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Married To A Stranger
Allison Leigh
Back in sleepy Weaver, Wyoming, for his father's wedding, rich and handsome Tristan Clay found himself unaccountably attracted to bespectacled Hope Leoni—a homespun, hometown schoolmarm! With every fiber of his astonished being, he craved her innocent kiss. Just a kiss—nothing more.Tristan knew better to flirt further with such a sweet, virginal temptation… especially in this town. Yet in one short week his sensual attention compromised Hope's hard-won reputation, jeopardizing her job. And suddenly—though wedding bells gave him the willies—the only way to make things right…was to make Hope his wife!
“Oh, God. What have we done?” Hope gasped.
Tristan would have been amused at the panic rounding her violet eyes if he hadn’t been wondering the same thing himself.
He rarely acted impulsively. He trusted his instincts, which seldom failed him. But this time his instincts had fully deserted him.
All because of this virginal, violet-eyed temptress.
“What have we done?” he repeated.
The irony burned. A week ago he’d started out thinking he’d like to taste Hope Leoni’s soft-looking lips. That was all.
He hadn’t gotten a kiss. He hadn’t “gotten” anything that everybody in town seemed to think he’d been “getting.”
No, he hadn’t gotten a kiss.…
He’d gotten a wife!
Dear Reader,
During the warm days of July, what better way to kick back and enjoy the best of summer reading than with six stellar stories from Special Edition as we continue to celebrate Silhouette’s 20th Anniversary all year long!
With The Pint-Sized Secret, Sherryl Woods continues to delight her readers with another winning installment of her popular miniseries AND BABY MAKES THREE: THE DELACOURTS OF TEXAS. Reader favorite Lindsay McKenna starts her new miniseries, MORGAN’S MERCENARIES: MAVERICK HEARTS, with Man of Passion, her fiftieth book. A stolen identity leads to true love in Patricia Thayer’s compelling Whose Baby Is This? And a marriage of convenience proves to be anything but in rising star Allison Leigh’s Married to a Stranger in her MEN OF THE DOUBLE-C RANCH miniseries. Rounding off the month is celebrated author Pat Warren’s Doctor and the Debutante, where the healthy dose of romance is just what the physician ordered, while for the heroine in Beth Henderson’s Maternal Instincts, a baby-sitting assignment turns into a practice run for motherhood—and marriage.
Hope you enjoy this book and the other unforgettable stories Special Edition is happy to bring you this month!
All the best,
Karen Taylor Richman,
Senior Editor
Married to a Stranger
Allison Leigh
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
For my daughters.
Live your dreams.
Books by Allison Leigh
Silhouette Special Edition
* (#litres_trial_promo)Stay… #1170
* (#litres_trial_promo)The Rancher and the Redhead #1212
* (#litres_trial_promo)A Wedding for Maggie #1241
* (#litres_trial_promo)A Child for Christmas #1290
Millionaire’s Instant Baby #1312
* (#litres_trial_promo)Married to a Stranger #1336
ALLISON LEIGH
started early by writing a Halloween play that her grade-school class performed for her school. Since then, though her tastes have changed, her love for reading has not. And her writing appetite simply grows more voracious by the day.
Born in Southern California, she has lived in eight different cities in four different states. She has been, at one time or another, a cosmetologist, a computer programmer and an administrative assistant.
Allison and her husband currently make their home in Arizona, where their time is thoroughly filled with two very active daughters, full-time jobs, pets, church, family and friends. In order to give herself the precious writing time she craves, she burns a lot of midnight oil.
A great believer in the power of love—her parents still hold hands—she cannot imagine anything more exciting to write about than the miracle of two hearts coming together.
Contents
Prologue (#u92bfe6d9-d493-54e3-826c-48b4ea5b3f64)
Chapter One (#u2b9b6b1e-bbea-59f9-97a4-ec19b4f957e3)
Chapter Two (#u20cd277e-8833-5d1b-9985-6ce924a0ef17)
Chapter Three (#ub03537c7-449b-5506-b0c5-ffbd1fc0bd10)
Chapter Four (#u038ad8bc-7fc6-5ebf-8d27-c4098cb342da)
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)
Chapter Fourteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fifteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Epilogue (#litres_trial_promo)
Prologue
All he’d wanted was a kiss. A simple kiss.
So how on God’s green earth had his life gotten so out of control in just one week over something so simple?
Tris rolled his head against the cushioned seat and looked across the aisle of the custom-fitted jet. Hope was still asleep. She certainly had no head for alcohol.
His jaw was so tight it ached. He had earned himself a doozy of a headache, too. But he knew it wasn’t from champagne, or whiskey or anything even remotely alcoholic. He’d barely choked down the few toasts they’d had at the reception—half a glass of champagne wasn’t anywhere near enough to set this pain in his head to throbbing.
No, his headache had begun a little over a week ago, he knew. Brought on strictly by himself.
He shoved his fingers through his hair and closed his eyes. But the sight of the woman stretched out on the long seat across from him was firmly burned into his brain.
Hope’s toffee-colored hair had fallen loose at some point on the drive to the airport. When he’d carried her onto the private jet, the long, thick waves had clung to his shirt, flowed over his arm and streamed behind them in the night breeze. Now, they lay tangled and gleaming over her shoulders, off the couch, nearly touching the carpeted floor.
He’d slipped off her narrow-heeled shoes and set them on the floor beside her. Her dress—so obviously an antique that he knew women who’d have given their eyeteeth for the ankle-length garment—had worked its way up her shapely calves. With one knee drawn upward, the fabric pulled in a taut stretch of beige-tinted lace over the back of her thighs and her derriere.
She was a total innocent, and lying there, so soundly asleep, she was temptation personified.
Temptation. That’s what had gotten them into this mess in the first place. Tris should have known better than to flirt with temptation. God knows she didn’t have enough experience to fight the blistering sparks between them.
But he was experienced. And older. And he should have known better. His heart might not be programmed for love and happily-ever-after, but he was on a first-name basis with the desires of the flesh.
Tris could feel the plane banking. There was no point in looking out the little oval windows. It was pitch-dark out there. Dark above, dark below, dark all around.
Even this luxurious main cabin of the plane was dark, except for one small lamp burning near him. It cast enough glow to highlight the lace dress and glossy hair of the woman across from him.
He wasn’t sure how long he sat there, legs sprawled out before him, his chin resting on his steepled fingers. It could have been one hour or three. But finally, Hope sighed deeply and shifted. Her hand tumbled off the cushion and grazed the carpet. The light glinted on the platinum rings—one plain and one studded with a trio of excruciatingly perfect diamonds—circling her ring finger.
The rings he had put there.
She turned her head and pushed her thick hair out of her eyes. She blinked drowsily and he figured her vision was probably blurry, because her eyeglasses were sitting on the round side table beside his seat.
Comprehension slowly dawned in her eyes. He waited, knowing just when that memory clicked into place, because she breathed in sharply and yanked her feet off the cushion to sit up.
“Where are we?” Hope pressed a trembling hand to her head.
“More than halfway to Paris.”
Her shoulders seemed to sag. “I drank too much,” she murmured. “I’ve never—Oh, God. What have we done?”
Tris would have been amused at the panic rounding her violet eyes if he hadn’t been wondering the same thing. He rarely acted impulsively. And even his actions over the last few days had been fairly deliberate. He trusted his instincts, listened to his gut because it rarely failed him.
But now, sitting here in this private jet equipped with every comfort known to man, from a whirlpool tub and a down-covered bed, to a fully equipped kitchen, to an array of computerized equipment that could run a small country if need be, his instincts had fully deserted him.
All because of this violet-eyed temptress.
“What have we done?” he repeated. He’d taken the easiest path of solving her problem. “We’ve stopped the gossip about us, effectively removing any reason for you to lose your teaching job.”
That’s all they’d done.
The irony burned. He’d started out thinking he’d like to taste her soft-looking lips. That was all.
He still hadn’t kissed her. Not really. That quick, off-centered glancing of lips earlier that day didn’t count.
He hadn’t gotten a kiss. He hadn’t “gotten” anything that everybody in town and beyond seemed to think he’d been “getting.” It was almost laughable.
Tris picked up her eyeglasses and leaned forward, handing them to her. But in the end, nothing about this situation was laughable.
Particularly the fact that the young woman slipping the gold-rimmed glasses on her nose had—less than twelve hours ago, stood where he’d long ago vowed never to stand—in front of a minister, promising to “love, honor and cherish.”
He hadn’t gotten a kiss.
He’d gotten a wife.
Chapter One
Eight days earlier.
“I think that’s plenty, darlin’. If you don’t mind.” Hope Leoni blinked, dragged her eyes from the deep blue gaze of the man sitting at the counter across from her. And realized she was pouring coffee all across the counter.
Well, not precisely across the counter. But it was overflowing the thick white coffee cup, the utilitarian saucer beneath it, quickly pooling around the base. Worse, it flowed into a rich brown river that ran straight to the edge of the counter and into the smoky gray sweater the man wore, creating a large spot where he’d been leaning against the counter edge. Now he sat back with a muffled comment.
Her cheeks burned and she hastily set down the glass coffee carafe and grabbed a cloth from behind the counter, mopping up her mess. “I’m so sorry.” She mopped, sopped, wiped and tried not to stare when, with a spare movement, he yanked the sweater over his head and tossed it onto the stool beside him. She dragged her attention from the plain white T-shirt that remained, hugging his broad shoulders, only to realize she was equally distracted by the thick gold hair that tumbled over his forehead. “I don’t know what I was thinking—”
He, the man…the blond god with a face that could make angels weep…put one hand over hers, stopping her motions. “No sweat, darlin’.”
She didn’t know which made her blood flow faster until it zipped along her veins with a fevered frenzy—the touch of his hand atop hers, or the casual endearment murmured in his low voice. The schoolgirl fantasies in which he’d been the star seemed as recent as yesterday. “I, uh, I’m not usually so clumsy. I can’t believe I—”
“Hey.” His long, long fingers encircled hers. Slid around her hand, beneath it; square, warm palm meeting hers. Warm. Dry. Hard.
Every sound faded—the dog that had been barking half the morning from where it was tied up outside the sheriff’s office a few doors down, the tractor mower that somebody was running over at the high school, the music from the radio on the shelf in the corner.
All of that faded. She could hear her pulse, thundering in her ears. Could hear her breath, slowly easing past her lips. She could hear the soft chink of his gold wristwatch as it bumped the counter beneath their hands.
“Relax,” he said in that voice that hypnotized. “Nobody’s going to fire you over a little spilled coffee. Certainly not Ruby, who’s got a heart bigger than Wyoming.”
At the mention of Ruby, owner of Ruby’s Cafе and, more importantly, Hope’s grandmother, some of Hope’s scattered senses returned. She tugged her hand, relieved and disappointed all at once when their hands separated. She picked up the damp cloth, rubbing her palm against the wet, rough, terry cloth. “I’m well aware of Gram’s generosity.”
“Gram?”
