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Moonlight Magic
Doris Rangel
How the heck had that happened?
Ellie wanted to pinch herself, just to see if she was dreaming. Her innards may have melted to blissful mush, but something wasn’t right here.
She’d just cried all over Daniel Morgan’s shirt. Where Daniel’s caress had scared her witless on the beach the other night, tonight it somehow liberated her. She felt lighter.
And that kiss! Admittedly she’d been waiting for him to kiss her since that night on the beach. She’d wondered what Daniel’s kiss would be like, even fantasized about it. Tonight she learned it was all that fantasy and more.
But whatever was going on here, it wasn’t going any further. She had her life planned, thank you very much, and it didn’t include danger with a capital Daniel.
Dear Reader,
What does romance mean to you? Sure, it could be sharing a candlelit dinner or strolling hand in hand on a spring day. But to me it’s even the smallest of gestures that tells you the person you think hangs the sun and the moon finds you equally unforgettable. As a lifelong romantic who met her future husband nearly twenty years ago, I’m delighted to be heading up Silhouette Romance. These books remind me that no matter what challenges the day has held, finding true love is one of life’s greatest rewards.
Bestselling author Judy Christenberry kicks off another great month with Finding a Family (SR #1762). In this sweet romance, a down-to-earth cowboy goes “shopping” for the perfect woman for his father but instead finds himself the target of Cupid’s arrow! Watch the sparks fly in Melissa McClone’s Blueprint for a Wedding (SR #1763) when a man who has crafted the perfect blueprint for domestic bliss finds himself attracted to an actress who doesn’t believe in happy endings. This month’s “Cinderella” is a feisty Latina, as Angie Ray continues Silhouette Romance’s commitment to offering modern-day fairy tales in The Millionaire’s Reward (SR #1764). Part of the SOULMATES series, Moonlight Magic (SR #1765) by Doris Rangel features a vacationing nurse who falls for a handsome stranger with a particularly vexing habit of vanishing into thin air.
And be sure to stay tuned for next month’s exciting lineup when reader favorites Raye Morgan and Carol Grace return with two classic romances.
Ann Leslie Tuttle
Associate Senior Editor
Moonlight Magic
Doris Rangel
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
For J and A
Who created their own Hawaiian Magic
With love from Mom
and Grammie
Books by Doris Rangel
Silhouette Romance
Marlie’s Mystery Man #1693
Moonlight Magic #1765
Silhouette Special Edition
Mountain Man #1140
Prenuptial Agreement #1224
DORIS RANGEL
loves books—the feel of them, the sight of them, the smell of them. And she loves talking about them. She has collected them, organized them, sold them new and used, written them, worked with others to write them, read them aloud to children and has hopefully imparted the magic of them to the grade school, college and adult students she has taught over the years. History, philosophy, science, satire, Western, mystery…In her home, books are the wallpaper of choice.
Romances hold a special place on her shelves, however. A story that ends with a couple stepping into the future with love and hope may be an ideal, but it is an ideal she wishes in the tomorrows of every living thing in the universe. Love, after all, in whatever form it takes, is all that is.
Contents
Prologue (#u608ec996-0078-55ad-85d1-0b4595c752ae)
Chapter One (#udc1a9acf-269f-5607-a8d9-2b3177293d4a)
Chapter Two (#u243cd140-4ca6-5228-9619-97c7ed543707)
Chapter Three (#u49c96071-21ab-5096-be13-c7b0a8922f8d)
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)
Prologue
Daniel Morgan startled into wakefulness.
But around him quiet reigned in the garden’s somnambulant midafternoon sunshine—as it should with the children in school, Janie and Tom at work, and the old woman in the house probably watching afternoon soaps.
Yet he’d felt someone touch him, brush warm fingers across his chest.
Dreaming again.
Idly, he listened to the breeze rustling quietly through the foliage and watched an insect investigate the heart of a nearby blossom.
Thoughts drifting to other times, other places, he sank again into lethargy…and slept.
If you can’t trust your sweet, old grandmother, who can you trust?
Running the tip of her finger over a silver petal on the earring she held, Ellie frowned. She trusted Grammie. Sure she did.
Most of the time.
The pair of earrings looked ordinary enough. Flower shaped, with a slight dangle from a French hook and attached to an ordinary flat plastic backing stamped, Plumeria, the Flower of Hawaii and Sterling Silver. The backing nestled on ordinary cotton batting in a small ordinary white cardboard box with Made especially for you by Ohana embossed on the lid. Shops used this kind of box by the thousands.
Grammie’s gift was perfectly…well, ordinary. A nice pair of unpretentious earrings, not terribly expensive, their shape the only exotic thing about them.
“Nice.”
Looking up, Ellie found the flight attendant standing beside her admiring the earrings.
“Thanks. They’re a gift from my grandmother,” Ellie told her. And that was an ordinary comment—if one didn’t know her grandmother.
She shivered.
“They’re very pretty. Is this your first trip to the islands?” the woman asked casually, pouring the soda Ellie requested.
“Yes. I’m going for a medical convention, but my brother is a marine stationed there so I’m visiting him, too.”
Inwardly, Ellie grimaced, knowing she’d given the flight attendant far more information than the polite question warranted. She wasn’t usually this chatty, but for some reason she was nervous. The earrings, probably.
“I’m sure you’ll have a wonderful time,” the woman replied, and passed on to the next passenger.
I certainly hope so. Ellie’s dubious gaze dropped again to the silver flower in her hand.
Did Grammie really buy these earrings?
The Simms family had a good-natured saying among themselves: Never trust one of Grammie’s little gifts if she didn’t buy it.
Their grandmother, descended from an Iq’nata shaman, had a stash of seemingly ordinary personal items that, if she decided to give one of them to you, had a way of bringing about all sorts of extraordinary events.
Not bad events, just strange ones.
Over the years the family had learned to politely refuse any items for which Gram hadn’t paid cold, hard cash. Grammie never took it personally. She just laughed, told them they had no sense of adventure and pulled out something obviously store-bought as their gift instead.
Right before leaving to catch her flight, Ellie had declined Grammie’s first “little something for your trip, dear”—a lei of pretty speckled shells her grandmother said she’d found on the beach when she traveled to Hawaii several years before.
Uh-oh.
When Ellie shook her head decisively, Gram smiled, her blue eyes twinkling with mischief.
“Just teasing, darling. But here’s something I know you’ll want,” and she gave Ellie the box containing the earrings. “I searched the shops for days before I discovered them in a little out-of-the-way place outside of Honolulu.”
At Ellie’s narrow-eyed look, the older woman lifted an eyebrow. “Don’t be so suspicious, Ellie. It’s a bad habit of yours.” Tilting the box so the light gleamed off the silver flowers, Gram smiled. “Aren’t they pretty? They’ll look perfect with your sarong.”
“I don’t have a sarong,” Ellie replied.
But she accepted the earrings. They were pretty. So…islandish.
Now, rehooking the earring to the plastic backing, she returned the set to the box and dropped it into her purse, dismissing her suspicions.
Not until she’d maneuvered her way to the exit with the rest of the disembarking passengers did Ellie remember another Simms family saying….
The Great Ones have a weird sense of humor.
Chapter One
From his place among the hibiscus, Daniel watched the party eddy around him. The old woman, bless her, never forgot him on occasions such as this. Several leis, many of them made with plumeria blossoms, hung about his neck.
He loved family get-togethers and already felt a little drunk on the heady scent of flowers mixed with the equally heady odor of barbecue.
Being physically sober as a post, it was an inebriation of the senses only, of course. What he wouldn’t give for a plate heaped high with food and a frosty cup of beer to wash it down.
Unfortunately, he was only a bystander at this luau. Literally. In the midst of jubilation, Daniel stood apart, watching it all.
Though an adult party—Tom had turned forty—children were everywhere, chasing each other, dodging groups of adults, giggling, shouting. At home, children wouldn’t be allowed at a function such as this, Daniel mused, but in Hawaii ohana prevailed. He loved it.
The adults, too, milled about, teasing, laughing, talking, sidestepping children sometimes or absently scooping up a young one to cuddle a moment before sending the child off to play again.
And music flowed through it all, everything from Elvis at his most powerful to Iz at his most fragile.
He’d love to dance again, Daniel thought—jiggle his bones to a jazzy beat, shake his booty and get down to rock ’n’roll, press his undulating body against a woman’s to the breathy croon of a saxophone….
Maybe all of the above, as various couples were doing on the patio.
Two little girls flung each other about madly while four teenagers, three girls and a boy, hip-hopped to the same music. An elderly man and woman showed they still had it, and a younger woman with long silvery-blond hair swayed in ministeps with a seriously intent boy of about five.
Make that six. When the woman said something, the boy looked up at her with a gap-toothed grin, causing her to laugh.
Over the music and the chattering crowd, Daniel couldn’t hear the laugh, but the woman had a killer smile.
Earlier, he’d seen her among the guests and admired her silvery hair that she wore long and loose down her back. Though dressed in a gauzy dress that set off her slim figure, she hadn’t impressed him as being particularly pretty; she was even, perhaps, a little austere.
But that smile! It transformed a plain-vanilla exterior into something fascinating and mysterious, as if he’d opened a shoe box and found a piece of exotically carved antique ivory. When she smiled, the woman became breathtakingly beautiful!
And she was coming his way.
The thing winked at her!
Nah, it couldn’t have.
Ellie eyed the small statue tucked among the flowers. A tiki god, probably, and obviously old, its wood weathered and cracked in places.
She’d seen similar carvings at the Polynesian Cultural Center when the convention arranged a trip there. But they’d been huge. This one stood only about three feet high.
Around its neck hung several leis, she assumed in honor of the party. Yet something else about it seemed different from the others she’d seen.
