LITMIR.BIZ

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her. Did she flavor his meals with some magical ingredient that made it easy for her to charm him?

      He had thought his beach house with its far-flung wings and modern lines too remote and boring to ever visit.

      He never wanted to leave it now.

      The phone was out. He found he liked feeling cut off from the world, his business, and from civilization. From the rigid rules that governed him, from the rules that made Miss Rose a highly unsuitable wife for a Lord.

      The house seemed a natural thing atop the fragile dunes. It seemed to blend with the high wavy golden grasses that grew near it as well as with the salt marshes and their pungent, dank-smelling ponds behind the dunes. Each day since the storm had been warmer and more summery than the last. Now the island with its soft humid breezes and white beaches seemed to be weaving a lazy spell on both of them. Flowers bloomed everywhere. She gathered them in baskets and brought them inside.

      Wrapped in a blanket, Cutter got out of bed and went to his chaise lounge near the fireplace and the window. He saw Miss Rose lying outside in the sun on his vast deck. Protected from the wind by a wall of sheer glass panels, she wore a skimpy white bikini while she pretended to read one of her grisly spy thrillers.

      She had the most abominable literary tastes. She went for genre paperbacks with lurid covers that featured halfnaked people or lethal weapons, lightweight novels that always had happy endings. “Page turners,” she’d called them when he’d criticized. Page turners, hell—He knew that she was only pretending to read. He’d been watching her for an hour—indeed, he couldn’t take his eyes off her any time she was near. She hadn’t turned a single page.

      He eyed the clock on the wall impatiently.

      Two-thirty. Soon she would get up as she had every other afternoon.

      Odd, how eager he was for her sunbath to end. For her to come back inside.

      To him.

      This avid craving was ridiculous.

      They had absolutely nothing in common.

      She read trash.

      He preferred business journals, news magazines, newspapers and the occasional, really good literary novel.

      “Newspapers and literary novels are depressing,” she had said.

      “One should stay informed.”

      “One should have fun, too.”

      “Was that why you dropped out of college?”

      “No. I told you. Mother got sick, and I had to help her. I wanted a degree more than anything.”

      He hadn’t had the heart to tell her that his finance degrees were from the best eastern schools.

      She was a struggling caterer. He hadn’t told her he was a multimillionaire. Nor had he told her his family had been wealthy and socially prominent for generations.

      And, of course, he hadn’t told her he was Cutter Lord, her fiancé’s spoiled half brother.

      Nor had she confessed she was a small-town bastard from Westville, Texas. That her mother had been called Alligator Girl and Witch Woman, that she, Cheyenne, had hung out in the salt marshes tending to her mother’s gators and strange wild things until she was eighteen. Then there’d been some sort of trouble, and she’d left home forever.

      No, his private detectives had told him all that.

      She had told him that she loved flowers and all wild things.

      He eyed the clock again.

      Sometimes when she finished her sunbath, she walked on the beach.

      Cutter, who had lain there willing her to come inside for more than an hour, smiled triumphantly when she got up and peered anxiously through the window. He beckoned her inside.

      She opened the door, her body flushed from the sun, her smile bright and teasing, her red hair and the dune flowers in it mussed. At the sight of her, a wild rhythm started in his chest.

      She met his gaze and looked away. “You have to stop doing that.”

      “What?”

      Breathlessly, she said, “Looking at me that way.”

      “I thought you liked me to.” He got up and moved toward her, trailing his blanket across the bleached pine floor.

      “I—I...”

      “What’s the matter?”

      Frightened, she began backing. “There’s something I have to tell you.”

      “So—tell.”

      “I’m practically engaged to another man.”

      “Do you love him?”

      The beach morning glories quivered in her hair. The tiny scar beneath her left eye, which was the only blemish on her near-perfect face, whitened. “Of—I’m not sure.”

      “So—how do you feel about me?”

      Her frantic eyes burned into him the same way her spicy food did.

      “I have to know,” Cutter insisted.

      “His brother doesn’t want us to marry. He doesn’t think I’m good enough. I—I came here to be alone—To think about Martin and our future together.” Her eyes glistened with unspoken pain as she studied Cutter. “Not for—”

      “Not for this.” With one hand Cutter grasped her shoulder. With his other, he caught her red hair and flower petals. His mouth slanted across hers.

      Her lips parted hesitantly; he felt her soft, indrawn breath. Next she shocked him by the full heat of her response to his kiss as her tongue slid against his. Consumed by hunger, his arms tightened around her slim waist as she surrendered passionately.

      “Cheyenne—”

      “No!” She stiffened and drew back. “Please—” She threw the door open and ran.

      “Damn,” he muttered, watching her, not following even though he sensed that if he pressed her now, he could win. He was tempted to go after her, to pull her into the sand and seduce her. Then he could tell Martin and advise him that Lords didn’t marry easy women like her.

      But three days with her had robbed Cutter of the appetite to destroy her.

      She had been so nice to him.

      She had saved his life.

      Which meant he owed her. Yes. But how much?

      Surely not Martin’s future and fortune.

      There was a new wrinkle. Cutter now wanted her himself.

      Tom, Cutter hesitated—and that wasn’t like him.

      Why the hell didn’t he just seduce her?

      It was only later that he wondered if he had not sensed the impending danger she would be to his coldly ordered life. To his soul.

      But—until he met Cheyenne Rose, Cutter had not known he had a soul.

      Until Cheyenne he had glided through life. First as the precocious, brilliant son and dutiful brother. Then as the ruthless businessman who believed that life was about money, not love. He had married; divorced. But ultimately, always—until Cheyenne—he’d been alone, an outcast. Envied and never loved. He had sought admiration. Not love. His loneliness hadn’t mattered—until her.

      Arrogant to the core, Cutter was accustomed to the glitter of exotic capitals and the easy pleasures of beautiful women. Long ago, when he had become strong enough to crush his opposition, he had not imagined that anyone, least of all a girl, could ever crush him.

      Cutter had lived in many houses and in many foreign lands. He had made many fortunes and had had many women. But nowhere and to no one had he ever belonged, least of all to himself. He spoke many languages,

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