LITMIR.BIZ

       www.millsandboon.co.uk

      ELIZABETH BEVARLY

      was born and raised in Louisville, Kentucky, and earned her B.A. with honors in English from the University of Louisville in 1983. Although she never wanted to be anything but a novelist, her career side trips before making the leap to writing included stints working in movie theaters, restaurants, boutiques and a major department store. She also spent time as an editorial assistant for a medical journal, where she learned the correct spelling and meanings of a variety of words (such as microscopy and histological) that she will never, ever use again. When she’s not writing, Elizabeth enjoys old movies, old houses, good books, whimsical antiques, hot jazz and even hotter salsa (the music, not the sauce). She has claimed as residences Washington, D.C., northern Virginia, southern New Jersey and Puerto Rico, but she now resides with her husband and young son back home in Kentucky, where she fully intends to remain.

      For David. You are my prince.

      Contents

      Chapter One

      Chapter Two

      Chapter Three

      Chapter Four

      Chapter Five

      Chapter Six

      Chapter Seven

      Chapter Eight

      Chapter Nine

      Chapter Ten

      Chapter Eleven

      One

      It didn’t take a lot to make Shane Cordello happy. Just a flawless blue sky overhead, a balmy Southern California breeze ruffling his hair, the spicy aroma of kielbasa and onions on the grill, and the rhythmic, incessant bam-bam-bam-bam of a diligent jackhammer as it pulverized the pavement nearby.

      Yeah, life didn’t get any better than that.

      Which meant that today was an ideal day for Shane. After punching the time clock at the construction site where he worked as foreman, he headed to the lunch wagon parked just beyond the gate for one of those savory kielbasas. He skimmed off his battered hard hat as he went, running his fingers briskly through his sweat-dampened, shaggy brown hair.

      The front of his denim work shirt was damp, too, he noted as he loosened the obligatory necktie that his position as foreman dictated he wear—though not on his off-hours, and lunch hour was one of those, by God—as were the knees of his faded blue jeans, though that last was due not to perspiration, but to the fact that he’d had to kneel down in the mud to look for the gold Waterman pen his mother had given him for his twenty-third birthday earlier in the year. When he’d finally found it, he’d taken it back to the foreman’s trailer and tucked it into his desk where he intended to leave it. He wasn’t the kind of man who should be responsible for things like solid gold pens. He was much better suited to clicking a plastic—disposable—Bic.

      Yeah, disposable was the way to keep it, Shane thought. It didn’t pay to get too attached to material things in life, because they’d only get taken away from you, sooner or later, one way or another. He’d learned that, if not much else, during his sojourn on the planet.

      He squinted his blue eyes against the sun beating down on him as he made his way toward the lunch wagon. November didn’t bring a cold autumn to L.A. the way it did to other parts of the country, but the air was definitely a bit cooler today and felt a bit less sunbaked than it had during the summer months. It was the ocean more than the air that signified the change of seasons in Southern California. These days, Shane was wearing his wet suit all the time when he surfed, because the temperature of the water had plummeted since summer—and even then, it had been none too warm. Other than having to don his wet suit on the weekends now, though, he hadn’t seen any big changes come into his life recently. Nor was he anticipating any to come anytime soon.

      And that, of course, was just the way he liked it.

      Amy Collins, who ran the lunch wagon that had visited the construction site daily since work had begun a week earlier, smiled when she saw Shane coming, anticipating his desire—his lunch desire, anyway—by forking up a kielbasa loaded with onions before he even asked for one. As for his other desires…

      Well, it was no secret to anyone on the Wellman Towers site that Amy had been trying since day one to capture Shane’s interest. And, truth be told, he wasn’t completely immune to her charms. She was darkly pretty, round in all the right places, boisterously outspoken, even downright sassy at times, which was just the way he normally liked his women. But there was something about Amy, too, that told Shane she played for keeps when it came to men. And keeps was a place he never wanted to find himself, especially with a woman. Mainly because he knew too well that keeps didn’t exist—not in his little corner of the world, anyway. So he steered clear of Amy, knowing she’d meet a forever-after kind of guy someday.

      Just, you know, not today.

      “Hey, Amy,” he greeted her as he stopped in front of the window and dug into a denim pocket for a few wadded-up dollar bills.

      “Hel-lo, Shane,” she replied in a soft, singsongy kind of purr.

      He smiled in response, not necessarily because he liked her purr all that much—in fact, he found it kind of off-putting, truth be told—but because he always responded to women with a smile. Shane liked women. All women. A lot. And women seemed to like him, too. All women. A lot. So it was only natural that he greeted one with a smile whenever he met one. Even if she did purr.

      “How’s it going?” he asked. The question was, at best, mechanical, at worst, hypothetical. Shane didn’t really expect or require an answer.

      But Amy replied anyway. “I could be better, actually,” she said, smiling back. Her cheek dimpled with the action, a gesture he was somehow certain she’d spent years perfecting. “It’s been kind of lonely this week. But there’s a new Schwarzenegger movie opening up this weekend,” she added, having heard Shane remark that he was a big fan of both the actor and action films. “Want to go with me on Friday?”

      “I can’t this Friday, Amy. Thanks, anyway.”

      “Saturday, then?” she asked audaciously without missing a beat.

      He shook his head. “I can’t this weekend at all. Stuff going on.”

      She expelled a breath that bordered on impatient, and her smile fell some. “Stuff going on,” she echoed dubiously. “Right. You know, Shane, you could give a girl a complex, if you’re not careful.”

      “Oh, I don’t want to do that,” he said honestly. “I really am going to be busy this weekend, Amy. That’s all.” There

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