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Chasing Dreams
Cara Colter
Dubbed the "brainy" one, Jessica King felt safest in an ivory tower. So working in a garage for brooding mechanic Garner Blake was well outside her comfort zone. But she would make the best of it because her father had requested it.Yet a daughter's "duty" was not what Jessica felt when Garner challenged her opinions and looked at her that way. Both of which he did much too often! No, she felt alive. And petrified. Because she was beginning to realize she'd never known herself–or what she really wanted….
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 (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
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
* (#litres_trial_promo)Husband by Inheritance #1532
* (#litres_trial_promo)The Heiress Takes a Husband #1538
* (#litres_trial_promo)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
† (#litres_trial_promo)That Old Feeling #1814
† (#litres_trial_promo)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.”
A Mechanic’s Guide to Love and Restoring Classic Cars:
Contents
Prologue (#u1b717ec2-ae1e-57ae-92d3-1b7025ff3f36)
Chapter One (#u28b7f5a4-f7a6-5043-97e0-51b3628c04b3)
Chapter Two (#ud59b7930-aaf6-56c9-9b98-af5a4e4e6368)
Chapter Three (#litres_trial_promo)
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)
Epilogue (#litres_trial_promo)
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.
