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When Love Walks In
Suzanne Carey
THE SECRET FATHER…Though his merest glance still filled her with desire, Cate was no longer a naive teenager blinded by love–this time she had to resist her intense attraction to Daniel Finn. Because now this successful businessman had the power to tear apart the town that once scorned him–and the girl he'd married, then left behind.For Danny didn't just abandon Cate seventeen years ago–he'd also unknowingly left his unborn child! So no matter how right Danny felt in her arms and her heart, revealing the truth about her son's paternity could ruin everything…
His kiss was as deep as the earth
And so hungry! Its insatiability poured comfort into her empty places, even as it drove her to a peak of wanting him. Mother, daughter-in-law, teacher, neighbor, she’d forced herself to focus on self-sacrifice, ignoring her innermost yearnings. Yet, incredibly, the rule-breaking teenager she’d been, the sensuous young woman who’d dared to accept his love despite her parents’ wishes, had lived on inside her, waiting to re-emerge.
I’m going to drown in him, Cate thought. Lose sight of what’s best for all the people I love. With a little shiver of apprehension, she realized Danny still fit into that category.…
Dear Reader,
Welcome back to Special Edition, where a month of spellbinding reading awaits you with a wonderful lineup of sophisticated, compelling August romances!
In bestselling author Jodi O’Donnell’s memorable THAT’S MY BABY! story, When Baby Was Born, a pregnant woman with amnesia meets a cowboy she’ll never forget! Beloved author Ginna Gray sweeps us away with another installment of her miniseries, A FAMILY BOND. In her emotional book In Search of Dreams, a woman with a scandalous past tries to say no to the man who vows to be in her future. Do you think a reunion that takes seventeen years to happen is worth waiting for? We’re sure you’ll say yes when you read When Love Walks In, Suzanne Carey’s poignant story about a long-ago teenage passion that is rekindled—then a secret is exposed. When the hero of Carole Halston’s Because of the Twins… needs help caring for his instant brood, the last thing he expects is a woman who turns his thoughts to matrimonial matters, too! Also this month is Jean Brashear’s Texas Royalty, in which a tough, once-burned P.I. seeks revenge on the society girl who had betrayed him—until she manages to rekindle his desires again! And finally, Patricia McLinn kicks off her compelling new miniseries, A PLACE CALLED HOME, with Lost-And-Found Groom, about a treacherous hurricane that brings two people together for one passionate live-or-die night—then that remembered passion threatens to storm their emotional fortresses once and for all.…
All the best,
Karen Taylor Richman
Senior Editor
When Love Walks In
Suzanne Carey
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
Books by Suzanne Carey
Silhouette Special Edition
When Love Walks In #1341
Silhouette Romance
A Most Convenient Marriage #633
Run, Isabella #682
Virgin Territory #736
The Baby Contract #777
Home for Thanksgiving #825
Navajo Wedding #855
Baby Swap #880
Dad Galahad #928
Marry Me Again #1001
The Male Animal #1025
The Daddy Project #1072
Father by Marriage #1120
The Bride Price #1247
Sweet Bride of Revenge #1300
Silhouette Books
Silhouette Summer Sizzlers 1993
“Steam Bath”
World’s Most Eligible Bachelors
The Greek Tycoon
Silhouette Desire
Kiss and Tell #4
Passion’s Portrait #69
Mountain Memory #92
Leave Me Never #126
Counterparts #176
Angel in His Arms #206
Confess to Apollo #268
Love Medicine #310
Any Pirate in a Storm #368
Silhouette Intimate Moments
Never Say Goodbye #330
Strangers When We Meet #392
True to the Fire #435
Eleanora’s Ghost #518
Whose Baby? #715
SUZANNE CAREY
A Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Lake Forest College, Lake Forest, Illinois, and a former reporter who covered local politics and criminal courts as well as undertaking investigative and feature assignments, Suzanne Carey has been writing novels for Silhouette Books since the early 1980s. Though she was born in Illinois, she has been a resident of Florida for many years. She and the man in her life, a clinical psychologist who is now a university professor, reside in Sarasota, on Florida’s Gulf Coast.
Contents
Prologue (#u750cb9cc-b26d-54f7-b7c9-17a53afe49f7)
Chapter One (#uaeecf1e2-24bf-5ed1-bfe2-d7c07b2df4b2)
Chapter Two (#u9c8a7c56-c2a5-5456-b6c5-183569a65628)
Chapter Three (#u23f05281-3d67-5a68-ada5-51fc18ebea7d)
Chapter Four (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Five (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Six (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Seven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eight (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Nine (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Ten (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eleven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twelve (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Prologue
August, Seventeen Years Ago
It was the kind of cricket-dense night when the moon is full and the woods are replete with leafy undergrowth, when Danny Finn parked his beat-up Ford in some tall weeds near Ohio’s Brush Creek and came around to help seventeen-year-old Cate Mc-Donough from the passenger seat.
Her face upturned to his in the moonlight, she came into his embrace. After much longing and many discussions about the ethics of their situation, she’d agreed to let him make love to her. He was on fire with anticipation now as he caressed her back and shoulders, the sweetly rounded shape of her buttocks through the thin, flower-sprigged cotton fabric of her dress.
A former star on Beckwith High School’s varsity basketball team who’d “dated” a number of other girls before Cate, Danny hadn’t understood the true nature of desire until his had focused on her. As he claimed her now, mutely acknowledging his need and the deep love he felt, she radiated a corresponding heat, the firm conviction that whatever they’d do together would be right and beautiful.
Since becoming interested in boys in the seventh grade, she’d been crazy wild in love with him. Yet for three and a half years, he hadn’t so much as glanced in her direction. It had made her ache to watch him drape a possessive arm around some undeserving girl’s shoulders, oblivious to the way that same girl mocked his eccentric grandmother and combat-traumatized uncle behind his back and flirted with other boys when he wasn’t available.
Then, one gray December afternoon, he’d literally bumped into Cate, almost knocking her off her feet on the salt-pocked but still-slippery sidewalk outside her father’s hardware store. The temperature had been twenty-three degrees and plummeting, her cheeks apple-red with cold, her naturally curly brown hair thickly encrusted with snowflakes.
When he’d offered to buy her a hot chocolate at Rudy’s, she’d accepted. From that moment on, they’d been inseparable, despite her parents’ strong disapproval of him. “The Finns are trash,” her father had raged when he’d found out that they were dating. Danny had been in trouble with the law. His family was eccentric. He wasn’t worthy of her.
Though she couldn’t deny Danny had been fined for underage drinking on one occasion and received several speeding tickets during his junior year, Cate had argued that the infringements were minor ones. He’d settled down since then. As a senior, he’d earned good grades, worked hard at a variety of after-school jobs and stayed out of trouble.
Nothing she’d said had changed Jack McDonough’s opinion of him. When her parents had ordered her not to see him again, she’d pretended to go along with their wishes while stubbornly following her heart.
Her best friend, Brenda Hale, who “lacked supervision” according to Cate’s mother, had covered for Cate whenever she and Danny could arrange to be together. Remaining a good girl in the sense that she was still a virgin, Cate had flirted on numerous occasions with going all the way. Each time, she’d pulled back from the brink, denying herself and Danny the intimacy they craved.
Now he was a man—nineteen going on twenty, lean and dark-haired, with the kind of smile that could melt all but the hardest of hearts, and eyes the deep-blue color of bachelor buttons. Not even Cate’s father could call him a slacker. Since graduating, he’d worked full-time, pumping gas and repairing cars at Miller’s Garage. In his off hours, he continued to make himself available for the kind of manual labor that was usually reserved for young teenagers, mowing lawns and shoveling snow, chopping and hauling firewood.
Though they’d never discussed the reason for his industry in so many words, Cate knew Danny was trying to amass enough money to bankroll their independence. Secure in his love, she’d become a woman. Or almost. She would graduate from high school seven months hence and turn eighteen a week later. Employed part-time in the hardware store by her father since she was in the eighth grade, she’d managed to save a modest nest egg of her own, in the process acquiring retail skills that would come in handy when she worked her way through college.
For most of her life, it seemed, she’d wanted to be an English teacher. Unable to count on her parents’ financial help if she married Danny, and unwilling to let him pay the freight for both of them while she continued her education, she was determined to come up with her own tuition money and contribute to their living expenses.
The previous week he’d formally asked her to be his wife. And she’d said yes. They’d agreed to leave Beckwith, the small town surrounded by farms where they’d both grown up, on her eighteenth birthday—head for Cincinnati or some other big city where she could attend college and he could find better paying employment. With the commitment, there didn’t seem to be any reason to postpone expressing their love.
At Cate’s suggestion, their first lovemaking would take place on Serpent Mound, a grassy, undulating, ceremonial earthwork that had been built on the crest of a bluff overlooking Brush Creek by a little-known Indian tribe nearly a thousand years earlier. Familiar with it since childhood, thanks to a series of school field trips and lectures about the indigenous residents of Adams County, she’d always considered the scenic promontory, crowned by the effigy of a partially uncoiled snake about to swallow a frog’s egg, to be a holy place.
Serene, enigmatic, a point of contact with the distant past, the mound wasn’t a burial site; archaeologists had long since determined otherwise. Aware the serpent’s head was aligned with the setting sun on the evening of the summer solstice, they’d speculated it had been built as a kind of earthwork calendar to keep track of the planting cycle. Or as a site for religious ceremonies.
Releasing her, he helped her up a steep, thickly wooded slope that offered a secluded, if somewhat more difficult to negotiate, approach to their destination. They caught sight of the park’s metal observation tower first. A moment later the mound itself came into view. Moonlight washed its verdant twists and coils like milk. The aroma of freshly mowed grass assailed their nostrils.
Lightly Danny rested his cheek against Cate’s hair. “Any special spot you’d prefer?’ he asked.
“Up by the serpent’s head,” she answered without hesitation, having pictured making love to him there a thousand times. “The depression in the middle of the egg can shelter us.”
It was his favorite spot, too—the most spiritually charged and welcoming, in his opinion. Thanks to the curve of the serpent’s body, it was also one of the most difficult to see from the gate.
“Suits me, darlin’,” he whispered.
If somebody caught them, it would be all over between them until her eighteenth birthday. Her parents would keep them apart if they had to follow her around with a shotgun. Or send her off to a religious boarding school. They’d probably try to have Danny arrested for contributing to the delinquency of a minor.
Shivers of excitement and anticipation prickled Cate’s skin as they reached the serpent’s jaw and the frog’s egg, a much smaller, circular mound with a depression at its center, almost like a hole in a doughnut. Inside it, two sapling trees had sprung up. Despite them, there would be more than enough room for them to lie down and get comfortable together. The lights of scattered farmhouses and outbuildings in the valley below glittered like diamonds against a swath of velvet as Danny led her into its embrace.
They lay down together on the sweet-smelling grass. Though she might have been deluding herself, she thought she could feel the earth turning as she came into his arms. A deep sense of connectedness to all of creation swelled in her imagination.
For a moment the only sounds that disturbed the night’s insect chorus and the rustling of leaves overhead were the rasp of Danny’s zipper and their hushed breathing as he helped her take off her panties. I wish we could take off all our clothes instead of remaining partly dressed, Cate thought. That we could share a bed and covers. Fall asleep afterward and wake with the morning light. I wish we didn’t have to worry about somebody catching us.
His touch gentle in its suggestiveness, Danny unbuttoned the bodice of her dress and reached inside it to stroke her nipples with his calloused fingertips. As they rose to meet his caress, stabs of arousal sped to her deepest places.
They’d agreed they couldn’t afford to linger. “Come into me, Danny,” she begged, her words blunted against the warmth of his neck as she pressed against him. “I want to feel you there…”
He didn’t need a second invitation. Cradling him with her knees as he assumed protection, she marveled at how beautifully made he was.
With a flash of pain that was quickly over, Cate’s virginity was lost. Joined to Danny and in a way she couldn’t have put into words, to all the lovers who’d gone before them in the history of the world, she abandoned rational thought. Like a leaf caught up in a stream that was approaching full flood, she immersed herself in the moment as they made fumbling, imperfect, ultimately satisfying love.
