as intimately as he did could do something so simple as set it up so his daughters could make the discovery that he himself had just made?

In the end, only one thing mattered.

Love.

Long ago, he had loved a woman, truly. She had not been like Marcie. She had not even been particularly pretty. But she had glowed with a genuine sweetness that, at the time, he had not fully appreciated. Lately, he awoke at night remembering the feeling of her head pressed into his neck, her dark hair scattered across his chest. He felt a sense of shattering loss now that he had not felt then.

Then, so busy building Auto Kingdom, so driven, that when she had talked to him of the future, of babies, he had been impatient. Perhaps he had even been cruel. Certainly insensitive, preoccupied with “important” matters.

He must have been, because she had gone away.

“Fiona,” he called softly, and for a moment he could have sworn he felt her presence tingle across his spine, as warm and sweet as ever. It filled him with longing, which he impatiently brushed aside. He would not start acting old and feebleminded!

But he did realize that, save for his daughters, he might have missed love’s glory all together. Was it too late to return to them the gift they had given him? If he could help them find love…

The shock lifted from him, the haze he had been walking in since opening the doctor’s letter fell away. He became a man with a mission, a brilliant strategist who needed to get his most important affairs in order before he left this earth.

His most important affairs: Brandy, Jessie and Chelsea.

He returned to his desk. He would have to be crafty. He couldn’t summon them all at once. They were smart girls, every one of them. Together they would sniff out a plot to meddle in their lives as easily as his hounds caught the scent of a fox.

No, he had to help them one at a time, and hope and pray that the clock wouldn’t run out.

Aware that time was of the essence, he picked up the phone to his personal assistant. “James? Find Brandy. Get her home at once.”

He picked up the letter and envelope from his doctor, crushed them in his hand, and moved to the fireplace. He hurtled them in.

Too late, he realized he had inadvertently crumpled the two letters—the one still unopened—together. He watched the girlish handwriting emerge from under the other burning paper, curl and then turn brown before it disappeared into flame.

A chill went up and down his spine, even though he could not know that he would have found the content of that second letter as devastating as that of the first….

Chapter One

“I do not love Clint McPherson,” Brandy told herself tersely.

She had been repeating the phrase like a mantra since she’d left Kingsway, her father’s home in Southampton on Long Island.

She was now driving, alone, on an unfamiliar road that twisted and wound around the shores of Lake of the Woods, a body of water so enormous that it was shared by two Canadian provinces and the state of Minnesota.

Finding one small cabin on it was beginning to look like an impossible task.

A cabin that belonged to none other than Clint McPherson.

Of course, she could say she hadn’t been able to find it or him. End of mission. Who would really expect her to find a place on a map dotted with names like Minaki and Keewatin and Kenora? People who were under the illusion English was spoken in Canada should just have a look at this map!

What are you afraid of? an unwanted voice within her asked.

Brandgwen King had spent the majority of her life proving she was afraid of absolutely nothing, so the question irked. She was not afraid of Clint McPherson, or in love with him either! So, she’d had a girlhood crush on the man once. Big deal. It meant nothing. At twenty-six, she was all grown up now. The pain of how he had scorned her was long gone.

The point should be moot. The man in her life was Jason Morehead, her long time companion in adventure. Recently things had turned romantic, then unromantic, and now Jason was avidly begging her hand in marriage.

Why not marry him? He was wealthy, he was awesomely good-looking, he shared her taste for all things fast and furious.

“I don’t love him,” she said vehemently, and knew she was talking about Clint, even though she had been thinking of Jason, whom she was pretty sure she didn’t love either. With pure frustration, Brandy pounded on the steering wheel of the red Ferrari she was driving.

Her father had arranged for her to have a car through a dealership connection in Winnipeg, Manitoba, where her flight from New York had landed several hours ago. She had been given the keys, told to use the car for as long as she needed it, no charge. It was a fact of life, in her circles, that the more money you had, the less you needed it.

Of course, that nice man had probably thought the tomboy princess was going to be photographed in and around town in his car, not heading into some godforsaken wilderness.

“Love Clint McPherson?” she said out loud, with a derisive snort. “More like hate him.”

How had she gotten back to that when she’d been thinking, with determination, about the nice man who had lent her the nice car?

She sighed, annoyed with herself, and then surrendered. Hate? That seemed a bit strong for a man she had not seen for nearly seven years, not since he’d totally spoiled her nineteenth birthday party.

“Indifferent,” she decided, and then announced it out loud, putting down her window and calling it to the giant fir trees that lined the road. “I am indifferent to Clint McPherson.”

It rang of a lie. She knew it. The trees probably knew it, too. She put her window back up, took a twist in the road a trifle too quickly and slowed marginally.

How could her father have asked this of her? And why had she said yes?

She thought back to her meeting with her father, and the frown of concentration deepened on her face.

He had seemed old.

Of course, he was old. He’d always been old, even when she was young!

But he had never seemed old.

She was coming to see Clint because her father had asked her to. And maybe because she needed time to sort through all the implications of Jason’s unexpected announcement of his deep and undying love.

It was that simple. She had not agreed to this trip because she harbored some secret wish to see Clint again. She had come because her father asked things of her so rarely. He didn’t know it, but if he ever said to her that he wished she would not do some of the things that she did—like jumping out of airplanes or, more recently, off cliffs, buildings and bridges—then she would stop, just like that, no questions asked.

But he never asked.

Now he had asked something. He was old, yes, but beloved to her. The truth was Brandy would do anything for him, this gentle man who had loved her, and her sisters, so unconditionally, forever.

She thought back on the conversation she’d had with him. She had been distracted by the heat in the room, the fire blazing, so his request had really caught her up the side of the head.

“Brandy,” he’d said. “I need a favor. Clint—”

Her heart had done that traitorous flip-flop at the sound of his name.

“—has not recovered from Rebecca’s death.”

Rebecca, the woman Clint McPherson had married, was a woman who had been everything Brandy was not. Because Rebecca was a lawyer for Jake’s company, Brandy had known her slightly, well enough to know she was composed, classy, refined. Her hair was of the tameable variety, her makeup never ran and her clothing never rumpled.

Brandy’s chestnut locks, on the other hand, had a will of their own. Her style depended largely on humidity, direction of the wind and other forces beyond her control. Even when she tried to tame her masses of wavy hair, a few tresses always defiantly sprang free, giving her an impish look that went well with the nickname tomboy princess the press had given her long ago, and that she had never managed to outgrow.

Added to that, she had never learned the subtleties of proper makeup application, despite her younger sister Chelsea’s many efforts to show her.

And clothing? She relied heavily on many-pocketed cargo pants and T-shirts. To Chelsea’s horror, sweats were her sister’s favorite fashion statement.

Brandy knew her lack of fashion acumen was a disappointment to the American public who had long ago made Jake King’s motherless daughters into their princesses. At least she had not opted out of the role entirely, like her sister Jessie. No, Brandy tried never to disappoint in the fast-living department. Not parties or drugs, no, just lots of rich-kid fun: big engines, fast horses, white water. She had discovered the love of her life when she was sixteen and had sky-dived for the first time. The new thrill was BASE jumping.

Her lack of ability to make a stunning personal fashion statement was part of the reason she had not attended Clint’s wedding, though she had been invited, of course. Clint was like family, her father’s right-hand man since Brandy had been fourteen.

Younger, and so much more dynamic than the rest of that inner circle, Clint had fairly bristled with a kind of dangerous energy that had made her skin tingle.

“Back when I was young and hopelessly naive,” she told herself, taking a curve much too quickly. Clint would not make her skin tingle, now.

Good grief, no. She hung out with Jason Morehead, People magazine’s number-two pick as the world’s sexiest and most eligible bachelor.

Still, Brandy had made sure she was a world away the day Clint McPherson had spoiled her fondest fantasy by marrying someone else. She had sent a lavish gift—a complete set of antique silverware—if she recalled. On the day Clint had said, “I do,” Brandy had been paddling frantically through the foaming, freezing waters in the Five Finger Rapids section of the Yukon River.

And for the birth of Clint and Rebecca’s daughter—the same. An exquisite, expensive gift—a handmade bassinet from Italy—but Brandy had been a no-show at the christening party. She’d been arrested for jumping off the New River Gorge Bridge in Virginia for the utterly ridiculous reason that it wasn’t “Bridge Day,” the only day of the year that BASE jumping was legal off the 876-foot height.

And then, shockingly, only days after the christening, Rebecca had died. Brandy had known, because of Clint’s longstanding relationship with her family, that she’d had to go to the funeral. But somehow she had ended up at Angel Falls in Venezuela instead. She’d sent a card and an extravagant, tasteful, subdued spray of white roses.

“It’s been more than a year,” her father had said, sadly. “He does some work from home, but he’s become reclusive. He stays at that cabin in Canada, with a baby, and when I talk to him he seems so detached, unnaturally cool, as if nothing touches him.”

Brandy had listened to her father, and thought, a bit cynically, that there was nothing new about Clint being detached or unnaturally cool. But her heart insisted on hearing the words her father didn’t say. Clint had loved Rebecca so much that he planned to mourn forever.

“Brandy, I want you to go to him.”

It was probably been the heat in the room, but for a moment she actually thought she was going to faint. “What?” she stammered.

“You were always the one who could make him laugh. Go and make Clint laugh again.”

“I don’t recall making him laugh,” she said stiffly. “I recall making him very, very angry on several occasions.”

“Precisely,” her father said with satisfaction.

“Sorry?”

“Brandy, you make him feel strongly. Go there. Make him laugh, or make him angry, but make him feel something.”

The room was silent for a long time while she pondered what he was asking of her. She gave him the only possible answer.

“I can’t,” she said softly. “Really. I can’t.”

Then her father did something he had never done before.

He covered her hand with his, and she felt the tremble in it. His eyes locked on hers, and she saw the weariness there and the pleading. Then he whispered, “Please.”

She stared at him and heard his desperation, heard that he was begging her to do this thing for him.

She felt the shock of it, knew the depth of his love for the man who had stood so loyally at his side for so long, and knew she could not refuse her father this request, even if it threatened the most secret places within her, even if she knew it was absurd to put herself in this position.

She was not going to be able to rescue Clint.

Still, her father’s hand trembling on top of hers and the stifling heat in the room and the desperation in his voice had made her say yes, she would go there. She would try.

Besides, it would give her a week or two to figure out what to do about Jason.

So now, pretty sure she was lost in the Canadian wilds, she stopped once again and studied her instructions. She was in the heart of lake country now. Down the occasional long, winding driveway, she caught a glimpse of a posh resort, a private cabin, heavenly worlds that promised the perfect summer. But it was still early in the year, spring, and the countryside seemed largely abandoned.

“I do not love Clint McPherson,” she told herself, and gave herself a shake, wondering how her thoughts had gone there when she had been focusing so fiercely on the spring landscapes around her.

She put the car back in gear and took the next series of twists in the road fast enough to make her heart hammer within her throat.

That was how she always handled emotion. She shoved it away with adrenaline.

“My drug of choice,” she muttered. She thought it was a fairly good one, too. Much better than booze or drugs or food, or the worst one of all, men.

She slammed on the brakes, put the car in reverse.

A small copper sign, mounted on a tasteful stone post, glinted in the sun, nearly lost among the thick green foliage that surrounded it. It marked a private driveway.

Touch the Flame.

She was here then. She took a deep breath and recognized she was afraid. So she did what she always did when she felt that uncomfortable little fissure of fear.

She put the gas pedal down so hard that she was sucked back into her seat as if she were on a launch.

The car rocketed up a scenic lane, lined on both sides with gigantic fir trees. The road climbed a gentle rise, and she slammed on the brakes again at the top, her breath caught in her throat.

She had seen some of the most beautiful places on earth.

Yet this place caught at her heart. The road curved downward, opening suddenly out of woods into a beautiful clearing.

It wasn’t exactly a cabin that stood there, but a log house, golden, sweeping, windows everywhere. It was on the edge of a manicured lawn that swept downward to the sparkling gray-blue lake waters. The property was located on a sheltered bay, completely private, natural rocks standing like powerful sentinels at the mouth of the cove. Beds of flowers rimmed the lawns, looking wild and glorious. It did not look like the property of a man who was living in misery.

It occurred to her, within minutes, she would see him again. Her heart beating in her throat, she drove slowly down to the house. She parked her vehicle beside a carport that held a silver Escalade.

She got out of her car and shut the door quietly. The fragrance of the trees wrapped around her, clean and pure, heaven-scented. At first she thought it was silent, almost eerily so, but then she could hear the call of birds, the insulted chatter of a squirrel, the lap of the water on the nearby shore.

Had she expected Clint to come out and greet her? Perhaps he had not heard her arrive. There was still time for her to get back in that car, ease her way back out that long driveway, save herself.

“Save myself,” she muttered. “Sheesh.”

She took a deep breath and walked around the front of the house on a beautiful black flagstone pathway that curved around and then spilled into a huge patio, of the same stone, that ran the entire length of the house. The front was even more impressive than the back. Outside living was obviously the priority here, a wide-timbered staircase led to a multitiered deck. On the first tier was a hot tub, on the second, lounge chairs with thick, colorful, yellow-striped cushions. Outside the French-paned doors leading into the house were a stainless-steel barbecue, a bright yellow umbrella table and matching cushioned chairs. Buckets of flowers were everywhere.

Then she spotted a lone pink bunny, and it seemed sadly out of place among all the sophisticated deck furnishings.

She turned away from the house, shaded her eyes against the brilliance of the sun glinting off the water, and scanned the yard.

A movement in the deep shadows in the farthest corner of the green grass caught her eye and stopped her heart.

Him.

Clint McPherson in the flesh.

Apparently he had not heard her arrival. He was in shorts, crouched over one of the flower beds, a spade in one hand, a bedding plant in the other.

If part of her had hoped that age had been cruel to him, that part of her was thwarted. Even from here she could see the power of his build, the grace and ease of his movement. He was wearing crisp khaki shorts and a navy-blue sports shirt. She could see the muscular line of his legs, the broad sweep of his shoulders, the muscles in his forearms leap and cord with each minute movement.

His hair was longer than she ever remembered it being, touching the collar of his short-sleeved shirt.

But she remembered that hair, thick and wavy, its color a burnished bronze that turned to spun gold in the sun.

The hair had always made her think of him as a throwback to some ancient and fierce Scottish warrior. For even in his business attire—knife-creased pants; white, starched shirt; conservative tie; black, polished shoes—even then, she had always seen that he was not what the rest of them were.

It was not just that he was not flabby or soft; it was that, in the most subtle of ways, he was not completely civilized. There was a look in his eyes of a man who had seen things, felt things, been at the center of things, that were hard and crude, perhaps even cruel. He had carried himself, back then, with the unconscious grace of a predator, alert, powerful, guarded.

He straightened suddenly, and she knew that part of him was unchanged—his instinct had warned him he was no longer alone. He stood and swung around, and Brandy saw the familiar grace and power in every line of his magnificent body.

Her breath caught in her throat and her foolish heart beat too fast.

His face was a study in unrelenting masculine angles. He had a strong nose, pronounced cheekbones; the line of his jawbone was straight and true. His chin, shadowed faintly with whiskers that were bronze tipped, hinted at a cleft. His lips were firm and sensuous.

His eyes were the tawny gold of a lion’s eyes, and every bit as watchful, every bit as ready, as they swept his property now.

She sensed two things immediately.

Her father had been right. Something was wrong. Despite the look of ordered perfection around the lake house, the light that had always flared in those eyes, brilliant and fierce, had an element in it she did not understand. It was as if ice and fire battled within him, and ice was winning.

The second thing she sensed and could not ignore was that her skin was tingling treacherously. She knew that she had wasted her time chanting her mantra all the way here. She loved Clint McPherson in some fierce and primal way she was not sure she could ever tame.

Nonsense, she told herself. Utter hogwash.

She drew in a deep breath and reprimanded herself firmly for her moment of weakness. She had been taming the untamable her whole life!

She was here on assignment for her father. Her assignment was to bring back the Clint they knew. But regarding him now, across the space of his well-manicured yard, she wondered if anyone had ever known him—or ever would.

But she had a third realization. She was also on assignment for herself.

Get over it, once and for all. It was probably this silly infatuation with Clint that was preventing her from jumping at Jason’s proposal.

She would lay her childish heartbreaks and hopes to rest. She would see Clint McPherson through the realistic eyes of a mature woman and tame that thing inside of her that wanted him.

Her exact words on her nineteenth birthday, if she recalled, and of course she did, in every excruciating and humiliating detail.

He looked at her for a long time, his expression unreadable, but certainly in no way welcoming. There was an impenetrable shield in his eyes, and his lips remained in a firm line. He folded his arms over the expanse of his chest, formidable, the lines of his face and body totally uninviting. Yet for all the rugged barriers set up by his body language, the unyielding expression on his face, the question that crowded her mind was How could a man approaching forty look so damned good?

Well, all you had to do was look at the men in Hollywood: Harrison, Tom, the other Clint. Some men aged well, like wine, and he was one of them.

Unfortunately.

She forced herself to move forward. She was good at this—looking over the side of a cliff or off the edge of the fiftieth floor of a skyscraper—and grinning with reckless abandon, as if nothing mattered to her, as if she knew no fear.

She strode toward him. “Hey,” she said. “Sobersides! Long time, no see.”

He inclined his head toward her, acknowledgment; his eyes narrowed, no smile. Not that she had expected one. He hated being called Sober-sides almost as much as she hated being called Brandgwen.

Before they could really take up their battle stations, the shrubs parted beside him and a gurgle emerged, followed by a baby, on all fours, her face dirty, her diaper swollen.

Brandy slowed her advance, entranced. Thirteen months. She knew the baby’s age, exactly.

Clint’s focus had shifted to his baby, too. That hard light in his eyes and the grim lines of his face softened, and for the briefest moment she caught sight of a vulnerability so immense it shook her to her core. But his face closed again, almost instantly, and she looked quickly away, almost terrified by the fact she might have glimpsed tenderness in him.

It seemed to be a good strategy, given the insanely wild beating of her heart. Brandy got down on her knees before his daughter.

The child was beautiful, her eyes the same tawny color as his, her shoulder-length hair a riot of messy red curls, freckles spattered across her fair skin. She put her thumb in her mouth and drew enthusiastically on it, her eyes narrowed.

Brandy glanced from the father to the daughter.

They were eyeing her with identical expressions of wariness, as if an enemy had trespassed the sanctuary of the clan camp.

“Brandgwen.”

She winced when he said her name, and at first he thought it was the gravel in his voice, but then he remembered she hated that form of her name. She preferred Brandy. Well, that was okay. He preferred almost anything to Sober-sides. A simple thing—the exchange of greetings—and yet already he could feel the friction between them.

He had not seen her for a long time, and he felt the shock of her presence, the subtle electricity of her. Of course, he had seen her in photographs, more recently in newspapers and magazines that could not seem to get enough of the oldest and youngest King girls. Just last month, he had caught a glimpse of her on the evening news after she had performed another outrageous stunt.

The cameras had caught the wild tangle of her hair, the devil-may-care quality of her grin, the jauntiness of her wave.

But had missed—as every photo and film sequence seemed to miss—her astounding essence.

Brandy King was not a pretty girl. Her features were too strong, much like her father’s, and the cameras had an almost cruel capacity to capture her lack of traditional beauty. Photographed, she always managed to look intensely ordinary, a plain Jane with an attitude. She also played down her absolutely stunning curves by dressing like a boy.

Photographs, even interviews on television, always totally failed to capture her fire, that mysterious something that was extraordinarily sensual and compelling.

Up close and personal, it was a different story. Her eyes, as sapphire as that lake when it changed color at dawn, glittered with that inner spark, an unsettling combination of mischief and passion. Her hair was dark and thick and shiny. It didn’t look as if she had run a comb through it anytime today, and when she saw him looking at it, she registered his look as disapproval, and tossed her hair with the spirited defiance of a wild horse tossing her mane. That grin was reckless and devil-may-care and totally disarming.

The simple truth was that Brandgwen King meant trouble.

She always had.

Yet when her father, Jake, had called and asked if she could stay with Clint and Becky at the lake for a little while, how could he refuse?

Jake was more than a business associate, more than his boss. He was Clint’s friend, his mentor, the closest thing he had ever had to a father. Jake had once seen something in a rough kid from the wrong side of the tracks and had believed in that something until it had come true.

Jake had offered no explanation for the imminent arrival of his eldest daughter, but Clint had assumed Brandy’s penchant for adventure mixed with mischief had left her in some kind of mess and that she needed to hide out until it blew over.

Well, there was no hideout quite like this one.

He’d been hiding successfully from the pain in his life for over a year and planned to keep on doing so.

He felt a small hand on his leg, and his daughter pulled herself to standing, swung behind his leg and then peeped out at Brandy with caution and reserve. Her diaper drooped nearly to her knees and her face showed telltale signs she had been sampling the dirt—again.

That feeling of inadequacy swept over him. He was a man accustomed to being in charge, but being entrusted with the care of his infant daughter had thrown him into an entirely different arena. He was like a man in a foreign land, lost, uncertain of which direction to take, having no grasp for the new language of his new world. He was fighting, as was his instinct, not to let it show that with his tiny daughter he came face-to-face with his own weaknesses and uncertainties every day.

But he was a disciplined man, and so he was careful not to let any of this slip onto his features. Brandy had a gift for sniffing out weakness and exploiting it. On her nineteenth birthday, just a little bit tipsy, hadn’t she seen his greatest weakness?

“So, you’re a shy one, are you?” Brandy said, still at Becky’s level, crouched easily on her haunches, her voice a rich imitation of a brogue.

The baby shrank even farther behind his knee.

Without warning, Brandy grabbed his other knee, ducked behind it, and peeped out at his daughter.

He felt shocked by her touch, the fire in her fingertips where they bit into the flesh below his knee. There was no mistaking, even from this brief encounter, that the oldest of the Misses King was not a child anymore.

And she had been a most dangerous child. How much more dangerous would she be as a full-grown, full-blooded woman?

He gazed down at her, the thick, rippling richness of the dark hair cascading over slender shoulders, the swell of her breasts under the thin fabric of a black tank top held up on the whim of two tiny little straps. She was wearing low-slung sweatpants that rode a little too low with her crouched like that and that clung to the delectable curves of her athletic legs.

She stuck out her tongue at his daughter, crossed her eyes.

Becky tried valiantly to make herself invisible, but not before he caught a ghost of a smile tickle her lips.

“Excuse me,” he said, inserting enough ice to sink the Titanic into his voice. “Would you mind letting go of my leg?”

“Becky,” Brandy said sternly, “you heard the man. Let go of your father’s leg.”

His little girl’s eyes went very round and she let go instantly.

“I meant you!” He scooped up Becky, and she buried her face in his chest.

“Oh,” Brandy said innocently, but thankfully, she unhanded his leg, rose easily, and stuck out her hand. Her eyes danced with amusement.

“Of course you meant me, Sober-sides. How are you?”

He shifted the minuscule weight of the baby from the crook of his right arm to his left and took Brandy’s proffered hand with a certain reluctance. He felt the heat and unexpected strength of her grasp, and let it go instantly.

“Fine, thank you,” he said, his tone clipped.

“A conversationalist as always,” she said. “Becky, how on earth are you learning to talk around this man of many words?’

How had she managed to hit such a sensitive spot after only seconds of being here? Was his daughter supposed to be talking more than she was? At just over a year, she had mastered da-da and poo-poo. That was it. The whole vocabulary.

“I thought I’d put you in the cottage,” he said abruptly. “It’s private.”

The thought of having her under the very same roof was a little more than he could handle.

Aware that the diaper was definitely a little far gone, Clint led the way across the clearing and down a small stone path with as much dignity as he could given that something warm and wet was leaking onto his arm. At the end of the path was a small guest cottage.

“It’s adorable,” Brandy said with genuine enthusiasm, as if she didn’t have an upscale apartment in New York and a house in Bel Air, as if she hadn’t stayed in palaces and five-star hotels all over the world. “Does it come with seven little men? And a prince?”

Seven men and a prince. He’d known she had become a dangerous woman.

“No,” he said tersely. “No men, no prince, no maids, no cook, no dishwasher, not a single amenity that you are used to.”

His voice crackled with unfriendliness.

Which, naturally, Brandy did not hear or chose not to hear.

“You have no idea what I’m used to,” she said cheerfully. “I slept with bugs as big as my fist in Brazil.”

“I remember you used to be scared of bugs,” he said, then could have kicked himself at the memory he had just conjured. Brandy, fourteen, in a much-too-skimpy bathing suit by the pool, standing on one of the deck chairs, pointing at some huge black insect that had crawled out of the filtration system.

He’d done the gentlemanly thing, dispatched the bug. When it had looked like she planned to leap into his arms in gratitude, he’d told her, coldly, her bathing suit was inappropriate.

But the part he remembered the most clearly was not the bathing suit or the bug. It was her saying softly, “Don’t tell anyone I was scared. Please.”

From that moment on, it was as though he knew a secret about her, a secret that made the heart he wasn’t supposed to have ache every time she did one more foolhardy or death-defying stunt.

Had she really conquered that long-ago fear of bugs? He didn’t want to know. He didn’t want to know one single thing about her.

Except what her lips tasted like.

“You must be very tired,” he said, abruptly, damning her silently for how little had changed between them. “You’ve come a long way today.”

“I’m never tired,” Brandy said.

Of course not. She was a woman who would have you believe she could handle seven men and a prince and anything else life threw at her, including bugs as big as her fist. Only, looking at her, he saw something flicker in her eyes, and wondered how much of it was all a front. He cut off that line of thought before it made her even more dangerous than she already was—which was plenty dangerous.

“Did you want me to bring your things from the car?”

She tossed him the keys, her expectation of being waited on as unconscious to her as breathing. She went up the cottage steps two at a time and burst in. Somehow he didn’t want to see her gushing over the cuteness of the accommodations. Still hefting the soggy Becky on his arm, he went up to the parking area behind the house.

A Ferrari, no less, and crammed floor to roof with her things as if she were thinking of staying for a long, long while. He counted three full-size suitcases and two overnight bags. There were several dresses hung in bags. There was a tennis racket, a riding helmet and a new blow-up dinghy that hadn’t been taken out of the box.

He didn’t have a tennis court or horses. There was no place, that he was aware of, within a hundred miles where a woman could wear dresses like that. The lake water wouldn’t be warm enough for weeks yet to risk capsizing her floating device in it.

Resigned, he set the baby on her padded rear and kept one eye on whether or not she was trying to ingest rocks while he began unloading Brandy’s vehicle.

“She’ll be bored in ten minutes,” he reassured himself as the pile of her belongings became a small mountain on the ground beside him.

So, she’d get bored, and then she would leave.

“She’ll last two days,” he bet himself, and felt his black mood lift slightly. “Three at the outside.”

“Poo-poo,” the baby commented, but he couldn’t tell if she was agreeing with him, or if she was “pooh-poohing” him. She was a female after all, and even a pint-sized member of the fairer sex was probably blessed with intuition. Perhaps his wee daughter sensed that the thing he was worst at—besides choosing girl clothes for a one-year-old—was predicting how anything was going to go once Brandy King was in the vicinity.

Chapter Two

It was the dawn of day four, and Brandy King was still happily ensconced in his little guesthouse.

“I’m losing my touch,” Clint decided. The baby was still asleep, and he usually enjoyed these quiet moments before she awakened, sipping his coffee, planning his day, enjoying his garden.

The love of gardening was a bit of a surprise. His father would have turned over in his grave to see his eldest son so content with dirt on his hands, and flower gardens growing around him. Clint himself had been unable to decipher the pull of it.

But this morning he looked out his kitchen window to the back of his property, not to his gardens in the front. No, he was focused on where her red Ferrari was still parked and he was aware his jaw hurt, as if he had been clenching it in his sleep, not surprising given the tension his houseguest made him feel.

Every morning, he got up hoping that car would be gone, hoping that some time in the night it would have occurred to her how bored she was and she would have left.

He had predicted two days—three—at the very outside, and he’d been wrong.

The thing was he was rarely wrong about human nature. That was the strength he gave Jake and Auto Kingdom; that was the skill behind his meteoric rise in the company.

A tumultuous childhood, filled with the rage and pain of his parents, had given Clint a rare and valuable gift. At the time, he had not recognized it as a gift. His ability to look at a person and judge instantly whether they were a friend or a foe, to be able to feel with one-hundred-percent accuracy the mood in a room, to be able to read the truth in a person’s eyes, no matter what their lips were saying, had been a survival tool.

That survival tool had been one in an arsenal of survival skills that had kept him and his younger brother, Cameron, out of harm’s way. That usually meant his father’s foul temper and fists, but they had both grown to manhood in a mean neighborhood where book-learning was scorned and street smarts were everything. Clint knew how to use his mind, and he knew how to use his fists, and he grew up using them both with regularity.

He would have never guessed it would be the unerring instinct about people, rather than his ability with his fists, that would decide his future. But Jake King had spotted him in a group of young apprentices working at one of Auto Kingdom’s tire shops, talked to him for a few minutes, and his destiny had changed. He had moved, at first uncomfortably, into a world where he had been certain he did not belong. It had not taken him long to figure out that, under the masks, most men were the same. And that became his job. To unmask men.

“What’s your measure of that man, Clint?” Jake would ask at some high-level meeting.

Clint could always tell. The light in the man’s eyes, the way he stood, the way he interacted with others, the grip of his handshake. Inevitably, Clint found himself at more and more meetings, more and more a part of the Auto Kingdom decision-making process, more and more part of the inner circle, more and more Jake’s right-hand man.

But now, taking another sip of his coffee and balefully eyeing the red Ferrari, he admitted he was losing his touch, not that “the touch” had ever been applicable to Brandy. Reading her would be like trying to read the wind. She was elusive and mysterious, one minute all woman, the next a wonder-filled child.

He had read wrong, been sure she would have been gone by now. But, if she was bored, she was pretending not to be, though sniffing out subterfuge was usually one of his specialities. She liked the baby and seemed to have a genuine way with her, which surprised him. He would not have put Brandy and a baby together in an equation that worked. But then who was Brandy, really? Did anyone know? Since her arrival, she always seemed to be full of laughter and mischief, as if life itself entertained her even when there were no tall buildings to leap off.

“One more day,” he said. He hoped so. Not that he didn’t appreciate her interest in Becky, but Brandy was disruptive without half trying. She didn’t cook and she didn’t pick up after herself. She walked around in boyish outfits that had never been meant to contain feminine curves and that were strangely alluring because of that.

He was ever conscious she was his boss’s daughter, off-limits for that reason alone, though if he wanted more reasons, he could find them. She was too young for him. She was frivolous. Though he and Jake had never discussed it, Jake probably expected his daughters to marry into the social circle he had spent his life earning his way into. It was one that Clint, for all he had won Jake’s respect and loyalty, did not fit into mostly because he lacked any desire to be a part of those worlds of pure wealth and power.

Still, Brandy did make Clint’s solemn little girl laugh, but what kind of price was he willing to pay for that?

His own peace of mind was in jeopardy—his aching jaw was a constant reminder of that—and he prized his peace of mind more highly than anything.

It was hard to be around a woman who was so vital and alive without feeling these uncomfortable, and totally inappropriate, stirrings of awareness.

Without remembering, dammit, what her lips had tasted like all those years ago.

She had forced him into trying to be invisible on his own property. He felt like the man servant, Jeeves, looking after her but trying to be unobtrusive about it. Trying to maintain his own space and sanity, while she tried to tease him out of it.

He hadn’t tested Brandy’s love of Becky as far as a diaper change. He brightened, a man with a plan. If she showed no sign of going, he’d ask her to handle one of those. Poo-poo with any luck. That should have the princess packing her car and driving back up that road….

Clint heard a deep rumbling, and frowned. A large vehicle was obviously laboring up the other side of the rise, and he turned his attention to his road.

Sure enough, an enormous truck—a moving van from the logo on the side—lurched over the crest of the hill, geared down noisily and began its descent into his backyard.

A moving van?

Had he misread the situation that badly? Not only was Brandy not leaving, but she was settling in more permanently?

“God give me strength,” Clint muttered, taking his coffee cup and going out the back screen door to meet the truck.

It had pulled to a halt in the parking area, which was not designed for trucks.

A redheaded kid with a pack of cigarettes stuck in the arm of his T-shirt rolled down the window and grinned at him.

“Wow,” he said. “That’s a hell of a trip for a tramp.”

A tramp? Clint felt relief wash over him. He wasn’t quite sure what the kid meant by a tramp, but obviously he was at the wrong address, an easy enough mistake to make along the lake roads.

“You have the wrong place,” he said.

“Brandy King’s house, right?”

Fury, red-hot, boiled up in Clint. Okay, she was reckless and a brat and annoying as all get out, but nobody was calling her a tramp in his presence. He wasn’t the least bit happy that his first impulse was to open that door, yank the kid out, and plow a fist into his face. He’d always known that part of himself, the fighter, was only buried, not banished.

But before he got to step one, he heard a cheery hello called out and turned to see Brandy coming around the corner of the house. She looked like she had just tumbled from bed, her hair springing around her head, uncombed, her clothing rumpled, her feet bare.

Unless Clint was mistaken, which was possible given his record of the last few days, she was wearing her pajamas, a pair of bright yellow low-slung pants with a drawstring waist and a skimpy narrow-strapped top that didn’t quite cover her belly button.

Which was pierced.

The morning air was chill, and her nipples were hard against the thin fabric of the top.

“God in heaven have mercy,” Clint muttered.

The young deliveryman said, “You’re not kidding.”

Clint’s hands formed fists at his sides and the fury deepened within him, especially when he turned back to the driver and saw the look of lascivious male interest on his face as Brandy sashayed toward them.

The younger man’s eyes met his, and apparently the street fighter Clint had once been was riding pretty close to the surface because suddenly the truck driver was examining his bill of lading instead of Brandy.

“Another gorgeous morning,” she said, arriving at the truck, completely unaware of the explosive tension in the air.

“Maybe you should go get a sweater,” Clint said tersely.

She looked momentarily puzzled, then caught on. She flashed him a careless grin and then folded her arms over her chest.

He cursed under his breath, took the bill of lading that the truck driver handed him and signed it without looking.

This is exactly what he’d always disliked about Brandy. He knew control was essential to life, to survival, and yet around her, he never quite knew what was going to happen next, or worse, how he was going to react to it.

“Please tell me you aren’t moving here,” he said, and he saw the hurt look before she carefully masked it.

“Sober-sides! You mean you aren’t enjoying my company?”

“If he isn’t, I will,” the young driver said hopefully, and then ducked his head at the killing look Clint gave him.

“Aren’t you the sweetest thing?” Brandy gushed, making Clint unsure which of them he wanted to kill first.

She thought the kid was sweet, the kid thought she was a tramp. Hadn’t she learned anything about the real world from all the years she had spent gallivanting around it?

That was the problem. He was a man who had learned to fight as naturally as he had learned to breathe. And that part of him had never been completely laid to rest, though it was buried under layers of refinement, education, wealth.

But Brandy brought his primal, rough instinct so quickly to the surface it was as if it had never been tamed at all.

He slid her a look. It would be impossible to call her beautiful and yet she was an undeniable presence. Electricity and pure energy seemed to crackle in the air around her. The young driver was acting like a fly caught in her web.

“Have you got something to unload?” Clint snapped.

“Oh, yeah. The tramp.”

“Maybe you better explain to me what you mean by that,” Clint ordered edgily, sliding Brandy a look to make sure her bosom was still covered.

“The trampoline. I’m to deliver it and put it together. Where did you want it?”

“A trampoline,” Clint repeated, stunned. All that fury and protectiveness wasted on a misinterpretation? He didn’t misinterpret things. He really was losing his touch, and it was her fault. He turned to Brandy. “A trampoline?” he demanded, as if the driver had said he was unloading an order of M-16s instead of a child’s toy.

“I got one for Becky,” Brandy told him, inordinately pleased with herself.

“Could I see you for a minute?”

He took her elbow and took her out of earshot of the young man who was a little too avidly interested in her.

“Do you think maybe you could have asked me before you went to all this trouble?” he asked.

“Oh! It hasn’t been any trouble. I mean it has been, because you should see what you have to go through to get a trampoline to the way-back-beyond, but it was kind of fun and I didn’t have anything better to do.”

“I don’t want Becky to have a trampoline,” he said, with all the firmness he could muster, given that the scent of her was wrapping itself around him, as sweet as sunshine on lavender, and nearly as drugging.

“You don’t want her to have one?” she exclaimed, as if he were an ogre who lived under a bridge. “You can’t mean that!”

“They are extremely dangerous toys. Do you know how many serious injuries are caused by trampolines every year?”

“No,” she said, tossing her hair defiantly, “but why am I not surprised you would have those statistics at your fingertips?”

“She’s barely pulling herself to standing. She does not need a trampoline!”

“Oh, Clint, let her have it, for God’s sake. We’ll be careful. I promise. You can make all kinds of rules around it. She’ll never be on it by herself, ever. I won’t do anything dangerous. I promise. No flips, or anything like that.”

“You aren’t happy with just trying to break your own neck all the time? You have to try and break my daughter’s?”

“Clint! The poor child should be walking, shouldn’t she? It will help her strengthen her legs. Besides, she hardly ever laughs. You guys need my help around here.”

She was hitting him in his sensitive spots now.

Should Becky be walking? He didn’t know these things, and the family doctor told him not to worry, but he worried. Should she be laughing more? Was she missing everything it was to be a child because she was stuck here with a man who knew so little about children? Once, he had thought fierce love should be enough. Now, he wasn’t so sure. Maybe his daughter did need a trampoline.

Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.

Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».

Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.

Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.