What a night. Face-to-face with Buck Bravo again.

And now she’d be expected to eat.

So B.J. faked drinking her wine. She even managed to get a little food down. On the polite conversation front, she nodded and made interested noises when spoken to. And she scrupulously avoided looking directly at Buck. No point in going there, nosiree.

Buck was, in all honesty, the man of the hour. There was talk that he’d get a Pulitzer for his last book. And the tabloids…to read what they wrote about him, you’d think every unattached woman in America longed to claim him for her very own.

Every woman except B.J. She didn’t long to claim him. She only longed for him to go away.

And soon he would go away. He’d go off and write his story and leave her alone to come to grips with the fact that she was going to have his baby….

Dear Reader,

The editors at Harlequin and Silhouette are thrilled to be able to bring you a brand-new featured author program for 2005! Signature Select aims to single out outstanding stories, contemporary themes and oft-requested classics by some of your favorite series authors and present them to you in a variety of formats bound by truly striking covers.

We want to provide several different types of reading experiences in the new Signature Select program. The Spotlight books offer a single “big read” by a talented series author, the Collections present three novellas on a selected theme in one volume, the Sagas contain sprawling, sometimes multi-generational family tales (often related to a favorite family first introduced in series) and the Miniseries feature requested previously published books, with two or, occasionally, three complete stories in one volume. The Signature Select program offers one book in each of these categories per month, and fans of limited continuity series will also find these continuing stories under the Signature Select umbrella.

In addition, these volumes bring you bonus features…different in every single book! You may learn more about the author in an extended interview, more about the setting or inspiration for the book, more about subjects related to the theme and, often, a bonus short read will be included. Authors and editors have been outdoing themselves in originating creative material for our bonus features—we’re sure you’ll be surprised and pleased with the results!

The Signature Select program strives to bring you a variety of reading experiences by authors you’ve come to love, as well as by rising stars you’ll be glad you’ve discovered. Watch for new stories from Janelle Denison, Donna Kauffman, Leslie Kelly, Marie Ferrarella, Suzanne Forster, Stephanie Bond, Christine Rimmer and scores more of the brightest talents in romance fiction!

The excitement continues!

Warm wishes for happy reading,

Marsha Zinberg

Executive Editor

The Signature Select Program

Bravo Unwrapped
Christine Rimmer

www.millsandboon.co.uk

Dear Reader,

Strong women. You gotta love ’em. I do. I like to think that I am a strong woman. And I like to write about strong heroines, women who know what they want and aren’t afraid to go out and get it.

Such a woman is B. J. Carlyle, the heroine of Bravo Unwrapped. B.J. is brilliant and, okay, she’s more than a little domineering. She loves pricey designer shoes and she’s a New Yorker through and through. She also happens to be pregnant, and she’s just decided that she’s no good at the man/woman thing. Her relationships somehow never work out. She’s giving up men.

I know what you’re thinking: Not going to happen. You are so right. Because, of course, there’s the father of her baby, Buck Bravo, the one man she’s never been able to forget.

Buck can’t forget her, either—and he doesn’t even know there’s a baby involved. Buck has decided he’s getting himself another chance with B.J., whether B.J. wants that chance or not. From New York to California and back again, Buck is determined to lay claim to the woman he knows is meant for him.

Happy holidays everyone,

Christine Rimmer

For my dad, who always believed I could do anything I set out to do—and who made sure that I believed it, too.

Contents

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

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Bonus Materials

Author Interview:

A conversation with

Christine Rimmer

Recipe: Sierra Star Pumpkin Muffins

The Ballad of Blake Bravo

The Bravos: Heroes, Heroines and Their Stories

Sneak Peak: Bravo Family Way

One

For B. J. Carlyle, features editor at Alpha magazine, that fateful day in late October started out in abject wretchedness—and went downhill from there.

B.J. was not someone who hit the snooze button as a rule, but that morning she did. She hit it. And she kept hitting it every five minutes for over an hour. Eventually, she realized it was either get up—or admit she was taking a sick day. B. J. Carlyle did not take sick days.

So she crawled out of bed groaning and headed straight for the bathroom, where she dropped to her knees, banged the seat lid back and threw up. Repeatedly.

By the time she finally stopped gagging and staggered upright, it was much too late for her usual session on the Stairmaster, let alone her blenderized breakfast cocktail of fruit juice and vitamin-packed protein powder.

Okay, she told herself. Fine. Tomorrow for the Stairmaster.

And the protein drink? Skipping it was not a problem, considering that the thought of gulping it down had her queasy stomach threatening to bring her to her knees again.

B.J. ate three saltine crackers and grabbed a quick shower. Precious extra minutes went into her makeup. She troweled on the concealer in a mostly failed effort to hide the ravages incurred by five virtually sleepless nights in a row. Finally, she put on her favorite short black pencil skirt and that cute pink Donna Karan silk blouse with the opera-glove sleeves and the wild spill of ruffles at the neck and the black snub-toed Pradas with the four-inch heels. Though she was a tall woman—five-eight in flats—on a day like this, she could use all the extra height she could get. She pulled on a short, snug pink leather blazer over the blouse, grabbed her big black alligator bag and her briefcase, and went out the door without so much as glancing at her message machine.

That little red light was blinking and she knew it. It had been blinking when she came in the night before. She knew who’d called. She’d checked the display.

Buck.

She wasn’t talking to him—she wasn’t even going to listen to his deep, sexy recorded voice. Uh-uh. Not a chance.

Downstairs, she waited, trying not to tap her toe, while sweet old Melvin, the doorman, got her a cab. Traffic on Broadway was a zoo—no surprise. The cab smelled of garlic and wet shoes. Her cell rang twice. Probably Giles, her right-hand man at Alpha. By now, Giles would be wondering where the hell she was.

B.J. ignored the calls. She stared out the side window at the sea of scurrying pedestrians and honking vehicles and told herself she was not going to vomit—garlic and stinky-shoe smell be damned. She was keeping down her three measly crackers and that was that.

At West 58th, she got out of the cab and sucked in a deep breath of lovely exhaust-rich, garlic-free air. She paid the cabbie. She tugged on her blazer and brushed at her skirt. Then she yanked her shoulders back, stuck her chin in the air and strode purposefully toward the black-marble-and-glass building that housed the offices of Alpha magazine. B.J.’s father, L.T. Carlyle, owned the building. Alpha had the fifteenth floor.

B.J. spent the ride up to the offices trying not to look at her own reflection in the elevator’s mirrored walls and ignoring her cell, which was ringing again. She had that Bride of Chucky look around the eyes. Scary. Very scary. And she really should have used a little more blusher….

The doors slid wide and she was facing the Alpha reception desk, complete with stunning receptionist Melanie, who had exotic slanted eyes and preternaturally large lips—lips that went with her breasts, as a matter of fact. Melanie automatically beamed her blinding big-lipped smile, as she’d been trained to do whenever the elevator doors opened.

Then she realized it was B.J. “Oh! B.J. You’re…late.” Melanie stated the obvious with a look of pure bewilderment. B.J., after all, was never late. And beyond the bewilderment, didn’t Melanie seem a little…guilty? She had a magazine open in front of her. She flipped it closed, folded her slim French-manicured hands on top of it and blinked three times in rapid succession.

Even with Melanie’s tightly clasped hands in the way, B.J. could see enough of the cover to make a positive identification: TopMale magazine. Apparently, Melanie felt guilty for checking out Alpha’s competition. Did B.J. care what the receptionist read while she was supposed to be working?

Not today, she didn’t. “Good morning, Melanie,” B.J. announced vehemently, and headed for the hallway to the left of the desk.

Melanie called after her. “Uh. Giles says he needs to talk to you. He’s been trying to reach you….”

B.J. stopped, pivoted on her mean black heels, and gave the receptionist her most terrifying smile. “And I’m headed his way as we speak, now aren’t I? Or I was, until you stopped me.”

“Uh. Well,” said Melanie, coloring prettily. “Yeah. Okay. That’s right….”

B.J. proceeded down the hall, sprinkling tight greetings at random colleagues as she went, careful not to make eye contact, which would encourage further communication. She was so not up for anything beyond “Hi,” right then—not that anyone tried to get her talking. In fact, they all seemed a little…strange, didn’t they? A little sheepish, their grins of greeting bordering on smarmy.

Or was she only being paranoid due to sleep deprivation, unremitting nausea and raging hormones?

Hmm. Could be.

Giles had the office next to hers. His door was open. She had to walk past it to get to her own. She was tempted to try that—zip right by, pop into her own office and shut the door. Silently.

Which was absurd. No point in coming to work just to hide in her office.

She stepped boldly into the doorway of Giles’s narrow cubicle, which only achieved the designation of “office” because it had actual walls and a door he could shut. “What?” she demanded.

Giles tossed his head as he looked up. His sleek blond hair flew back out of his eyes. “God. I thought you must have died.” People assumed that Giles had to be gay, he was so pretty. He let them assume it. Women adored him. They felt safe with him, even though they weren’t. He loved to gossip and he cared about fashion. His last name was CynSyr, pronounced sincere—which he actually was, on occasion. Giles spotted her shoes. “Darling. I love those. All you need is a whip.”

“Is there a problem or not?”

“Unfortunately, there is.” He peered at her more closely. “Are you…all right?”

She stood straighter and lied—aggressively. “Fabulous.”

“Did you, ah, see the new issue of TopMale, by any chance?”

She scowled. “What is it with that? Melanie was reading it just now, when I came in.”

“You haven’t seen it.”

“No. Why?”

“Ah—first, the good news.” He grabbed the Starbucks cup at his elbow and held it out to her. “Decaf mocha almond. Venti. One packet of Splenda. Just the way you like it.” His golden brows drew together and he wrinkled his aquiline nose. “Sorry, but it’s lukewarm by now.”

She stepped into the room and took the latte from him. “Thanks. You do have your uses.”

“I figured you’d need it.”

“I do.” Assuming she could get it down without hurling. She gestured with the covered cardboard cup. “Okay. Let me have it.”

“Disaster, that’s all.”

Her stomach lurched. She swallowed. Hard. “I’m listening.”

“The Wise Brothers just broke up,” Giles said. “Their manager called Mike yesterday. They’re not going to be available for the Christmas cover story.”

The Wise Brothers were the biggest thing to hit popular music since…comparisons failed her. And this was not good. Very, very not good.

B.J. shoved a stack of back issues off Giles’s lone extra chair and sank into it, dropping her briefcase to the floor, letting her bag slide off her shoulder. “Tell me you’re joking.”

Giles did nothing of the kind. “I’m as serious as a cheap tie. Trust me. ‘Christmas with the Three Wise Men’ is history.”

“But…a different slant, maybe? Their new solo careers? Their, uh…”

Giles was shaking his golden head. “They don’t want to do it. They are all, and I’m quoting Mike quoting the manager, ‘devastated.’ They’re also all in seclusion, or some such crap. Mike tried all day yesterday to get through to at least one of them. No luck. And we both know that if Mike can’t get to them, nobody can.” Mike Gallato, one of the best, was Alpha’s top contributing editor.

And B. J. Carlyle never gave up a major story without a fight. She shouldered her bag again, grabbed up her briefcase and shot to her feet. “I’ll make a few calls.”

“Been done. It’s hopeless.”

“Never use that word around me.”

“Yes, Mistress.”

“Hah.” She started to turn.

Gingerly, from behind her, Giles suggested, “Just…a point or two more.”

She whirled back to him. “Speak. Fast.”

“Arnie wants a meeting at eleven to discuss your plans.” Arnie Dale was the managing editor. In recent years, Arnie pretty much ran things at Alpha, though B.J.’s father, who had created Alpha on their kitchen table back when B.J. was in diapers, had never relinquished his twin titles of publisher and editor-in-chief.

B.J. prompted, “My plans for…?”

Giles looked at her patiently. “The new Christmas-issue cover feature.”

She blew out a gusty breath. “Fine. Meeting at eleven.” She looked at her watch. Nine-thirty-two. She needed to get going on those calls. “Anything else?”

“Ah. Yes.” Giles wore the strangest expression, suddenly. Pitying? Worried? She couldn’t read it. B.J. made an awkward wrap-it-up gesture with the hand that held her briefcase, after which Giles clucked his tongue and tossed his golden locks again. Then, at last, the perfect line of his square jaw hardened. His fine nostrils flared. He yanked open his pencil drawer and whipped out the latest issue of TopMale magazine—the one Melanie had been reading so furtively a few minutes before.

“Oh, please,” B.J. said. “As if I’ve got time to read that rag with my December cover feature dead at my feet.”

Giles stood—or sat, in this case—firm. “Darling. You need to read this.”

“Just give me the salient points.”

Giles only shook his head and shoved the magazine toward her. “I marked the page. Go in your office, sit down, drink your lukewarm latte and then deal with that. And when you do, keep in mind that it’s nothing but meaningless drivel written by a dickless ass.”

In her office, with the door firmly shut, B.J. set down her bag and briefcase, tossed the November issue of TopMale to the side of her desk, hung her jacket on the coat rack in the corner, booted up her computer, and made those calls.

Giles had been right, of course. She got nowhere. The Wise Brothers had called it quits, they weren’t talking to anybody and she had no cover story for the issue that would hit the stands in twenty-eight days.

There would definitely be meetings. Several.

Her head pounded and her stomach churned. Still, gamely, she picked up her latte and removed the lid. She sniffed. Waited.

And didn’t gag.

Carefully, she sipped.

Oh, yes. Excellent. It was almost cold, but it went down fine.

Sipping some more, she considered. She had a half an hour until the meeting with Arnie. So? E-mail, phone messages—there had been several new ones while she was making all those hopeless calls—or TopMale?

She picked up the phone and punched the code for message pick-up.

Big mistake. The first one was from Buck. She heard his voice—so deep, so sexy, so gallingly tempting. “B.J. Give it up. Give me a damn call.”

She slammed the phone down. Later for messages.

With a heavy sigh, she slid TopMale—by a corner—from the side of her desk to right under her nose. She sneered down at the eye-candy guy on the cover. A winning smile and six-pack abs. Not terribly imaginative, but effective.

TopMale didn’t have Alpha’s market share, or its cachet. After all, Alpha managed to be all things to a wide cross-section of men. From bon vivants to backwoods survivalists to your everyday Joe with a beer in one hand and the remote in the other, they all bought Alpha. Still, the upstart TopMale did have a solid readership, a readership that kept growing….

B.J. flipped the magazine open to the page Giles had marked for her. She drank her cold latte and began reading.

Manhattan Man-Eater

Well, okay. A reasonably catchy title. Then she read the byline: by Wyatt Epperstall.

The last time she’d seen Wyatt was the day four months ago when she’d told him she wouldn’t be seeing him anymore.

Her hand began to shake. Cool milk and espresso sloshed on her wrist and stained her pink blouse.

He wouldn’t.

He couldn’t….

Oh, but he had.

You know her when you see her. She’s tall and she’s smart and she has great legs. Great legs and killer shoes on her narrow, perfect feet. You know the kind of shoes I mean. Shoes with fancy Italian names and price tags to match, shoes with high, pointed heels that have you dreaming of what it might be like if she wore them and took a walk on your chest.

If you’re lucky, she might do just that.

She makes the rules. And she makes sure you live by them. That is, until she’s through with you—which, believe me, will be sooner than you think.

Okay, big guy. I know what you’re muttering right about now. No driven, focused, powerful steamroller career woman for you. You don’t go for that type.

Let me tell you. You would. You could. In the dark heart of every man lies a yearning for a dangerous woman he cannot control. She is that woman. She could have you if she wanted you. One glance from those frosty gray-blue eyes and you are her slave.

In bed, she—

B.J. shut her—admittedly—gray-blue eyes. But shutting them didn’t do any good. When she opened them again, the damn article was still there—the article about her written by her sleazeball ex-boyfriend, Wyatt. Oh, she should have known better than ever to get involved with him.

He’d seemed so…nice. So harmless. So sweet, really. At first, anyway. But then the niceness began to get on her nerves. The sweetness got cloying. She found herself doing what she always did with men she’d dated in the past six years: she compared him to—

No. Not the B-word. She wasn’t thinking about B— No way. No more. Not today.

And she really, truly had to face it: she was good at a lot of things. Especially her job. But men? Not her forte. Every time she tried with one—which wasn’t all that often, no matter what Wyatt Epperstall wanted every TopMale subscriber to think…whenever she tried with one, it always ended badly.

Just like it had with Buck.

Oh, God. Buck…

And there. She’d done it. Thought his whole first name, again—twice—not thirty seconds after promising herself she wouldn’t.

Note to self: Do not think of B.

Second note to self: No. More. Boyfriends. Ever.

And really, she should never have taken that big sip of latte. Because, for some reason, her swallowing mechanism seemed to be malfunctioning. Her stomach was rising.

B.J. knocked over her chair as she stood. The latte went flying. It hit the floor and splattered—across the floor tiles, up the wall. She glanced frantically around.

Oh, God. What she wouldn’t give right now for the corner office—the one her father never used, the one with its own damn bathroom, for pity’s sake.

She spotted her wastebasket in the corner. What else could she do? Making hideous gagging noises, she staggered toward it….

Good thing she had Giles. Once she was through ruining both her blouse and the wastebasket, she buzzed him and he came right in.

He shut the door. “Darling, my God,” he said, wincing and wrinkling his patrician nose. Then he considered. “Ditch the blouse. Wear the blazer, buttoned up. It’s going to be fine. I’ll just crack the window…”

He went out while she changed and came back with one of the maintenance people. She escaped to the ladies’ room. When she returned, her office smelled of floral air freshener. The wastebasket had been replaced and the splattered latte mopped up. She gave the maintenance guy a massive tip and he took the blouse, promising he’d have it back, good as new, in a day or two.

“Alrighty.” She forced a grateful smile, thinking at the same time that if she never saw that blouse again, it would be more than alrighty with her. The janitor left her alone with her assistant.

Giles looked at her and frowned. “Go home,” he said.

“Not on your life—BTW, you are invaluable.”

“I am, aren’t I?”

“And it’s ten-fifty-five. Arnie awaits….”

The meeting was not a success.

They came up with zip. The alternative features simply wouldn’t do. Either the slant was wrong or the story wasn’t big enough for the cover. There was nothing in the works that could effectively be moved up. Fresh ideas were in short supply.

Arnie told her to “work it out” and get back to him by the end of the day.

After the meeting, there was lunch. B.J. took a pass on that. She ate more crackers from the box she’d stowed in her desk and drank some water and racked her exhausted brain for a solution to the cover-feature dilemma. Racking did nothing. Her brain refused to spit out a single viable idea.

The afternoon brought more meetings. Tense ones. She made frequent trips to the restroom and avoided the eyes of her colleagues. When she wasn’t in a meeting or hugging the toilet bowl, she received sniggering and/or sympathetic calls from acquaintances and associates who had seen—one even went so far as to say she had devoured—the “Man-Eater” article.

At four-thirty she met with Arnie again—to tell him she’d have something for him by the next day. Arnie was not pleased.

At five, as she and Giles were brainstorming madly, her outside line, set on silent page, began flashing. She glanced at the display. Her father. So not the person she wanted to talk to right then. But also not someone she could ignore.

“L.T.,” she said to Giles. Her father’s name was Langly Titus, but everyone, including B.J., called him L.T.

Giles nodded, got up, and left her alone.

She picked up. “Hello, L.T.”

“We need to talk,” said her father, and then fell silent. L. T. Carlyle fully understood the power of silence. He would make pronouncements, then wait. And wait some more. First one to speak was the loser. L.T. never lost.

B.J. allowed a full count of ten to elapse before prompting wearily, “About?”

More silence. Then, at last, “First, and of minimal importance, that pissant, Wayne Epstein.”

“Wyatt. Wyatt Epperstall,” she patiently corrected as her stomach gave a nasty little lurch. So. L.T. had read the “Man-Eater” article. She wasn’t surprised. Though he rarely left his world-famous mansion, Castle Carlyle, upstate, L.T. made it his business to know just about everything that was going on in the outside world. He subscribed to every newspaper and magazine known to man, TopMale included. And he could read two thousand words a minute.

“Wyatt, schmyatt,” grumbled L.T. “A wimpy, whiny-assed piece of work if ever there was one. Didn’t I warn you about him?”

“Yes,” she said carefully. “I believe that you did.”

L.T. laughed his lusty laugh. “But I have to say, B.J.

You make your old dad proud.”

“Oh? How’s that?” she asked, though she knew she wouldn’t like the answer.

She didn’t.

He said, “‘Manhattan Man-Eater.’ That’s my girl. Tough, smart and always on top. Takes after her old man, and that is no lie.”

“Gee, L.T. I never thought of it that way.”

“Do I detect a note of sarcasm? Stand tall. Be proud. Let the Waldos of the world whine and whimper.”

“Wyatt. The weasel’s name is Wyatt. And I’m sorry. But I don’t see it that way. That article just happens to be a total invasion of my privacy.”

Her father swore. Eloquently. “B.J. You shame me. You’ve got to do something about that Puritanical streak.”

That was way below the belt. B.J. was no Puritan, far from it. But she wasn’t an exhibitionist either. She wanted the details of her private life to remain exactly that: private.

She said nothing. She told herself she was exercising the power of silence on L.T. for a change, though in reality she was simply too frustrated and miserable at that moment to speak. Her head pounded and her stomach kept threatening to eject its contents all over her desk pad.

She hated to admit it, but maybe she should have stayed home today, after all.

L.T. moved right on to the next item on his agenda.

“I heard about the Three Wise Men.” Again, no surprise. Arnie would have called him. “Too bad, so sad. And I’ve got it covered.”

She sat a little straighter. “Meaning?”

“I’m on top of the problem. I’ll tell you all about it. Tonight. Dinner at eight. Be here. We’ll put this situation to bed.”

“A story?” She sounded ridiculously grateful—and she didn’t even care that she did. “You’ve got my Christmas feature story?”

“I have. And it’s good. Very good. Puts those puny Wise Men to shame—if I do say so myself.”

“The story. What is it?”

“Tonight.”

“L.T., I can’t. Not tonight. I’ll be here at the office until nine, at least. I have a mountain of work to…” She heard the click, right there in the middle of her sentence. Her father had hung up.

During the limo ride upstate, B.J. tried to work. Her queasy stomach wasn’t going for it. She ended up staring out the window, tamping down her frustration and resentment that L.T. just had to step in, that he’d ordered her presence upstate and refused to listen when she tried to tell him she didn’t have time for the trip. The loss of the Wise Brothers was her problem, her challenge to handle as she saw fit.

Or at least, it should have been.

Then again…

I’m a true professional, she reminded herself—which meant she’d take any help she could get. And as autocratic as he could be at times, her father was a genius when it came to knowing—and getting—what was needed for Alpha. So if L.T. said he had her cover story, he probably did.

She shouldn’t be so put out with him—and she wasn’t, not really.

Not any more than she was put out with her life in general in the past five days. Or maybe not so much put out as freaked out. Since the stick turned blue, as they say. Since the panel said pregnant.

Six years since she called it quits with…B. She’d moved on. He’d moved on.

And then, seven weeks ago, she’d run into him. Your classic Friday night at that great club in NoHo, the underground one with the incredible sound system. Fabulous music and one too many excellent Manhattans and they’d ended up at his place. She wasn’t careful—with B, that had always been her problem: a failure to be careful.

Or one of her problems, anyway. To be painfully frank, there were several.

So she’d slipped up, she’d reasoned, feeling like a drunk off the wagon, a junkie back on the stuff. Once in six years. That wasn’t so bad she kept telling herself. Oh, no. Not so bad. Not to worry. She wasn’t taking his calls. He was out of her life and she’d make absolutely certain that what had happened in September would never happen again…

And then, just when she’d pretty much succeeded in convincing herself that one tiny slip-up did not a crisis make, she’d realized her period was late.

Very late.

Thus, the disastrous encounter with the pregnancy kit five mornings ago. Now, everything was all messed up all over again.

And speaking of again, she was doing it. Again. Thinking about B, and what had happened with B and the result of what had happened with B—all of which was not to be thought about. Not tonight. Not…for a while.

The limo rolled up to the iron gates that protected the Carlyle estate. The gates swung silently back. The stately car moved onward, up the long, curving drive that snaked its way through a forest of oak and locust trees, trees somewhat past their fall glory and soon to be winter-bare.

At the crest of the hill, the trees gave ground and there it was: Castle Carlyle, a Gothic monstrosity of gray stone, a Norman conqueror’s wet dream of turrets and towers looming proudly against the night sky.

Roderick opened the massive front door for her. Roderick was tall and gaunt and always wore a black suit with a starched white shirt and a bow tie. He’d run the castle since before her father had bought the estate from an eccentric Dutch-born millionaire twenty years back. L.T. liked to joke that Roderick came with the castle.

“Ms. B.J. Lovely to see you,” Roderick said with a faint, slightly pained smile. He wasn’t very good at smiling. Loyalty and efficiency were his best qualities.

“Roderick,” she said with a nod, as he relieved her of her bag and briefcase. “The oak room?” she asked. Roderick inclined his silver-gray head. She told him, “I’ll see myself in.”

“As you wish.”

Her heels echoing on the polished stone floor, B.J. proceeded beneath the series of arches down the length of the cavernous entry hall, past a dizzying array of animal heads mounted along the walls. For about a decade, back when B.J. was growing up, L.T. had amused himself hunting big game all over the world. Being neither a modest nor a subtle man, L.T. proudly displayed every trophy he took—whether it was a handsome buck with a giant rack, or one of an endless string of gorgeous girlfriends known in the press as his Alpha Girls.

The oak room, named for the dark, heavily carved woodwork that adorned every wall, branched off toward the end of the entrance hall. The room boasted a long bar at one end, also ornately carved. L.T., wearing his favorite maroon satin smoking jacket over black slacks, sat in a leather wing chair near the bar, a Scotch at his elbow and one of his trademark Cuban cigars wedged between the fingers of his big, blunt-fingered right hand.

His current Alpha Girl, Jessica, had found a perch on the arm of his chair. Jessica was, as usual, looking stunning. Tonight she wore red velvet, her plunging neckline ending just below the diamond sparkling in her navel. As B.J. entered, Jessica threw back her slim golden neck and trilled out a breathless laugh.

L.T. and his Alpha Girl weren’t alone. On a brocade sofa across a Moorish-style coffee table from the pair sat the one person B.J. did not want to see.

Buck Bravo, in the flesh.

Two

Jessica spotted B.J. first.

“B.J.,” said the Alpha Girl breathlessly—Jessica did just about everything breathlessly. “How are you?”

“About time,” said L.T., and puffed on his cigar. He tipped his steel-gray head in Buck’s direction. “As I recall, you two have met.”

B.J. resisted the urge to say something scathing. L.T. knew very well that she and Buck had once been in love. He also knew that it had ended badly and that Buck was not, by any stretch of an active imagination, B.J.’s favorite person.

Yes, okay. She’d had sex with the man last month. Or nearly two months ago, actually. Sometimes even a smart woman makes mistakes, especially when there are too many Manhattans involved. But no way would L.T. know that. Buck could be ten kinds of unmitigated SOB, but he wasn’t the type to go blabbing about subjects that were nobody’s business.

“Hello, Buck,” she said and tried not to sneer.

“B.J.” He looked at her through those sexy dark eyes of his and, in spite of her determination to remain unaffected, she felt the familiar thrill go pulsing through her.

Dumb. Stupid. Never again.

She ordered her mind off steamy images of her and Buck—in his bed, minus their clothes—and turned to her father. “I thought you ordered me up here to discuss my Christmas cover feature.”

L.T. blew out a thick cloud of cigar smoke. “That is exactly what I did.”

B.J. sent a sideways glance at the handsome hunk of aggravating temptation sprawled on the crimson sofa—and then spoke to L.T. again. “Buck has a story?”

“Not a story,” said her father, gesturing grandly with his double corona. “The story.”

Her pulse picked up—this time for purely professional reasons. Buck, after all, was your quintessential Alpha male. He was not only a gold miner, a cow-puncher, a wildcatter and a bull rider. He also just happened to be a top-notch journalist and a bestselling author. Black Gold, his gritty exposé of life—and death—on a Texas oil rig, had hit the bookstores in June and quickly climbed all the major lists.

If Buck had a story for her…

Oh, yeah. Just his name on the byline would be a coup. She should have thought of him. And she probably would have—if they didn’t have a serious past. If she hadn’t been so busy ignoring his phone calls. If she didn’t just happen to be pregnant with his baby…

She made herself look directly at him. “Okay. I’m listening.”

Buck smiled that charming, infuriating, warm, slow smile of his. The one that had made her fall in love with him in the first place, back in that fateful February, when they were both slaving away in the boiler room of Alpha’s circulation department. Back then, B.J., fresh out of Brandeis, was in the early stages of learning her father’s company from the ground up. Buck? Straight off a West Texas oil rig, still shaking the red dust off his boots, getting his start in the big city, determined to be a writer, though he had no formal education beyond a high-school diploma.

“Well?” she prompted, when Buck gave her nothing except that killer smile.

Her father chuckled. “Patience, B.J. How about a drink?”

“I’ll pass.”

L.T. stubbed out his hundred-dollar cigar in the brass dish beside his glass of Scotch. Then he stood and held out his hand to Jessica. With a glowing smile, she took it. He kissed her slim fingers. “Then let’s sit down to dinner, shall we?” He gestured at the round table across the room. It was set for four, with a white cloth, gleaming crystal and china rimmed in gold. “Nothing like a good meal to get the creative juices flowing.”

What a night. Face-to-face with Buck again. And now she’d be expected to eat. Her father loved nothing so much as a nice, big slab of rare red meat. Ugh. “If you’ll excuse me, I’d like to…freshen up a little.”

In the lavish black-marble half bath across the main hall, B.J. washed her hands and fluffed her hair and dreaded going back out there and dealing with Buck. But it had to be done and somehow, she would manage it. She would be pleasant. And professional. She’d get the damn story and—at work, at least—things would be fine until the next crisis came along.

She joined the others in the oak room, sliding into the chair between Buck and L.T. with a determined smile on her face. Roderick came in and opened the wine. Colette, one of the maids, appeared and began serving the meal.

B.J. faked drinking her wine. She even managed to get a little food down. On the polite conversation front, she nodded and made interested noises and spoke when spoken to. And she scrupulously avoided looking directly at Buck. No point in going there, nosiree.

Colette had served the main course—rare venison, wilted greens and whipped sweet potatoes—when L.T. finally got down to business.

“Arnie called me this morning and told me the problem. The solution came to me instantly, as it so often does. I thought, Buck Bravo. And immediately after, Of course. Who else? So I gave Buck a call. And wouldn’t you know? Buck was amenable and told me he could make himself available.

“The December cover feature—” L.T. raised his glass of cabernet high and then paused to knock back a mouthful “—will be Buck.”

B.J., who had her own wineglass near her lips at that moment, set it down without even pretending to drink from it. “Buck’s the story?”

Her father laughed. “Yes, indeed. Buck Bravo. His life, his past, how he got where he is now.”

B.J. turned her full glass by the stem and admitted, “All right. It’s good….”

“Good?” crowed her father. “It’s a damn sight better than good. It’s perfect. Ideal. Terrific. Better than terrific.”

Buck cut in. “Well, I wouldn’t go that far…”

“I would,” L.T. insisted. “Any story the competition would do murder to get is, unequivocally, better than terrific. Right, B.J.?”

“Right,” B.J. gave out grudgingly. Buck was, in all honesty, the man of the hour. There was talk that he’d get a Pulitzer nomination for Black Gold. The tabloids couldn’t get enough of him. To read what they wrote about him, you’d think every unattached woman in America longed only to claim him for her own.

Every woman except B.J. She didn’t long to claim him. She only longed for him to go away.

And as soon as they got the details ironed out here, he would go away. He’d go off and write his story and leave her alone to come to grips with the fact that she was going to have his baby.

Argh.

Colette cleared off the plates and began serving brandy, dessert and coffee. L.T. lit up another corona and continued to rave—about how Buck’s hometown, a tiny mountain hamlet in the mountains of California, was named New Bethlehem Flat. “Bethlehem. Could it get any better? And the Bravo family history? Pure gold—scratch that. Platinum. Platinum all the way…”

Buck’s father, the notorious Blake Bravo, the “bad seed” of the Los Angeles Bravos, had faked his own death at the age of twenty-six. Once everyone believed the evil Blake dead, he went on to kidnap his own brother’s baby son for a king’s ransom in diamonds and to litter the American landscape with illegitimate children—Buck and his three brothers among them. Blake had died for real a few years ago and the whole story had at last come out. A day late and a few dollars short, as they say. Because Blake Bravo had managed to live on for thirty years after everyone believed him dead. He’d gone to his grave without answering for a single one of his many crimes.

L.T. announced, “So it’s ‘Buck Bravo: Unwrapped.’

Could there be a better holiday cover story?” B.J. silently agreed that there couldn’t.

And it was about time she got past her personal issues with Buck and took control of this discussion. “All right, L.T. I’m convinced. It’s a great story and we’ll go with it.”

“Great? It’s—”

“I know, I know. It’s better than great.” She turned her head in Buck’s direction and looked at him without actually meeting his eyes. “I’ll settle the details with your agent tomorrow, and you’ll get going on it right away.”

“Agreed.”

“I’ll need you to pull it together in two weeks, if you can manage that. There is some leeway—just not much.”

“I understand.”

“I’m thinking I can get Lupe to go with you to California for the pictures.” Lupe Martinez was their top contributing photographer. “Is there snow in the Sierras yet?” she pondered aloud. “There had better be. This is the Christmas feature, after all.”

Buck let out a low chuckle, one that sizzled annoyingly along every one of her nerve endings. “I’ll see what I can do about the weather.”

“Thank you.” B.J. realized it was time to be gracious—and grateful. “I’m…so pleased about this, I truly am.”

“Glad to help out.”

“I know you’ll write us a terrific Christmas feature. I can’t wait to read it.”

“But I’m not writing it.”

B.J. opened her mouth to lay on more compliments—and snapped it shut without speaking. Surely she hadn’t heard him right. “Excuse me?”

“I said, I’m not writing it. You are. You’re going with me. And you’re right. We should leave tomorrow. I’m guessing L.T. will provide one of his jets.”

“Happy to help out.” Her father beamed, an over-bearing Santa in a smoking jacket. “No problem. The jet is yours.”

Stunned and appalled at the mere idea of being thrown into constant contact with Buck for days running, B.J. gaped. Openly. Her head swiveled from her father to Buck and back to her father again—and she saw the truth right there in L.T.’s pewter-gray eyes. He had known this was coming. How could he do this to her—and not even give her a heads-up in advance?

A thousand volts of pure fury blazed through her. She was certain her hair must be standing on end. Her stomach clenched tight—and then rolled. She looked down at her coffee, at the creamy chocolate dessert with its topping of fresh whipped cream. The few bites of food she’d eaten lurched upward toward her throat.

She gulped—hard. “Excuse me,” she said quietly—and then she shoved back her chair and dashed for the bathroom.

“Is she sick or something?” asked the doe-eyed Jessica as B.J. raced toward the door to the entrance hall, pointed heels tap-tap-tapping.

“Yeah. Sick of me,” Buck replied with a grim smile. Things weren’t going exactly as he’d hoped. Uh-uh. Not as he’d hoped—but pretty much as he’d expected.

“Maybe it was the venison,” said L.T. philosophically. He shrugged and blew a few smoke rings. “Seemed fine to me, though.”

“She’s upset.” Jessica, distressed, stated the obvious. Both men turned to look at her. “Well, she is,” Jessica insisted in that breathy way of hers. “I’m sorry, Buck. But, you know, I don’t think she likes you.”

“No kidding?”

“And I don’t get it. Why would you want to make her write the story? You’re the one who writes.” Jessica’s smooth brow furrowed as if great thoughts troubled her. “Aren’t you?”

L.T. chuckled and puffed on his cigar and, for once, didn’t comment.

That left Buck to make a noncommittal noise in his throat and take a sip of the excellent brandy and wonder if he was biting off a big wad more than he would ever be able to chew.

Maybe so.

Should he back down, agree to head home to California with only a photographer for company? Write the damn story and turn it in and forget it—forget B.J.?

Hell. Probably.

But then there she came, tap-tap-tapping back to the table in her skinny little skirt and dangerous black shoes, shoulders back and head high. She looked sexy as all get-out—and also ready to start spitting nails.

Buck still wanted her. He wanted her bad. The past year or so he’d come to grips with the fact that maybe he always would.

Back down? Not this time. This time he was taking it all the way. And if she wanted her damn cover story, she could come and get it—his way.

“Are you all right, B.J.?” Jessica asked, doe eyes wider than ever.

B.J. slid into her seat again. “I have been better,” she informed L.T.’s girlfriend with a stately nod of her shining blond head. “Thank you for asking.” She turned on L.T. again, eyes stormy, mouth set. “In case you might have forgotten, I have a department to run. I can’t just go traipsing off to the wilds of California. And really. Where is the sense in this? That Buck’s got the byline is half of the story.” She threw up both hands. “Oh, this is all just too, too insane. He’s going to do a much better job of writing the damn thing than I ever could. That’s what he does—write.”

L.T. waved a hand, dismissing her objections.

“Don’t worry about the features department. Giles can handle things for a week or two. And the piece shouldn’t be a memoir. It needs an objective eye.”

B.J. looked at her father as if she’d like nothing better than to grab his cigar from between his fingers and put it out in his face. “Excuse me. An objective eye?”

Her father faced her right down. “That’s what I said.”

“Oh, please. It’s better with Buck’s name on the byline, don’t try to kid me it’s not.”

L.T. nodded. Regally. “Unfortunately, he’s not offering his name on the byline. And we have to work with what we can get.”

She whipped around to glare at Buck again. “Come on. Write it yourself.”

He only shook his head.

“You…” Evil epithets lurked right behind those lips he couldn’t wait to kiss again.

But she held them in. She sat back in her chair, regrouping. Buck could practically see her quick mind working. Cornered but still swinging, she tried again. “I can’t see any reason to pay you, if you’re not doing the writing.”

“Fine. Leave my agent out of it.”

“We will. And I’ll get someone else to write the piece. Someone really good. Mike Gallato should be available, now the Wise Brothers thing fell through. I can call him right now and we can—”

“No,” said L.T. “You’re going to write it. And you’ll do a fine job. It’ll be good for you. You need to get out in the field now and then, anyway.”

“Listen very carefully,” B.J. said in a voice that could have flash-frozen the testicles off a bull. “I’m not going to do this.” Her eyes were wild, her mouth a thin line. Two bright spots of color rode high on her cheekbones. Other than that, her face was much too pale.

Buck frowned. Had Jessica been right?

Was she sick?

He wanted to ask her for himself if she was okay. But he didn’t. B.J. absolutely refused to show weakness, anytime or anywhere. If he asked, he’d get nothing but a snarled denial. No point in going there.

She said, tightly, “Buck. Listen. I assure you. If you don’t want to write this yourself, it’s going to be no problem finding someone else, someone really…top-notch. Someone much better than I would be.”

Again, for a split second, he wavered. But not long enough that she could see it in his eyes. He was going for it. Going the whole way. And, whether she liked it or not, she was going with him.

True, at the moment, she was madder than a peeled rattler at him for roping her into this. But she’d get over it. He’d have as long as he could keep her in California to make her admit that the two of them were far from over. A big job, admittedly. But Buck Bravo was accustomed to life-and-death challenges.

“No,” Buck said. “I want you, B.J. You come with me to California and write the story. Or the whole thing is off.”

L.T. sipped his brandy and waved his cigar. “Sorry, B.J. But it looks like the decision’s been made for us.”

Three

Trapped and fully aware of the fact, B.J. stewed all the way home in the back of her father’s big, black limousine.

Looks like the decision’s been made for us, L.T. had said.

“Us,” B.J. muttered under her breath as the car hummed across the Henry Hudson Bridge. Us? She should have ripped that prize rhino head off the far wall when her father said that, just got up and ripped it off the wall and stabbed him to the heart with that big, fat horn.

For the first time, as she rode through the nighttime streets of uptown Manhattan, she actually considered quitting Alpha.

But the magazine—and her dream of running the whole enterprise someday—had been her life. She simply wasn’t ready to walk away from it.

Not yet.

Not ever.

And because she wasn’t ready to walk out, she was off to California at ten tomorrow morning.

Off to California, with Buck…

Not twelve hours later, B.J., Buck and Lupe Martinez—sleek and exotic as always in her trademark black—took off from Teterboro for Reno.

B.J. kept to herself during the plane ride. She sat at the opposite end of the cabin from Buck and Lupe, put on a pair of headphones and tried to zone out with the help of her trusty iPod. She did her best not to seethe—not too much, anyway. She composed a long series of e-mails to Giles on her laptop, instructions on how to handle the various challenges he’d be facing while she was away, notes on priorities, on whom to deal with immediately and whom he could safely ignore for a while. Between e-mails, she shut her eyes, leaned back and concentrated on letting go of her anger and frustration. Anger meant tension and tension seemed to trigger unpleasant activity in her pregnancy-sensitized stomach.

She did understand that she would have to work through her rage and get past it; it would be pretty difficult to get Buck’s story if she refused to talk to him. Besides, who was she kidding? In the next few months she’d be talking to him, anyway—about his upcoming fatherhood.

Though she’d never given a thought to having kids before, now that B.J. found herself pregnant, she’d discovered she actually wanted the baby.

Okay, so maybe she wasn’t so hot at the male/female relationship thing. She’d accepted the fact that she would probably never marry. This could very well be her one chance to have a baby and she was grabbing it—even though it was bound to wreak serious havoc on her career.

She’d manage, somehow. She had an embarrassingly large trust fund, courtesy of L.T., so money would be no problem. She’d hire nannies. The best that her nice, fat fortune could buy.

And since Buck was the dad, she probably would have to deal with him. How much would depend on how large a part he intended to play in her baby’s life.

And no, she wasn’t telling him the big news yet. No way. She needed to get through this trip with him, get the damn feature written. Until that was done, she refused to complicate the situation with him any further.

In Reno, a rental SUV awaited them. They piled their bags and all of Lupe’s equipment in the back and climbed in. Buck took the wheel and Lupe jumped right in behind him, leaving the front passenger seat for B.J.—if she wanted it. She didn’t. However, she did need to practice being civil to Buck.

So she hopped in front and sent Buck a quick, bland smile. There. Civil. Sort of. And that was certainly enough cordiality for now. He started up the car and she aimed her gaze straight ahead.

The ride to Buck’s hometown took over an hour. B.J. watched the impressive scenery roll past. Especially after they left Nevada’s high desert behind, it was gorgeous out there. The bare hills and scrubby trees gave way to tall evergreens and sharp, dramatic stone peaks. Overhead, the sky was a pale wash of clear blue. No snow, except higher up than the road ever took them, on the topmost peaks. They wound down the mountains, into the green, shady depths of canyons and then back up to sub-alpine heights, where the trees grew farther apart, white-barked and twisted-looking, and the gray ground lay littered with silvery rock.

Lupe kept up a steady stream of chatter from the back seat—about the “crystalline” quality of the light, about how she wouldn’t mind pulling an Ansel Adams and doing her own series on the Sierras in dramatic black and white.

Buck answered Lupe’s occasional questions, but other than that, he didn’t say much. B.J. kept quiet, as well. She avoided turning Buck’s way. She might be slowly allowing herself to adjust to the reality of this situation, to accept the fact that she was headed for New Bethlehem Flat whether she liked the idea or not. But she still wasn’t quite ready yet to have anything resembling an actual conversation with him.

They reached Buck’s hometown at a little after four in the afternoon. B.J. got a quick view of a picturesque mountain village as they rounded a curve. And then they were winding their way down into a valley—or really, maybe more like a big canyon. The highway became Main Street, which consisted of a strip of pavement lined with cute old-fashioned buildings, some of clapboard, some of brick, each with a jut of porch providing cover for the rustic wooden sidewalks.

Buck turned right on Commerce Lane. They rattled over a single-lane bridge and there, on the west side of the street, sat a rambling canary-yellow wooden building with a sharply pitched tin roof. The front yard had a slate walk leading up to a wide, welcoming porch—a porch complete with oh-so-inviting white wicker furniture. There was even a white picket fence. The large sign hanging from the porch eaves read Sierra Star Bed & Breakfast in old-timey script, the letters twined with painted ivy.

Buck swung in and parked at the curb as the front door of the house opened. A tall, slim middle-aged woman with short brown hair emerged. She wore a green corduroy skirt, a cable-knit sweater and practical flat shoes. Strictly L.L. Bean, B.J. thought: no frills, all function.

B.J. recognized the woman from pictures Buck had shown her way back when: Chastity Bravo, mother of Buck and his three younger brothers, Brett, Brand and Bowie. B.J. turned and looked straight at the man in the driver’s seat for the first time that day. “Your mother…”

He gave her a nod and she had the strangest urge to smile at him—an urge she quickly quelled. He was getting no smiles from her. Not now. Maybe not ever.

By then, Buck’s mother had reached the low white gate that opened onto the narrow cracked sidewalk. She hovered there, her hands on the pickets, waiting for them to emerge from the car.

When they did, Chastity smiled, a slow, warm smile—a smile a lot like Buck’s, though not nearly so dangerous. “Welcome to the Sierra Star,” she said in a voice as calm and friendly as her smile. “Good to have you home, Buck.”

“Hey, Ma.” Buck strode around the front of the SUV and fell in behind B.J. and Lupe. When he cleared the gate, he grabbed his mother in his big arms and hugged her, hard. “Good to be home,” he said, lifting her right off the walk and rocking back and forth.

She let out a cry of surprise. “Buck, you put me down this instant!”

Now, there was a weird moment: watching Buck hugging his mother. Yes, B.J. had seen the pictures. She’d known that a mother—and those three brothers—existed. But still…

Odd. Very odd.

Maybe it was just that she was used to a certain idea of him, as a guy all on his own, unattached in every way that mattered.

Once the hugging was over with and he’d set his mother back on the ground, Buck threw an arm around her and they started up the walk together. By then, Lupe had already mounted the steps and stood waiting by the front door.

B.J. hung back, pondering the whole Buck-has-a-mother thing—until he sent her a glance over his shoulder. “B.J. You coming?” She shook herself and followed them to the front door.

Inside, the foyer boasted a pressed-tin ceiling and classic beadboard paneling painted a nice, fresh-looking white. Cheerful rag rugs covered the scuffed hardwood floors. The drawing room off the entrance contained lots of chintz and plaid furniture, an excess of fat pillows and mismatched antiques.

The effect was far from luxurious. Still, B.J. found it kind of comforting. Homey and welcoming. Already the sun had fallen behind the mountains, leaving it kind of gray outside and dim within, but Chastity had turned the lamps on and a cheery fire burned in the stone fireplace.

Buck made the introductions.

“B.J. How nice to finally meet you,” Chastity said, leaving B.J. to wonder just how much Buck’s mother knew about their disaster of a love affair six years before.

“Uh. Great to meet you, too.” She forced a friendly smile. “We should bring in our things….”

So they all headed back outside again. B.J. and Chastity each grabbed a couple of suitcases and trudged back to the house, leaving Buck and Lupe behind to sort out the rest.

“This way…” Chastity led B.J. upstairs to her room, which contained a queen-sized bed, nightstand and dresser and had enough room for a small sitting area. A tall armoire hid the TV. Not far from the head of the bed, French doors led out to a balcony and a gorgeous view: the rushing river behind the house and the evergreen-clad mountains rising skyward to the west.

B.J.—work, as always, foremost in her mind—cast a doubtful glance at the spindly-legged desk in the corner. “Internet access?” she asked hopefully. She didn’t see anything resembling a data port. Maybe wireless?

“Not in the room,” Chastity confessed. “But if you want to use my computer, you’re welcome to. I have the Internet. Don’t do much with it, I admit. I don’t have time to sit around and wait for those pages to come on the screen. Takes forever and a day—I’m a busy woman, you know.” She added the last briskly, with pride.

B.J. got the picture. Not pretty. “You mean you have…dial-up?” She tried not to shudder. Chastity looked at her vacantly. B.J. tried again. “You dial in to hook up?”

“Yes, I think that’s it.”

So much for zipping off her long, helpful e-mails to Giles. She’d call him. Later.

An ugly thought occurred to her. “What about cell phones? Do they work around here?”

“Now and then.” The twin lines between Chastity’s brows—lines that cried out for a little Botox—deepened even further. “Well, the truth is, not that often. The canyon walls block the signals.” She gestured toward the window and the rim of tree-covered mountains across the river. “People around here who just have to have cell phones take them up there. Reception’s pretty good once you get out of the canyon.”

B.J. considered the concept: climb a mountain, make a call. “You know what? Maybe not.”

Chastity shrugged. “But we do have regular phones.” She pointed at the land line on the dinky desk. It was big and bone-colored, an early push-button model. “They work just fine.”

“I’m sure I’ll manage.”

“Come on, then. I’ll show you your bathroom.”

The bath was down the hall. But at least it was all hers—Chastity told her so. B.J. reminded herself to be grateful for small favors. It had a sink, a toilet and a claw-footed tub with a tall, added-on shower head and a flowered curtain that could be drawn all the way around.

And most important, she wouldn’t have to share it with Lupe—or worse, with Buck.

Buck and the photographer came up with the second load of suitcases and equipment. Chastity showed them their rooms. Buck got one next to B.J.’s. Now, why wasn’t she surprised?

“Make yourself comfortable,” Buck suggested, dark eyes much too knowing. “And then I’ll show you around town.”

“Wonderful,” said B.J., meaning it wasn’t, but what could she do? “Give me ten minutes.”

He cast a doubtful glance at her open-toed leopard print Manolos. “Got any decent walking shoes?”

“I can walk anywhere in these,” she replied, just to be difficult. Then she relented. “Okay, okay. I’ll change into something more clunky and hideous.”

“Do that.”

He went into his room. She stared at the door he’d shut behind him and thought a series of evil thoughts. Eventually, when glaring at his door failed to make it burst into flames, she gave up and went into her own room.

First things first: time to unpack.

B.J. loved living large. Though she was perfectly capable of traveling light if the situation demanded it, she preferred lots of options when it came to what to wear. For this trip, she’d brought four full-sized suitcases and a couple of smaller ones for her vanity items.

No worries, though. She was extremely efficient. She could pack half her closet in no time—and unpack it again in less than that. Swiftly, she put things away in the drawers and filled the narrow closet. She even trotted down the hall and put her grooming products away in her bathroom.

With two minutes to spare, B.J. pulled on some jeans and a pair of low-heeled knee-high Michael Kors suede boots—not hideous in the least, actually. But a girl has to score her points where she can. There was a tap at the door. B.J. scowled. Buck, no doubt. Ready to give her the guided tour. Oh, the joy. She grabbed her shearling jacket and answered the knock.

And there he was, wearing jeans and boots and a flannel shirt, looking scrumptiously rugged and far too smug. “Ready?”

She opened her mouth to say something snippy—and a blood-curdling scream erupted from the first floor. “What in God’s name was that?”

But Buck had already turned and headed for the stairs.

Four

B.J. took off after Buck as another piercing scream echoed up the stairwell.

“I won’t!” a woman shouted. “I will not. No way!” Another scream followed, fading right in on top of the words.

A man spoke—roughly, and low enough that B.J. couldn’t make out what he said.

The woman screamed again.

“Now, settle down, Glory.” That was Chastity’s calm, level voice. “Bowie. Back off.”

By then, Buck had cleared the stairs and was striding toward the living room. B.J., right behind him, glanced back and saw Lupe coming down after them. Lupe always wore about twenty silver bangle bracelets on each arm. They jingled together as she took the steps two at a time. “What’s going on?” she demanded, kohl-lined black eyes wide with surprise.

As if B.J. knew.

In the living room, they found Chastity in front of the fireplace, legs braced apart, fisted hands planted hard on her hips. Behind her crouched a petite, dark-eyed brunette.

“No, Bowie,” the brunette cried. “No, no, no!” She peered through the crook in Chastity’s left elbow, gripping hunks of Chastity’s chunky sweater in either hand, using Buck’s mother as a human shield against the strapping, shaggy-haired mountain-man type over by the window.

“Your brother?” B.J. asked Buck out of the corner of her mouth, tipping her head toward the mountain man.

“’Fraid so,” said Buck, sounding midway between amused and resigned.

Even without Buck’s confirmation, B.J. would have pegged the guy as a Bravo. Beneath a couple of days’ worth of beard, he had that telltale cleft in his chin—not to mention that beautifully shaped, way-too-sexy mouth. “Glory,” Bowie said, his tone gentle and careful—the look in his eyes anything but. “Come on, honey…” He took a step toward his mother and the little brunette who cowered behind her.

Not wise.

The brunette let out another wake-the-dead shriek.

“Glory,” groaned Chastity, putting a hand to her left ear—the one nearest Glory’s wide-open mouth. “Cut that out. You’re breaking my eardrums.”

“Well, I can’t help it,” Glory wailed. “I just can’t.” She spoke to Buck’s brother again. “Get it through that thick head of yours. I will not marry you. Ever. You don’t love me. You only say you do because you think you have to.”

“No, damn it. That’s not true. I do love—”

“You don’t.” The brunette bit her trembling lip and shook her head. “Oh, Bowie. You’d make a terrible husband.” She edged out from behind Chastity. “We both have to face it. You’re wild and irresponsible and…and you can’t keep a job.” With that, she burst into tears and buried her head in her hands.

Bowie, looking about a mile out of his depth and sinking fast, tried again. “Honey. I do love you. And I’ll get a damn job.”

Glory threw back her head and screamed some more.

B.J. winced at the piercing sound. She slid another glance at Buck. “What’s this about?”

“Hey. Don’t ask me. I just got here myself.”

“I don’t care who knows,” Glory wailed. “I don’t care that the whole town’ll be talking. It’s nothing to me what anyone says. I said no. I meant no—and I will never change my mind!”

“That’s it,” said Bowie. “Damn it, I’ve had it.”

Whimpering, Glory scooted back behind Chastity. “Don’t you dare come near me, you big lunk.”

Bowie made a sound like an injured moose. Then he pointed a threatening finger at the sobbing brunette. “You will marry me, Glory. By God, I’ll get a ring on that finger of yours if it’s the last thing I ever do.”

“No, you won’t.”

“Yes, I will.”

“No, you—”

“Enough!” shouted Chastity, so loudly that both Bowie and Glory actually shut up. Into the lovely moment of silence, she commanded, “Bowie. Get out.”

“But Ma, she—”

“Out. Now.”

“Ma, she’s gotta—”

“I said, out.”

Mother and son glared at each other. Bowie blinked first. Chastity swept out a hand toward the front door. “Now.”

Muttering very bad words under his breath and shaking his big golden head, Bowie turned for the foyer. Buck, B.J. and Lupe were blocking the door. In unison, they each took a sliding step to the right, into the room—and out of Bowie’s way.

About then, Bowie noticed his brother. He paused in midstride. “Hey. Buck.” His dark look brightened. “How the hell you been?”

“Good to see you, little brother.”

“Bowie,” Chastity warned on a rising inflection.

Bowie scowled again. “Awright, awright.” He clapped Buck on the shoulder. “Good to have you home.” And he trudged on by and out the front door—slamming it good and hard behind him.

Chastity clucked her tongue. “That boy. He’ll be the death of me, I swear.” She turned to Glory. “You okay, honey?”

“Oh, Mrs. B.” Glory burst into a fresh flood of weeping.

Chastity gathered the girl into her capable arms and spoke over her head to Buck and the two women flanking him. “If we could have a few minutes…”

Buck nodded. “B.J. and I were heading out, anyway.”

Lupe cast a nervous glance at the still-sobbing Glory. “I’m going with you—wait. I want to grab a camera…”

B.J. spoke up before Buck could argue. “Good idea.” She beamed Lupe a big smile—and sent a defiant look in Buck’s direction. “We’ll be out on the porch.” Lupe took off up the stairs and B.J. followed Buck out.

“You can’t avoid me forever,” Buck warned, as they waited on the steps for Lupe to join them.

“Probably not.” B.J. wrapped her jacket tighter against the late-afternoon chill. “But I’m giving it my best shot.”

“We have to talk.”

“So you keep telling me.”

“If you’d taken just one of my damn calls—”

She waved a hand. “I know, I know. Maybe you wouldn’t have found it necessary to manipulate me into coming here.”

“I didn’t manipulate you.”

“Hah.”

“I had a story you wanted. To get it, you paid the price I set.”

“As I said, you manipulated me into coming here.”

“You could have turned down the story…” He sent her one of those looks—intimate, dangerous. “Or maybe not. Maybe you couldn’t turn it down. After all, anything for Alpha, right?”

As if she’d deny it. “That’s right. Anything. Even a week in the sticks with you.”

“A week?” His breath plumed on the air. “I don’t know. This job is likely to take a lot more than a week….”

More than a week? To cover her dismay, she stuck her hands in her pockets and laid on the sarcasm. “Now you’ve really got me scared.”

He moved in closer—too close, really. But she had her pride. Damned if he’d make her step back. He asked, “Did you notice?”

“What?”

“You’re actually talking to me.”

“Don’t let it go to your head.”

He loomed closer still, close enough that she could feel his breath across her cheek, marvel at the thickness of his lashes over those damn night-dark eyes of his. “You’re not scaring me off.” He spoke the threat tenderly. “Not this time.”

She held her ground. “Watch me.”

“I am. I do.”

The door behind them opened and Lupe appeared, a black pea coat flung over her black jeans and short-sleeved black sweater. Her bangles jingled as she held up a Nikon. “Ready.”

B.J., deeply grateful for the photographer’s timely appearance, flashed her a blinding smile.

Buck muttered, “Fine. Let’s go.” He led the way across the bridge to Main Street.

As they strolled along the town’s major street, Buck played tour guide. He pointed out landmarks: the post office, the school on a rise one street over, the hardware emporium, the town hall, the firehouse. Three gift stores, a beauty shop, two restaurants. He showed them the bars, of which there were also two—one on either side of the street. And the Catholic church on the hill behind the school. Lupe got several shots of the white clapboard building sporting one central spire and nestled so prettily in a copse of autumn-orange maple trees. There was also a Methodist church, Buck told them, farther up Commerce Lane from Chastity’s B & B.

Everybody seemed to know him. It was “Buck, how you been?” and “Buck, nice to have you home again,” and “Great to see you back in town.” Some had even read his book.

One grizzle-haired old fellow perched on a bench outside the grocery store asked him when he was going to write a book about “the Flat,” as the locals called it. “Now, there’s a book that needs writin’.” The old character winked at B.J.

“One of these days, Tony,” Buck promised.

“You be sure to come and talk to me before you put down a single word,” Tony warned, turning his bald head this way and that, hamming it up for the camera as Lupe snapped shot after shot. “I got all the best stories—and I can tell you where all the bodies are buried…if you know what I mean.” He wiggled his bushy white eyebrows.

“Tony, you know you’re the first one I’ll come see.”

The old guy nodded, looking gratified. “I’ll hold you to it, see if I don’t.” He winked again at B.J.—and then at Lupe, too. “I like a pretty woman. Which one of these is yours?”

Buck sent B.J. a far too intimate look. She pretended not to notice.

“Well?” prompted old Tony with a chuckle.

Lupe blew a midnight strand of hair out of her eye and brought her camera into position again. “Leave me out of it. I’m just here to take the pictures.”

“Ah,” said Tony, turning to size B.J. up. “You, then.”

“No. I’m not his—and he’s not mine.”

“You sound real definite about that,” said Tony. “Maybe too definite. So definite I’m wondering who you’re tryin’ to convince.” Tony did some more chuckling.

Buck stepped in and made the introductions. “Tony Dellazola, this is B. J. Carlyle and Lupe Martinez.”

“Well, I am pleased to meet you both—so Buck. Tell me. You still livin’ in New York City?”

“That’s right.”

“Never been there, never will. It’s not healthy, folks livin’ all on top of each other that way. Like rats in a maze. They start chewin’ off their own tails.”

“Hey.” B.J. couldn’t let that remark pass. “I’m a New Yorker. You couldn’t pay me enough to live anywhere else.”

“And I like a good-lookin’ woman who knows her own mind,” declared old Tony. He pulled a toothpick from his shirt pocket, stuck it between his yellowed teeth, leaned back on the bench and asked Lupe, “What d’you need all those pictures for?”

Lupe kept shooting and let Buck answer for her. “We’re here to do an article for Alpha magazine.”

Tony snapped to attention. “What’s that? I’m gonna have my picture in Alpha magazine?”

“Could be.”

Tony thought it over. “Well. I suppose that’s okay with me. Alpha’s a fine magazine. Classy, you know? And those Alpha Girls…each one prettier’n the last, all of ’em wearing a nice, big friendly smile—and not a whole lot more.” He gave yet another cackling chuckle and then grew serious again. “You’ll send me a free copy so I’ll know I was in there?”

“Absolutely,” said B.J.

Buck thanked the old guy and they moved on, crossing the street and heading down the other side, back toward the bridge to Chastity’s place.

“Quite a character,” Lupe remarked once they were out of earshot.

Buck said, “He was sitting on that bench all day every day back when I was a kid. I swear, he looks exactly the same today as he did then. He’s gotta be ninety by now. Glory’s his great-granddaughter.”

“Glory.” Lupe looked pained. “You mean the screamer?”

Buck ignored Lupe’s question. He seemed faintly bemused. “Glory was maybe ten years old when I left town. And now look at her.”

“Yeah,” said Lupe, “hanging around your mother’s B & B, terrorizing the clientele.”

Buck shrugged. “No one to terrorize. It’s the slow season. For tonight, I think we’re the only guests—and whatever she was screaming about, Glory does have a valid reason to be there. She lives downstairs, in an add-on apartment in back. She’s the maid.”

Lupe shuddered. “Remind me to lock up my valuables when I leave my room.”

“Relax,” Buck said. “Glory’s a good kid. Yeah, she’s got a little drama queen in her. Like all the Dellazolas. They’re a big, rowdy family and generally, with them, the one who screams the loudest gets the most attention. But they’re sweet and harmless, really—and honest as the day is long. Every last one of them.”

Back at the Sierra Star, all was quiet. They went in the front door to find the fire still burning cheerily in the fireplace and nobody in the living room or the front hall. Lupe headed for the stairs. B.J., oh-so-casually, fell in behind her, hoping to reach the safety of her room without Buck suggesting another outing—one with just the two of them this time.

She made it halfway up.

“B.J.”

With a sigh, she turned and looked down at him. Their eyes met. Zap. There went that disgusting hot little thrill coursing through her.

Really, he was much too attractive—an attractiveness consisting of more than mere good looks. He had a certain…energy about him. An energy that radiated off him and kind of filled up the space around him with excitement, with a sense of expectation.

And why, oh why, was she thinking about how attractive he was? She really had to watch herself or she’d be falling into bed with him all over again.

And she wasn’t going to do that. She really, truly wasn’t.

He said, “I want to take you to dinner.” He glanced beyond her at Lupe, who had paused at the head of the stairs. “Lupe, you’re officially not invited.”

Lupe shrugged. “So I’ll check out the club scene.”

“Bars, Lupe. They’re just bars.”

“Leave me my fantasies, at least.” She turned for her room.

Buck waited until the photographer disappeared from view before insisting, “Dinner. In an hour. We’ll walk over town.”

More eating. So not her favorite thing lately. And eating with Buck, as well. That would mean an hour, at least, of sitting across from him, counting his eyelashes, thinking stupid thoughts like how no other man smelled like him, or laughed like him, or looked at her in such a dangerously delicious kind of way.

She was in trouble here.

No doubt about it.

Then again, there was the interview. She should concentrate on that. The sooner she got the material she needed, the sooner she could get back into her Manolos and away from Buck and New Bethlehem Flat. “I’ll bring my tape recorder.”

“One hour. No excuses.”

She turned and left him without actually saying yes, though both of them knew she’d be ready. On time.

In her room, using the push-button phone, B.J. called Giles, who was still at his desk, bless his ambitious little heart, though it was well after seven at night in New York.

He listened patiently to her long list of notes and suggestions, then told her that everything was going fine. “Not a crisis in sight.”

“That’s not normal.”

He laughed. She pictured him tossing those thick blond locks of his and felt homesick—for the city, for her office, for her own world where she could so easily avoid dealing with Buck.

“B.J.,” Giles chided. “You worry too much.”

“Call me. The minute there’s any kind of problem, any time you need advice…”

“I will, I will.”

“Use this number.” She rattled it off. “Cell phones don’t work here. And forget the Internet. It’s not happening, either.”

“Okay, okay.”

“If I’m out of the room, you can leave a message. I’ll get back to you as soon as I can.”

“Makes sense to me. And I mean it. There is zero to worry about.”

The call was over too quickly, leaving her standing in her cozy little room at the Sierra Star B & B, staring out the window at the rough, silvered reflection of the moon on the river, wondering what she was doing there—and silently vowing to pull the damn article together fast and get the hell out of New Bethlehem Flat.

Five

Buck took B.J. to the Nugget Steakhouse—on Main Street, wouldn’t you know? The Nugget had a main dining room and another room next door, which contained one of the town’s two bars.

A stocky waitress in jeans and a polo shirt greeted Buck by name. He gave her that grin that bowled all the women over. “Nadine. How you been?”

“Can’t complain.” Nadine led them to a booth. “What can I get you to drink?” She handed them each a menu.

Buck ordered a whisky and soda. B.J. asked for water. The waitress hurried off through the door to the bar.

B.J. opened her menu. “What’s good?”

“How would I know? I haven’t eaten here in over a decade.”

The menu was big enough that, held upright, it blocked him from her view. Which was fine. After all, every time she looked at him, she only wanted to look some more.

He said, “You probably can’t go wrong with the filet.”

She grunted in answer, staring blankly at the menu, wondering why she’d bothered to ask for his recommendation. It wasn’t as if she would be eating or anything.

Morning sickness. Who ever thought of calling it that? Probably some idiot with a disgustingly positive attitude. For B.J., the problem went on all day and all night. If it kept up, she’d be the skinniest pregnant lady in Manhattan. She might die of starvation, and her poor unborn baby with her.

And she just knew he was waiting over there across the table for the moment when she had to stop hiding behind the menu and look at him again.

Might as well get it over with. She shut the menu, set it aside and went ahead and met his eyes.

Wouldn’t you know? Compelling as ever.

She glanced away. For something to do as she tried not to look at him, she studied the decor.

The place was aggressively rustic, a virtual sea of knotty pine. Knotty pine crawled up the walls and spread across the ceiling. Their booth and the tables grouped in the center of the room were all made of knotty pine. The ladder-back chairs? Yet more knotty pine. Even the wagon-wheel chandeliers overhead were knotty pine, stained dark enough that it was hard to make out the knots. But B.J. wasn’t fooled.

She knew knotty pine when she saw it—and she didn’t care for it in the least. B.J. had history with knotty pine, history that involved a dead animal, a rifle and a hunting lodge in Idaho.

In October, the year she turned twelve, L.T. had taken her to Idaho to hunt elk. B.J. had always loathed hunting. She didn’t want to watch her dinner die, she truly didn’t.

But she’d learned to shoot and how to handle herself in the woods just to prove to L.T. that she could. That trip, she’d actually shot an elk. A gorgeous big bull with a massive rack. It was one of those things that just happened. She had the rifle and she knew how to use it and she knew what L.T. expected of her.

In the sub-freezing pre-dawn, she’d crouched behind a big, gray rock and waited there for hours, being quiet and tough and self-reliant, the way L.T. expected her to be. She had it all figured out in her twelve-year-old mind. No elk was even going to come near her, so she wouldn’t have to actually shoot anything.

Wrong.

The animal appeared out of nowhere. All at once it was just standing there in the early-morning gloom, looking off toward the snow-capped mountains to the east and the bright rim of light where the sluggish sun was slowly rising. Soundlessly, she shouldered her rifle, got the creature in her sights—and pulled the trigger. A perfect, clean shot. The bull dropped dead where it stood, forelegs crumpling, big brown eyes going glassy, making no sound but a loud thump as it hit the ground.

B.J. emerged from behind her rock and stood over it, still not believing that she’d actually killed the poor thing.

The knotty pine had come into play that night. Their hunting lodge was paneled, like the Nugget Steakhouse, all in pine. L.T. and the other men stayed up late, drinking and laughing and loudly discussing how “little B.J.” had got her elk. Little B.J., who had gone to bed early, lay awake in the open sleeping loft upstairs, counting the knots in the paneling, thinking that she really hadn’t meant to shoot that bull, and wishing the men would just shut up about it.

“You’re too quiet,” Buck said.

She blinked and focused on him. “Sorry. Just thinking.”

“About?”

Nadine reappeared, saving B.J. the trouble of coming up with an answer. The waitress set their drinks in front of them, along with a bread basket, bread plates and their flatware rolled in white cloth napkins. “You two ready to order?”

“I am,” said B.J. She rattled off what she wanted and Buck did the same. Nadine scribbled it all down and hustled off again.

“So,” said Buck.

“What?”

“What was on your mind, just then?”

“When?”

He gave her a look—kind of weary and put-upon.

Oh, what the hell? “I was just thinking that I hate knotty pine. Knotty pine is depressing. Every damn knot is like a big, sad, reproachful brown eye—an eye that watches your every move.”

“Never thought of it that way.”

“This is probably not a good place to be on medication.”

“I kind of like it myself.” He tipped his head to the side and looked toward the center of the room. Admiring the knots in the tables and chairs? Apparently. The light from the hurricane lamp on their table shone on his dark hair. So silky, his hair.

And thick. Very thick…

“My dad brought us here once,” he said, turning to her again, smiling slowly when he caught her eye, causing certain responses, certain small, shivery feelings she instantly denied.

She cleared her throat. “How old were you?”

“Pretty little. Maybe five. It’s one of my few memories of him. He was gone so much. He would show up out of nowhere, now and then, for a week or two, and then disappear again. That was the last time he came to town, when he brought us to dinner here. It was before Bowie was born—nine months before, if you know what I mean.”

She did. Blake had gotten Chastity pregnant, gone away, and never come back. “What a guy.”

Buck said, “That was pretty much his M.O. He’d show up, get my mother pregnant and leave. He’d come back in a year or so, get her pregnant again. Leave again. None of us ever got to know him or anything. He was the stranger who happened to be our father.”

Her editor’s brain kicked in. The stranger who happened to be our father. That might make the cutline under a photo of the notorious Blake. They’d need to dig up an old picture….

And she should be getting this down. Any revelations about Blake Bravo could definitely be usable.

She grabbed her bag, dug out the mini-recorder, turned it on and set it on the table, down toward the hurricane lamp—out of the way, but close enough to pick up everything they said. “So Bowie never even met his father?”

Buck eyed the recorder. “Always on the job, right?”

“That’s what I’m here for.”

He looked at her. A long look. “I keep hoping for more.”

“Well, don’t—about Bowie and Blake…”

He said nothing, just looked at her some more.

And if she’d didn’t watch it, she’d be looking right back, going ga-ga over his eyelashes and the sexy curve of his mouth. “Talk,” she commanded.

He made a low sound—something between a grunt and a chuckle. And at last, he got down to it. “Bowie, as the youngest, never met our father. And Brand, Brett and I never knew him. Not really. He hardly ever came around, and we were mostly too little to have a clue who he was.” Buck glanced down into his drink and then back up at her. “He had the weirdest, scariest light-colored eyes. Wolf eyes…but I told you that, didn’t I? About his eyes. Back when you and I were together?”

She nodded. Back then, he never talked about his family much. Just that his dad had left them when Buck was very young—and about Blake’s pale, strange eyes. “Tell me more about the time your dad brought you here, to the Nugget. You were five, you said?”

“Yeah. I was the only one of the kids who got to go. Brett and Brand were…two and three, I guess. Ma left them with my grandmother. It was December. I remember there were tinsel garlands looped on the light fixtures.” They both glanced up at the wagon-wheel chandelier over their heads. “And a tree, over there by the door to the street—a fresh tree, strung with those old-style big lights and shiny glass ornaments. I remember passing it as we came in, breathing in the piney smell of it, getting off on the way the lights glowed in the branches. It meant Christmas was coming and that gave my five-year-old heart a thrill.”

“You had good Christmases, growing up?”

He nodded. “Ma made a big deal of it. She baked like a champion, played Christmas carols all day and half the night from the morning after Thanksgiving on. She decorated a huge silver-tip fir in the front room. She seriously decked the halls—and every flat surface in sight. The hotel—in those days she called it a hotel—was a damn Christmas wonderland and that is no lie. My brothers and I loved it.”

“It sounds fabulous.”

“It was.” Those dark eyes of his were shining.

Nadine trotted up, bearing a pair of totally retro salads: iceberg lettuce and wedges of tomato drizzled all over with ranch dressing. “Here we go.” She plunked them on the table and bustled away again.

B.J. looked down at her plate—and her stomach actually growled. Amazing. For the first time in a week, out of nowhere, she was starving.

“Back to dinner out with psycho-Dad,” she prompted as she unrolled her napkin, spread it on her lap, grabbed for her fork and dug in.

It tasted so good. She had to make a conscious effort not to groan in delight at the crisp texture of the lettuce, the creamy, perfect consistency of the dressing. She gobbled down several crunchy, delicious bites before it came to her that Buck wasn’t talking.

She looked up from devouring her salad to find him watching her—again.

“Hungry?” he asked, annoyingly amused.

She took time to swallow, lick a spot of dressing off her upper lip and wipe her mouth with her napkin, before replying. “Yeah. So?”

“Last night at the Castle, you didn’t eat much of anything.”

She wisely refrained from comment on that one and instructed instead, “Your father. With lots of detail, please. If I have to write this thing, you have to give me something to work with.”

“You can be very bossy, you know that?”

“And you can be a manipulative SOB—or did I mention that already?” She dropped her napkin in her lap and forked up another huge bite of salad.

“Yeah. You mentioned it.” He stared at her mouth as he lounged back in his seat, keeping one strong arm resting on the table—to the right of his empty drink and his untouched salad. “You’re still steamed because I dragged you into this.”

She paused before stuffing that big bite into the mouth he kept staring at. “How did you guess? The story, please.”

He picked up his drink, rattled the ice cubes as Nadine rushed by—and finally continued. “We took a booth that night. The one right behind you, I think it was. I remember that Ma and my dad sat together. I sat across from them. I tried to be very, very good. And whenever my father would look at me with those scary eyes of his, I’d get this tightness in my stomach, this feeling that I wouldn’t mind so much when he went away again. Little did I know that when he left that time, he was never coming back.”

B.J., having polished off her salad, longed to pick up her plate and lick the last of the dressing from it. Somehow, she restrained herself.

And besides, there was still the bread basket. She grabbed it and peeled back the warming towel to reveal four nice, big dinner rolls. Snatching one up, she slathered on the butter and then tore off a hunk and stuck it in her mouth.

God. Bread. Delicious—and Buck was watching her again, grinning that grin of his. She made a move-it-along circular gesture with her free hand.

He took his cue. “Recently—since a few years ago, when it all came out in the papers and I found out who he really was—I’ve been learning about dear old Dad. Blake kept a home base in Norman, Oklahoma, with a woman named Tammy Rae Sandovich. He had one child with Tammy Rae. A boy, Marsh.”

She swallowed. “Your half-brother…”

“One among many. I met Marsh last year. Great guy. Blake used to beat him—and his mother, too. A lot. So in hindsight, with the information I have now, I can’t say I regret that dear old Dad didn’t show up much, or that he stopped coming around when I was so young.”

B.J. felt a faint twinge of something that might have been sympathy—for Buck, for all the left-behind children of the evil Blake. With that twinge came the urge to reach across the table, to cover Buck’s hand with her own, to reassure him, the way a friend would. It was an urge she took care to suppress.

Nadine set Buck’s second drink in front of him. “Everything okay?”

B.J. swallowed again. “Great,” she said, and popped the last of the roll into her mouth.

Nadine beamed at B.J.—and scolded Buck. “Eat your salad. Steaks are on the way.”

“I’m getting to it, Nadine.”

The waitress clucked her tongue and left them—and Buck reached over and turned off the recorder. Before B.J. could swallow that last chunk of bread and object, he leaned closer and spoke low. “I talked to Ma—about what’s up with Bowie and Glory.”

Okay, she was curious. She washed the bread down with water. “So, and?”

“Glory’s pregnant.”

“Pregnant.” She set down her glass. She probably should have guessed—and was this too close to home, or what?

“Bowie wants to marry her.”

“So he said—more than once. And she said no. Repeatedly. At the top of her lungs, as I recall.”

Buck finally picked up his fork. “It doesn’t matter what she said. He’ll marry her, one way or the other.”

“Not if she keeps saying no.”

“You just don’t get it.”

“That’s right, I don’t.”

“Bowie’s a Bravo.”

“And that explains…what?”

“Everything.”

“Oh. Well. To you, maybe.”

He wore an excessively patient expression. “My brothers and I were raised minus a father. That’s not going to happen to our kids.”

“Ah.” And given her own circumstances, B.J. wasn’t sure she liked the sound of this. “Okay. Just to recap here. Bowie’s a Bravo. So he has to marry Glory—because she’s going to have his baby?”

“Yeah.”

“As in, one and one equals two?”

“That’s right.”

“Buck. Hello. Twenty-first century, U.S. of A.”

He waved his fork for silence. “Look. A Bravo may make mistakes in life. Big ones. But you can bet your favorite pair of sexy shoes that when there’s an innocent kid involved, a Bravo will always find a way to do the right thing.”

A stream of perfectly valid arguments scrolled through B.J.’s brain: that sometimes marriage just isn’t the right solution, that a child can have a productive, happy life without her parents being married. That some people—herself among them—just aren’t meant for marriage, that a bad marriage is never a good thing, for the child, or her parents….

She kept those arguments to herself. This was much too dangerous a subject to get into right now.

Chewing on another roll, she watched him as he ate his salad, thinking, I am now going to turn on the tape recorder and get on with the interview.

But then again…

Okay. She had to ask. “You, too, Buck? You’d marry some woman you didn’t care about, didn’t…love, just because she was having your baby?”

He speared a tomato wedge. “Bowie does love Glory. He said so.”

“Well, yeah. To convince her to do things his way.”

“Uh-uh. I don’t think so. I think he really does love her.”

“And you determined this, how?”

He considered a moment. “Call it an informed opinion. He’s my baby brother. I grew up with him. It’s my informed opinion that he meant what he said. He loves Glory.”

There was a moment. They looked at each other and B.J. felt…sparks. Heat. That burning energy, way too sexual, zipping back and forth between them.

Why this guy? she thought, as she’d thought a thousand times before. Why, always, in the end: Buck?

Nadine appeared with their steaks. She served them and took their salad plates away.

Buck started in on his T-bone. B.J. sipped her water and told herself not to go there—after which, she promptly went there. “And anyway, I wasn’t asking about Bowie. I was asking about you. If you got a woman pregnant, would you think you had to marry her, whether you really wanted to or not?”

“Why do you ask?”

“Just curious,” she baldly lied.

Those eyes of his seemed to bore holes right through her. And then he lifted one hard shoulder, sketching a shrug. “Honestly, I can’t say for certain. It hasn’t happened.” Then he frowned. “Wait a minute. Are you trying to tell me something?”

“No. No, I’m not.” Well, it was the truth. Barely. She wasn’t trying to tell him. Not now. Not yet…

“I’ll say this much.”

She gulped. “Yeah?”

“Any kid of mine is going to know his dad and know him well.” His steak knife glinted as he sliced his T-bone.

B.J. realized she’d been holding her breath and let it out. Slowly. “Buck?”

He set the knife aside. “Yeah?”

“Why are we doing this?”

He arched a dark brow. “Because it’s dinnertime? Because we have to eat—by the way, your filet’s getting cold.”

Stop, a voice inside her head commanded. Drop it. Now. But her mouth kept right on talking. “No. I don’t mean dinner. I mean this whole thing. You and me, here in your hometown. Why did you find it necessary to drag me across the country with you? We both know there’s no reason you can’t write this damn piece yourself.”

“No denying it now,” he said wryly. “You are talking to me.”

“Against my better judgment,” she shot back, then cut the sarcasm enough to ask, “And will you please answer my question?”

He looked at her in a measuring sort of way. The seconds ticked by. At last, he said, “Eat your steak so we can get out of here.”

“And then?”

“You’ll get your answer.”

Buck said nothing after they left the restaurant. In the chilly Sierra darkness, they strolled down the street, around the corner and across the bridge. The stars overhead, no city lights to mute them, shone thick and bright against the black-as-velvet night sky.

At the Sierra Star, the curtains at the front window were still open. Inside, as they mounted the steps, B.J. could see Chastity, sitting alone by the fire, reading a paperback book, an orange tabby cat curled in her lap.

Buck opened the door and ushered B.J. in—still without saying a word. Evidently, he’d decided against explaining why he’d forced her to head for the hills with him.

Fine. She was having second thoughts, anyway, wondering what had possessed her to ask him why in the first place. Whatever his reasoning, she didn’t need to hear it.

And it had been a long day. She’d go upstairs, enjoy a soak in her own private claw-footed bathtub and then watch some TV. Maybe jot a few notes for the story. Play a computer game. Read a book.

Whatever.

The keyword here was disengage. When it came to Buck, prolonged contact inevitably meant trouble. If she didn’t watch herself, she’d start obsessing over how attractive he was, how smart, how funny. In no time she’d be thinking that maybe they could get something going, after all.

It could end up just like that night in September—with her naked on top of him, demanding more. Or beneath him, begging for more. Or…

Now, see? See what she was doing? All it took was dinner and a little semi-friendly conversation, and she was back with the vivid images of the two of them doing things they were never going to do again. Italics intended.

Chastity looked up from her book. “Did you two have a nice dinner?”

“Great,” said Buck.

“We did,” B.J. agreed. She brought her hand to her mouth as she faked a yawn. “I’m pretty tired, though. Jet lag, I guess. Goodnight.”

“Sleep well,” said Chastity with a serene little smile. The cat looked up at Buck’s mother and twitched its caramel-colored tail. Chastity petted it as she turned her attention back to her book.

Buck said nothing. Why? What was he thinking? What did his silence mean?

Bad questions. Pointless questions. Keyword: disengage. B.J. turned for the stairs.

He fell in behind her. He walked softly. Still, she could feel him at her back all the way up the stairs and down the hall to their side-by-side rooms. She had her key ready. She slid it smoothly into the lock and pushed the door open. Stepping swiftly in, she turned to shut it behind her—to shut him out. She almost made it, too.

At the last possible second, he said, “Five minutes.”

Disengage, disengage. Without a word, she shut the door the rest of the way and shot the bolt, heard that reassuring click as the lock slid home. She turned with a groan and sagged against the door.

“Shit,” she said to the empty room. Five minutes. What did that mean?

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