Midnight Fantasy
Ann Major

www.millsandboon.co.uk

MILLS & BOON

Before you start reading, why not sign up?

Thank you for downloading this Mills & Boon book. If you want to hear about exclusive discounts, special offers and competitions, sign up to our email newsletter today!

SIGN ME UP!

Or simply visit

signup.millsandboon.co.uk

Mills & Boon emails are completely free to receive and you can unsubscribe at any time via the link in any email we send you.

To Aaron Clark, my late cousin, and his widow, Glenda Clark. There are lessons in life, both dark and bright. Sometimes the dark ones teach us what we most need to know.

Aaron, you have blazed bright with love.

You have taught me about courage.

You have taught me that it is never too late

to begin anew. You have become

everything and more than you ever dreamed.

You are one of my real-life heroes.

To Glenda, who taught me more about real love than almost anyone I know.

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

Epilogue

Coming Next Month

Prologue

Get the hell out of here, you half-wild, no-good bastard!

The van swerved off the asphalt. A rumble of bumps and rattles jolted the prisoner on the floorboards back to queasy consciousness. Murky, gray light filtered through his blindfold.

He saw his father’s face, mottled with rage.

You’re damn sure no son of mine!

He’d turned away, knowing what he’d always felt deep down, that he was nothing. He’d gotten his start in the gutter. That’s where he should have stayed.

The stench of dank air made him shudder.

God, he was scared. So scared.

They were in the swamp now, in that eerie, primeval kingdom of cypress trees, stagnant brown bayous, knobby-headed gators and mud deep enough to swallow a man whole.

Cajun music whined through bursts of static. He was bound hand and foot, sprawled on top of smelly fast-food boxes, Styrofoam cups and candy wrappers.

The waxy-faced driver with the spider tattoo was driving faster than he had in New Orleans. “You’re gonna be gator food, boy.”

A surge of fresh fear shook the captive.

Another voice. “You know what gators do, don’t you, no?”

A boot nudged the prisoner’s hip. “They’ll drag you to some underground hole, stuff you inside, yes, and tear off little bits of you for days.”

A strange terror gripped the blindfolded man. When he shifted on top of the garbage, something squished against his clean-shaven face. Only yesterday he’d sat with his father in the best restaurant in the French Quarter. He swallowed carefully against the gag, fighting not to choke on the oily rag in his mouth and the coppery flavor of his own blood. He tried not to breathe because every tortured breath made weird, gargling noises in his broken nose.

His assailants’ mood was quiet, tense, electric.

The road got bumpier, wetter; the pungent odor of still, dark waters and rotting vegetation stronger.

Big tires sloshed to a standstill.

“Let’s dump him. Sack him up, throw those concrete blocks in. Haul him out deep so he sinks.”

The back doors were thrown open. His fine Italian loafers came off when they grasped him around the ankles and pulled him roughly over garbage, tools, and bits of wood. They flung him onto the muddy ground, and his head struck a rotten log. When he regained consciousness, they were waist deep, pushing him under.

He fought to stand up in the gummy mud, but a boot sent him reeling in the warm, soupy water. Panic surged through him when big hands clamped around his shoulders and pressed him deeper.

He fought. His lungs burned with the fierce will to breathe. He pushed harder and was stunned when their grip on his neck miraculously loosened. His head broke the surface, and he choked on watery breaths as a shell was racked into a chamber. A shotgun blast exploded. Then everything got quiet.

He reeled backwards, flopping helplessly as the weights pulled him under. Strangely, as he began to sink, dying, his terror subsided.

All was peace and darkness.

Was this how she’d felt when her alarm went off and she couldn’t get up?

Again he was a frightened, guilt-stricken boy shivering in wet pajamas. Bear tucked under his arm, he’d padded into his mother’s dark bedroom. Bright sunshine lit her black, tangled hair. Lost in shadows her body was a slovenly heap, half on, half off the bed.

Her alarm kept ringing. He’d lain for hours, listening to that ringing till it had become a roar in his head. She was mean most mornings. Mean every night. How he lived for those rare moments when she tried to be nice, when she read to him from the books Miss Ancil loaned him from the library.

As always her bedroom stank of booze and cigarettes.

“Mommy! I—I’s sorry, so sorry…I wet….”

He’d called her name after this confession and promised the way he did every morning never ever to do it again.

Only she hadn’t cussed him. Nor had she gathered him into her arms and clung to him as if he were very dear which she sometimes did. She’d just lain there.

Finally, he’d gone to her and shaken her. “Open your eyes. Please, Mommy.” He’d touched her cheek. She’d felt so stiff and cold…like his frosted window-pane in winter. Her alarm clock kept ringing.

He hadn’t thought of that morning in years. Then here it was, his last thought on earth.

After her funeral his aunts had marched him over to his father’s house. A man with black hair and blazing silver eyes had thrown open the door. His aunts had pushed him forward just as the door had slammed.

He’d been shuffled among distant kinfolk who had too many kids of their own. He’d done time in foster homes with other throwaways like himself, gotten in trouble at school. Then, miraculously, his father had had a change of heart and adopted him. He’d done everything in the world to please his father, eventually, even going into business with him.

Then one night he’d worked late and without warning opened the wrong file on a computer.

A gush of water soaked his gag, slid down his throat, up his nostrils, burning, strangling. He was dying when brutal hands manacled his waist, maneuvered his head forcefully to the surface, dragged him out of the water and flung him onto the muddy bank.

A rough voice cursed him in Cajun French. Gnarled fingers tore off his soggy blindfold, ripped at the duct tape over his mouth, then yanked the gag out.

“Jesus.” His rescuer’s breath stank of gin and tobacco as he pounded his back. Water trickled out of the drowning man’s lips in spurts.

“Damn it,” he pleaded.

The hard palm froze. “Ha! So! You’re alive!”

He was rolled over and a flashlight jammed under his chin. “You don’t look too good.”

“Damn it!” He grabbed the light and shone it at his rescuer.

The stranger had wrinkled brown skin, white hair, and soulless black eyes. “You don’t look so good yourself.”

Yellow teeth flashed in an irreverent grin. “The name’s Frenchy.” Frenchy seized his long black flashlight and turned it off. “Frenchy LeBlanc. I was just helping my brother check his trotlines. We fell out…. He’s kinda cranky.”

“Not like you…sweet as sugarcane.”

With a grin, Frenchy ripped off the tape at the prisoner’s ankles along with a wad of dark body hair.

“Ouch!”

“You need a ride home? A hospital? Or the police station?”

“I’m okay.”

“You’re beat up pretty bad—” When he said nothing, Frenchy held out his hand and helped him to his feet. “You gotta name, boy?”

He hesitated. Then, just like that, a name popped up from his childhood. But his voice sounded rusty when he used it. “Tag…”

The older man eyed him. “Tag. Tag what?”

Right. Right. Last name. “Campbell…Tag…Campbell.”

“Like hell!” The yellow grin brightened. “You been to Texas…Tag?”

Tag shook his head.

The older man’s gaze appraised his tall, muscular body. “You got soft hands for a big guy…and a hard face…and eyes that don’t quite match it. That suit, even trashed, looks like it set you back some.”

Tag said nothing.

“Real work might do you good—”

“Damn it…if you’re going to insult me—”

“I fish. I could use a deckhand.”

Tag turned away helplessly, and stared at the lurid shadows the cypress trees with their draperies of moss made. A deckhand. Minimum wage. For years he’d been on the fast track. His education. His career. His high-flying plans for his father’s company. He’d been good, really really good at one thing.

But he couldn’t go back.

“I’ve always worked in an office, but I lift weights in my gym every afternoon. I’ve never had time to fish,” he said. Never wanted to. But he didn’t say that.

Frenchy nodded, taking in more than was said. “I don’t blame you for saying no to such hard, thankless work.”

“I didn’t say no, old man…. You’d have to teach me.”

Frenchy patted his shoulder. “You gotta job.”

“Thanks.” Tag’s voice was hoarse. He was disgusted that it might betray eagerness and gratitude. He knew better than to believe that this crude stranger or his casual offer and his kindness tonight meant anything.

He was through with ambition, through with dreams, through with false hopes that led nowhere. Again he was staring into his father’s cold gray eyes. He was through with family and dreams of real love, too.

A deckhand. A trashy job working for a crude, trashy guy.

Get the hell out of here, you half-wild, no-good bastard.

“Thanks, Frenchy,” Tag repeated in a colder, darker tone.

One

Five years later…

Stay with me, Frenchy. I need you.

That’s as close as Tag had come to telling the best friend he’d ever had, he loved him.

But maybe Frenchy had known.

Tag had clasped him in his arms long after Frenchy’s eyes had gone as glassy as the still bay, long after his skin had grown as cool as his dead mother’s that awful morning when the alarm clock had kept ringing.

Stay with me, Frenchy.

He’d lashed the wheel of the shrimp boat to starboard with a nylon sheet…his makeshift autopilot…and headed home, cradling Frenchy’s limp, grizzled head in his lap.

Stay with me, Frenchy.

But Frenchy’s eyes had remained closed.

The deck had rolled under them.

It was midnight. The full moon shone through the twisted live oaks and tall grasses, casting eerie shadows across Frenchy’s tombstone. Tag was all alone in that small, picturesque, historical cemetery located on a mound of higher earth that overlooked Rockport’s moonwashed bay. Come morning, this time of year, the graves would be ablaze with wildflowers. Funny, how death could make you see the truth you didn’t want to see. Tag had been living so hard and fast for so long, he hadn’t admitted he’d loved the old bastard, till he’d held his friend’s limp body and begun to weep.

“This wasn’t supposed to happen! Damn your hide, Frenchy, for leaving me like everybody else…. But most of all I damn you for making me give a damn. It should be me who’s dead.”

They’d buried Frenchy beside his son, the son he’d lost right before Frenchy had saved Tag’s life.

Tag was glad the cemetery was deserted. He didn’t want anybody to see how profoundly Frenchy’s death had upset him.

Sunken black circles ringed Tag’s bloodshot eyes; his jaw was shadowed with several days of dark stubble. His stomach rumbled painfully from too much liquor and too little food.

The moon shone high in a cloudless, bright sky. The salt-laden sea air smelled of dry earth and newly mown grass. Frenchy’s favorite kind of night. The shrimp would be running. Not that Tag could bear the thought of shrimping under a full moon without Frenchy.

Tag’s big black bike was parked a little way from Frenchy’s tombstone under a live oak tree that had been sculpted by the southeasterly prevailing winds that blew off the gulf, cooling its protected bays and low-lying coastal prairies.

Tag was kneeling before the pink tombstone. Soft as a prayer, his deep voice whispered. “Haunt me, Frenchy. Damn you, haunt me. Stay with me.”

“You don’t need an old man past his prime. You need a woman, kids,” Frenchy had pointed out, in that maddening know-it-all way of his, a few nights ago.

“Strange advice coming from a man who’s failed at marriage four times.”

“Nothing like a pretty woman to make a man old enough to know better hope for the best. Life’s a circle, constantly repeating itself.”

God, I hope not.

“You’re young. But you’ll get old. You’ll die. Life’s short. You gotta fall in love, get married, spawn kids, repeat the circle.”

“There’s places in my circle I don’t want to revisit.”

“You’re not the tough guy you pretend. You’re the marrying kind.”

“Where’d you get a damn fool notion like that?”

“You’re either sulkin’ or ragin’ mad.”

“Which is why you think I’d make a delightful husband.”

“You don’t fit in here. Your heart’s not in bars or fights or gambling…or even in fishing. Or even in getting laid by those rich, wild girls who come to Shorty’s looking for a fast tumble in the back seat of their car with a tough guy like you.”

“What if I said I like what they do to me? And what if I said I can do without a heart, old man?”

“You’re a liar. You got a heart, a big one, whether you want it or not. It’s just busted all to pieces same as your pretty, sissy-boy face. Only the right woman can fix what ails you.”

“You’re getting mighty mushy, old man.”

“You think you can stay dead forever?”

The wind drifting through moss and honeysuckle brought the scent of the sea, reminding him of the long hours of brutal work on a shrimp boat. The work numbed him. The beauty of the sea and its wildlife comforted him, made this hellish exile in an alien world somehow more endurable. Just as those women and what they did to him in their cars gave him a taste of what he’d once had, so that he could endure this life. But always after the women left, he felt darker, as if everything that was good in him had been used up. Which was what he wanted. Maybe if they used him long enough, he wouldn’t feel anything.

Tag knelt in the soft earth and studied the snapshot of a younger Frenchy framed in cracked plastic in the center of the pink stone.

“You’re a coward to run from who you are and what you want, Tag Campbell—a coward, pure and simple.”

Tag had sprung out of his chair so fast, he’d knocked it over. “You lowdown, ignorant cuss! Every time you drink, your jaw pops like that loose shutter.”

Frenchy laughed. “What’s the point of wisdom, if I can’t pass it on to a blockhead like you? Life’s a circle….”

“Don’t start that circle garbage.”

Tag had slammed out of the beach house, taken the boat out, stayed gone the rest of the night on that glassy, moonlit sea. He hadn’t apologized when he saw Frenchy waiting for him on the dock.

Then Frenchy had collapsed on the boat a few hours later when they were setting their nets.

Guilt swamped Tag. He’d never thanked the old man for anything he’d done.

The wind roared up from the bay, murmuring in the oak trees, mocking Tag as his empty silver eyes studied the grave. It was difficult to imagine the hard-living, advice-giving meddler lying still and quiet, to imagine him inside that box, dead. Emotions built inside Tag—guilt, grief—but he bottled them, the way he always did when he wasn’t driving fast, fighting, chasing women, or drinking.

The dangerous-looking man who knelt at his friend’s grave bore little resemblance to the younger man whose life Frenchy had saved in a Louisiana swamp. That man had been elegantly handsome before the beating, his smooth features classically designed, the aquiline nose straight, his trusting silver eyes warm and friendly.

That man was dead. As dead as Frenchy.

The powerfully-built man beside the grave was burned dark from the sun. On the inside his heart had charred an even blacker shade. Fists had smashed and rearranged his once handsome features into a ruggedly-brutal composition. The broken nose had been flattened. There was a narrow, white ridge above one brow. Despite these changes, or perhaps because of them, an aura of violence clung to him. Maybe it was this reckless, outlaw attitude that made him so lethally attractive, at least to women of a certain class. Such women cared little about his inner wounds. They came on strong, wanting nothing from him except to use his body for quick, uncomplicated sex.

His guarded silver eyes beneath black arcing brows missed nothing, trusted no one. Especially not such women—women who made him burn, but left him feeling even colder and lonelier when they were done with him and drove off in their fancy cars to their big houses and safe men.

His muscles were heavy from hard, manual labor. He wore scuffed black cowboy boots, tight jeans, a worn white T-shirt, and a black leather jacket.

Frenchy.

Death triggered deep, primal needs.

Death. Violence. Sex. Somehow they went together.

Alone with his demons, without Frenchy to irritate and distract him, Tag needed a bar fight or a woman—bad. So bad, he almost wished he’d gone to the funeral and wrestled some shrimper for a topless waitress. So bad, he almost wished he was in jail nursing a hellish hangover with the rest of Frenchy’s wild bunch.

Instead he’d driven his motorcycle—too fast and over such rough roads, he’d almost rolled. He’d scared himself. Which was a sign that cold as he was in his lonely life, he wasn’t ready to end it. When he’d calmed down, he’d come to the cemetery to pay his last respects.

The silvery night was warm and lovely.

Perfect kind of weather to hang out in a cemetery perfumed by wild flowers and glistening with moonlight.

If you could stand cemeteries.

Which Tag couldn’t. Any more than he could stand funerals. Especially the funeral of his best friend. Not when his own mood was as brittle and hopeless as the morning his mother had died, as the afternoon his father had slammed the door in his face.

Frenchy’s funeral had been a blowout brawl at Shorty’s. The cocktail waitresses, even Mabel, had danced topless on the pool tables. Some of the shrimpers had found their dance inspiring, and since there weren’t ever enough women to go around in Shorty’s, the “funeral” had gotten so wild, two of Frenchy’s ex-wives had called the cops who hauled the shrimpers and barmaids to jail.

It had been just the sort of uproar that gave shrimpers and the industry a bad name.

Then Frenchy’s will had been read. Everybody really got mad when they found out that, fool that he was, Frenchy had left that black dog, Tag Campbell, everything.

Everything. Boats. Restaurant. Fishhouses. Wharves. Even the beach house which was practically an historic landmark. Everything.

Campbell.

That snobby bastard! He didn’t even like to fish! Still, he was the best fisherman any of them had ever seen. Just as he was way too popular with their women even though he secretly despised them. The bastard preferred books to beer even though he could drink any one of them under the table. Tag Campbell was too proud and high-and-mighty to hang out with the likes of them at Shorty’s. How in the hell had he outsmarted them all—even Frenchy?

Everything was his.

There was lots of angry muttering.

“It isn’t right! Frenchy dead on that boat with just that lying Tag Campbell to tell the tale.”

“If you ask me, the bastard killed him.”

“You heard the coroner. Autopsy report says massive coronary. Says Frenchy smoked and drank too much. Says it’s a miracle Frenchy lived as long as he did.”

“I say it was murder. Frenchy was fit as a fiddle. Why just two nights ago he was drunker than a skunk dancing on that table with Mabel.”

Rusty and Hank, two of the rougher prisoners, deckhands Tag had fired for laziness and pure meanness, vowed that as soon as they got loose, they’d see their friend, Frenchy, avenged.

Frenchy had a lot more money than the shrimpers suspected. The sheriff paid Tag a visit just to tell him he’d be smart to leave town, at least till Rusty and Hank cooled off.

At the sight of the sheriff’s car in his drive and Trousers, his Border collie, slinking off to the woods, Tag grimaced. No wonder Trousers was scared. The big man cut an impressive figure in his uniform and silvered sunglasses. He had heavy features, squared-off shoulders, and a big black gun hanging from his thick belt.

Tag had dealt with more than his share of armed bullies in uniforms. The law, they called themselves.

Self-righteous bullies, strutting around in their shiny boots like they owned the world. They’d boarded his boats, slashed his nets, kicked his ice chests over and swept his catch overboard, fined his captains. No sooner had Sheriff Jeffries slammed his meaty fist against his screen door and bellowed Tag’s name, than sweat started trickling under his collar. A lot of his cats scurried under the house or after the cowardly Trousers. Others hunkered low behind pot plants to watch the suspicious character stomping down their breezeway.

“I just let Rusty and Hank out. They’re calling you a murderer.”

You half-wild, no-good bastard.

His own father had wrongly accused him of embezzlement and grand larceny. Anger burned in Tag’s throat, but he smiled as if he didn’t give a damn and saluted the man with a whiskey bottle. “You got a warrant—”

“Sometimes, Campbell, the smart thing is to walk away.”

Tag stared at his own reflection in the silver glasses and then pushed the door wider. “I ain’t runnin’.”

The sheriff planted himself on his thick legs and then leaned against the doorway.

“Jeffries, those guys talk big when they’re safe in jail, but they’re like dogs barking from inside a fence. You let ’em out, and they’ll lick my hand like puppies.”

“Just a friendly warning, Campbell.”

“Thanks, amigo.”

Still, Tag had opened a drawer, loaded his automatic and stuffed it in the waistband of his jeans before setting out on his bike alone.

Numbly Tag studied his friend’s tombstone. Frenchy had been mighty proud of the pink stone. He’d chosen it himself on a lark five years earlier right after he’d brought Tag home. Frenchy was known for cheating at cards, and had won the plot off one of Rockport’s most respectable citizens in a drunken poker game at Shorty’s.

“You cheated him,” the man’s indignant wife had ranted, and the whole town, at least the women, had believed her. “You got him drunk, so you could cheat him.”

Now Frenchy was as ashamed of his lack of talent at cards which made cheating a necessity as he was proud of his drinking skills. He might have gallantly returned the plot had she not accused him of cheating.

“We wuz drinking his whiskey, I’ll have you know, and I was even drunker than he was, lady,” Frenchy had declared almost proudly. “Could be he cheated me.”

The lady sued, but the judge, a poker player, had sided with Frenchy.

Tag studied Frenchy’s name and the date of his birth and the single line etched in caps on the bottom of the stone—IT WAS FUN WHILE IT LASTED.

Slowly Tag lowered his gaze. Instead of flowers, a mountain of beer cans and baseball caps were piled high on the mound of clods. Indeed, every baseball cap that had been nailed to the ceiling of Shorty’s had been enthusiastically ripped off and reverently placed on his grave.

Tag’s eyes stung. Frenchy would’ve been mighty proud.

Grief tore a hole in Tag’s wide chest as he slowly rose and stalked over to his bike. He pulled on his black leather jacket, zipped it. Next came his gloves, his black helmet. Straddling the big black monster, jumping down hard, revving the engine, he made enough noise to wake the dead.

But then maybe that was his intention.

Not that it did any good.

Frenchy wasn’t coming back.

Tag roared to the gate, skidding to a stop in a pool of brilliant gold that spilled over him from the streetlight.

He turned and looked back at the cemetery.

Stay with me, Frenchy.

Suddenly, time as Tag knew it did a tailspin. Or maybe the world just turned topsy-turvy. Whatever. The moon got bigger. Then it flattened itself into the shape of a huge pink egg in that inky sky. Stars popped like fireworks. For a second or two Tag felt there really might be a mastermind up there.

Tag got all warm and tingly inside. The wind sped up and the silvery night pulsed bluish-pink. A couple of beer cans came loose from the grave and started to roll straight toward Tag.

He shut his eyes, but the same pulsating, vivid rosy-blue fog swirled behind his eyelids, too. He blinked. Open or shut, the otherworldly, blue-pink radiance pulsed.

After a while, somebody, maybe Frenchy, switched off the pink light, and the moon settled down. The streetlamp came back on, gold and bright as ever. The night beyond was silvery dark. The can didn’t stop rolling till it hit the toe of Tag’s boot. He picked it up, noticed it was Frenchy’s favorite brand. Tag flattened the can, stuffed it in his back pocket.

What the hell had that been about? Had the streetlight malfunctioned? Or was it just him?

As he stared at the moon he felt different somehow, not so tight and morose. The hole in his chest seemed to have closed. And the night, like his future, beckoned with amazing possibilities.

Had Frenchy done this? Had he actually haunted him? Had he given him this strange sensation of peace? Of new opportunities?

Hell no. The grief and the booze he’d drunk earlier, coupled with not eating, was getting to him. He was hallucinating.

He’d better make it a short night, grab a burger and go to bed. Warily, he looked both ways before pulling out.

Two cars zoomed recklessly toward him from his right. Kids, playing chase. Where the hell was Jeffries when there was real work for a big bully with a gun to do?

Impatiently, Tag waited for the juvenile delinquents to pass.

When he caught that first glimpse of long blond hair, the back of his neck began to tingle. She was a rich tart on the prowl for a cheap thrill.

Happy to oblige, pretty lady.

Then she came into clearer focus the way a terrified deer does in your headlight.

He didn’t notice the make of her late-model, flashy red sports car. He was too busy noticing her. She looked nervous and scared.

He felt her—deep inside. She touched a raw place he hadn’t known was still alive. She made him ache and hurt and crave things he’d thought he’d given up for good. What would it be like to have a woman like her waiting at the door with a smile every night when he came home?

In the space of a microsecond he memorized that pale pampered face; those classy, even features she’d painted with way too much makeup, probably to make herself look older and more sophisticated. Pert, shapely breasts spilled above a low-cut white bodice. The style was overly sophisticated for her, too.

He caught a glimpse of something sparkly around her throat. Diamonds? Rich, too?

He knew her type. She was the kind of woman who wanted her real man to be a money machine but found “nice” men too tame in bed. So, she came looking for a guy like him at Shorty’s. He’d gone with plenty to motels. Some preferred backseats of cars, but once they got their kicks, they rearranged their skirts and drove off. They never asked his name, and he always felt depressed and cheapened, less than nothing when they were done with him.

Other men envied him his popularity. What the hell was the matter with him? What did he want really?

He couldn’t tear his gaze from this one. With her long blond hair streaming behind her, she looked like an angel riding the wind.

He willed her to look at him, to really see him.

Suddenly she tossed her head toward him. Her eyes grew huge the instant she saw him—as if she were equally fascinated and yet scared, too. Again, he thought her different than the others. He had the strangest feeling that if he stared into her eyes long enough, he would rediscover his own soul—which was a crazy feeling, if ever there was one.

Something dangerous and fatal connected them. Unwanted longings and painful needs bubbled too near the surface. His pulse raced out of control.

How could he feel so much in the space of a few heartbeats? She was a baby, younger than her voluptuous body, while he was far older than his years.

“Do you hold yourself as cheap underneath as all the others, baby?” he growled.

The minx flirtily tooted her horn and sped up. As if she wasn’t already driving fast, way too fast.

Her little car careened onto the shoulder, pinging his bike and long, denim-clad legs with gravel, but she regained control. The beat-up sedan behind her raced past Tag in hot pursuit. Gravel sprayed his boots and his bike like bullets. Only he didn’t get any hormonal bang from these punks.

Damn. He knew that junk heap. Rusty and Hank. Not kids. Two mean guys who were mad at the world in general and out for vengeance against him tonight. What if they took it out on her?

He’d lied to Jeffries. Those guys were bad news. As bad as the thugs who’d almost killed him in the swamp. After he’d fired them, they’d sprayed paint all over the cars in the parking lot out back of Frenchy’s restaurant. Painted the outer walls of the kitchen in purple graffiti.

Correction. His restaurant now.

He had a score to settle. A damsel as a trophy only upped the stakes.

Tag whipped his big bike onto the asphalt road, gunned it.

The cars raced north at double the speed limit, flying over the lighted bridge, veering left on screaming tires, onto Fulton Beach Road. The moonlit bay glittered to the east of them. The mansions on pilings that lined the canals loomed tall and dark to the west.

The quaint road along the beach, with its cottages, historic Fulton Mansion and motels, narrowed, roughened, but the girl and her pursuers kept driving like maniacs. Just as she got to the wharves and warehouses that lined the waterfront near his own restaurant, a black shadow raced from the water side into the road.

Her brake lights flashed.

Adrenaline pumped through Tag’s veins.

Had she hit whatever it was…killed it—

Animals touched a soft spot, especially strays. He had a collection of mongrel dogs and cats that lived out back in the woods behind his house.

Her car spun off to the right, bounced over something on the shoulder, and rolled to a crooked stop in front of the alley that ran between two abandoned fish houses. A long shadowy tail disappeared into the tall reedy grasses of the marshy wetlands on the other side of the road.

The junk heap came to a stop right behind her car, ramming her.

The woman in skintight white stumbled out of her sports car.

Rusty and Hank fell on top of her.

Party time.

Tag ripped his bike off road, stopping so fast, he nearly rolled. His right boot hit white shell, and he skidded in a geyser of white dust.

Party time.

Not their party.

His.

He’d been spoiling for a fight…and a woman.

Looks like he had his own personal wish fairy looking out for him up there in heaven.

Frenchy?

Stay with me, Frenchy.

A girl’s terrified scream went through Tag like a knife. He was off his bike—running.

Two

Tonight should have been the happiest night of Claire Woods’s life. Instead, tears of disillusionment stung her eyes. North had let her drive off. So, now here she was, forty miles from home, her blond hair whipping her face like a mop, and two unsavory goons honking on her tail.

She hit the accelerator. Nothing was turning out the way she’d planned. She had so wanted her wedding to be a fairy tale, but as the big day approached Claire Woods, who everybody thought spoiled and pampered, was feeling bereft and hollow.

If only Melody, her quirky, irrepressible, unpredictable sister, hadn’t come home to spoil everything!

It was just like Melody to helicopter off that freighter bound for China and fly home—tonight! Just like her to stage that provocative dance for North’s benefit and steal Claire’s show and maybe her man.

Claire had wanted to shout, “I’m the bride! North loves me now! Not you!” But, of course, she’d only stood there with a frozen smile while Melody hummed and did her cute routine.

And North…

“It’s not North’s fault!”

He hadn’t known Melody would pull one of her stunts. Who but Melody would fly in from China just to crash their party? From the second Melody had waltzed into the yacht club ballroom in those tight pants and shimmery blouse, looking like she owned the place, everybody had been electrified. Nobody could stop talking about that buffoon, Merle somebody, a fly-by-night P.I. their daddy had sent to find her six months ago. Melody had laughingly explained how she’d lured Merle on board her China-bound freighter and then tricked him into walking the plank, so to speak.

“Why did you come home?” North had demanded of Melody. “Why now?”

“I…I couldn’t miss your wedding.”

“You sure missed the last one.” North’s low voice was rapier-sharp.

If North truly loved Claire, he would be chasing Claire right now instead of the two hoods flashing their highbeams and honking behind her.

Instead, her fiancé and her sister were still at the party, probably making eyes at each other this very minute, while she was driving around alone.

No…. No….

A vision of Melody humming softly, Melody, in those skintight black jeans and a white silk shirt, eyes aglow, her honey-gold hair streaming down her slim back took shape in Claire’s too-vivid imagination. Her sister’s dance had been so enthusiastic, so spontaneous, and so original that everybody had stopped dancing and started clapping the moment she kicked off her shoes and threw them to North. Everyone except North who’d gripped those sparkly high heels in a strangle-hold. Not that he hadn’t watched her dance, his expression darkening when the other men had started clapping.

How much of her childhood had Claire spent curled up with a book or in her room alone with her dreams while bubbly Melody was out in the yard putting on a show that had all the neighborhood children, especially the boys, spellbound?

Applause and love and sheer sexiness came so easily to the uninhibited Melody.

All her life Claire had wanted to be first with somebody.

“Don’t think about Melody,” Claire whispered to herself. “Don’t think about the pain in North’s eyes when he’d watched her dance.”

“But I can’t stop.”

Claire had never outgrown the childish habit of talking to herself, especially when she was in her car alone or primping in front of her mirror.

“Chase me then!” she’d laughingly challenged North a little while after Melody’s dance.

The memory made her blush, made her eyes burn. What a brazen fool she was. When would she ever learn North was too cool and mature to play what he called her childish games?

Or was that really it? Did he love her, really love her as once he had loved…

He had told her once, “I can never love you as I loved Melody. But I believe what we’ll have will be better and stronger than what I felt for her.”

Claire was sick of driving around. More than a little scared, too, and not just of losing North. The jerks behind her were persistent. Her parents’ warnings played like tapes in the back of her mind.

A woman alone on the road is prey, Claire. This in a shrill tone from her bossy mother, Dee Dee.

When a man sees a woman alone, he takes it as an invitation. This from Sam, her all-knowing doctor father.

Maybe the old folks were smarter than she’d thought. Her legs had been jelly ever since these two goons had almost sideswiped her, forcing her onto the shoulder a while ago.

The humid wind that battered her face and tangled her butter-colored hair stank with the pungent fragrance of a plankton-laced bay. When their car speeded up, attempting to pass her again, Claire shakily pushed a sticky strand of hair out of her eyes.

Her front wheels skidded. Her heart skittered.

“I’m not scared!”

When the car in her rearview mirror rushed forward and she could no longer see it, she yanked her steering wheel to the left and cut them off. Honking, they eased off the accelerator and veered back into the right lane behind her. So did she. They slowed, and she relaxed enough to rehash the humiliating little scene at the country club with North and Melody, which was the reason she was in this mess.

North never wanted to discuss wedding details, maybe because his first wedding had ended in such disaster.

“We’ll all be happier when you grow up!” North had thundered distractedly a few minutes after Melody’s dance had ended. Claire had been trying to discuss some of the difficulties with wedding costs. “So, scale back. Compromise!”

North could hold onto his cowboy cool a whole lot longer than most guys, so his uncustomary show of temper should have warned her.

“But I can’t. It’s our wedding day. If your family would just—”

“You know what your problem is?” North had waved one of Melody’s shoes at her. “You’re spoiled, Claire.”

“Me? Spoiled? You’re the big multimillionaire rancher.”

Men. At first she hadn’t been able to believe that North, whose wealth was legendary, had joined forces with the wedding consultant, caterers, her parents, and his family to attack her. Why couldn’t he understand how unsure she felt with Melody home and everybody else pulling her to pieces?

“Darling, Mother keeps saying she just wants our wedding day to be fairy-tale perfect,” she’d whispered, “something special we’ll remember forever. We’re doing this for you…to make up for…” Claire stopped, staring at the sparkly shoes he still held because she couldn’t say, my sister jilting you at the altar.

“I wish you two would worry a little more about what comes after that day—our marriage.”

“Oh, that—That’s the happily-ever-after part.”

“Damn it.” North had shrugged wearily. “I’m beginning to wonder about that.”

Finally, she’d said what was really on her mind. “Is this about Melody?”

“Hell, no.” But he’d reddened, and the sparkly shoes had glinted. “Life’s not lived like the glossy pictures of those bridal and home magazines you and your mother pore over all the time. I wish to hell we’d eloped.”

Suddenly she’d realized everyone, especially Melody, had begun watching them when North had raised his voice in annoyance. Claire had felt frightened and guilty when North’s gaze had drifted back to her blushing sister.

“I’m sorry,” Claire had said. “So sorry. I shouldn’t have said anything.” When he’d scowled at her and then at the shoes and hadn’t apologized, she hadn’t known what to do. Suddenly she’d realized she shouldn’t have upset him with wedding details right after Melody’s dance. “Dance with me, darling,” she’d pleaded, realizing he hadn’t said one word about how beautiful she was in her white sheath.

Again his black gaze had drifted to Melody. “I’m really not in the mood to put on a show!”

“But we’re supposed to be madly in love.”

“Claire, your sister’s show is a hard act to follow. And now you’ve got me all worked up, too. I can’t just…You’re always pressuring me, chasing me—”

“’Cause you never chase me.”

His black eyes left Melody and flicked over Claire with a strange look of pity that startled them both. When he pressed his handsome lips together and continued to regard her thoughtfully, she was terrified.

“How will it look to everybody if we just stand around, not dancing, not talking?” Claire pleaded. “And holding my sister’s shoes?”

“Frankly, I don’t much give a damn.”

“You’d better be careful,” Melody had quipped, gliding up to them. “That sounds a lot like Rhett Butler’s exit line.”

A look had passed between Melody and North. Then North’s face had hardened and he slammed the shoes into her open palms. “And you’re just the girl to appreciate a good exit line.”

Melody had gone as pale as death.

Claire had felt a burst of sympathy for North.

Would he ever get over her sister?

Of course, he would. He was. She had just been immature to push him.

Would he ever be over her sister?

People were turning to stare. Not knowing what to do, Claire had flown out of the club and gone to her car.

North would follow. He would leave the stuffy party where all anybody ever did was try to impress each other. He would chase her. He had to.

Nobody had been more upset than Dee Dee when Claire’s wacky, unconventional sister had broken North’s heart. Just as nobody had been more elated when he’d found consolation first in Claire’s friendship, and then in her love.

Claire banged her hands on her steering wheel and listened to the band. Even out here the throbbing music was loud, almost loud enough to drown out the loneliness in her young aching heart, almost.

“Go back inside.”

“No, any minute North will march out those polished mahogany doors with the shiny brass handles and prove his love for me—to everyone.”

But the doors didn’t open, and the brass handles began to swim in a sea of hot tears. North stayed at the club.

And even though Claire had known deep down that she was, at least, partly in the wrong—she hadn’t had the guts to go back inside, face Melody and meekly apologize to North.

Her mother, Dee Dee, who’d all but engineered this marriage after Melody had jilted North, was, once again, planning the wedding of the year. Only Dee Dee was determined that Claire’s wedding would be so magnificent everybody would forget and forgive what Melody had done. But the financial burden of marrying great wealth for the second time was a strain on their upper-middle-class budget, a fact her father never let Dee Dee forget, which was why Claire had asked North to help.

“Have a wedding your family can afford,” he’d said. “After what Melody pulled, all that matters is a sacred ceremony.”

Mother said the wedding had to be perfect…perfect. Just the event to reestablish Dee Dee Woods as a Texas hostess to be reckoned with after having been made the laughing-stock of the town last year by Melody. The effort and pressure to impress the right people had her mother in bed with what she called “heat” headaches.

Bridal nerves. Maybe that’s what had Claire so uptight and jittery lately…even before Melody’s return.

The moon lit a path from the horizon to the shoreline. Not that she noticed when the jerks behind her honked loudly.

Their bumper slammed into hers. A sickening chill of fear shivered up her spine.

She had driven forty miles on this fool’s errand to regain her pride. Halfway to Rockport where her parents had a condo on the bay, the punks had forced her onto the shoulder.

They honked flirtily again. Somehow she had to get back to North and apologize, really apologize. But first she had to shake these juvenile delinquents before she left Rockport.

When the hoods flashed their high beams, she stomped down on the accelerator of her sports car.

It was now or never.

As the cars raced, she began to practice her apology.

“Oh, North, I’m sorry. You were right and I was wrong. You’re my best friend.” She would close her long lashes, let them drift open slowly. “Of course, I love you just as I know you love me. Seeing Melody…Those shoes…That dance…I just wanted you to chase me…To excite me…To thrill me…To act like a caveman for once.”

The way Loverboy does.

“You can’t say that to North Black!” an irreverent masculine voice in her head drawled.

“I know that, silly.” She couldn’t ever let North…or anyone else know about her embarrassing, secret, fantasy life with…with Loverboy.

The trouble had started innocently, the way most bad things do. A lonely little girl, Claire hadn’t ever been able to make friends as easily as Melody. And if she had made a friend, Melody had quickly charmed her or him.

Claire had worn lace dresses when Melody and the other girls wore jeans. Claire had read books, while Melody and her friends had made mud pies and climbed trees. Finally, Claire had invented an imaginary friend, Hal, who was just as lonely and shy as she was. Everybody had thought it was so cute the way she included him in every conversation, set a special place for him, even bought presents for him. Somehow over the years, Hal had grown up and gotten way too sexy for her to handle. She was a virgin…but only technically. In her imagination, Hal and she got up to wanton mischief in all sorts of dark and inappropriate locations, on kitchen tables and the hood of her car. Hal was tall with black hair…like North.

And yet not like North at all.

North didn’t have all that much time for her. He kept much of himself hidden from her. He was steady and predictable when it came to his work, too tied to the responsibilities of his ranching empire and his duties to his legendary family.

Hal was wild and dangerous and free, insidiously attentive, and as faceless as an outlaw’s shadow.

North could give her the kind of safe, secure life her upper-middle-class mother could brag about.

Mostly her imaginary lover was a pirate on a ship who carried her off to sea. Sometimes he was a bandit or a highwayman who carried her to his hideout and robbed her of more than her gold.

Strip, my lady. Slowly. And every time she took something off, he would toss a gold coin at her feet.

Mostly she dreamed about him at night, but lately she’d been having the most lurid daydreams. The over-sexed phantom was becoming terribly distracting. One reason she was so anxious to get married was to send Loverboy packing. Once North made love to her, she would have a husband to dream about. What sane woman would chase a dream, when she had a man like North in her bed? Everybody, simply everybody told her North was the sexiest, hottest, richest cowboy prince in all of Texas.

North could have chosen any woman. He had chosen her.

“That’s not the way it was, Sugar-Baby,” purred Loverboy.

She hated to be called that. “Shut up, Hal!”

“I was there! And Melody was first!”

“Go away and leave me alone!”

“Never. I am not abandoning you till I find a more suitable companion for you.”

“Stay out of my love life!”

Suddenly a strange thing happened. The black sky turned pink, and she saw a lone black figure on a motorcycle off to her left silhouetted in a white cone of light. Pinkish-blue light pulsated around him. He was wearing a helmet, but the heat of his gaze was a visceral, physical connection. Even in that blurred, peripheral glimpse, she sensed that such a man in the flesh might prove wilder and more chaotically thrilling than any secret interior existence with Loverboy.

She knew better than to look at the biker, but some dark and dangerous force compelled her.

Curiosity kills more than cats.

The forbidden—especially in the tame, pampered life of a woman like Claire, who lived her life by rules the way some people paint by numbers—was the most powerful temptation. Besides, Melody’s dance and North’s dark mood had opened a crack in her heart and self-esteem.

She was on the brink of marriage to the most desirable of men. Never had she felt less sexually attractive, nor more afraid or vulnerable. What was the biker doing alone in a dark cemetery?

Jauntily, she turned toward him. For the space of a heartbeat her long-lashed eyes fixed on the black helmet that hid his face with an avidity that should have shamed her. Then with a will all its own, her glossily tipped fingernail tooted her horn.

He nodded. Her lips parted coquettishly. But when the biker skidded out onto the road after her, her heart jumped into her throat.

The thunder of his big bike racing to catch up to her was a fuse that lit a primal heat in every nerve in her body.

The biker left asphalt, caught up with her pursuers, spewing gravel on them before braking and then falling in behind them.

She knew he was bad.

Bad to the bone.

Why did she suddenly feel she was on a collision course with destiny? She turned her three-carat engagement ring backwards.

North was in Corpus, but the chase was on.

Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.

Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».

Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.

Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.