The man had a huge and undeniable presence.

He pushed through the small gathering and stood before her.

“Are you all right?”

Jessica must have bumped her head harder than she thought. She felt suddenly paralyzed, as if she couldn’t breathe. “I’m f-f-fine,” she managed to stammer.

“Jessica King?”

“How did you know?”

Lucky guess. Did she detect dryness in his tone? He scowled and, without warning, touched the corner of her lip.

Intellectually, Jessica supposed she had known life could change—completely, irrevocably, permanently—in a split second. She supposed she had always had a peripheral awareness that fate and the most well-planned of lives were sometimes on a collision course. What she had not believed was that something as innocuous as a chance meeting, a rough finger laid on the delicate skin of her upper lip, could bring on this sensation.

That everything about her reasonable and well-ordered life had just changed.

Dear Reader,

After looking at winter’s bleak landscape and feeling her icy cold breezes, I found nothing to be more rewarding than savoring the warm ocean breezes from a poolside lounge chair as I read a soon-to-be favorite book or two! Of course, as I choose my books for this long-anticipated outing, this month’s Silhouette Romance offerings will be on the top of my pile.

Cara Colter begins the month with Chasing Dreams (#1818), part of her A FATHER’S WISH trilogy. In this poignant title, a beautiful academic moves outside her comfort zone and feels alive for the first time in the arms of a brawny man who would seem her polar opposite. When an unexpected night of passion results in a pregnancy, the hero and heroine learn that duty can bring its own sweet rewards, in Wishing and Hoping (#1819), the debut book in beloved series author Susan Meier’s THE CUPID CAMPAIGN miniseries. Elizabeth Harbison sets out to discover whether bustling New York City will prove the setting for a modern-day fairy tale when an ordinary woman comes face-to-face with one of the world’s most eligible royals, in If the Slipper Fits (#1820). Finally, Lissa Manley rounds out the month with The Parent Trap (#1821), in which two matchmaking girls set out to invent a family.

Be sure to return next month when Cara Colter concludes her heartwarming trilogy.

Happy reading!

Ann Leslie Tuttle

Associate Senior Editor

Chasing Dreams
A Father’s Wish
Cara Colter

www.millsandboon.co.uk

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Books by Cara Colter

Silhouette Romance

Dare To Dream #491

Baby in Blue #1161

Husband in Red #1243

The Cowboy, the Baby and the Bride-To-Be #1319

Truly Daddy #1363

A Bride Worth Waiting For #1388

Weddings Do Come True #1406

A Babe in the Woods #1424

A Royal Marriage #1440

First Time, Forever #1464

*Husband by Inheritance #1532

*The Heiress Takes a Husband #1538

*Wed by a Will #1544

What Child Is This? #1585

Her Royal Husband #1600

9 Out of 10 Women Can’t Be Wrong #1615

Guess Who’s Coming for Christmas? #1632

What a Woman Should Know #1685

Major Daddy #1710

Her Second-Chance Man #1726

Nighttime Sweethearts #1754

†That Old Feeling #1814

†Chasing Dreams #1818

Silhouette Books

The Coltons

A Hasty Wedding

CARA COLTER

shares ten acres in the wild Kootenay region of British Columbia with the man of her dreams, three children, two horses, a cat with no tail and a golden retriever who answers best to “bad dog.” She loves reading, writing and the woods in winter (no bears). She says life’s delights include an automatic garage door opener and the skylight over the bed that allows her to see the stars at night. She also says, “I have not lived a neat and tidy life, and used to envy those who did. Now I see my struggles as having given me a deep appreciation of life, and of love, that I hope I succeed in passing on through the stories that I tell.”

Contents

Prologue

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Epilogue

Prologue

“That insolent young pup!” Jake King slammed down the phone. He was eighty-three years old, he was one of the wealthiest and most respected businessmen in America and he was dying. He had a right to have his wishes granted!

They were simple wishes: happy marriages for the three daughters born to him so late in his life and a perfectly refurbished 1923 Rolls-Royce Silver Ghost Oxford Open Tourer for himself.

Things had been going rather well in the wish department. Just last weekend he had attended the wedding of his oldest daughter, twenty-six-year-old Brandgwen, to one of his most cherished business associates. The happiness and love shining in Brandy’s eyes—just the way he had planned it—had made Jake overly confident. It had made him think he could have whatever he wanted, that God granted wishes to dying men.

Or maybe acquiring the Rolls had seemed like less of a challenge than trying to save his middle daughter, Jessica, from herself.

Jake sighed. Jessica announcing her engagement to Professor Mitch Michaels at Brandy’s wedding had put a black spot on the whole event.

A black spot on his life.

Possibly he was trying to erase it with the Rolls.

He glared at the picture of the car on the Internet, and particularly at the disgustingly handsome young man who leaned beside it, grinning confidently, dark hair falling over eyes so like his grandfather’s had been. Dark, snapping with defiance.

“I should have known he wouldn’t sell me the car,” Jake muttered. There was bad blood between the Blakes and the Kings. It hadn’t always been that way. No, far from it. That insolent young pup’s grandfather, Simon, had been Jake’s business partner, way before the phenomenal success story of Auto Kingdom. And it might have remained that way, if Simon’s son, Billy, hadn’t been such an arrogant ne’er-do-well.

Billy would have sold him the car, Jake thought cynically. He would have sold it in a flash, just like he had sold everything else. But the grandson was a different story. Inner toughness shone from his eyes.

Garner Blake had made something of himself, despite the horrendous debts he’d inherited as a result of his father’s runaway grandiosity. It seemed Garner shared his grandfather’s passion for cars. He brought old beauties back to life. He did it better than anyone else in the business.

Jake knew these things. A man was smart to keep track of his enemies.

The door to his office burst open, and his assistant, Sarah, came in with his new son-in-law’s baby, Becky, riding on her hip. Becky was staying at Kingsway while her dad and new mommy honeymooned.

“Do you want to go see Grandpa Jake?” she asked the child.

The baby’s weight settled against him, and he allowed himself to appreciate the miracle and the marvel of her. When he had found out he was dying he had wished for a grandchild. For happiness for his daughters. He had wished he could show them, somehow, that only one thing really mattered.

Love.

Okay, love and good cars, but mostly love.

He had succeeded with his eldest daughter, succeeded beyond his wildest dreams at his first awkward attempt at matchmaking.

But Jessie, his second daughter, was different. Jessie was disconnected and intellectual. Given those defects, Mitch Michaels was simply unsuitable. The good professor, while obviously an honorable and stable man, could only bring out those qualities in her. Her beauty would remain forever hidden under layers of prim control that Mitch actually seemed to encourage.

Poor Jessie. The girl was twenty-four years old. She had no business acting so old. She always seemed to have her head down, in a book. She needed a man who could show her how to look up, dream a little, touch the sky.

He mulled over the surprising poetry of those thoughts while the baby pulled at his nose and his ears.

Really, especially after his episode with the Blake lad, it was beginning to feel like too much for him. What did he know of poetry and passion? Where could he find such things for his daughter? His energy was waning, his light dimming, and so much more quickly than he had expected.

“Look what I found,” Sarah said. She looked like Brandy. And sometimes there was a lilt in her voice that reminded him of a time long ago.

She plunked a picture down in front of him. Over the objections of his secretary, James, and just about everybody else in this household, he had given Sarah a job. She was sorting through mountains of photos and assembling memory albums, one for each of his daughters. Sarah was good at it, and he was glad he had hired her to put together a suitable memento for the daughters who had no idea that soon they would be looking at their father only in picture albums.

“I didn’t quite know what to make of it.”

Jake studied what she had placed before him. It was an old photo, sepia, the edges curling. It was a picture of himself as a young man, his arm looped casually around the shoulders of his best friend, Simon Blake. Jake felt a slight tremble in his hand. How odd that he had just hung up on Garner Blake and now this picture would be presented to him.

Or perhaps not odd at all…The veil between the worlds of the seen and the unseen were thinning. Perhaps all things were linked in ways he had never allowed himself to believe before.

He studied the photo of the two happy young men. Behind them, draped in a grand opening banner, was a building that couldn’t have possibly been big enough to hold all their youthful hopes and dreams. K & B Auto, the humble beginning of the Auto Kingdom empire in Farewell, Virginia.

And the beginning of the end of something far more precious than all the successes he had ever enjoyed.

The beginning of the end of his lifelong friendship with Simon. Not Simon’s fault. Simon’s son, Billy’s. Billy had managed to squander every single thing his father had worked for. In the end, Billy owned only his half of that small shop. No doubt he would have lost that, too, had Jake ever been willing to sell his share.

Jake felt the sharpness of regret.

Had he been too hard on Simon’s son? Probably. It was not until he had children of his own, long after Billy had grown, that he understood the complete helplessness of that love, the compulsion to overindulge.

He recalled his conversation with Garner. Hadn’t he heard the stamp of Simon’s own resolve in that young man’s strong, confident voice? Yes. And he’d heard more. A fierceness of spirit that reminded him of who he himself, Jake King, had once been. Plus, that love of cars, passed to Garner straight from Simon.

Jessie’s love of cars remained, too, under all that intellectual frou-frou.

Jessie and Simon’s grandson. Was it possible? Could Jake repair his mistakes of the past and manipulate his daughter’s future in one fell swoop? A shiver traveled the length of his spine.

Perhaps the gods would take pity on a man with so much to do, and so little time left. He snorted. This kind of thought had to be contained, or next he would be consulting his daily horoscope and reading crystals to find direction.

Of course, where he was going, who was to say where the direction would come from? Perhaps hunch and instinct and all those nebulous things came from heaven’s door. Meanwhile, he had a lot of homework to do on Mr. Garner Blake before Jake would cross the young man’s path with that of his beloved Jessie.

Reluctantly, he passed the baby back to Sarah. “Tell James I need to talk to Cameron McPherson, at once.”

Did she color at the mention of that name? Ah, yes, he recalled. She had danced with Cameron at the wedding. He saw the longing flash through her eyes. Too bad it wouldn’t be so easy with Jessie.

Three days later, with a thick folder in front of him, Jake redialed that number in Farewell, Virginia. He knew everything there was to know about Garner Blake. And he liked what he had found out. Garner was tough, but innately decent. What was best about his grandfather had survived in him. He had been nominated Citizen of the Year by the town of Farewell, and Jake’s sources told him Blake would win.

He let none of what he was feeling—excitement and hope—show in his voice. Instead, Jake King informed Garner Blake, coldly, that his daughter would be coming to work at K & B Auto for the summer, to fill the long-vacant position of office manager.

“Have you been spying on me?” Garner asked, his voice hard and incredulous.

Jake chose not to answer. Instead, he reminded Garner that he owned half the business and was, according to the legal documents he was looking at, entitled to hire and fire employees.

There was the faintest veiled threat in his statement. He knew from the dossier in front of him that Garner Blake hired good men to work for him and he was intensely loyal to each of them. Jake also knew one of those men had just had a baby, another had just bought a home. They were men who needed their jobs.

There was a long silence on the other end of the line.

Then Garner said, “Is this about the car?”

“If it was, would you change your mind?”

“No.”

“That’s what I thought.”

Jake hung up the phone thoughtfully. He hadn’t broken it to Jessie that he’d found her a summer job. He had a feeling she wasn’t going to be any happier about the arrangement than Garner Blake was.

She had just completed a master’s degree in science and she was contemplating beginning her Ph.D. She was brilliant and academically successful and she wasn’t going to want to work the front counter of an auto repair shop.

She could refuse. But he doubted she would. If he was dealing with her younger sister, Chelsea, he would have to threaten the trust fund, the allowance, the car and the credit cards. But Jessie was not Chelsea. She had always wanted to please him. He recalled, affectionately, the soft worry in her green eyes when she looked at him, even as a child.

Despite his treachery in playing with his unsuspecting daughter’s well-ordered life, he decided to call her immediately and smiled when he heard her voice on the other end of the phone. It was all for the greater good, after all.

Chapter One

The wedding gown was designed by Dior. The bride was slender and radiant. Her bouquet held pure white French Lace floribunda roses, flown in from Oregon.

The groom waited at the end of the aisle. He was turning toward her—

The daydream ended with a bang. Literally.

Jessica King’s head flew forward and hit the steering wheel. After a stunned moment, she stared at the crumpled hood of the car she had rented earlier this morning after flying into Harrisonburg, Virginia. Beyond the damaged front of the car was the parking meter she had hit, and beyond that was the rather dingy cream stucco storefront of K & B Auto.

Steam hissed out of the hood of her damaged Cadillac, and a small crowd began to gather.

“That’s what dreaming will get you,” Jessie admonished herself.

Embarrassed rather than hurt, Jessie took a deep breath and stepped from the car. Emerging from the air-conditioning into the steamy heat of an early-summer morning took her by surprise. But not as much as being watched by half a dozen or so people, their interest in her unabashed. There was really nothing she hated quite so much as being the center of attention.

Odd then that she had been imagining her wedding day instead of paying attention to what she was doing. Was there a day where a person was more the center of attention than that one? Of the King girls, she was the practical one, the pragmatic one, the nondreamer.

“For good reason,” she muttered, surveying the damage to the car. It had been a beautiful car, undeserving of her carelessness.

She was not a careless person! Not the least ditzy! And yet, after overcoming her initial surprise at Mitch’s announcement of their engagement at her sister’s wedding only two weeks ago, she was astonished to find a romantic hidden within herself, a romantic who simply could not get enough of daydreaming about every detail of her big day.

“I’m sorry,” she mumbled to the onlookers. “I just didn’t see the meter. Over the hood. I don’t usually drive a car with such a large hood…”

Her voice trailed off as the front door of K & B Auto swung open and a man emerged.

The last residue of her wedding fantasy faded.

Her entire former life faded.

The man had huge and undeniable presence. He was big, six feet or better, and every inch of that frame was muscular and spare. She could see power in every line of him, from the way his faded jeans clung to the large muscles in his thigh to the way the short-sleeved white T-shirt hugged the hard curve of a bicep and the washboard smoothness of his stomach. His hair was as dark as devil’s food cake, a little too long at the collar. His facial features were clean and chiseled, but the hardness in the line of his body was repeated in the stamp of his face—in the faint whisker-roughness of cheekbones and chin, in dark slashes of brows arrowing downward, in the line of lips that appeared stern and forbidding. How was it that the fullness of those lips made him sensual in a way that overrode his obvious ill temper? His eyes were animal dark, brown bordering on black, and a light snapped in them that was fierce, frightening, compelling.

He pushed through the small gathering and stood before her.

“Are you all right?”

She must have bumped her head harder than she originally thought. It was only four small words grouped together to form a question, and there was no sincere compassion in that question, either. In fact, the man seemed to be bristling with impatience. And yet she felt suddenly paralyzed, as if she couldn’t breathe.

“I’m f-f-fine,” she managed to stammer.

“Jessica King?” His gravel-edged voice scraped across the delicate skin at the back of her neck like a physical touch.

“How did you know?”

“Lucky guess,” he said. Did she detect a certain dryness to his tone? Then his scowl deepened. Without warning he reached out and touched the corner of her lip.

Intellectually, Jessica King supposed she had known life could change—completely, irrevocably, permanently—in a split second. She supposed she had always had a peripheral awareness that fate and the most well-planned lives were sometimes on a collision course. She had heard about such things: the decision to fly instead of to drive, a right-hand turn instead of a left one, and poof, a life changed for all time. What she had not believed was that something as innocuous as a chance meeting, a rough finger laid on the delicate skin of her upper lip, could bring on this sensation, not unlike drowning, that everything about her reasonable and well-ordered world had just changed.

What she had not believed was that such a thing could ever happen to her.

Lives forever altered by chance, by the whimsy of the gods, happened to other people, perhaps to people more spontaneous than she was or those more willing to take chances. She had lived with the happy illusion that fate had a much better chance of toying with people less organized, less in control, less dedicated to routine and precision than Jessica King.

His finger left her lip, and she returned to her well-ordered world with a pop, though she could not quite shake the sensation that there might remain a scorch mark where he had touched.

The devil will do that, she told herself. And the man was a devil, so at ease in his body, radiating self-assuredness. He had a roguish, untamed quality that was damnably sexy.

And he was no doubt exactly like every other man who was damnably sexy. He would know it and play it.

Jessica King would not be like her deceased, and rather infamous, mother. Not ever. She despised women who were helpless against the raw power that radiated from certain kinds of men.

This kind of man.

“Keep your mucky fingers to yourself,” she said, bristling with annoyance. He had come out of K & B Auto, likely a mechanic. His fingers would, of course, be mucky. Her eyes trailed to his hand. A big hand, the knuckles grazed, the back corded with a powerful network of vein and sinew. No ring. No muck.

He seemed unmoved by her annoyance, if he’d even had the good manners to notice it. Instead, he was studying the finger that had touched her lip. She noted, stiffly, it appeared to have muck on it.

“I thought it was blood on your lip,” he said. “But it’s not, is it?”

His eyes met hers, and a hint of laughter overrode his bad temper. Then he grinned, a small gesture, a tilting of firm lips. The grin changed everything. It was the sun glimpsed in the midst of a storm. The warrior cast of the face was momentarily transformed and he looked young and boyish and even more irresistible than he had before.

She shook her head. Now that was the real world. Men like this laughed at girls like her, girls who wore glasses and never got their hair quite right and were a teensy bit overweight. Never mind that the brief spark of laughter lighting the darkness of his eyes was more seductive than…

“Chocolate,” he said, and a small ripple of laughter went through the crowd, which was beginning to drift away now that the car was evidently just going to sit there hissing and not blow up.

He didn’t join in the laughter, and she was sorry he wasn’t having a laugh at her expense. A good defense against a man like him would be pure, unadulterated hatred.

“And you are?” she demanded. She resisted an impulse to tug at her skirt, which suddenly seemed binding around her hips.

How much weight had she gained since her sister’s wedding? Seven and a half pounds, as if she didn’t know exactly. You would think a person would have to work at gaining that much weight in such a short period of time, but she had no idea how—

“Garner Blake.”

She closed her eyes, just briefly, praying for strength. This was the man she was going to be working for?

“Oh, no.” It slipped out.

“My sentiments exactly,” he said.

She opened her eyes and glared at him. “Then why am I here?”

“Because your father wanted you to be. And for the most part, it would seem that what Jake King wants, Jake King gets.”

That for the most part seemed loaded with satisfaction.

Her father had told her that he was part owner in an obscure little business called K & B Auto that needed an office manager for the summer. He had told her he wanted her to get a taste of the real world.

Of course, she’d been briefly offended that he didn’t think her world was real and that he did not understand she was rather overqualified to be an office manager. She would have said so, too, except she had heard something in his voice that had troubled her. His voice had lacked strength, and the tone of his words had been faintly pleading.

Her father had never asked anything of her. So many times she had wished he would. When her father had asked this of her, she had sensed there was history here, a story, perhaps even a secret, that went beyond the fact that this humble little garage in nowhere Virginia was where it had all started for him. Her logical mind had known she needed more details, but for once logic had fled her. Looking at the predicament she was in now, it had probably been an omen.

When she should have been asking important questions, all she had been thinking was finally her father had recognized her. Finally he was seeing, even in the smallest way, that she was an educated woman of sound business skill, not one of his little princesses. She had assumed he was trusting her with a business assignment for Auto Kingdom!

“You do need an office manager, don’t you?” she asked, and was annoyed to hear a little tremor of uncertainty in her voice.

He must have heard it, too, because he sighed, pushed a large, impatient hand through tousled locks and made an obvious effort to restrain his impatience.

“Lady, I am absolutely desperate for an office manager. It’s just that the job requires a little know-how. The type of training you don’t get at the debutante ball or out fox hunting with the hounds.”

She felt herself stiffen. As if she hadn’t been up against this kind of prejudice her whole life.

“You might be interested to know I’ve never attended a debutante ball,” she said sharply, “and I don’t ride horses.” Terrified of them, actually, though she was reluctant to admit weakness to this man.

Chelsea did the balls. Brandy did the horses. Had he mixed her up with one of her sisters?

“You get my drift,” he said.

Oh, yes, she did. Useless. Rich. Frivolous.

“I happen to have a master’s degree,” she said tightly.

She decided now might not be the best time to mention it was in science. Still, she was confident that anybody who could spend two years painstakingly researching and documenting the effects of pesticides on the bone structure of prairie dogs, as she had just done, could handle a little office work.

He looked at her narrowly, his gaze so long and so stripping that she had to disguise a tiny tremor of…something.

“A master’s degree,” he repeated slowly. “Okay, that’s a surprise.”

“Didn’t my father tell you anything about me?”

“No. And I didn’t ask.”

She was struck with a sensation that she had been dropped in the middle of a war zone, completely unarmed.

“You might as well come and see what you’ve gotten yourself into.” Again, she heard a hard note of satisfaction in his voice.

He turned and walked away from her, not even waiting to see if she would follow.

Used to having women follow him like puppies?

Not this woman!

“What about my car?” she asked.

He glanced back at her. “You picked a good place to crash it. Kind of like having a heart attack while visiting the hospital. I’ll limp it around to the service bay and have a look at it.”

Feeling somehow chastened by his offhand courtesy, she followed him inside. Going from sunlight to indoors, Jessie tried to get her bearings.

Her eyes adjusted and she saw the shop was as humble inside as it had been outside. There was no decor. The floor was black and white linoleum tile, the white squares long since gone to gray. A glass-fronted counter separated the work area from the customer waiting area. The case contained several models of old cars, a faded placard that announced the oil and filter change special and a sample container of the brand of oil that was presumably on sale. Both areas, waiting and work, contained old kitchen chairs, the gray-vinyl padded seats patched with black swatches of tape. The walls held an assortment of calendars, which featured cars, cars and more cars, but thankfully no nude or near-nude women.

The nicest thing about the entire space was a huge picture window that looked onto the main street of Farewell. The morning mist was lifting, and she could see K & B faced the town square—a lovely little park surrounded by a wrought iron fence. It contained several mature trees, green grass, two benches that faced each other and a fountain. In the near distance the mountains looked cool, green and mysterious.

But by the looks of things, she wasn’t going to be spending much time admiring the view. Every single surface had papers sliding off of them. There were boxes on the floor with yet more papers and what appeared to be stacks of car parts.

“I think there’s been some kind of mistake,” she said. The place was a dump. And depressing. The computer was at least a thousand years old. Somehow, even when confronted with the rather dingy exterior of the place, she had imagined she would be running a sleek, state-of-the-art office. She had talked herself into thinking it might be a tiny bit fun.

The phone, which was ringing incessantly, looked like an antique. Black, rotary dial. The red light of the answering machine was blinking furiously. From a door that connected the office to the service bays she heard clanking.

“A mistake,” she repeated. Jessica King did not do well with chaos.

It was a far cry from the neat little office she had set up in her apartment, from the order of classrooms, from the quiet of fieldwork….

“A mistake,” he agreed with silky satisfaction, folding his arms over the ridiculous breadth of his chest and looking at her, pleased that she had lived up to his every unspoken judgment: rich, useless, frivolous and chased away by the slightest hint of a challenge.

In less than ten seconds, too!

Jessie was compelled to wipe the smirk off his face, even if it meant she closed the escape door. She straightened her shoulders and tilted her chin.

“Oh, I’m not going anywhere,” she said, though of course a split second ago that had been exactly her intent, to cut and run. Aware he was watching her with every ounce of his ill humor returned, she looked for a place to set her purse. She found a tiny corner of clear floor under the desk. Her skirt tightened uncomfortably across her derriere when she bent over, and she straightened hurriedly.

“My specialty is disasters,” she said, with cocky confidence that she was far from feeling. “I can fix a mistake like this one—” she motioned to the office with her hand “—in a week.”

“A week,” he muttered dubiously, and then brightened marginally as he watched her. “Honey, if you last half a day, I’ll eat my shorts.”

“Briefs or boxers?” she asked. And then she added quickly, “And don’t call me honey. It’s tacky.”

“Tacky,” he repeated, stunned, as if one of those precariously leaning boxes had slid off the counter and landed on his toe. Thankfully, he focused on the tacky enough that he didn’t even appear to notice how uncomfortable she was with the uncharacteristically bold remark she had made. Talk about tacky—how about discussing a man’s underwear preference?

“Is there any particular part of this mess you’d like cleaned up first?” she said, eager to shift the focus completely.

They were faced off, and she could see she was somewhat of a surprise to him and not an altogether pleasant one, either.

Oh, why hadn’t she just turned around and walked back out the door while she still had the chance? Oh, no, Little Miss Has-To-Prove-Herself had to pick the worst moment to put in an appearance.

“Miss King, MBA, that’s entirely up to you.”

She should really correct him. She had never said a thing about an MBA. “Good,” she said decisively. “I’ll begin with—”

“No, wait. On second thought, coffee would be a good place to start.”

“Coffee,” she repeated uneasily. She was pretty sure affirmative action meant that she didn’t have to make coffee.

He regarded her rebellious expression cynically, then shook his head.

Something snapped loudly in the vicinity of her desk, and she started, turned and saw nothing. Still, she knew the startle reflex had given away her wee bit of nervousness.

He hadn’t missed it. He smiled grimly. “I’m downgrading. Two hours. That’s how long you’ll make it.”

“I hope they’re boxers,” she shot back. “Those would take you a little longer to eat.”

Good grief, this had to stop! She’d known this man less than ten minutes and she had mentioned his undergarments twice! She and Mitch had never discussed undergarments, ever.

“And just for future reference, for your next job, in the real world work starts at seven, not—” he glanced at his watch “—eight forty-five.”

She wanted to defend herself. Not everyone came in from Harrisonburg, either! But she sensed under these circumstances that excuses, even very legitimate ones, would be wasted.

He picked up a sheaf of papers from a leaning stack on the counter, looked at her once more, shook his head ruefully and headed for the door. The phone started ringing again, and he moved to pick it up, then stopped.

He grinned at her, that grin that made her heart do traitorous and treacherous things. She was glad she was engaged to a man who did not make her feel so topsyturvy. It would be exhausting to feel this way all the time!

“Hey,” he said, his deep voice edged with just a trace of sarcasm, “that would be your job now.”

The door shut behind him, and thankfully he took all his bristling energy with him, though without him in it, the room seemed even more depressing than before, if that was possible.

She went around to the other side of the desk, closed her eyes, tried to concentrate. Surely she must have hit her head harder than she thought. She felt shell-shocked, but she took a deep breath, picked up the phone and said, “K & B Auto.”

She had barely gotten it out when she was assaulted by a description of a malfunctioning carburetor in an accent so deep it was nearly indecipherable.

She loved cars. She always had. She loved how they looked and how they smelled and how they sounded when they were running perfectly. She realized what she loved was the cosmetics of cars, because she was not even entirely sure what a carburetor was. Maybe she had been a little overly confident in telling that annoying man she was going to bring calm to chaos. She wasn’t sure how her master’s degree was going to help her with this challenge.

“Call back. Later. Tomorrow would be good.” She hung up the phone and sank into a padded leather chair in front of a scarred metal desk overflowing with paper.

The connecting door to the work bay swung open.

“That coffee? I like it strong.”

He was zipping himself—very unselfconsciously—into a pair of faded blue coveralls, the jeans and white T-shirt underneath.

The politically correct reply would have been to tell him to make his own damn coffee, but her eyes were mutinously glued to that zipper.

The door shut again before she came to her senses enough to become politically correct.

Coffee. Strong. Now would really be the time to march into the dark cavern of the auto repair bays to tell him he had obviously mistaken her for someone she was not. She might be able to manage an office. But girl Friday? Really that was beneath her dignity! She hadn’t spent the last six years of her life at school so that she could make coffee and fetch doughnuts!

What on earth had her father been thinking? It was totally evident she was going to be a fish out of water in this environment. It was totally evident this had been a mistake.

“My specialty is disasters,” she said, mimicking herself. “I can fix a mistake like this one—in a week.”

She pushed back several leaning stacks of paper to make enough room for her elbows. Then she rested her head in her hands and ordered herself to think. Thinking was generally her specialty, not that she had let even a hint of that show in the encounter she had just survived. Nor was any of her natural intelligence surfacing now. Because instead of formulating a plan of attack for the terrible mess in this office, and the huge coffee machine that gloated at her from its perch on the crowded counter, she was lamenting her choice of outfit.

A terrible choice. A suit, classic Chanel, jacket and straight skirt, in a small plaid pattern that had made her feel exceedingly professional when she had chosen it, along with dark stockings and plain black pumps, this morning. It was the type of outfit her fiancé, Mitch, approved of. Respectable. Mature. Appropriate for someone planning an academic career.

It makes you look fat, a voice inside her head wailed. Plus, it was going to be too hot. Her office space already seemed sauna-like, though in fairness, part of that might be her reaction to Garner Blake.

And her hair! Why had she ever allowed her sister Chelsea to talk her into cutting it? Oh, because Chelsea had talked about bone structure and her eyes and had made her believe, somehow, that having only two inches of hair could make her other features seem extraordinary!

Of course, under Chelsea’s hand—that wheat-blond hair coaxed into a riot of cheerful curls—that had happened. For Brandy’s wedding, Chelsea had also used makeup like an artist used a brush. In moments, Jessie had found herself in possession of startling cheekbones, stunning eyes, a sinfully puffy bottom lip.

But left to her own devices? Jessie felt her new “do” managed to look like she had slept with a demon-possessed rolling pin. Desperate for some semblance of order from her unruly hair she had taken to wetting it down, plastering it against her head and letting it dry like that. Without looking in a mirror, she knew the result was less than stellar, a drowned rat mixed with a helmet-head kind of look.

And makeup? A tiny line of gloss around her lips, a hint of mascara, a touch of blush. The result? Dull. Dull. Dull.

Stop it, Jessie commanded herself. The order of business was not to sit here wishing for another opportunity to make that all-important first impression. If she had it to do again, she should not waste her wishes on beauty. Why should she care if Garner Blake thought she was attractive? She was already taken, engaged, not available for the man-woman game anymore. She was relieved about that. The rules and procedures had always seemed just a little nebulous. She was a disaster at interchanges with the opposite sex, and she was darned lucky to have found Mitch, who appreciated her for her mind.

No, if she was throwing wishes around, she should opt for a chance to look brilliant.

Just a year from her doctoral degree, if she chose to continue her prairie dog study, and she had managed to present herself as a complete imbecile from the moment she had stepped out of her smoking car.

She had confidently proclaimed her master’s degree qualified her to look after his office, and she could clearly see it would take something much more than that.

“A combination of the Queen of Clean and Trump,” she muttered out loud.

Sitting at this horribly messy desk in a building that smelled of grease and other mysterious and extremely masculine substances, and that was heating up more by the second, it occurred to her she should have asked more questions of her father.

Still, he hadn’t really given her much opportunity. He had passed her off to James to get details like location, date and time. She remembered her father had sounded frail in a way that had made her uneasy—and eager to please.

She might not like this job, but she was not letting her father down!

And she was not letting that arrogant ass—who happened to be her boss—win!

“And I am certainly not being defeated by a coffeepot,” she decided, and leapt to her feet. She focused furiously on her task, ignoring the almost constant jangling of the phone. The pot was a huge silver monstrosity that did not bear any resemblance to the one she had at home on her kitchen counter. She found grounds, dumped in approximately enough to sink the Titanic, found the on switch and got it working.

“‘I like it strong.’” She mimicked his deep voice.

Still, when the office began to fill with the smell of coffee, Jessica King felt inordinately pleased with herself.

“There’s no problem so great a good mind can’t solve it,” she said to herself, quoting Mitch. With new confidence she picked up the ringing telephone.

Okay, she might be in the shadow of her gorgeous younger sister, Chelsea, who the world and the press could not get enough of. And she was definitely in the shadow of Brandy, who was so bold and adventuresome.

But Jessie had her talents. She was the brainy princess, and K & B Auto—and Garner Blake—were about to find that out! That good-looking oaf didn’t think she could do it. She couldn’t think of a pleasure greater than proving him wrong.

“So, uh, Garner, what do you think?”

He didn’t have to ask, “About what?” Clive, the best mechanic in his shop, looked like a biker and was as mild and shy as a groundhog fresh out of its hole. He and his wife had just had their first baby. Garner had been named godfather.

“She makes lousy coffee,” he said, couching his answer in carefully diplomatic terms. What he was thinking was I hate rich girls.

In just a few moments of acquaintance she had called him mucky and tacky. The business he had spent his whole life building had been reduced to a mess and a mistake. She hadn’t even known she was being insulting. She’d just been exercising that unconscious superiority of the very rich.

“I like the coffee,” Clive said with just a touch of stubbornness. “Garner, you try being nice for a change, or she’ll up and quit like all the rest of them.”

We can only hope. Garner had chosen not to mention to these guys that their new office manager was one of those Kings. It would bring up a whole lot of questions that he didn’t know how to answer.

“I ain’t working here another week if you keep on trying to do all the jobs, including billing, booking and answering the phone.”

Garner tried not to groan. Clive was going to make his stand over this girl, the one he needed to get rid of? Resentfully, he reminded himself that his loyalty to this man who was threatening to quit was part of the reason he found himself in this predicament in the first place.

“Look, I’ll run the business, you pull the wrenches.”

“I miss your aunt,” Clive said glumly.

Garner’s aunt Mattie had done the office managing since he was a child. She was old and efficient and not the least distracting. Imagine her abandoning K & B for the dubious pleasure of marrying Arnold Hefflinger and moving to Quartzsite, Arizona! She’d given fair notice, but somehow Garner hadn’t taken her seriously, or understood exactly how much she did and how hard she was going to be to replace, until it was too late.

“Them last two gals left in tears,” Clive said, faint warning in the look he sent Garner.

But Garner could only hope it had been good practice for getting rid of this one. Though even as he thought it, he knew he didn’t ever want to see Jessica King’s big green eyes filming with tears.

Spitting with anger was another thing altogether.

“The second one looked awful good in a miniskirt,” Clive remembered wistfully.

Garner sighed. Something they weren’t going to have to worry about with Jessica King. She wasn’t the miniskirt kind. In fact she looked like she had taken a wrong turn on the way to finding her kindergarten class—not what he’d expected at all. But those rich kids could be real good at that—the wolf-in-sheep’s-clothing game.

Still, he’d expected, as a King princess, she would have been a whole lot flashier. Manicure, makeup, clothes, hair, jewelry. Jessica’s hair had been a pretty color, but short, flattened to her head in a very unflattering manner. The boxy, refrigeratorlike design of the suit had successfully disguised any lines beneath it, which was a good thing. Her nails had been neat and filed. The only jewelry had been that ring.

She had the attitude, though, in spades. Mucky, tacky and messy, he reminded himself.

“I hope she brings cookies to work,” Clive said.

“That girl hasn’t ever baked a cookie in her life,” Garner said.

“What would make you say that?” Clive asked innocently.

Garner stifled a snort. One thing he knew for sure: Rich girls did not bake cookies.

But Clive saved him from having to reply by shuffling off to his bay, where Mrs. Fannie Klippenhopper’s thirty-year-old Impala was up on the hoist.

Aunt Mattie, of course, had provided cookies. Cookies and comfort. She had been part den mother and part drill sergeant and the sad fact of the matter was she was going to be irreplaceable as the office manager of K & B Auto.

He was willing to bet Jake King’s daughter not only hadn’t ever baked a cookie, she hadn’t ever canned peaches, ridden a public bus or worried over a bill, either. Despite her rather surprising academic achievement, normal—like working the front end of a garage—would not be in her life experience. Normal to her was probably denting a very expensive car and walking away from it with a shrug and an oh well.

Unwillingly, the look on her face when he’d zipped up his coveralls in front of her came to mind.

If he didn’t know better he would have called it hunger.

She had poked a rather delectable tongue out between lips that he’d already been misguided enough to touch. Those lips had been plump and sensuous, and that had been before she licked them.

“Sheesh,” he said to himself.

From the size of that rock on her finger, she was very engaged.

Dumb was bad for an office manager, but complicated was way, way worse.

And complicated was his mind insisting on asking questions that were none of his business. Like why did a girl wearing a ring like that look so, well, not in love? None of that telltale glow and way too interested in a man who was not her fiancé zipping up his pants. Plus chocolate before nine in the morning? That woman was not happy.

Rich women were never happy.

His mother had been the first to teach him that lesson, but he’d insisted on repeating it several times, most recently with Kathy-Anne Rice-Chapman.

Besides, the plain fact of the matter was, even without the complication of Jessica being Jake King’s daughter, Garner did not consider himself good at reading the intricacies of the female of his species, with the possible exception of Aunt Mattie. Though he’d even misread his good aunt. He’d thought she was staying forever, pure and simple. Though his daddy had warned him, a long, long time ago there was no such thing as a woman who stayed forever, and Garner’s mother had been a case in point.

Jessica King had been here only moments, and Garner realized he was contemplating the most miserable moments of his life. It was not a good omen.

Garner Blake was good with cars. He read cars the way scholars read books. He could rebuild an old one until it purred like a kitten. He could ferret out the most elusive of mechanical problems. When parts didn’t exist he could manufacture them. There was a science of sorts to cars. As far as he could tell, women did not come with the same predictable set of rules as the mechanical workings underneath the hood.

He had spent two days getting out every old box of files and bills he could find to scare Jessica King right off his place. Now he had upped the ante by daring her to last more than two hours. Of course, hearing the mousetrap go off under her desk had made him up his bet.

“Rich girls do not like rodents,” Garner said cheerfully. He consulted his watch. One hour and fifty-one more minutes to go.

Garner sank down at his desk, took a sip of coffee and winced. As ungrateful as Clive would be for it, he felt responsible for Clive’s child, or at least for the livelihood of that child’s father. He had not missed the veiled threat in Jake King’s voice during that last phone call. But if she left on her own, gave up, tossed in the towel…

He sighed. He had his own lawyers researching documents now, but it didn’t look promising.

“You want what?” his lawyer had said. “Garner, those documents were likely signed two or three decades ago. I don’t think this firm handled it.”

So why was Jake King digging up decades-old dirt? Garner had known, of course, that Jake owned half the building. Years ago, as soon as he’d cleared up the wreckage of his father’s mismanagement, he’d offered to buy Jake out. The offer had been rejected without explanation. Now this. Did Jake really have a say-so in how Garner ran his business? Did Jake own more than half the building?

Thinking of the legal tangle that could cause made Garner’s head hurt.

What was that old devil, Jake King, up to?

And why on earth would he send his daughter here, straight into the camp of the enemy?

Maybe he doesn’t like her, Garner mused, but Jessica King did not have the look—or the attitude—of a child not liked. He suspected she had been adored.

With relief, he remembered he had to look at her damaged car. If she was only going to be here another hour and forty-nine minutes, there needed to be no hitches to her leaving. He abandoned the coffee happily and began to whistle the moment he got behind the wheel.

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