The Virgin Beauty

“I’m helping you on with your damn coat,” he said between his teeth.

Daniel was slowly buttoning up every button on her stupid coat. Winning the battle. His knuckles brushed her breasts as he reached the middle button, and he heard the slightest intake of her breath. His finger froze.

It was probably a little twisted, getting turned on while you were wrestling with a woman for the dubious privilege of helping her on with her coat, but Grace McKenna had been giving him the strangest ideas since the day he met her.

He watched his own fingers slowly unfasten the buttons on her coat, then he slid his hands inside.

“Daniel?”

“Don’t say it’s a mistake,” he whispered thickly. “Please don’t say it’s a mistake.”

She pulled his head up to hers. “I won’t….”

Dear Reader,

The 20th anniversary excitement continues as we bring you a 2-in-1 collection containing brand-new novellas by two of your favorite authors: Maggie Shayne and Marilyn Pappano. Who Do You Love? It’s an interesting question—made more complicated for these heroes and heroines because they’re not quite what they seem, making the path to happily-ever-after an especially twisty one. Enjoy!

A YEAR OF LOVING DANGEROUSLY continues with Her Secret Weapon by bestselling writer Beverly Barton. This is a great secret-baby story—with a forgotten night of passion thrown in to make things even more exciting. Our in-line 36 HOURS spin-off continues with A Thanksgiving To Remember, by Margaret Watson. Suspenseful and sensual, this story shows off her talents to their fullest. Applaud the return of Justine Davis with The Return of Luke McGuire. There’s something irresistible about a bad boy turned hero, and Justine’s compelling and emotional handling of the theme will win your heart. In The Lawman Meets His Bride, Meagan McKinney brings her MATCHED IN MONTANA miniseries over from Desire with an exciting romance featuring a to-die-for hero. Finally, pick up The Virgin Beauty by Claire King and discover why this relative newcomer already has people talking about her talent.

Share the excitement—and come back next month for more!

Leslie J. Wainger

Executive Senior Editor

The Virgin Beauty

Claire King

To Suzie

The bravest, best woman I know.

A special thanks to Sue Vos

For her generous advice and the invaluable loan of her Merck Manual.

CLAIRE KING

lives with her husband, her son, a dozen goats and too many cows on her family’s cattle ranch in Idaho. An award-winning agricultural columnist and seasoned cow-puncher, Claire lives for the spare minutes she can dedicate to reading and writing about people who fall helplessly in love, because, she says, “The romantic lives of my cattle just aren’t as interesting as people might think.”

Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 1

Grace McKenna did not want to get out of her truck. Hadn’t wanted to for five minutes, and still didn’t want to. Didn’t suppose she’d ever want to, in fact. So she sat in the cab, considering her options.

She could drive back to her hometown in Washington State. People knew her there, were accustomed to the sight of her. She was hardly ever whispered about, hardly ever asked a single, stupid question about basketball or the weather “up there.”

Or she could go back to the practice she’d left in eastern Washington, where she stayed in the clinic most of the time, working with the animals, who didn’t care in the least what she looked like.

Or she could get out of this cramped pickup and start her new life and let the people talk. She knew from experience they’d find something else to talk about after a time. A year, maybe. Or twenty.

She sighed, looked around a little.

A new town.

It made her nervous. It always did. No matter where she went, she couldn’t escape who she was—didn’t really even want to. But she always dreaded the first day. Until people got used to the look of her, she felt something like a weed suddenly sprouted green and tall in the middle of an even field of wheat. The eye couldn’t help but be drawn to it, opinions formed, discussions begun. It was something to which she was certainly accustomed—having been a conspicuous weed kind of person since she was twelve years old—but she never got over the apprehension of it.

A new town, a new job. A thousand new faces and facts and places.

She looked around at the dusty little Western outpost. Well, maybe not a thousand.

She was on the main street; homey-looking and not too long, with grand winter skeletons of ash trees that in summer would shade it from the ruthless Idaho sun. On the one street was one grocery store, one supply store, one clothing store with fading Wrangler Jeans on sale in the front window. And a Dairy Queen, of course. She’d lived in the west all her life and had yet to see a town of any size without a Dairy Queen. Thank goodness, she thought as she smiled over at the jumble of old pickups and used sports cars in the parking lot. Every teenager west of the Mississippi would starve to death otherwise.

And that was about the size of Nobel, Idaho. She smiled again, a little more confidently. In a little town like this, people would quickly get used to the look of her. With any luck, she’d only spend the first year or so shaking off the whispers that had followed her since puberty.

Time to be brave, Gracie, she told herself. Time to meet your new town. Time to start your new life.

She unfolded herself from the front of her pickup, a rather long chore considering the length of her legs and her reluctance. She snagged two boxes of supplies from the bed of the truck, balanced them in one hand as she unlocked the glass front door of the small cinder-block-and-tin-roof building in front of her, and welcomed herself—there was no one else to do it—into her new home.

Nobel County Veterinary Clinic, here I am.

Daniel Cash leaned against the icy bumper of his pickup and watched her with narrowed eyes. Nice to know he was such a miserable jerk that he could hate a woman on sight, he thought to himself. His mother would swat him a good one if she knew just how much he wanted to stalk across the street to tell that amazingly long drink of water that she didn’t belong in his town, didn’t belong in his county, and she sure as hell did not belong in his building.

Yep. Hated her on sight. Too damn bad for him she was the most interesting-looking female he’d seen since…ever. Too bad she looked a mile long from where he was sitting, and most of that leg. Too bad her butt sat up as high as a fence post and her hips moved kind of slinky-like. That wasn’t going to make a bit of difference. She was in his building, doing his job, living his life. And he wasn’t happy about it.

He’d been waiting for her, brooding about her. When he’d drunk as much coffee as he could hold in the café across the street from the old vet clinic—the new vet clinic, he supposed people would call it now—he’d come back to the truck to brood in the cold spring wind, hoping it’d take the edge off. It hadn’t.

He levered himself off the bumper and crossed the street without looking for cars. There hardly ever were any. Nobel, Idaho, was not bustling. Half the storefronts that in his childhood had glowed with prosperity and the promise of worldly goods now stood dark; the half that were still hanging on by their fingernails were mostly just wasting electricity. The huge warehouse stores and supply companies and chain groceries in nearby Twin Falls were too much temptation for Nobel’s formerly loyal consumers.

Not that he was thinking about his town’s faltering economy just now. She’d come back out of the building and was headed for her truck, which was parked on the street. She didn’t notice him there—which gave him a good indication of just how preoccupied she was, settling into what was supposed to have been his life. He was a hard man to miss. She leaned in and grabbed another couple of bulky boxes from the back. Without a word, he took what looked to be the heaviest right out of her hands.

Lord. The woman was tall, was all Daniel could think as she straightened. Rose, and rose still. She’d looked tall from across the street, but this was…tall.

He was a good bit over six foot four inches, and was accustomed to being just about the tallest man around. And to looking at the tops of every woman’s head; at uptilted eyes with flirty lashes, at the downslopes of noses, at those darling little whorls of hair every woman had at the top of her head she didn’t know about, as distinguishing as finger-prints. But this girl—

Woman, he corrected himself. Nothing girlish about this Amazon. She met him almost inch for inch. If she was under six-two he’d eat his cap. His eyes widened at the sheer damned length of her. And the blood rushed into his face almost as fast as it rushed south to his groin. He couldn’t for the life of him explain either reaction.

Grace felt the package go and gave a little dismayed whimper. Her extra meds were in that box; darn expensive to get and half in glass bottles. She dipped her knees to try to catch it as it fell, but it didn’t fall at all. It swooped into the air instead and landed against the broadest, nicest chest she’d had the pleasure of coming across in years. She straightened slowly, wishing she didn’t have to.

“Thanks,” Grace said, holding her arm out to receive the box he’d nabbed, “but I can get it.”

He didn’t answer her so she frowned at him. She was used to those wide-eyed stares, and was, she told herself sternly, resigned to being a freak of nature. But the man was young and handsome in that Western, aw-shucks kind of way, and she was a little embarrassed he’d dropped his jaw the way he had. Embarrassed and exasperated. Surely even this big, dumb cowboy knew it was rude to stare. Apparently not…

Daniel ignored the frown, knowing enough about women to understand when he was being reprimanded. And why. But he just couldn’t get over it. Over her.

He knew she wasn’t wearing high heels; he would have noticed that from across the street. He had a definite thing for high heels. He looked down at her feet, anyway. Nope. Boots, low-heeled and clunky.

Well, something had to explain why this woman looked him straight in the eye. Why she was the first woman he’d come across in all his wide and varied experience whose shoulders wouldn’t graze his belly, whose head couldn’t snuggle up under his chin, whose eyes he’d never see head-on unless she was scooted all the way up onto the pillows of his bed.

Grace glared at him. Wonderful. Now he was staring at her feet. They were, naturally, not dainty. She would have tipped over every time she walked if they had been, but she was still a little self-conscious about them. If he was so flabbergasted by their size, she thought, drawing her brows together, maybe she should just kick him with one and show him how useful they could be.

“Excuse me,” she said sharply. He looked up, blinking, his gaze sidetracked briefly in the general vicinity of her chest, as though he somehow expected her face to be there and was surprised when it wasn’t. At least he wasn’t gawking at her feet any longer.

She meant to raise her eyebrows at him when he finally got all the way up to looking at her. Give him a disdainful stare, she told herself. The one she practiced in the mirror for occasions just such as these, when people—when men—made her feel like some kind of circus curiosity for something genetic and completely beyond her control.

But she didn’t raise her eyebrows. When she met his eyes, she felt the oddest jolt. They were mossy-green, the color of the lichen on the trees in her native state. And intense. And looking at her not as an oddity of nature, but as someone who might be backed up against the pickup behind her and pressed against. Taken. Right in front of the Nobel County Veterinary Clinic.

“Uh…” She couldn’t get out another single syllable.

Daniel just stared at her. He was trying to remember why he wasn’t supposed to like this woman. He’d sulked for days about her coming here, and waited in the cold so he could give her a little trouble. That was reason enough why he shouldn’t squeeze up against that long body to see if it fit his as well as he imagined it might. Wasn’t it?

For several seconds he couldn’t answer his own question. Until she shook her head, breaking their strange and electrifying eye contact, and made a grab for the box he was holding.

Daniel recovered, barely, and sidestepped her effort to get her box back. He wanted inside the building, inside the boxes, and this was his chance. Besides, even though he disliked her on principle, that whole long length of her was making him twitch like a teenager, and he was man enough to admit he’d like the feeling to continue awhile.

“I got it,” he said. He stepped in front of her and through the open door as if he owned the place. He put the box down—it clinked and he knew there was medicine in there; his fingers itched to get at it—and looked around.

“You just get into town?” he asked as she came in behind him, though he knew perfectly well she had.

“About five minutes ago,” she said, annoyed and surprised at herself. She was unsettled, and nerves she hadn’t known she had were zinging around inside her like marbles in a centrifuge. This big man had grabbed her box of expensive medicine without warning, gaped at her like a rube, and then short-circuited something important, she was sure, inside her normally very good brain.

Thankfully, she had enough sense left to know now wasn’t a good time to make a blathering fool of herself in front of this, her first townsperson. The people of Nobel, including this giant, were going to be her lifeblood. Or their animals were, anyway. She stuck out a hand. “Grace McKenna. I’m the new vet.”

“I know who you are,” he said shortly. It made his blood simmer just thinking about who she was, what she was doing in his town. He took her hand anyway. “Daniel Cash.”

“Oh, my landlord.” She pumped his hand a couple times, was pleased beyond reckoning to find it was bigger than hers, and tried to pull hers back. He held on. “Uh, excuse me.”

He let her hand go when she tugged the second time. He couldn’t decide whether he’d kept it in some kind of perverse power play, or because it felt perfectly right in his; not butterfly small and crushable like so many women’s hands had, but strong and long-fingered, like his own.

“So…the place is going to be great, I think,” Grace said awkwardly. “Smells like you just had it painted. Thanks.”

He nodded, still taking her in with a pair of depthless, moss-green eyes.

“Dr. Niebaur said you would. Paint it for me. I bought the practice sight unseen.” And she was dying to see it, if this bruiser with the pretty eyes would get out of her way. “But he assured me you took good care of the building.”

He nodded again.

“So—” She moved to open her boxes, wanting something to do. She’d always been a little shy around men, owing mostly to their drop-jawed expressions when they got a good look at her, and this one, with his sudden appearance and intense expression, intimidated her more than most. She felt an old, despised clumsiness as she bobbled the box on the counter and watched him automatically dip his knees to catch it before it crashed to the floor.

“Thanks. So,” she began again after a deep breath, “are you the Nobel welcoming committee, or do you hang around town waiting to help carry boxes around?”

“I was passing by.”

“Well, thanks for the help.” She started lifting items, two-handed, from the boxes.

He’d seen Niebaur’s old vet box bolted into the back of her pickup, knew she’d bought it with the practice she was taking over from the retired vet. This was extra medication, animal supplements, promotional items from feed companies, other fascinating stuff. He could barely keep from brushing her hands away.

“I don’t want to keep you,” she said after an extended, uncomfortable silence between them.

Daniel ignored her polite but pointed comment. She wanted him to leave. Too bad. He shifted so he could get a better look at what she was unpacking, and brushed up against her in the process, making them both jump.

“’Scuse me,” he mumbled.

“Uh-huh,” she said, giving him room. He seemed to need it. He was huge, at least an inch taller than she was. Maybe two, she thought, and a good fifty pounds heavier. His shirt stretched tight at his shoulders, and his forearms, bare despite the weather, looked like tree trunks. She didn’t want to go lower, because she already felt crowded, but she got the impression of narrow hips and long, long legs.

He was less interested in her legs than she was in his, Grace noticed in something resembling relief. He was studying the felt-wrapped bundle she’d laid on the reception counter.

“My surgical tools,” she said.

He grunted and chewed his lower lip. “Mind?”

“Um…” She looked at him warily. He had hardly said two words together. “I don’t think so.”

His dark brows snapped together. Not too difficult to figure out what she was thinking. “I’m not going to attack you with them,” he scolded.

Her brown eyes widened fractionally. “So you say.”

He shot her a look that told her not to be an idiot, and reverently unwrapped the instruments. He picked up a scalpel and examined it.

“You didn’t get these from Niebaur.”

Funny he’d know such a thing, Grace mused nervously. “No. I bought his vet box, but I got these as a gift from my folks when I graduated from vet school.”

Another little grunt. “They look pretty new.”

Nastily said, she thought. That cleared her head, got her back up a little. “They’ve been used. I’ve been out of school for almost two years.”

“Two years, huh?” He put down the set of hide clamps he’d been absently weighing in his hand and looked at her, surprised all over again at how her eyes met level with his. She was slim, but not skinny the way so many tall women tended to be. Nice, wide hips, a nipped-in waist, high, heavy breasts on a gorgeous chest. He glared at her in a rush of lust and annoyance. “This your first practice then?”

“My first on my own,” she conceded.

“It’s a big job for a new vet.”

“I’m not new,” she repeated slowly. “As I said, I’ve been practicing veterinary medicine for two years, mostly large animal work, which is what the bulk of Dr. Niebaur’s practice consists of. I’m good.”

“I’m not saying you’re not. I’m saying you’re young. What are you, twenty-five? I’m saying this is a big area for one vet, much less one just out of W.A.S.U.”

Oh, so he knew where she’d studied, did he? Niebaur must have told him. He’d used the slang term for Washington State University, pronounced “wazoo,” where she’d received her veterinary medicine degree. It made her mad, but because she was accustomed to men making her mad, she just smiled.

“I think I can handle it. And my age is really of no relevance.” He’d underbid her age by a couple years, pleasing her in spite of herself.

He made a sound with his teeth and cheek, and nodded dubiously.

Oh, he was hostile, all right. She didn’t know why, but she could guess. Some men, especially these rangy, manly types, automatically went into full browbeat mode the minute they got a look at her. They were used to walking tall in their little towns, and women such as her unmanned them. Well, tough.

Grace straightened her spine and lifted her chin to give herself every inch and advantage. She watched his Adam’s apple move in his throat as she did. Probably in irritation.

“You want to see my diploma?” she challenged.

Daniel almost drooled. Her neck was long, like a swan’s, like Audrey Hepburn’s, for crying out loud. And when she got huffy her shoulders seemed to widen until he wanted to take them between his hands and measure their width, dig his fingers in a little, test their resilience. Lord, she was one long, cool drink of water. He was suddenly parched.

“No. Niebaur would have been careful with his practice.” He’d wanted to say yes, just to needle her a little.

“Oh,” she said. “Well, good.” Naturally good-natured and easily mollified, she tried a closemouthed smile on him, a dismissal and peace offering in one. She didn’t like his attitude, but she also wasn’t in any position to alienate a potential client. She couldn’t remember seeing his name on Niebaur’s client list, but he might have a cat he needed spayed someday.

She looked at his sharp face, his vast size, and decided no. No cats for this one. And certainly not anything spayed. This man would have a dog, a wolfhound or something, blissfully un-neutered so as not to offend his manly sensibilities.

“I should probably get busy in here, Mr. Cash. If you would excuse me.”

“It’s Daniel. Where are you living?”

She stared at him. “I beg your pardon?”

“Where are you living?” he repeated, ignoring her ruffled feathers. He knew he was being rude. He knew why, of course. She was in his building, with the practice that should have been his, would have been his if not for fate and a horrible lie he’d never been able to disprove. What he didn’t know was why he was so reluctant to slink out and leave her to her unpacking. He hoped it was because he was small and petty and bitter, all manageable, if not particularly honorable, emotions. And not because she was just so damn tall and because he could vividly picture where she’d fit if he shoved her up against that newly painted wall she seemed to like and wedged his knee between her thighs. That was not manageable. Not manageable at all.

“Where am I living?” she echoed. She thought of a million reasons he shouldn’t know, all big-city, woman-alone reasons. But what difference did it make, really? She was this town’s vet now, the only one in a hundred square miles. She’d have to post her home phone and address for her patient’s owners anyway, sooner or later. “I’ve rented a house.”

“Here in town?”

“What—what—” Now she was stuttering. Wonderful. She wondered if punching Daniel Cash, landlord and probably Noble County scion, her first day in town would lose her many customers. “Why do you want to know, Mr. Cash?”

“Daniel.” He corrected her again. “I have some other properties here in town. Just curious.”

She doubted that. “On Fourth.”

“Mrs. Hensen’s old house? Did she get those front steps fixed?”

“I don’t know. Also sight unseen.”

“You have plans for dinner tonight?”

She almost laughed. “No.”

“Want some?”

Her eyes went wide. “With you? I don’t think so.”

“Why not?”

She cocked her head, looked him up and down. She’d been right about the length of his legs, but she ignored the tiny buzz of interest in them. She put her hands on her hips and gave him her most confident glare. “Because you seem a little unbalanced, frankly. What’s the matter with you?”

He frowned at her. “‘Unbalanced’?”

“Yes,” she said. “Unbalanced. You nab my box of meds without introducing yourself, play with those surgical instruments like some kind of serial killer, grill me on my credentials and my qualifications and then ask me where I live? Not to mention I met you all of three minutes ago. And I’m supposed to go out to dinner with you?”