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“You aren’t going to marry Jillian!” Letter to Reader Title Page About the Author Letter to Reader Chapter One Chapter Two Chapter Three Chapter Four Chapter Five Chapter Six Chapter Seven Chapter Eight Chapter Nine Chapter Ten Copyright
“You aren’t going to marry Jillian!”
“Is that so?” Zach muttered dangerously.
Jillian tried to plead with her sister to keep quiet, but she wouldn’t be stopped. “Jillian told Mother and me that you wouldn’t have her even after she threw herself at you!”
Humiliated beyond endurance, Jillian groaned. “Camille, please—”
“You think I didn’t sleep with her because I didn’t want to?” Zach asked incredulously. “Let me tell you, I didn’t sleep with Jillian because I respect her too much. And you have nothing to say about me marrying her. Does she, Jillian?”
“You don’t have to go through with it,” Jillian replied instead, praying that he’d declare with heartfelt sincerity that he wanted nothing more than to spend the rest of his life with her.
Instead, Zach took a deep breath, his eyes full of apology and regret. “You know I wouldn’t insist if it wasn’t the only solution. For now.”
For now. Jillian blinked back tears and nodded. Only for now.
Dear Reader,
The wonder of a Silhouette Romance is that it can touch every woman’s heart Check out this month’s offerings—and prepare to be swept away!
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WRANGLERS & LACE is a theme-based promotion highlighting classic Western stories. July’s offering, Cathleen Galitz’s Wyoming Born & Bred, features an ex-rodeo champion bent on reclaiming his family’s homestead who instead discovers that home is with the stubborn new owner...and her three charming children! A long-lost twin, a runaway bride...and A Gift for the Groom—-don’t miss this conclusion to Sally Carleen’s delightful duo ON THE WAY TO A WEDDING.... And a man-shy single mom takes a chance and follows The Way to a Cowboy’s Heart in this emotional heart-tugger from rising star Teresa Southwick.
Enjoy this month’s selections, and make sure to drop me a line about why you keep coming back to Romance. We want to fulfill your dreams!
Happy reading,
Mary-Theresa Hussey
Senior Editor, Silhouette Romance
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www.millsandboon.co.uk
ARLENE JAMES
grew up in Oklahoma and has lived all over the South. In 1976 she married “the most romantic man in the world.” The author enjoys traveling with her husband, but writing has always been her chief pastime.
Dear Reader,
Don’t you just love to discover some hidden strength or goodness in yourself? It makes one feel a certain careful pride and a sense of accomplishment. Unfortunately those discoveries don’t come on soft summer days spent in a hammock with a good book and a tall glass of lemonade. Such self-discovery is always the result of some difficulty in our lives, something we feel helpless to face or change. Such is the case with Jillian Waltham.
Like most well-rounded adults, Jillian knows herself better than she realizes. She knows that she has talent and that she’s capable of loving selflessly. She even knows what she wants. What she doesn’t realize is that she can make others know those things about her, too, even Zachary Keller, the handsome hero who makes all the girls’ hearts go pitter-patter.
It’s difficulty and the very real threat of danger that brings a hero into Jillian’s life to begin with, but it’s Jillian herself who provokes him to his very greatest acts of heroism. In doing so, Jillian discovers the depth and value of her true self—and she begins to understand, along with everyone else, that she actually deserves true love as much as, say, Zach Keller.
I hope you enjoy Jillian’s journey to her true self and her true love as much as I have.
God bless,
Chapter One
Two broad slices of potato bread, lightly toasted and slathered with honey mustard. Mesquite smoked turkey breast, sliced paper thin, and a slab of lean roast beef. Shredded iceberg and butter lettuce. Tomato, lightly salted. No cheese. A relish of white onion, kosher dill and pickled jalapeño pepper. And for the finishing touch, black olives cut into tiny rings and sprinkled liberally over the whole with just a dash of red wine vinegar.
Jillian pressed the second slice of potato bread carefully over the monstrous sandwich, neatly “diapered” it with waxed paper and a toothpick, wrapped it a second time and slipped it into the brown paper sack printed with the words Downtown Deli. To the sandwich in the sack she added a small bag of barbecue potato chips, a shiny red delicious apple and a single piece of dark-mint chocolate, which he would eat first instead of last. The lunch safely packed, she poured a large container of strong black coffee, capped it with a lid and placed both lunch sack and coffee container in a cardboard punch-out tray. Now it was time to look to herself.
She washed her hands at the far sink, removed her smudged white apron, smoothed the straight skirt of her pale-gray uniform, pushed her glasses farther up on her nose and patted the headband with the white paper decoration that declared her a Downtown Deli Delight and held back her wispy, caramel-colored hair. She sighed, knowing exactly what she looked like. At five feet ten inches and 130 pounds, she was a gangly, awkward excuse for a woman, with waiflike pale-blue eyes twice the normal size dominating a pointy face more suited to a gnome than a female. Ah, well, Zachary Keller, of Threat Management, Inc., wasn’t likely to notice the first thing about her.
She doubted that in the seven weeks since she’d come to work here behind the counter of the deli in his office building he had noticed her even once, despite the fact that she’d built him the same sandwich at least a dozen times. Now she needed his help. She was about to pass from the cipher behind the counter to supplicant and then intermediary. Soon, she suspected, she would be dismissed altogether. The important thing was to engage his interest on Camille’s behalf, and she could do that. She could.
So what if her knees went weak every time she saw him? Every tall, hunky, dark-haired, green-eyed, chiseled-faced man did that to her. If she couldn’t exactly remember any others, that signified nothing. They hadn’t noticed her, either, she was sure. Camille was the one who got noticed, petite, pretty, blond, successful Camille, the Camille who was all the family she had, her much admired, much loved elder sister.
Jillian waved at the counter manager and received his permission to leave in the nod of his balding head. Carrying the cardboard tray, she slid from behind the deli cooler and walked across the tiny dining space toward the bank of elevators across the lobby. Tess, one of her co-workers, paused while wiping down the hubcap-sized glass top of a tiny wrought-iron table recently vacated by two secretaries taking a late coffee break and called out encouragement.
“You go, girl! Get that good-looking man in your corner!”
Jilly laughed and held up crossed fingers. Every female in the building had a crush on the man. His quick smile, enigmatic green eyes and extremely fit, muscular build were the stuff of fantasies, but according to his secretary, Lois—fifty-something, divorced, pragmatic, efficient and talkative—he didn’t date much. Some of the girls suspected a deep emotional wound, perhaps even a broken heart.
Jillian stepped into the elevator and punched the seventh-floor button.
At the rap of his secretary’s knuckles upon his office door, Zach looked up from the notes from which he was dictating, switched off the recorder and cleared his throat before assuming “the position” by leaning back in his chair and propping one cowboy-booted foot negligently on the corner of his desk. “Yeah?”
The door swung open, and Lois’s long, thin face, piled high with too-dark hair, appeared. “Lunch!” she announced brightly.
Zach launched a normally straight eyebrow into an expressive arch as he sat upright and glanced at the black onyx face of his watch. “Bit early, isn’t it?”
As often happened, Lois wasn’t paying the least attention. Instead, she stood gesticulating at someone out of sight. Resignedly, Zach leaned back once more and lifted both legs to prop them on the corner of his desk, then crossed them at the ankles. Hands folded complacently over his belt buckle, he admired his reddish-brown, round-toed, full-quill ostrich boots and the stiff crease in his dark jeans for a moment, quite sure that whatever was up would soon be forthcoming. Sure enough, a tall, slender woman in a tacky, ill-fitting, gray-and-white uniform and large square glasses appeared in the doorway, holding a cardboard tray. He recognized the bag wedged into one end of the tray, and his mouth watered. The woman took a moment to place—behind the deli counter. She was a lot taller than he’d realized and willow thin, with an interesting, piquant face almost obscured by those huge, hideous glasses. He’d always figured that she was nearsighted, because her eyes could not possibly be that big; they must be distorted by the lenses.
“I didn’t order lunch today,” he said, pleasant but dismissive.
Her small, plump, bow-shaped mouth trembled slightly above her delicately pointed chin. “I know,” she admitted breathlessly. “It’s a bribe.”
He almost laughed, but the seriousness of her expression somehow quelled the impulse. “Policemen can be bribed,” he pointed out, “but I’m not a cop any longer, Miss—?” He made it a question.
Lois took over then, saying, “Waltham. It’s Jillian Waltham. Jilly, this is my boss, Zachary Keller. Jilly has a problem, Boss, just the sort you manage best. I promised her you’d help.”
So that was it, another charity case. For some reason, that irritated him when it never had before. He turned away no one who really needed his help—women, usually, whose mates battered and berated them. Most of his paying clients were celebrities of some sort who needed protection or just “buffering,” someone to stand between them and the public. Occasionally, if business was slow, he worked standard security for corporations and organizations, seminars, private banquets and such, but he much preferred helping individual clients remove themselves from danger and dead-end lives. And yet, for some reason, he didn’t want to deal with this woman. He didn’t want to, but he would.
Zach dropped his feet and leaned forward, reaching for the bag with a smile on his face, as if to say he’d save the world for a Downtown Deli sandwich. “Have a seat, Jillian Waltham, and tell me how I can help you.”
She handed over the tray and practically collapsed into the small armchair opposite his desk. “I know I should have made an appointment, but I was afraid it would be weeks before you could see me.”
.Business was good, but not that good. Thankfully. He waved away the statement with one hand while unfolding the top of the bag with the other. “No problem. We try to be accommodating.”
“It’s just the way you always order it,” she said helpfully, meaning the sandwich.
He shot her a look and moved on to the coffee, lifting the container from the tray and carefully removing the lid before tossing it into the trash basket under his desk. Settling back into his chair once more, he sipped the strong black brew and contemplated the woman opposite him. He was surprised to find that behind those hideous glasses and beneath that laughable headband was an arrestingly pretty face. It was almost elfin. In fact, if her ears were pointed she’d look just like the drawing of a fairy princess in his nephew’s book of fairy tales. And, by golly, those enormous eyes were just that. Upon closer inspection, he rather doubted that she really even needed those glasses and their seemingly flat lenses. For some reason that irritated, too. What was she hiding from? Who was she hiding from? Or was it something more sinister?
Zach had learned from sad experience that the more controlling, abusive husbands and boyfriends typically belittled the very objects of their desire to the point of self-hatred. It was as if such men could not bear for the world to see what attracted them. Women so beleaguered tended to see themselves as unattractive, humpy, even ugly, and to present themselves accordingly. He wondered who had convinced Jillian Waltham that she was unattractive.
“Are you married?” he asked, taking a peek at her bare ring finger.
She seemed surprised by the question. “Ah, no.”
“Ever been married?”
She frowned. “No.”
“It’s a boyfriend, then,” he surmised authoritatively, “someone who tells you that you don’t deserve him and then won’t let go. I’ve seen it dozens of times.”
She pushed her glasses up on her short, sharp nose and studied him. Suddenly enlightenment softened her face, and she laughed, a light, chiming sound that seemed to make magic. In that instant she wasn’t pretty at all. She was beautiful, breathtakingly so. Zach set his cup down with a muted plunk, hot coffee splashing over the rim onto the webbing between his thumb and forefinger. He shook his hand and rubbed it against his thigh, mesmerized, and suddenly he knew what it was about her that bothered him.
Serena.
Jillian Waltham reminded him of Serena.
He immediately squelched the spurt of emotion that thinking of Serena inevitably brought him. It had been almost five years, and the thought of her senseless death still enraged and pained him. Desperately, he pushed the thought away and tried to listen to Jillian Waltham.
“It isn’t my boyfriend,” she was saying, leaning forward. “It’s my sister’s.”
“Sister’s,” he echoed dumbly.
“Maybe you’ve heard of her, Camille Waltham, Channel 3 News.”
Camille Waltham. Channel 3 News. Sister. Something familiar swam around the edges of his mind and then suddenly dove into its center. He saw a trim, effervescent, conventionally pretty blonde with smartly styled hair and perfect makeup. The sound of her voice came to him: “This is Camille Waltham, Channel 3 News, thanking you for watching. Because we’re YOUR news station.” Reality snapped into focus. Not Jillian Waltham. Not someone who reminded him of Serena. And not a charity case, thank God. Camille Waltham, newscaster. He opened a drawer and took out a pad and pen. After flipping open the pad, he began to write.
“Let me get this straight,” he said, “someone is threatening your sister.”
A brief silence alerted him, and he looked up. Jillian Waltham sat with a pensive expression on her face.
“Not threatening, really.”
Zach laid down the pen, feeling seriously exasperated.
“It’s more like he’s stalking her.”
Ice slid through his veins. Zach picked up the pen, all business now. “Any idea when this started?”
“Oh, yes. When she broke up with him. And it’s just like him, too. Janzen never could take no for an answer. It’s like putting up a red flag, issuing a challenge. Even if he doesn’t want it, he’ll go after it just because you told him he couldn’t have it.”
With a sigh, Zach laid down the pen again and reached for patience. “I really need a date.”
“A date?”
The squeak in her voice confused him. “Yes, please.”
“Well, all right,” she said, “but we have to take care of my sister first. She’s all the family I have.”
He stared at her for several long seconds before all became clear, and then he didn’t know whether he was amused or appalled. “Uh, you, um, misunderstand me, I think. What I need is the date your sister broke up with this boyfriend.”
“Oh! That date!” She laughed, but it was nothing like before, and the red flags of color rose in her cheeks. “I thought...but, I should have known better! You sounded a little desperate there, and a man like you wouldn’t...” She laughed again, the sound so strained and false that it made him want to shake her. She must have sensed his mood, for she took a deep breath then and said solemnly, “It was almost two months ago when they broke up. Say, May 8 or 9. Camille would be able to tell you exactly, of course.”
Of course. He cleared his throat, uncomfortable with the knowledge that she considered herself beneath him. But that wasn’t his problem. He tried to concentrate on business. Question number one. “Why, exactly, am I talking to you about this instead of your sister?”
“Oh, Camille’s scheduled for every moment,” Jillian said. “You know how it is, the station’s always sending her out on public relations stuff. It’s that local celebrity thing.”
He knew too well the demands made on and by celebrity types. “Okay, then, let’s take it from the top, Miss Waltham.”
“‘Jillian,”’ she said.
He nodded.
“Or ‘Jilly,’ if you prefer.”
He didn’t prefer, actually. The sobriquet seemed to further trivialize her somehow, but again, it wasn’t any of his business. He made himself nod and smile. “Could you start from the beginning, please, and explain exactly why you’re here?”
She slid to the very edge of her seat and confided, “It was the broken window.”
He opened his mouth to elicit an explanation, then closed it again, hoping that he would do better to let her tell it in her own way. The fallacy of that notion quickly became obvious.
“Camille says it was an accident,” Jillian went on. “and it probably was. He’s not all that coordinated. I mean, you’d think someone who’s involved with music, even if it is just advertising on the radio, could at least dance, you know, but not Janzen—not that he knows it. He doesn’t. He thinks he’s the world’s greatest dancer, just as he thinks he’s God’s gift to women. So maybe he broke it when he was trying to paint it.”
Zach realized he was grinding his teeth and relaxed his jaw to ask, “The window, you mean?”
“Yes.”
“He was painting a window?”
“With words,” she confirmed.
“Words. Ahha. And what words would those be?”
She shrugged. “I don’t know. We couldn’t read them after it broke.”
“The window, you mean.”
“Yes, of course.”
Of course. Zach contemplated the container of coffee growing cold on his desk and wondered if it was possible to drown in it. He rejected that particular avenue of escape and sat back again, elbows propped on the arms of his chair, fingers templed. “So your sister broke up with her boyfriend, Janzen, and he tried to write words on her window and probably broke it that way, so no one knows what he was writing.”
“Except you.”
“Me?”
“No, you. The word you. That part was written on the brick next to the window.”
Zach swallowed something hot and acrid that tasted strangely like anger, but he couldn’t have said just with whom he was angry at that moment. He rubbed a hand over his face and said, “So he wrote something that ended in the word you.”
“Exactly.”
Zach waited, but she didn’t say anything else; so he thought perhaps he would offer some suggestions. “What do you think he wrote? I hate you? I want to kill you?”
She shrugged, not quite meeting his eyes.
“But it was a threat of some kind,” he pressed impatiently.
She sighed. “I think so.”
He floundered helplessly. This obviously was getting them nowhere. “I’m afraid I’m going to have to speak with your sister.”
Jillian closed her enormous eyes in obvious relief. “Oh, thank you! I’m so worried about her.”
He nodded, “Right. So, um, shall I call her?”
“Oh, that won’t be necessary,” Jillian said. “Just show up around six o’clock.”
“Show up?”
“At Camille’s.”
“You want me to come by her house at six o’clock this evening?”
Delicate, wispy brows drew together. “Is that a problem?”
It wasn’t, actually. He often made calls to women’s shelters, private offices and police stations, and he could make this one on his way to dinner at his brother’s. Why, then, was he looking for excuses not to go? He shook his head. “Just tell me where, exactly, I should show up.”
She rattled off an address in North Dallas between the Park Cities and LBJ Freeway. He grabbed the pen and wrote it down in his notebook.
“And your sister—will she be expecting me?”
“Absolutely.”
He closed the notebook and laid the pen atop it. “I’ll see her, then.”
Jillian got up from the chair and attempted to smooth her wrinkled skirt, saying, “I can’t thank you enough, Mr. Keller.”
“No problem.” He stood and thrust back the sides of his pale, tweed sport jacket to place his hands at his waist. “Thanks for the lunch.”
“My pleasure.”
He nodded and forced his mouth into a semblance of a smile until she’d maneuvered around the chair and turned toward the door. Then for some reason, without even planning to, he heard himself calling her back. “Jillian.”
She turned and blinked owlishly at him. “Yes?”
“About that, um, date thing.”
Her cheeks immediately flamed pink. “Oh, don’t worry about that. It was a silly misunderstanding.”
“I know, but it’s not that I wouldn’t... That is, I have a policy about getting involved with clients. It’s not wise. Emotions tend to run high in situations like these, and I can’t let myself take advantage of that.”
“Of course,” she said. “You’re a professional.”
“Exactly.”
She smiled wanly. “I understand.”
“Good.”
Still smiling, she pushed her glasses up on her nose and went out the door. It had barely closed behind her before he remembered that she wasn’t a client at all. Her sister might be, but Jillian Waltham was not. No reason really existed why he couldn’t ask her out on a date if he wanted to. Not that he wanted to. He just didn’t want her to think that he didn’t want to, which didn’t really make any sense even to him.
It was the Serena thing, no doubt. Funny that she should put him in mind of Serena, though. She didn’t look like Serena—well, other than that tall, model’s build—and she certainly didn’t behave like Serena, who had been quietly confident and well-spoken. No, it was something else. Something he couldn’t quite put his finger on just yet.
He sat down and contemplated the brown sack containing the lunch he hadn’t ordered, but it was Serena’s face he saw. A perfect oval framed by long auburn hair, expressive green eyes, straight, slender nose, a full lush mouth. That face had sold everything from mascara to opera tickets. But as lovely as it had been, it was nothing compared with the loveliness of her soul. Serena had been that rare, true beauty who was as pretty inside as out. And she was gone, killed by a crazed, obsessive fan who had fancied himself somehow rejected by her. As was that naive, cocky young policeman who had fed the threats and complaints into the system, believing that would be enough to protect her. He knew better now.