Irresistible You

He reached out and cupped her cheek with his hand. Her skin was soft and warm, and he lightly stroked it with his fingertips.

Her gray eyes flashed. “What are you doing?”

“Good question,” murmured Luke. “But the only answer I can come up with is that I’m not doing enough.”

Brenna licked her lips, and he followed the movement with avid eyes. “I won’t hurt you, Brenna. Don’t be afraid of me.”

“I’m not!” she exclaimed fiercely.

“If you’re not afraid, prove it, Brenna.”

“By doing what?”

He gave a tug, pulling her against him. “I’ll think of something.”

“Have you lost your mind?” Brenna gaped at him. “I’m almost nine months pregnant!”

Dear Reader,

The year 2000 has been a special time for Silhouette, as we’ve celebrated our 20th anniversary. Readers from all over the world have written to tell us what they love about our books, and we’d like to share with you part of a letter from Carolyn Dann of Grand Bend, Ontario, who’s a fan of Silhouette Desire. Carolyn wrote, “I like the storylines…the characters…the front covers… All the characters in the books are the kind of people you like to read about. They’re all down-to-earth, everyday people.” And as a grand finale to our anniversary year, Silhouette Desire offers six of your favorite authors for an especially memorable month’s worth of passionate, powerful, provocative reading!

We begin the lineup with the always wonderful Barbara Boswell’s MAN OF THE MONTH, Irresistible You, in which a single woman nine months pregnant meets her perfect hero while on jury duty. The incomparable Cait London continues her exciting miniseries FREEDOM VALLEY with Slow Fever. Against a beautiful Montana backdrop, the oldest Bennett sister is courted by a man who spurned her in their teenage years. And A Season for Love, in which Sheriff Jericho Rivers regains his lost love, continues the new miniseries MEN OF BELLE TERRE by beloved author BJ James.

Don’t miss the thrilling conclusion to the Desire miniseries FORTUNE’S CHILDREN: THE GROOMS in Peggy Moreland’s Groom of Fortune. Elizabeth Bevarly will delight you with Monahan’s Gamble. And Expecting the Boss’s Baby is the launch title of Leanne Banks’s new miniseries, MILLION DOLLAR MEN, which offers wealthy, philanthropic bachelors guaranteed to seduce you.

We hope all readers of Silhouette Desire will treasure the gift of this special month.

Happy holidays!

Joan Marlow Golan

Senior Editor, Silhouette Desire

Irresistible You

Barbara Boswell

www.millsandboon.co.uk

BARBARA BOSWELL

loves writing about families. “I guess family has been a big influence on my writing,” she says. “I particularly enjoy writing about how my characters’ family relationships affect them.”

When Barbara isn’t writing and reading, she’s spending time with her own family—her husband, three daughters and three cats, whom she concedes are the true bosses of their home! She has lived in Europe, but now makes her home in Pennsylvania. She collects miniatures and holiday ornaments, tries to avoid exercise and has somehow found the time to write over twenty category romances.

Contents

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Epilogue

One

Jury Duty!

Luke Minteer was still in shock. As of tomorrow morning he was supposed to be a juror in a civil case. And from the few facts the opposing lawyers had revealed about the case during the juror interview, Luke already deemed it a major time waster. Of his valuable time!

This, after he’d been such a good sport about the situation. Despite the major inconvenience of being summoned to join his fellow citizens in the potential jury pool, he had dutifully—albeit grudgingly—shown up at the courthouse for the selection. That should have been the end of it, as far as he was concerned.

He expected to be rejected; he was counting on it. For the first time ever, rejection was infinitely appealing, and his past days as a tarnished hotshot political operative seemed to guarantee it. Who would want the likes of him on a jury?

Apparently the judge and the attorneys on both sides would—because he’d been selected.

Desperately he looked around at the other chosen jurors sitting with him in the box, while a bailiff instructed them on their upcoming obligations. They were now expected to put their lives on hold, to be held captive in a courtroom—and all because two idiots, aided and abetted by their mercenary lawyers, had decided to sue each other.

He was Luke Minteer! He didn’t do jury duty!

Eight of the chosen were years older than he was. Decades older! Two young men who appeared to be in their early twenties sported multiple tattoos and piercings on various parts of their bodies—their eyebrows, their noses, their lips and of course their ears, with at least ten earrings per lobe.

Luke glanced at the final juror, the young woman sitting next to him, who was very visibly pregnant. She looked like a teenager, though he knew she couldn’t be. In the state of Pennsylvania, jury duty fell only to those who’d reached the legal age of twenty-one.

Luke couldn’t gauge how advanced her pregnancy was. Unmarried and not a parent, he steered clear of the mysteries of pregnant women.

What mattered in this situation was that she was unmistakably pregnant, the young men looked like circus freaks, and the elderly people were very, very old. One of them coughed continually.

Luke groaned. “I don’t have a prayer of getting out of this.”

“You just said exactly what I was thinking,” said the pregnant woman, looking surprised.

Luke was surprised, too. He hadn’t intended to speak his own thoughts aloud like that. Another sign of how rattled he was by his unexpected inclusion.

“They must be desperate for jurors to pick this crew,” she murmured, now voicing his observation. “I’m due to deliver my baby in six weeks. The lawyers for both sides said the trial would be all wrapped up long before then, though,” she added hopefully.

“Don’t believe everything you hear,” Luke grumbled. “Especially when a lawyer says it. I worked in politics. I know.”

“Didn’t you tell them you worked in politics?” Her gray eyes widened. “It seems that would instantly disqualify you.”

“Why would I be disqualified on those grounds?” Never mind he’d believed the same thing—wrongly. “This case has nothing to do with politics, it’s a battle-of-the-sexes case.”

“And a really stupid one,” she added glumly.

“You took the words right out of my mouth.” Luke heaved a groan. “The facts of this case read like the rejected proposal for a really bad book. Guy gives girl engagement ring, then dumps her. She refuses to give back the ring, which he claims is a family heirloom—and which he wants for his new fiancée. Let’s call her fiancée two. So he sues fiancée one to get the ring back.”

“But fiancée one claims the ring was a gift, hers to keep,” his pregnant fellow juror interjected.

“Or to sell. In order to finance the breast implants she claims are essential to her career as a nude dancer,” Luke added dryly.

“And she also countersues him for harassment or interfering with her civil right to work or whatever.” The young woman rolled her eyes heavenward. “I tuned out at that point.”

“Did you hear that both parties are demanding punitive damages for their emotional pain and suffering? As if either one feels any emotion except pure greed—and possibly revenge.”

“Why can’t they settle it themselves like civilized human beings? Why do they have to go to court and drag all of us into it?” she railed. “Who can side with either one, anyway? He’s a fickle cheapskate and she’s a manipulative—”

She paused for a moment.

“Perhaps litigious, silicone-endowed nude dancer is the term you were looking for?”

“I had something a bit less flattering in mind. Already, I can’t stand either one of them, and I’ve never even met them.”

“Did you say that to the lawyers?” quizzed Luke.

She nodded. “Oh, yes.”

“So did I. Must be why we were picked. Better to dislike them both than to side with one. The lawyers would consider that fair and impartial.”

“It’s a lot like politics after all,” she said thoughtfully. “Where you don’t like either candidate but are supposed to vote for one. It boils down to the lesser of two evils at worst, or at best, two jerks.”

“Evil or jerk.” Luke held back a sigh. “I’m going to take a wild guess that you think all politicians are unlikable, morally corrupt, sleazy…. Feel free to jump in and stop me at any time.”

She didn’t. Which apparently meant she agreed with his assessment?

“I was attempting to be ironic,” he said to enlighten her. “There are exceptions to the corrupt politician stereotype, you know.”

“I’ll take your word on that.” She looked bored with the subject.

From his past work in the field, Luke was aware that politics tended either to bore or inflame, and unless one was canvassing for votes, a change of topic was advisable. Still, he was unable to let it go.

“One exception is my brother, Matt Minteer. He’s a congressman.” Luke’s voice held a note of fraternal pride. “Matt is the representative for the Johnstown district, which includes this county, so that would make him your congressman.”

“Matt Minteer,” she repeated. “Is he the one who fired his own brother for dirty tricks or nasty campaign tactics or something like that? I heard about it when I moved here last year.”

This time Luke didn’t suppress his sigh. He let it out heavily. “Yeah, that would be Matt. The nasty, dirty-tricks-playing brother is me. I was fired two years and eight months ago, but the story is still being told, I see.”

“And those lawyers picked you for the jury anyway?” The young woman was incredulous. “Wow! They are really, really desperate.”

“No charges were ever filed against me. It’s not as if I’m a convicted felon.” Luke was defensive. “Although as far as my brother’s staff is concerned, I might as well be. They’re a very traditional group, set like cement in the old ways. When I tried to be innovative and competitive, to take some risks and implement some new ideas and methods for—”

“Translation,” she cut in. “When you used dirty tricks and nasty tactics, they didn’t approve, and you got the ax.”

Luke scowled. “Are you always so…blunt?”

Though she’d pretty much summed up the situation, it didn’t mean he liked hearing it.

“Yes,” she said…bluntly.

“Well, why should you be different from everybody else?” Luke was aware that his voice held just the faintest trace of self-pity. He didn’t care. “No one else in the district bothers to hold back their opinion of me, including my own family. Everybody reminds me that, though to the world at large I may be a bestselling crime fiction writer these days, in this district, I’m still Congressman Minteer’s brother, the weasel.”

She arched her dark brows. “Crime fiction?”

Luke brightened. Even the locals who disapproved of him as an innovative, risk-taking political mastermind bought his book. Everybody, everywhere, had, bringing him national success as an author.

“I wrote a bestselling crime novel about a serial killer that was published in hardcover and did well and then hit number one on the New York Times list when it came out in paperback. It’s still on the bestseller lists, although farther down by now, of course, and—”

“I don’t read crime fiction, and I’d never read about serial killers,” she said disapprovingly. “Why would anyone want to read about such evil and ugliness? Why would anyone want to write it?”

“You aren’t the first to ask that question.” Instead of taking offense, Luke grinned. “In fact, most of my family does. But I do have one favorite aunt who tells me to make the crimes in my next book even more grisly.”

“Well, I don’t agree with your favorite aunt. Glorifying crime is…is toxic.”

“I don’t glorify—” He began to argue, but inevitably, his sense of humor kicked in. “You are brutally frank. Opinionated, too. Those lawyers in this trial might think you’re a malleable little mommy, but it looks like the joke is on them. You’ll probably hang the jury and they’ll have to try the case all over again.”

The bailiff appeared again, instructing the chosen twelve to report back to the courtroom tomorrow morning at nine-thirty for the beginning of the trial. Then he excused them for the day.

Everybody stood up. None of the selected jurors looked happy with their fate.

“It’s four o’clock,” muttered one of the older men. “The day is already completely wasted. Why did they take so darn long to pick us? All those foolish questions they asked us…”

“I had to take two buses to get here,” complained an elderly woman. “Now I have to take two to get home—and do it for heaven only knows how many more days, until this is all over.”

“I’m bringing my knitting with me every day,” said another woman defiantly. “I have to finish an afghan for my great-niece’s new baby in time for Christmas. That’s little more than a month away.”

The two pierced, tattooed young men slunk off. Luke stared after them, bemused. He noticed that the pregnant woman was looking at them, too.

“What are the odds of two jurors sporting identical dragon tattoos that stretch the length of their arms?” he murmured. “I’d never put that in a book. My editor would say, ‘Come on, Luke, that’s too over the top.”’

“Sometimes truth is stranger than fiction. Which is a creepy thought, considering some of the fiction being written these days.”

“I assume that’s another potshot at my writing career?” drawled Luke. “Nobody can accuse you of being subtle.”

She and Luke faced each other.

“Since we’re fellow jurors, we might as well introduce ourselves. I’m Luke Minteer.” He offered his hand to her.

“Brenna Morgan.” She shook his hand but withdrew her own quickly.

“You look like you want to wipe your palm on something. Don’t worry, I’m not infectious,” Luke said drolly. “I’m merely the bad-guy brother of your good and honorable congressman, and that is not contagious.”

She looked ready to debate the point. “You switched to a career writing crime novels about serial killers.”

“And you don’t know which is worse. My political chicanery was disgusting, but my writing is morbid and sick.” He smiled slightly at her startled look. “No, I’m not a mind reader, Mrs. Morgan. I’m just quoting my mom and my sisters, my grandmother and my aunts, except for Helen. You’d get along famously with them. They never miss a chance to lecture me on the perils of writing about evil.”

“But you enjoy writing about evil?”

She was looking at him as if he were Satan incarnate on a book tour. Luke felt compelled to offer some sort of defense.

“Look, I’ll try to explain to you the way I’ve tried to explain it to the family. Inventing a crime and a case and solving it is fascinating. You can enter the mind of your characters and set up the cat-and-mouse game between the criminal and the police. Plus, on the practical side, it’s been a very good career move.”

Okay, he wanted to brag a little about his writing success, Luke acknowledged to himself. Was that so bad, in light of the fact he’d been viewed as a disgrace to the Minteer clan, as the district pariah? His writing had elevated him to something akin to celebrity status.

Celebrity or pariah? That choice was a no-brainer.

“A person’s got to make a living, you know,” he added, with a practiced touch of boyish charm.

Brenna Morgan stared impassively at him, uncharmed. “And since you’d already been kicked out of dirty-tricks politics, creating serial killers was the logical next step? There’s nothing in between? Not anything in the retail industry or in the business world or the—”

“Aha! Now you’re joking. I see the glint of humor in your eyes, despite your best efforts to hide it behind that deadpan facade.”

This time Luke flashed his most winning smile, the one on the back cover of his book’s dust jacket. He’d gotten fan mail based on that picture, from women who hadn’t bothered to read the book.

Brenna slowly, almost reluctantly smiled back.

Luke knew she would. No woman was immune to his special smile, not even pregnant ones who thoroughly disapproved of him and his profession. That is, unless she happened to be related to him. To his female relatives, his smile and his charm were distinctly underwhelming.

“I really wasn’t joking,” Brenna insisted.

“Sure you were. Those big gray eyes of yours are still shining with amusement.”

“No, they aren’t.”

“Are you one of those types who always has to have the last word? Your poor husband—and those hapless lawyers who have no idea that they’ve chosen an intractable force of nature to be on their jury.” Luke laughed. “Yeah, it’ll be a hung jury, all right.”

The two of them started walking toward the door, toward freedom. They fell into step, side-by-side. Luke cast a swift glance over at her.

He always noted a woman’s height, and he made no exception this time. She was wearing flat shoes, which allowed him to correctly estimate that Brenna Morgan was not quite five-four. At five feet ten inches, he seemed to be towering over her. Luke enjoyed the sensation in spite of himself.

After all, he’d made peace with his less-than-six-foot height years ago. He didn’t mind being the shortest of the four Minteer brothers, he didn’t care that his three sisters were nearly his height. That two of his teen nephews already were as tall as he was and were still growing.

It wouldn’t be long until he was surpassed in height by another generation of Minteer brothers. Not that Luke minded, of course.

And to prove it to himself and everybody else in the world, he deliberately dated tall women, women close to his own height or even taller, especially in very high heels. He liked the elegance, the challenge of height. He was completely comfortable being one of the less-tall Minteers and didn’t need short women to make him feel—well, six-feet tall.

In fact, he assiduously avoided pairing up with a petite woman. To prove his point to himself and everybody else.

He cast another surreptitious glance at Brenna Morgan.

She was pretty. That renegade thought fleetingly crossed Luke’s mind, surprising him. He did not, as a rule, take note of a pregnant woman’s looks. A pregnant woman obviously belonged to another guy, and he wasn’t the type who poached on his brother man’s territory.

He might be viewed as a snake by some—okay, by many—but he did have a certain code of ethics that he followed. Cheating with another man’s woman was strictly taboo.

Besides, a pregnant woman was a mother-to-be, and mothers deserved the utmost respect. The Minteer brothers had that canon drilled into them by their own mother and grandmothers, by their aunts and great-aunts and older cousins, too.

He certainly respected mothers too much to think of them as pretty, Luke reminded himself. Because thoughts of prettiness too easily led to thoughts of desirability, which logically progressed to thoughts of sex.

Mothers, those paragons of maternal virtue, were not sexy! At least, they weren’t to Luke Minteer.

But Brenna Morgan, with her long black hair curving just over her shoulders, her thick bangs accentuating high cheekbones and big, clear gray eyes fringed with dark lashes, with her firm little chin and full, sensual lips… No, not sensual, he quickly amended. Sensual and pregnant just didn’t go together.

Still, Brenna Morgan was definitely a pretty woman.

To cleanse himself of the disturbing thought, Luke allowed his gaze to drift over her totally nonexistent figure. She looked like a balloon overinflated with helium, the skirt of her blue maternity dress swirling around her swollen feet and ankles.

Luke expelled what might have been a sigh of relief. He admired long, shapely legs on a woman. Though he couldn’t see Brenna’s legs under the long blue skirt, her puffy ankles certainly failed his desirability test.

As well they should. She was pregnant, some kid’s mother-to-be.

She was some guy’s wife. She was of no interest to him whatsoever.

“Is your husband going to be ticked off that you’re stuck with jury duty and that your poor unborn child is going to be exposed to lawyers and their sleazy clients for days on end?” Luke asked jovially, purposefully, as they reached the main entrance of the building.

Brenna, in the midst of pulling on her oversize light-brown parka, looked up at him, in that serious, earnest way of hers. “I don’t have a husband. This baby is mine and mine alone.”

She pushed the double doors open and walked off, leaving him staring after her, his jaw agape.

“You were picked for jury duty in your condition? Are they nuts? Did you tell them the baby is due in six weeks?” Cassie Walsh, Brenna’s next-door neighbor, was outraged on her behalf.

Cassie’s three-year-old daughter, Abigail, sat on the floor, transfixed by a video of Winnie the Pooh, and didn’t look up as Cassie rolled an ottoman toward Brenna, who was resting in the armchair.

“I told them.” Brenna wearily propped her swollen feet up on the ottoman. “It didn’t matter. The judge told us at the beginning of the day that they were cracking down on people getting out of jury duty.”

“How can you be expected to sit for hours when you’re so far along in your pregnancy?” Cassie demanded. “Can’t you get an excuse from your doctor?”

“But then my name would go back in the jury pool and I might be chosen after I have the baby. I’d rather get it over with now. Anyway, sitting in the courtroom isn’t any different from sitting in an office all day—or me sitting in my studio drawing for hours, right?”

“I suppose so.”

“Uh, one of the jurors is the brother of our congressman, Matt Minteer,” Brenna added, keeping her voice carefully casual.

It bothered her that she had to make an effort to sound uninterested. She should be naturally uninterested! Even worse was the realization of how much she wanted to talk about Luke Minteer to Cassie, because she knew that Cassie’s brother, Steve, was a lobbyist in Harrisburg and a reliable source of information about Pennsylvania politicians. And maybe about the brothers of politicians, too?

Brenna blushed. She was attempting to pump her friend for information about a guy—like some infatuated thirteen-year-old! A wave of hot embarrassment swamped her.

“Which brother?” asked Cassie. “Matthew Minteer has three brothers, Mark, Luke and John.”

“Luke,” mumbled Brenna. She still couldn’t believe she was playing this game. It was so very unlike her!

“Ah, Cambria County’s most notorious bachelor.” Cassie chuckled. “He’ll sure bring a wealth of experience to any jury!”

Brenna stared silently into space. She was too preoccupied with Luke Minteer, and that was not a good thing, she warned herself. She could visualize him so clearly in her mind’s eye, it was as if he were standing right in the room with her….

Brenna gulped. Luke Minteer was one of those too-handsome, too-charismatic, too-masculine-for-his-own-good men. Certainly, for her own good.