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Love Me True
Ann Major
MEN of the YEAR MAN of the MONTH "You had things your way for six miserable years. Now it's my turn." - Joey Fasano, irresistible renegade screen idol He had it all - wealth, fame, success. But the emptiness aching inside him wouldn't subside. Watching TV coverage of Heather Wade's upcoming wedding, Joey marveled at how she'd changed from the wild, free spirit he'd loved to the cool, proper socialite her powerful family had made her.But now he had to see her again, and even her family couldn't stop him. Because if that boy whose hand she was holding wasn't the image of Joey at age five, he'd eat his Oscar! Some men are made for lovin' - and you'll love our 125th MAN OF THE MONTH!
“Does That Blush Go All Over, Honey?” (#u546fc033-1a28-57fe-afa6-2328f4adad32)Letter to Reader (#u64d84b83-123a-52f7-9885-10db5545a0f2)Title Page (#ud908c0f0-62c7-5f56-ba0a-e8fba9a3fc96)Dedication (#u26b74013-f2ad-5633-b83c-8c91cb12c802)About the Author (#ucda4f61c-8295-5dbe-a14e-889da77debcb)Letter to Reader (#uc8e4f30c-eb97-5825-b183-830d445e2f34)Prologue (#ue971f9c4-dddb-5889-8e9a-4553864a25fb)Chapter One (#u116352e5-399f-5cff-9215-062b5cfd1e13)Chapter Two (#ud3f6dcf0-9c36-52d9-afce-39c8c8d749ce)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)Chapter Eleven (#litres_trial_promo)Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
“Does That Blush Go All Over, Honey?”
Joey’s grin was too conceited for words. “Let me see.”
He yanked at Heather’s blanket, but gently, just to tease her. She held on ferociously.
“You’re in a different mood this morning, my pet,” he said.
“I’m not...your pet...”
“Last night you were most...affectionate. You couldn’t get enough of me. You were...we were...well, pretty incredible.”
Her gut twisted in fresh shame. “I don’t believe you.”
“Fine. Suit yourself.” He chuckled, but her words had wiped that tender eagerness from his gaze. “Your head hurts, I’ll bet. You probably don’t remember much.... Lucky for you, I remember everything. So, if you get curious, I could describe our night together in the most vivid detail. In fact, I’d love to do so.”
She clamped her hands over her ears. “I’m living in a nightmare.... How could you sink so low as to seduce me?”
“You have it all backwards. You seduced me. For your information, I put up one hell of a fight defending my...er...virtue.”
Dear Reader,
This May we invite you to delve into six delicious new titles from Silhouette Desire!
We begin with the brand-new title you’ve been eagerly awaiting from the incomparable Ann Major. Love Me True, our May MAN OF THE MONTH, is a riveting reunion romance offering the high drama and glamour that are Ann’s hallmarks.
The enjoyment continues in FORTUNE’S CHILDREN: THE BRIDES with The Groom’s Revenge by Susan Crosby A young working woman is swept off her feet by a wealthy CEO who’s married her with more than love on his mind—he wants revenge on the father who never claimed her, Stuart Fortune A “must read” for all you fans of Daphne Du Maurier’s Rebecca!
Barbara McMahon’s moving story The Cowboy and the Virgin portrays the awakening—both sensual and emotional—of an innocent young woman who falls for a ranching Romeo But can she turn the tables and corral him? Beverly Barton’s emotional miniseries 3 BABIES FOR 3 BROTHERS concludes with Having His Baby. Experience the birth of a father as well as a child when a rugged rancher is transformed by the discovery of his secret baby—and the influence of her pretty mom. Then, in her exotic SONS OF THE DESERT title, The Solitary Sherkh, Alexandra Sellers depicts a hard-hearted sheikh who finds happiness with his daughters’ aristocratic tutor. And The Billionaire’s Secret Baby by Carol Devine is a compelling marriage-of-convenience story
Now more than ever, Silhouette Desire offers you the most passionate, powerful and provocative of sensual romances. Make yourself merry this May with all six Desire novels—and buy another set for your mom or a close friend for Mother’s Day!
Enjoy!
Joan Marlow Golan
Senior Editor, Silhouette Desire
Please address questions and book requests to:
Silhouette Reader Service
U.S. 3010 Walden Ave., PO. Box 1325, Buffalo, NY 14269
Canadian: PO Box 609, Fort Erie, Ont. L2A 5X3
Love Me True
Ann Major
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
To my late father, Millard Holland Major,
who taught me to love the written word
About the Author
ANN MAJOR loves writing romance novels as much as she loves reading them. She is a proud mother of three children, who are now in high school and college. She lists hiking in the Colorado mountains with her husband, playing tennis, sailing, enjoying her cats and playing the piano among her favorite activities.
Dear Reader,
I love writing for the MAN OF THE MONTH promotional miniseries in Silhouette Desire, and I’m especially honored that my hero Joey Fasano is Desire’s 125th MAN OF THE MONTH!
If I could have three wishes, one of them would be to hop into my man’s brain, so I could figure out once and for all what makes him do and say all those illogical things that drive me crazy. Writing from the male point of view is the next best thing.
I think I get a little carried away with this sometimes. I tend to invent heroes who are larger-than-life, difficult and pushy. My guys love deeply and completely, especially when they don’t want to. They have trouble with the “no” word. They want what they want, and they go after it. In short, they are every bit as maddeningly adorable as the real man in my life.
No-fantasy haunts me more than the man from the past showing up on the heroine’s doorstep and turning her life topsy-turvy.
My hero in this latest story, Joey Fasano, bad boy turned movie star, has become a force unto himself. He’s never forgotten Heather, his first love, and once he sees her again, he realizes how empty his life and soul are without her. He can’t go on, if he doesn’t win her. Such a love is worth fighting for.
I hope you enjoy Joey and Heather’s story.
Best,
Prologue
Maybe everybody was right after all. Maybe Joey Fasano was too wild and too passionate and too damned no-account for his own good.
Whatever.
Joey was too scared about Heather to care one way or the other.
The weather was as blustery and uncertain as his foul mood. It was raining intermittently. Every so often, the moon would break out from its wispy cover and put a stop to the nonsense.
Joey was damn sure driving like a demon from hell. His knuckles shone like bright white bones as he whipped the steering wheel to the right and swerved his daddy’s battered Chevy onto the wet hospital drive.
Massive and ink-black, the rectangular building looked as forbidding as a prison as it loomed in stark relief above a black fringe of live-oak trees and was backlit by that violent, moon-dark, Texas sky.
Heather was in there somewhere...maybe dying.
His gut cramped in sick, demoralizing fear. Her powerful family would stop at nothing to keep him from seeing her.
Let them try.
He slammed on the brakes, got out of the car he’d taken without permission and ran, heedless of the soft rain that had begun to fall again, uncaring that he’d left the door wide open and the headlights blazing into the empty blackness like twin cones.
With a callused brown hand, he shielded his eyes against flashing red and white lights of an ambulance. More sirens screamed from the distant interstate, jarring him in his panicky confusion as raced toward the E.R. entrance.
His mouth twisted when he spotted the same scowling deputy who’d all but accused him of killing Ben a week ago. Ben, his best friend; Ben, Heather’s brother. Ben, whose lifeless head he’d cradled in his lap. Ben, whose grave he’d visited less than an hour ago to plead for forgiveness.
Nod Smile at the uniformed jerk. Stay cool.
Joey shot the officer a tense grin that must have passed muster. Then he shouldered his way through the sliding glass doors like a surly outlaw. Inside, heads swiveled as rain dripped off his black hair. He slicked the thick stuff back, out of his scalding eyes. A pretty teenager gasped coyly and then gave him one of those fluttery smiles all the girls gave him. He saw her father’s hand clench warningly on her slim shoulder and draw her out of Joey’s path.
Half boy, half man, Joey moved too fast, as if he hadn’t quite grown accustomed to his long, rugged body. Still, he was hunky and gorgeous. His voracious sex appeal made him suspect with all parents and teachers, and with any other guy his age who had a girlfriend.
“You’re every teenage girl’s dream lover and every daddy’s worst nightmare,” Coach Howard had teased him when he’d been voted Most Handsome in high school.
“When I was your age I had pimples. I envy the hell out of you, kid. Looks like yours will open all sorts of doors.”
Behind a cluttered desk a nurse ignored a stack of charts and blinking lights on her phone and licked pizza crust off her fingers.
But she couldn’t ignore him.
No woman ever could, especially if he smiled.
But when he tried, the skin on either side of his mouth tightened painfully.
“Save the fake charm. Visiting hours are over, sonny.”
She obviously had a teenage daughter.
Joey froze. “Please, Ma’am.... I’ve gotta find somebody.... She’s real sick.”
The nurse shook her head in curt dismissal, sucked a last crumb, and then punched a button on her telephone to tend to more important business.
Joey’s cold wet hand grabbed the receiver from her
“Heather Wade,” he rasped, suddenly seeming older and scarier than his twenty years. “The senator’s daughter.... What room is she in?”
“Your pretty face has got you way too cocky, sonny. You may be hot stuff to some little girls foolish enough to go for tall and dark and dangerous, but a Wade wouldn’t wipe her pretty feet on the likes of you...even if you did get her pregnant.”
His broad shoulders sagged. Joey’s tough stance wilted. “Where—?” he pleaded in a desperate, breathless voice, a boy’s voice now.
Her stare hardened. Then she seized the phone from him. “Get outta here, sonny, before you get yourself into real trouble. The senator’s been down here. He told me all about you and to be on the watch-out—”
When Joey didn’t budge, she hollered off-handedly, “Officer! It’s him! It’s that Joey Fasano guy.”
Joey took off in a dead run.
So did the deputy.
As Joey sprinted like a crazed rat through a maze of endless white corridors, the big deputy lumbered at his heels.
The bastard would probably throw the book at him.
Let him. All that mattered was finding Heather...before it was too late.
Then Joey slammed through a double set of swinging doors only to find himself trapped in a dead-end hall on the seventh floor.
His heart beat like a tom-tom when he pivoted wildly just as the deputy banged through the doors and smiled.
Behind Joey, Senator Wade’s voice thundered, “What the hell are you doing up here, Fasano?”
“I came to see Heather.”
“Over my dead body, punk.”
Shock and disapproval rippled through the grim clump of fashionably-dressed people standing outside Heather’s door.
“You better let me see her!” Joey screamed her name like a crazy man. “Heather!”
Heather’s mother opened the door. “She doesn’t want to see you.”
“You’re lying!”
Vaguely Joey was aware of her mother’s pitying gaze as he stumbled past her. Suddenly he felt that he moved in weird slow motion. The white walls closed in on him like a surrealistic nightmare.
Was that frail, thin creature veiled in curtains and swaddled in white sheets like a mummy in that far corner really his lively Heather?
The blinds were down. The room was gray and shadowy.
“Babe.... What have they done....” He choked. His voice died. “Oh, God...what have I done?”
Her amethyst eyes that usually brightened at the sight of him, were dull and painfilled. Dark circles of grief and exhaustion ringed them. She stared at him as if he were a ghost. Then she twisted her head away from him and lay as still as death.
Even in this state, he thought she was the prettiest girl in the world. He sat down beside her and took her slim hand. A shock went through him. Her fingers cold and stiff and lifeless. Just as Ben’s had been.
“You okay, babe?”
“I’m fine,” she whispered.
Fine? Her tone cut him. Ever after he would hate that word.
There was scarcely a pulsebeat in her slender, blue-veined wrist. Her icy skin was almost translucent.
She was so changed, so lifeless, fear squeezed his heart like a vice.
“Please...just go away,” she whispered in a strange almost thready voice.
He lifted her hand and laced his brown fingers through hers. “What about our baby?”
