Big-Bucks Bachelor

Harlequin American Romance proudly launches MILLIONAIRE, MONTANA, where twelve lucky souls have won a multimillion-dollar jackpot.

Six titles in this captivating series—

JACKPOT BABY by Muriel Jensen (HAR #953)

BIG-BUCKS BACHELOR by Leah Vale (HAR #957)

SURPRISE INHERITANCE by Charlotte Douglas (HAR #961)

FOUR-KARAT FIANCÉE by Sharon Swan (HAR #966)

PRICELESS MARRIAGE by Bonnie Gardner (HAR #970)

FORTUNE’S TWINS by Kara Lennox (HAR #974)

Dear Reader,

It’s that time of the year again. Pink candy hearts and red roses abound as we celebrate that most amorous of holidays, St. Valentine’s Day. Revel in this month’s offerings as we continue to celebrate Harlequin American Romance’s yearlong 20th Anniversary.

Last month we launched our six-book MILLIONAIRE, MONTANA continuity series with the first delightful story about a small Montana town whose residents win a forty-million-dollar lottery jackpot. Now we bring you the second title in the series, Big-Bucks Bachelor, by Leah Vale, in which a handsome veterinarian gets more than he bargained for when he asks his plain-Jane partner to become his fake fiancée.

Also in February, Bonnie Gardner brings you The Sergeant’s Secret Son. In this emotional story, passions flare all over again between former lovers as they work to rebuild their tornado-ravaged hometown, but the heroine is hiding a small secret—their child! Next, Victoria Chancellor delivers a great read with The Prince’s Texas Bride, the second book in her duo A ROYAL TWIST, where a bachelor prince’s night of passion with a beautiful waitress results in a royal heir on the way and a marriage proposal. And a trip to Las Vegas leads to a pretend engagement in Leandra Logan’s Wedding Roulette.

Enjoy this month’s offerings, and be sure to return each and every month to Harlequin American Romance!

Melissa Jeglinski

Associate Senior Editor

Harlequin American Romance

Big-Bucks Bachelor

Leah Vale

www.millsandboon.co.uk

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For Melissa Jeglinski,

for giving me this wonderful opportunity.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Having never met an unhappy ending she couldn’t mentally “fix,” Leah Vale believes writing romance novels is the perfect job for her. A Pacific Northwest native with a B.A. in communications from the University of Washington, she lives in Portland, Oregon, with her wonderful husband, two adorable sons and a golden retriever. She is an avid skier, scuba diver and “do-over” golfer. While having the chance to share her “happy endings from scratch” with the world is a dream come true, dinner generally has come premade from the store. Leah would love to hear from her readers, and can be reached at P.O. Box 91337, Portland, OR 97291, or at www.leahvale.com.

Books by Leah Vale

HARLEQUIN AMERICAN ROMANCE

924—THE RICH MAN’S BABY

936—THE RICH GIRL GOES WILD

957—BIG-BUCKS BACHELOR

Contents

Prologue

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

Prologue

It took everything Jack Hartman had not to end his day by getting kicked in the head. But since he’d already given the Masons’ prized Angus cow more help than she appreciated delivering her calf, Jack couldn’t blame her.

Preferring his skull intact, he leaned more weight on his hand that held the cow’s jerking hind leg still. At the same moment her stomach contracted, he pulled as hard as he dared on the fragile front legs of the stuck calf—all the lathered cow, her musky scent thick in the air, had been able to push out on her own. The muscles in his arms and back strained with the effort, but he didn’t quit. Failing to deliver an animal that had the slimmest chance of survival was never an option for this particular vet.

Even if success was bittersweet.

His pull was enough, and the calf’s head emerged, followed quickly by the rest of the baby in a wet rush. Steam rose from the calf in the frigid January air let in by the ever-widening gaps between the boards of the Masons’ barn walls. Jack let go of the cow’s back leg and caught the calf, easing the newborn to the thick straw covering the largest stall in the barn. While Kyle and Olivia Mason might not be able to afford to fix up their old barn, at least they took excellent care of the animals within.

Jack barely had time to clear the calf’s nose and mouth to help it pull in its first breath before the baby’s mother had turned and taken up her motherly duties of licking and nudging her calf to stand. He straightened and backed away to let the cow’s natural instincts do their job.

A hand clapped on his shoulder and he turned to meet Kyle’s grin. About twelve years older than Jack’s thirty-three years, Kyle Mason was starting to show his age—in the graying of his dark brown hair at the temples, visible beneath his green John Deere baseball cap, and the belly where the beer he used to be able to work off now settled. Kyle and his wife, Olivia, were good people. They’d been there for Jack when he’d needed it, and Jack was glad to be of some help to them.

Kyle squeezed Jack’s shoulder before releasing him. “I knew if anyone could save those two, you could.”

Jack shrugged and grabbed a towel from the fence to clean his hands off. Until four months ago when he’d finally found some help, he’d been the only veterinarian in the little town of Jester, Montana. And before he’d come eight years ago, they’d had to beg someone to come over from the much larger town of Pine Run, about twenty miles southwest of Jester. But the townsfolk’s faith in his abilities warmed him just the same. “She only needed a bit of help.” He nodded at the calf. “That little fellow was almost too big for his own good.”

Kyle’s face lit up. “A bull?”

“A bull,” Jack confirmed, using a clean corner of the towel to wipe his too long hair, its light brown darkened by sweat, out of his eyes. He really did need to make time to let Dean Kenning, the town’s barber, take a whack at it.

“Hallelujah. Maybe I’ll finally be able to afford to fix up some things around here.”

Jack followed Kyle’s gaze with his own, taking in the boards warped from the extreme southeastern Montana weather and the farm equipment wearing more rust than green paint. But the Masons had held things together better than some folk around here. “I’m sure you’ll get a good price for him in Pine Run. Might even be worth the trip to Billings.”

Before Kyle could respond, the sound of Kyle’s wife of almost twenty years, Olivia, frantically calling for her husband and Jack reached them. “Kyle! Jack! Ky-le! Jaaack!”

While Jack knew that Olivia Mason wasn’t given to hysterics—being a teacher in the town’s lone school that housed all the kids, grades K-12—one glance at Kyle told Jack something serious must be going on to generate that sort of noise from her. The concern building in Jack’s chest was mirrored on Kyle’s face.

They had barely left the stall to go see what was wrong when Olivia barreled through the barn door, letting in a burst of frigid air that lightened the heavy smell of cattle considerably. Her light brown hair flew in her face and the hem of the serviceable blue shirt-dress she’d worn to work swirled around her slim form along with the snow that had followed her in. Most telling of all, she hadn’t put a coat on.

They rushed toward her.

She was crying. And laughing. “Oh, Kyle, sweetheart, you’re not going to believe this. And Dean said you, too, Jack. Oh, my word, all of us!” She spread her arms, then pulled them back in to cover her mouth. Squealing behind her hands, she started to bounce up and down, looking like a teenager instead of a woman in her early forties.

Kyle grabbed her upper arms to still her and bent to look her in the eye. “Olivia! What is it? What happened?”

She slid her hands from her mouth to her flushed cheeks. “We’re rich, Kyle! All of us. We’re all rich!”

Just as confused as Kyle clearly was, Jack took a step closer to her. “Olivia—”

She stopped him with a wave of her hands, then took a deep breath and straightened, encouraging Kyle to let go of her. Despite her visible effort to calm herself, her voice was still shaky. “Dean Kenning called. The lottery. One of our twelve tickets hit. We won. And not just enough for a pizza party, like last time. We won the jackpot. The fifteen of us won the lottery!” She squealed again and launched herself into her husband’s arms, nearly knocking his green cap off.

Jack stumbled a step back as if it had been his arms Olivia had jumped into, gripping the towel he still held tightly in his hand. He couldn’t believe it.

He had never before played with the loosely defined Main Street Merchants who’d been pooling their money and having Dean drive into Pine Run each week to buy tickets in the Big Draw lottery for the past eight years. As long as Jack had been living in Jester.

But Wyla Thorne had decided not to play anymore, her optimism running as thin as the town’s luck, and yesterday morning as Jack was heading into the Brimming Cup for his daily apple Danish, Dean had stepped out of his barbershop to yell across the street at Jack to ask if he wanted to take Wyla’s place. For the heck of it, Jack had thrown in a dollar. Talk about it paying off.

Now he had more than enough money to do what he needed to do.

Kyle loosened Olivia’s hold around his neck to ask, “How much? How much was the jackpot up to this week?”

Olivia released him and stepped away, her pretty face glowing. “Forty million. We get to split forty million.”

Kyle whooped and swept his wife up into his arms again, then twirled her around.

Jack’s own head was spinning. Forty million. “How—” his voice cracked and he had to try again.

“How many ways? Did I hear you say fifteen of us played?”

Kyle stopped so Olivia could answer. “Yes, fifteen total. But married couples only count as one, if they put in only one dollar. Counting Kyle and I, the Perkins, and the Cades as one each, the money will be split twelve ways.”

A familiar stab of pain pulsed in Jack’s heart at the mention of married couples. He closed his eyes, giving the pain time to settle in to its usual steady ache.

Setting Olivia down, Kyle mumbled to himself and counted on his fingers, obviously doing the math, then said, “After they halve it for taking the lump sum payout, which we did, right?”

Olivia nodded.

“And after taxes, I think that’ll leave us all with something like one million, one hundred thousand and change.” He moved his mouth as he silently ran over the numbers again, ticking off on his fingers, then waved off his apparent need for accuracy with a frustrated sounding noise. “Anyway, it’s definitely well over a million dollars. A million dollars.”

He whooped again and whipped off his baseball cap to hit it against his leg. “Damn, Olivia, no more money worries for us!”

Jack absently twisted the towel between his hands as he wandered back toward his stuff.

Over a million dollars.

More than enough to finally get him out of Jester and open a new practice in some other state.

Somewhere far from the memories of all that he had lost here.

The only thing left to do was get his new partner, Melinda Woods, more established, then he could take off.

And maybe, just maybe, make a new start.

He might be able to finally outrun the pain.

Chapter One

Two months later as Jack sat at his desk, the slight rattle of aluminum blinds against the clinic door brought his gaze down from a pet pharmaceutical company’s wall map of where rabies most often occurred in the United States. He’d been fantasizing again about where he’d set up shop next. Through the open door of the clinic’s lone office he saw that his partner in the Jester Veterinary Clinic, Melinda Woods, had just burst into the lobby as only a petite, shy woman could, barely rattling the blinds to announce her arrival.

Since she normally didn’t make any noise at all when she came in, Jack knew something was wrong. His gut tightened and he frowned. The last thing he wanted was Mel upset. She was the key to his being able to leave Jester.

As she strode toward him, he met her glowering gaze, surprised to find her big brown eyes sparking in a way he’d never seen before. His gut tightened still more. “What’s up, Mel?”

“Pigs! That’s what. Pigs.”

Jack’s eyebrows went up. “Pigs?”

She stopped beside the coatrack next to the office door. “Like I don’t know from pigs. Me! Of all people!” Yanking her big, tan corduroy jacket off her shoulders, she muttered darkly when the sleeves of her red flannel shirt clung to the jacket’s quilted lining. The resulting static electricity had the fine strands of long, blond ringlets that had escaped her ponytail rising in a crazy dance around her head.

She looked more than a little wild around the edges, a far cry from the quiet, efficient woman Jack had grown used to in the six months they’d worked together. It had taken him a long time to find someone willing to work in such a small town so far from anything, and the fact that that someone was as easy to get along with as Melinda was nothing short of a miracle.

Hopefully nothing had happened to change his surprisingly good luck of late.

His confusion and concern mounting, he repeated, “Pigs?”

“The Websters’ pigs—oh, excuse me,” she jerked a hand from her coat sleeve to hold it up in clarification, “prize-winning hogs.” Her tone dripped a sarcasm he’d never heard from her before. “Mr. Webster won’t let me near his prize-winning hogs.”

She flung her coat down on the desk that butted against his, fluttering the paperwork he should have been attending to instead of daydreaming about moving. While they were rarely in the office at the same time, there was plenty of space for them both to handle the paperwork the clinic generated, which historically wasn’t enough to warrant hiring any office staff.

Though business had certainly picked up since he’d won part of the lottery. Funny how being rich suddenly made a guy popular. Annoyingly popular.

Settling his elbows on the armrests, he sat back in his wooden chair, the swivel mechanism creaking. “Bud Webster wouldn’t let you near his hogs? You’re kidding.”

“Trust me, you have no idea how much I wish I were.” She plopped down in her matching chair, which made nary a peep. She, however, let out an exasperated sounding huff and dropped her delicate chin to her chest.

Jack’s concern trumped his puzzlement. He’d never seen Melinda like this. From what he could tell, she loved being a vet, and had never once complained about her work, the town or the population of Jester. Just the opposite.

She often spoke highly of the people she was getting to know, even though her shyness made the process slow, and Jack suspected incomplete. He doubted many in town knew just how smart Melinda was. She’d come highly recommended by one of his former professors. What if she changed her mind? What if she decided Jester wasn’t the place she wanted to be after all?

A spurt of panic had him leaning toward her. “What exactly happened?”

“Just what I said. Mr. Webster wouldn’t let me near his hogs.” She lurched to her feet and started pacing the small office, her square-toed work boots clomping heavily on the dark blue vinyl floor. “He said he doesn’t want ‘no slip of a woman doctoring his hogs.’ Slip of a woman,” she grumbled, “I’ll show him a slip.”

Jack pulled back his chin. He’d yet to see a critter cross Melinda’s path that she couldn’t keep a strong, tight hold on, despite being no more than five-four, and she always handled everything with quiet capability. He’d never seen her express herself with so much…passion before.

And despite how threatening her upset was to his intentions to leave, he had to admit the fire in her eyes suited her. But it was a fire that, for Jack’s long-term plans, needed to be doused.

“Of all the pigheaded males, that pig farmer has got to be the pigheadedest of them all…” The rest of what she said was lost behind her hands when she reached up and rubbed at her makeupless face as if she were trying to scrub away her frustration.

She dropped her hands and planted them on her jean-clad hips. “He wants you to do the vaccinations.”

“Because you’re…you’re…” he waved a hand at her, struggling to describe her in a way other than the fact that she was outweighed by most large dogs “…not very big?”

She rolled her eyes and threw out a hip. “No. Not because I’m petite. Because I’m a woman, Jack. Nothing more than that. Mr. Webster doesn’t want a woman vet to work on his ranch. And he doesn’t care that I grew up on a farm surrounded by pigs, along with just about every other kind of animal.” The fiery spark in her eyes turned to a watery shimmer and her defiant expression started to crumble slightly. “I know from pigs, Jack.” Her voice sounded a little strangled.

His own throat closed up in response. He hated to see a woman cry. It was one of the reasons he’d become a veterinarian instead of a physician. You didn’t have to come up with something good to say to make a suffering animal feel better.

Worried by the degree of her aggravation, he rose from his chair and went to her, placing what he hoped would be calming hands on her shoulders. He felt her rigid stance instantly soften and melt. “I know you do, Mel. But the old guard—farmers like Bud Webster—they’re still living in a different century. And I don’t mean the most recent one. They’ll see soon enough that you know what you’re doing.”

“How? When they won’t let me through the gates?”

Her heat seeping into his palms, Jack realized with a jolt that this was the most contact he’d had with a woman in five years and dropped his hands from her slender shoulders. He turned to look at the map on the wall again. At all the places he could go.

The need to leave Jester and the pain that ate away at his insides like a slow-growing cancer flared white-hot. He could have left the day he’d received his lottery check, but he’d wanted to see Melinda securely established in the practice he planned to simply sign over to her so he could leave with no strings attached.

If some of the townspeople refused to accept her, though…

He pulled in a heavy sigh and ran a hand through his hair. It didn’t matter. He couldn’t stay. Jester held too many memories, too many dreams that would never be realized. Even the dingy statue on the Town Hall lawn of Caroline Peterson, atop her horse, Jester, the town’s namesake, brought echoes of laughter and the true story about how the wild horse was really tamed—not with grit and bluster, but patience and sugar.

He turned back to Melinda, absently noticing how her high temper had added an attractive flush to her already sun-kissed cheeks and a golden glow to eyes he had previously only thought of as brown. “Pretty soon they won’t have a choice if they want to keep their prize-winning hogs healthy.”

Her finely arched blond brows came together, then she stilled. “How so?”

“They can’t very well refuse to let you treat their livestock if you’re the only vet within miles.”

JACK’S WORDS hit Melinda like an unexpected blast of frigid, Montana winter air, freezing the breath in her lungs as quickly as fog to glass. While he’d been talking about leaving since the day he’d given her a spot in his practice, she didn’t want him to go.

Granted, the prospect of virtually being handed an established veterinary clinic had been the sweetest part of the deal when she’d first signed on, but even without that offer she probably would have agreed to partner with Jack because Jester was exactly the sort of place she wanted to spend her life. She could continue to live in her beloved home state of Montana, be close enough for her mother to afford to call and check up on her like she insisted on doing every Sunday, but still be far enough away from the father Melinda had never been able to please. The one thing she couldn’t change about herself was the fact she’d been born a girl.

Then there was Jack, himself.

She’d never forget walking into this office for the first time and nearly being floored by how handsome he was. He’d been sitting with the heels of his brown work boots propped on the corner of the desk, his long, muscular legs stretched out in jeans. The light chambray shirt he’d had on clung to his broad shoulders, and where he’d left it unbuttoned at his neck showed off a sprinkle of chest hair that matched the thick, slightly wavy light brown hair hanging to his collar. His position, along with the set of his square jaw and wide, sensuous mouth, exuded such confidence and animal magnetism it was a wonder she could speak at all.

But unlike her father, and even the guy she’d thought she had a future with in college, Eric Nelson, Jack had wanted to hear what she had to say, so he’d coaxed her past her nervousness and awareness of him enough that she’d landed the partnership despite her relative inexperience. She’d still had to prove herself, though, which was something she had plenty of experience with.

Even on that first day he’d mentioned leaving Jester, that because he’d lost his wife—a loss that had instantly made her ache for him—he should move on, away from Caroline’s hometown. But he’d talked so often since then of leaving without ever taking steps to do it that she’d ceased to believe he actually intended to leave. He seemed so ingrained in the town, so a part of its pulse.

She forced herself to pull in a chest-warming breath. “You say that like you mean it.”

A muscle in his jaw flexed. “This time I do.”

Melinda felt gut punched. She struggled not only to breathe, but to keep the air moving in and out steadily. Today just wasn’t her day. She should have stayed in bed with her cats asleep on her feet.

But she’d never been the type to hide from life. To temper her father’s disappointment over her being a girl, she’d pulled more than her weight around their farm while growing up, whether he noticed or not. It wasn’t her fault she was not only female, but short and quiet. Being the only kid on a farm a long way from most everything, with no one but animals to talk to, didn’t make for a sparkling conversationalist.

She couldn’t retreat and complain to her critters over this one, though. Simply venting wouldn’t make her feel better, wouldn’t allow her to accept the outcome, because, bottom line, the outcome was unacceptable to her.