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The Merciless Travis Wilde
Sandra Marton
The wild before the storm Travis Wilde doesn’t do love or commitment – but he’d never turn down a willing woman and a king-sized bed! Normally innocence like Jennie Cooper’s would have the same effect as a cold shower, yet her determination and mouth-watering curves have him burning up all over!The clock is ticking and, forced to confront her life, Jennie is determined to cross some major things off her to-do list. Some might be risky – like taking on the renowned Travis Wilde – but Jennie has nothing to lose except the one thing she thought was untouchable…her heart.‘Absolutely fantastic and enough passion to blow your mind away! Thank you Ms Marton!’ – Ven, 40, Hastings
Jennie blushed. She did that a lot. Travis liked it.
He moved closer, flattening his palms against the cab of the truck so that his arms encased her. He looked into her eyes. Looked at her lips. Gave her a second to figure out what was coming.
Ohmygod, she thought. Oh—my—God!
He lifted her off the ground, one arm around her waist. Her face was on a level with his; he kissed her slowly, caught her lip between his teeth and sucked on her flesh, and—and—
He kissed the place where her neck and shoulder joined.
It was magic.
Her eyes closed; the world went away.
And when he asked her to go home with him she gave him the only logical answer—because, after all, she was nothing if not logical.
She said, “Yes.”
THE WILDE BROTHERS
Wilde by name, unashamedly wild by nature!
They work hard, but you can be damned sure they play even harder! For as long as any of them could remember, they’ve always loved the same things:
Danger … and beautiful women.
They gladly took up the call to serve their country, but duty, honour and pride are words that mask the scars of a true warrior.
Now, one by one, the brothers return to their family ranch in Texas.
Can their hearts be tamed in the place they once called home?
Meet the deliciously sexy Wilde Brothers in this sizzling and utterly unmissable new family dynasty by much-loved author Sandra Marton!
In August you met
THE DANGEROUS JACOB WILDE
In December were you able to resist
THE RUTHLESS CALEB WILDE?
This month meet
THE MERCILESS TRAVIS WILDE
About the Author
SANDRA MARTON wrote her first novel while she was still in primary school. Her doting parents told her she’d be a writer some day, and Sandra believed them. In secondary school and college she wrote dark poetry nobody but her boyfriend understood—though, looking back, she suspects he was just being kind. As a wife and mother she wrote murky short stories in what little spare time she could manage, but not even her boyfriend-turned-husband could pretend to understand those. Sandra tried her hand at other things, among them teaching and serving on the Board of Education in her home town, but the dream of becoming a writer was always in her heart.
At last Sandra realised she wanted to write books about what all women hope to find: love with that one special man, love that’s rich with fire and passion, love that lasts for ever. She wrote a novel, her very first, and sold it to Mills & Boon
Modern
Romance. Since then she’s written more than sixty books, all of them featuring sexy, gorgeous, larger-than-life heroes. A four-time RITA
award finalist, she’s also received five RT Book Reviews magazine awards, and has been honoured with RT’s Career Achievement Award for Series Romance. Sandra lives with her very own sexy, gorgeous, larger-than-life hero in a sun-filled house on a quiet country lane in the north-eastern United States.
Recent titles by the same author:
THE RUTHLESS CALEB WILDE(The Wilde Brothers)
THE DANGEROUS JACOB WILDE(The Wilde Brothers)
SHEIKH WITHOUT A HEART
Did you know these are also available as eBooks? Visit www.millsandboon.co.uk
The Merciless Travis Wilde
Sandra Marton
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
CHAPTER ONE
FOR AS LONG as Travis Wilde could remember, Friday nights had belonged to his brothers and him.
They’d started setting those evenings aside way back in high school. Nobody had made a formal announcement. Nobody had said, “Hey, how about we make Friday evenings ours?”
It had just happened, was all, and over the ensuing years, it had become an unspoken tradition.
The Wildes got together on Fridays, no matter what.
Always.
Okay.
Maybe not always.
One of them might be away on business, Caleb on one coast or the other, dealing with a client in some complicated case of corporate law; Jacob in South America or Spain, buying horses for his own ranch or for El Sueño, the family spread; Travis meeting with investors anywhere from Dallas to Singapore.
And there’d been times one or more of the Wildes had been ass-deep in some bug-infested foreign hellhole, trying to stay alive in whatever war needed the best combat helicopter pilot, secret agency spook, or jet jockey the U.S. of A. could provide.
There’d even been times a woman got in the way.
Travis lifted a bottle of beer to his lips.
That didn’t happen often.
Women were wonderful and mysterious creatures, but brothers were, well, they were brothers. You shared the same blood, the same memories.
That made for something special.
The bottom line was that barring the end of the world and the appearance of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, if it was Friday night, if the Wildes were within reasonable distance of each other, they’d find a bar where the brews were cold, the steaks rare, the music an upbeat blend of Willie Nelson and Bruce Springsteen, and they’d settle in for a couple of hours of relaxation.
This place didn’t quite meet that description.
It wasn’t where the Wildes had planned on going tonight but then, as it had turned out, Travis was the only Wilde who’d been up for getting together at all.
The original plan had been to meet at a bar they knew and liked, maybe half a dozen blocks from his office, a quiet place with deep booths, good music on the speakers, half a dozen varieties of locally-brewed beer on tap and by the bottle, and steaks the size of Texas sizzling on an open grill.
That plan had changed, and Travis had ended up in here by accident.
Once he knew he would be on his own, he’d driven around for a while, finally got thirsty and hungry, stopped at the first place he saw.
This one.
No deep booths. No Willy or Bruce. No locally-brewed beer. No grill and no steaks.
Instead, there were half a dozen beat-up looking tables and chairs. The kind of music that made your brain go numb, blasting from the speakers. A couple of brands of beer. Burgers oozing grease, served up from a kitchen in the back.
The best thing about the place was the bar itself, a long stretch of zinc that either spoke of earlier, better days or of dreams that had never quite materialized.
Travis had pretty much known what he’d find as soon as he pulled into the parking lot, saw the dented pickups with their rusted fenders, the half a dozen Harleys parked together like a pack of coyotes.
He’d also known what he wouldn’t find.
Friendly faces. Babes that looked as if they’d just stepped out of the latest Neiman Marcus catalogue. A dartboard on one wall, photos of local sports guys on another. St. Ambrose beer and rare steaks.
Not a great place for a stranger who was alone but if a man knew how to keep to himself, which years spent on not-always-friendly foreign soil had definitely taught him to do, he could at least grab something to eat before heading home.
He’d gotten some looks when he walked through the door. That figured. He was an unknown in a place where people almost certainly knew each other or at least recognized each other.
Physically, at least, he blended in.
He was tall. Six foot three in his bare feet, lean and muscled, the result of years riding and breaking horses growing up on El Sueño, the family’s half-million acre ranch a couple of hours from Dallas. High school and college football had honed him to a tough edge, and Air Force training had done the rest.
At thirty-four, he worked out every morning in the gym in his Turtle Creek condo and he still rode most weekends, played pickup games of touch football with his brothers …
Correction, he thought glumly.
He used to play touch football with Caleb and Jacob, but they didn’t have much time for that anymore.
Which was one of the reasons he was in this bar tonight. His brothers didn’t have much time for anything anymore and, dammit, no, he wasn’t feeling sorry for himself—he was a grown man, after all.
What he was, was mourning the loss of a way of life.
Travis tilted the bottle of Bud to his lips, took a long swallow and stared at his reflection in the fly-specked mirror behind the bar.
Bachelorhood. Freedom. No responsibility to or for anyone but yourself.
Yes, his brothers were giving life on the other side of that line a try and God knew, he wished them all the best but, though he’d never say it to them, he had a bad feeling how that would end up.
Love was an ephemeral emotion. Here today, gone tomorrow. Lip service, at best.
How his brothers had missed that life-lesson was beyond him.
He, at least, had not.
Which brought him straight back to what had been the old Friday night routine of steaks, beer …
And the one kind of bond you could count on.
The bond between brothers.
He’d experienced it growing up with Jake and Caleb, at college when he played football, in the Air Force, first in weeks of grueling training, then in that small, elite circle of men who flew fighter jets.
Male bonding, was the trendy media term for it, but you didn’t need fancy words to describe the link of trust you could forge with a brother, whether by blood or by fate.
That was what those Friday nights had been about.
Sitting around, talking about nothing in particular—the safety the Cowboys had just signed. The wobbly fate of the Texas Rangers. Poker, a game they all liked and at which Travis was an expert. Which was more of an icon, Jake’s vintage Thunderbird or Travis’s ’74 Stingray ’Vette, and was there any reasonable explanation for Caleb driving that disgustingly new Lamborghini?
And, naturally, they’d talked about women.
Except, the Wildes didn’t talk about women anymore.
Travis sighed, raised the bottle again and drank.
Caleb and Jake. His brothers.
Married.
It still seemed impossible but it was true. So was what went with it.
He’d spoken with each of his brothers as recently as yesterday, reminded them—and when, in the past, had they needed reminding?—that Friday was coming up and they’d be meeting at seven at that bar near his office.
“Absolutely,” Caleb had said.
“See you then,” Jake had told him.
And here he was. The Lone Ranger.
The worst of it was, he wasn’t really surprised.
