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“You have the softest skin,” Max murmured against her hair. “Like satin.”
Jessie struggled to drag air into her lungs past her constricted throat. Her eyes instinctively slid shut to better savor the sensations flowing through her.
Disoriented, she stumbled slightly as his hands tightened and he turned her around to face him.
Jessie risked a look up and was immediately lost in the swirling depths of his eyes. They seemed to glow with some emotion that her mind was too confused to decipher. She watched with an escalating hunger that threatened to consume her as his mouth came closer. Instinctively her entire body strained upward, desperate to make physical contact with him.
As his mouth brushed lightly against hers, she felt the remaining threads of her self-control snap, freeing her to move deeper into his embrace. Hunger tore through her. A hunger that was primal, drawn from the very core of who and what she was.
Dear Reader,
Just as the seasons change, you may have noticed that our Silhouette Romance covers have evolved over the past year. We have tried to create cover art that uses more soft pastels, sun-drenched images and tender scenes to evoke the aspirational and romantic spirit of this line. We have also tried to make our heroines look like women you can relate to and may want to be. After all, this line is about the joys of falling in love, and we hope you can live vicariously through these heroines.
Our writers this month have done an especially fine job in conveying this message. Reader favorite Cara Colter leads the month with That Old Feeling (#1814) in which the heroine must overcome past hurts to help her first love raise his motherless daughter. This is the debut title in the author’s emotional new trilogy, A FATHER’S WISH. Teresa Southwick concludes her BUY-A-GUY miniseries with the story of a feisty lawyer who finds herself saddled with an unwanted and wholly irresistible bodyguard, in Something’s Gotta Give (#1815). A sister who’d do anything for her loved ones finds her own sweet reward when she switches places with her sibling, in Sister Swap (#1816)—a compelling new romance by Lilian Darcy. Finally, in Made-To-Order Wife (#1817) by Judith McWilliams, a billionaire hires an etiquette expert to help him land the perfect society wife, and he soon starts rethinking his marriage plans.
Be sure to return next month when Cara Colter continues her trilogy and Judy Christenberry returns to the line.
Happy reading!
Ann Leslie Tuttle
Associate Senior Editor
Books by Judith McWilliams
Silhouette Romance
Gift of the Gods #479
The Summer Proposal #1562
Her Secret Children #1648
Did You Say…Wife? #1681
Dr. Charming #1721
The Matchmaking Machine #1809
Made-To-Order Wife #1817
Silhouette Desire
Reluctant Partners #441
A Perfect Season #545
That’s My Baby #597
Anything’s Possible! #911
The Man from Atlantis #954
Instant Husband #1001
Practice Husband #1062
Another Man’s Baby #1095
The Boss, the Beauty and the Bargain #1122
The Sheik’s Secret #1228
JUDITH McWILLIAMS
began to enjoy romances while in search of the proverbial “happily-ever-after.” But she always found herself rewriting the endings, and eventually the beginnings of the books she read. Then her husband finally suggested that she write novels of her own, and she’s been doing it ever since.
An ex-teacher with four children, Judith has traveled the country extensively with her husband and has been greatly influenced by those experiences. While not tending the garden or caring for her family, Judith does what she enjoys most—writing. She has also written under the name of Charlotte Hines.
Dear Reader,
The idea for Jessie’s occupation as a manners expert came to me one snowy late December day when my son suddenly asked, “Are there manners police?”
I glanced over to where he was sitting at the kitchen table, spared a quick look at the so far totally blank sheet of stationery in front of him and said, “Why do you ask?”
“Because I can’t figure out why grown-ups would torture little kids by making them write stupid thank-you letters unless it was a law or something.”
I briefly considered giving him the standard-issue mom lecture on how “if people care enough about you to run all over town tracking down an obscure toy that you said you wanted, the least you can do is write them a thank-you note,” before discarding the idea. Instead, I took the easy way out and said, “Yes, there are manners police, only we call them experts, and yes, they have decreed that you can’t play with your gift until you’ve written a thank-you note to the giver.”
“But what does a manners expert look like, Mom?”
“Look like?” I repeated as into my mind suddenly popped the image of a laughing redheaded woman. To my surprise she looked exactly like the heroine of a book.
I shoved the turkey to the back of the counter, grabbed a pencil and paper and hastily started to jot her description down. And thus was born Jessie Martinelli, manners expert, whose story is told in Made-To-Order Wife.
I hope you enjoy reading her adventure as much as I enjoyed writing it.
Judith McWilliams
Contents
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Prologue
He’d finally done it, and the proof was there in black and white for the whole world to see!
With a sense of exultation, Max Sheridan studied the article in Forbes that annually listed the richest Americans. For the first time his name was listed among the billionaires. Just eleven letters, but those eleven letters represented the culmination of seventeen years of single-mindedly working eighteen-hour days.
Reaching into the pants pocket of his custom-tailored gray suit, he pulled out a plain, stainless-steel key ring. Separating a small brass key, he unlocked the bottom right-hand drawer of his massive antique Regency desk. Pushing aside a pile of contracts, he pulled out a battered spiral-bound notebook. Carefully he set it on his desk and opened it to the only page that had any writing on it.
A complex swirl of remembered pain and hope engulfed him at the sight of the words penciled there. He’d been sixteen when he’d made that list of things he was going to accomplish in his life. A scared, defiant sixteen who had just buried his parents.
As he’d stood over their graves, he’d vowed that never again would he allow himself to be at the mercy of other people’s decisions. And he’d kept that vow. He’d run away from the crowded foster home the state had dumped him in after his parents had died, determined to make so much money that no one would ever again have power over him.
His gaze swept the elegantly restrained grandeur of his office with its priceless antiques and original artwork, perched fifty-two stories above the bustling New York City streets. It was as far removed from the squalor he’d grown up in as he could ever imagine.
Picking up the gold fountain pen on his desk, Max deliberately drew a thick, black line through the third-to-last item on his list, which read, make a billion dollars.
His blue eyes narrowed as he studied the final two entries. Marry and have a family.
Marriage to the right woman would be the final step in his long journey toward respectability. It would be visible proof that he’d made it. That he was no longer “that woman’s brat,” but someone who was accepted in the highest levels of society.
Acquiring the perfect wife should be a lot like masterminding a hostile takeover in business, he reasoned. First you identified your objective and then you came up with strategies to achieve it.
He turned to a blank sheet in the notebook and, for the first time in seventeen years, began to write in it.
“Objective—wife,” he wrote at the top of the page. He thought for a moment then added a slash beside the word wife and wrote “mother.” Her role as the mother of his children would be every bit as important to him as her role as his wife.
Max stared blankly at the Monet on the wall to his right as he marshaled his thoughts.
Since he knew nothing about parenting, he was going to have to depend on his wife to show him how to recognize and nurture his children’s emotional needs. She would have to teach him the basic dynamics of family life that most people instinctively absorbed during their own childhood.
Max snorted. The only insight he’d absorbed growing up was the danger of getting too close to either of his parents when they’d been drinking. That and the futility of counting on them for anything.
So, one of his most important requirements in a wife was that she have firsthand knowledge of a happy, normal childhood herself.
She should also appeal to him physically. Common sense told him that his marriage would have a better chance of success if he were sexually attracted to his wife.
An image of his last girlfriend, an internationally famous model, formed in his mind. She certainly wasn’t his idea of a wife, but she definitely appealed to his libido with her tall, slender body, flawless features and long, blond hair.
Tall, blond, beautiful, he added to his list, paused, thought a moment, and then crossed out beautiful and substituted attractive. Looks weren’t all that important in a wife, and he didn’t want to limit his choices by being too restrictive.
Although she absolutely had to be intelligent since she was going to pass her genes on to his children. And she should be a college graduate to balance the fact that he hadn’t even finished high school.
And she should like him. He didn’t expect her to love him any more than he intended to love her. In his experience, love was at best an excuse for indulging in emotional excesses and at worst a humiliating, degrading trap.
Max winced as he recalled his father’s self-pitying voice claiming that he couldn’t do anything about his wife’s flamboyantly adulterous behavior because he loved her.
No, he wanted no part of the insanity called love. Besides, from what he’d seen, marriages based on love were very high-maintenance affairs. Women in love expected a man to be totally wrapped up in them, and he didn’t have time for that nonsense. He was far too busy running his business. And while he did intend to cut back on work once his first child was born, he also intended to spend most of his newfound free time with his children. He was determined to be a hands-on dad. His children were going to be the most important things in the world to him, and he needed a wife who understood that. A wife who wouldn’t expect to be the focus of his life. A wife who would find her emotional satisfaction in their children and not in him. A wife who would be satisfied with his respect and affection and not expect vows of undying devotion.
But even if he didn’t want a lot of messy emotions cluttering up his marriage, he also didn’t want to be married for his money. A woman whose only interest in him was his net worth might decide to bail out at the first hint of a problem, and a divorce accompanied by a bitter custody battle would be devastating to his children’s emotional health. Even someone with his nonexistent parenting skills could figure that one out.
He could protect both his children and himself to some degree by having his future wife sign a prenup, he decided. He added a notation to his list. A prenup wasn’t a foolproof solution to fortune hunters, but it was probably the best he could do.
And last, he wanted a wife from a socially prominent family that his children would be proud to belong to, unlike his own. He wanted his wife to reflect the fact that he’d arrived—financially and socially.
Max studied his list with a sense of satisfaction. It was the perfect blueprint for what he wanted in a wife.
But what might his prospective wife want in a husband? The unsettling thought occurred to him. Would he appeal to the kind of woman he wanted to marry? Unconsciously his fingers rubbed over the three-inch scar on his right jaw, which was the result of a barroom fight he’d gotten caught up in when he was eighteen.
Would his wealth be enough to overcome his rough-and-ready background for the type of woman he wanted to marry?
It depended, he finally decided. Depended on a lot of factors, some of which he had absolutely no control over.
And that being so, it was imperative that he seize control wherever possible. One of the things he could do would be to polish his social skills to a fine gloss. To learn to move with ease in the society his prospective wife would have been born into.
He frowned slightly as he suddenly remembered something he’d overheard at a cocktail party last month. One of the women in the group standing behind him had made a crack about Bunny Berringer, the twentysomething runway-model trophy wife of Sam Berringer, a business associate of his. Something to the effect that Bunny had undergone a transformation. That the liberal use of Sam’s money had turned the socially clueless Bunny into a clone of the late Diana, Princess of Wales. But despite the women’s speculation, no one had had any idea how Bunny had done it.
Max frowned slightly. While he didn’t doubt that Bunny had worked hard to learn the necessary skills, someone had to have taught her what to do and when to do it. And whoever that someone was had kept his or her mouth shut or those social piranhas at the party would have heard about it.
Maybe he should talk to Sam and ask him who he’d used. He’d always gotten along well with the older man. If he explained why he needed the information… Max nodded decisively. The worst Sam could do would be to refuse to give him the information. Sam wouldn’t tell anyone that he’d asked. Sam was far too smart to betray a confidence.
Picking up the phone, he asked his P.A. to get Sam on the phone. He needed to put his plan into action as soon as possible. It was already July, and he wanted to be in his own home with a wife, preferably pregnant with the first of his children, by Thanksgiving.
Chapter One
Jessie glanced down at her small gold watch as she hurried across the almost deserted lobby of the large office building toward the bank of elevators. It was one fifty-three. Perfect. She would arrive in Max Sheridan’s office five minutes early. Not so early that she would seem anxious, and yet early enough that it would be clear to him that this meeting was important to her.
Stepping into an empty elevator, she pressed the button for the fifty-second floor and then checked her appearance in the mirrors that lined the elevator’s walls. Her black box-pleated skirt fell almost to her knees without a wrinkle and the matching fitted jacket had no lint on it. Her gaze dropped to her long, slender legs, searching for a run in her panty hose. Thankfully, she didn’t find one. Nor were there any stray specks of dirt on the highly polished gloss of her black slingback heels or her slim black briefcase.
When the unexpected summons to see the normally in-accessible head of Sheridan Electronics had come yesterday, she hadn’t been sure what to wear. Normally she dressed to project an image, and the image depended on who she was working for and what she was trying to accomplish. But since she had no idea why the enigmatic Max Sheridan wanted to see her, she had finally opted for a conservative, professional look.
When the elevator opened its doors with a restrained chime on the fifty-second floor, Jessie took a deep breath, ignored the butterflies in her stomach and walked briskly toward the well-groomed middle-aged woman sitting behind an elegant antique desk in the reception area.
“I’m Jessie Martinelli,” she said. “I have an appointment with Mr. Sheridan at two.”
“Good afternoon, Ms. Martinelli. Just a moment while I check with his P.A. and see if he’s free.”
Surreptitiously Jessie looked around while the woman made the phone call. A huge cream-and-blue Aubusson carpet covered the floor, and comfortable-looking chairs had been scattered around, presumably to give the appearance of a living room in a private home. The whole area spoke of good taste and the means to indulge it.
It was the first time she’d been on the executive level of Sheridans. She’d visited their human resources department one floor down last year when she’d given a presentation on her workshops to one of their managers, but since the shortsighted woman hadn’t seen the need for teaching business manners to their account executives, she’d never had a reason to return.
Could that be what this unexpected summons was about? Had they decided to use her workshops, and Max Sheridan himself wanted to discuss them? A sense of excitement tore through her. Landing an account with a conglomerate like Sheridans would do wonders for her company’s bottom line.
“Mr. Sheridan will see you now, Ms. Martinelli. If you’ll come with me…” The woman gave her a bright, professional smile.
Taking a deep, steadying breath, Jessie followed the receptionist.
“Ms. Martinelli, sir.” The woman moved out of the open doorway, and Jessie forced herself to walk into his office, praying she didn’t look as nervous as she felt. The sound of the door closing behind her echoed ominously in her ears.
Jessie instinctively tensed as the man behind the oversize mahogany desk slowly got to his feet. The office was huge, but Max Sheridan easily dominated the space. She’d seen pictures of him in the paper from time to time, but nothing had prepared her for the reality of his physical presence. He seemed to project a force field of energy that drew her like the proverbial moth to the flame.
Critically she studied him, trying to analyze her unexpected fascination with him in the hopes of minimizing its effect. He wasn’t particularly tall. Probably no more than six foot, with a solid, muscular build that for some reason reminded her more of a dock worker than a business tycoon. Nor was he classically handsome. Not only were his features too bluntly chiseled, but the silvery scar on his right jaw suggested an aggressive masculinity than made mere beauty seem superfluous.
Jessie felt a tingling sensation skate over her skin as her gaze collided with his bright blue eyes. Somehow he made her aware of her femininity in a way that she’d never felt before, and she didn’t like it. She was nervous enough without adding sexual tension to the mix.
Taking a deep breath, she tried a trick Maggie had taught her years ago of picturing your audience naked, to lose your fear of them. It was a mistake. An image of Max Sheridan’s broad shoulders minus the expensive gray suit jacket he had on immediately popped into her mind. His chest would probably be covered with the same inky black hair that was on his head. Would it feel as silky as his hair looked or would it feel crisp? Her fingers began to itch as if they couldn’t wait to find out.
“Good morning, Ms. Martinelli.” His deep, smoky voice slammed through her fantasy, smashing it to pieces—pieces that immediately reassembled themselves to form an image of him bending over her, his bare shoulders…
Stop it! She hastily sliced off her thoughts. What was the matter with her? So he had a magnetic presence. That was no excuse for her to act like some half-wit groupie. She was here on business, and she’d better start acting like the competent professional she was or she could kiss any hope of landing the Sheridan account goodbye. Max Sheridan’s reputation was that he didn’t tolerate incompetence. And he didn’t believe in second chances.
“Mr. Sheridan.” Jessie reluctantly took the hand he held out. If just being in the same room with him sent her nervous system into disarray, what would touching him be like?
Mind-blowing. She had her answer as his hand closed firmly around hers. Heat seemed to pour off his strong fingers, permeating her skin and sending her heartbeat into overdrive.
Jessie gritted her teeth, praying that the heat boiling through her wasn’t visible on her face. She absolutely had to keep her professional demeanor intact.
As quickly as good manners allowed, she dropped his hand and stepped back.
“Please have a seat.” Max gestured toward the chair in front of his desk, and Jessie gingerly perched on the edge of it.
She watched as Max sat back down in his leather chair and silently studied her with a narrow-eyed intensity that made her want to get up and run. He probably wasn’t even seeing her, she tried to tell herself. Chances were he’d been working on some high-powered deal when she’d arrived, and his mind was still on it.
Keeping a polite smile on her face, she waited for him to break the silence, knowing that rushing into speech would give him a tactical advantage.
Damn! Max thought in frustration as he stared at her. When he’d spoken to Sam Berringer last week, his glowing account of the fantastic job Jessie Martinelli had done in transforming his wife hadn’t included a physical description: his use of words like solid background, absolute discretion and unimpeachable integrity had all suggested an older woman. He’d formed a mental image of a comfortable, grandmotherly type who was supplementing her social security check by giving etiquette lessons. And he couldn’t have been more wrong. There was nothing the least bit comfortable about Jessie Martinelli.
On the contrary, there was something about her that put him on edge, and he wasn’t quite sure exactly what it was. She wasn’t beautiful. Her mouth was a shade too big, and her cheeks a bit too rounded. Although she did have good skin. Very soft and silky looking. He ignored his sudden compulsion to stroke it. And her eyes were intriguing. A clear, crystalline green that reminded him of emeralds. As for her hair… He studied the profusion of fiery red curls that framed her face and had an inexplicable urge to thread his fingers through them. He wanted to tug one of those curls and see how long it really was. He wanted to bury his face in the satiny mass and draw deep into his lungs the faint scent of flowers that clung to her.
For some reason that he couldn’t begin to fathom, Jessie Martinelli fascinated him on a primitive level that owed nothing to rational thought.
So now what? he wondered in frustration. Did he jettison his plan because he had a totally unexpected case of the hots for his prospective consultant? But if he did that, where was he going to find someone else to help him? He could hardly advertise for an etiquette expert. It would be all over the gutter press the next day, and the last thing he wanted was publicity.
He would hire Jessie Martinelli and ignore his attraction to her, he finally decided.
“I imagine you’re curious as to why I asked you to come in to see me,” he said.
Max paused to allow her to say something, but she didn’t. She simply gave him a small, encouraging smile and waited for him to go on. To his surprise he felt the urge to do exactly that. Jessie Martinelli had clearly mastered the technique of convincing people that she was fascinated by what they were saying.
“I want to impress on you that anything I say is to be treated with the utmost confidentiality. I would be seriously annoyed if you were to mention it to anyone else.”