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Beautiful Stranger
Ruth Wind
SHE NEVER KNEW LOVE–UNTIL HIMRaised in a gilded cage, she was the chubby twin sister no one noticed. Now her weight loss made Marissa Pierce the kind of woman every man desired–including Robert Martinez. If only she had the courage to return his seductive gaze…A proud Native American, Robert resented Marissa's privileged lifestyle. Yet this elegant stranger understood his wounded heart. Now Robert was determined to show her how truly beautiful she was–before the princess could escape to her ivory tower forever.The Last RoundupRed Creek, Colorado's matchmaking matriarch rounds up two bachelors for the Pierce twins!
“We are going to have to deal with this attraction sooner or later,”
Robert said roughly, holding her hand tightly.
“Maybe it would be better if we didn’t see each other.”
He looked at her mouth, closed his eyes. “We’ll just…take it easy.”
“All right.” She pulled on her hand. He pulled back.
“Why do you think it happens like this?” he said, stepping closer. “Out of nowhere?”
It wasn’t out of nowhere on her part. “I always saw you, Robert. You just never saw me before.”
He moved even closer, until his hips and hers were nearly touching. “Yes, I did.”
She rolled her eyes. “Right.”
“You used to have this green dress,” he said. “Your hair spilled all over it. And you wore red lipstick in those days. Bright red, like something sinful.”
His eyes were intent, “You’ve always been beautiful, Marissa. You just didn’t know it till now.”
Dear Reader,
Once again, Silhouette Intimate Moments has rounded up six top-notch romances for your reading pleasure, starting with the finale of Ruth Langan’s fabulous new trilogy. The Wildes of Wyoming— Ace takes the last of the Wilde men and matches him with a pool-playing spitfire who turns out to be just the right woman to fill his bed—and his heart.
Linda Turner, a perennial reader favorite, continues THOSE MARRYING MCBRIDES! with The Best Man, the story of sister Merry McBride’s discovery that love is not always found where you expect it. Award-winning Ruth Wind’s Beautiful Stranger features a heroine who was once an ugly duckling but is now the swan who wins the heart of a rugged “prince.” Readers have been enjoying Sally Tyler Hayes’ suspenseful tales of the men and women of DIVISION ONE, and Her Secret Guardian will not disappoint in its complex plot and emotional power. Christine Michels takes readers Undercover with the Enemy, and Vickie Taylor presents The Lawman’s Last Stand, to round out this month’s wonderful reading choices.
And don’t miss a single Intimate Moments novel for the next three months, when the line takes center stage as part of the Silhouette 20
Anniversary celebration. Sharon Sala leads off A YEAR OF LOVING DANGEROUSLY, a new in-line continuity, in July; August brings the long-awaited reappearance of Linda Howard—and hero Chance Mackenzie—in A Game of Chance; and in September we reprise 36 HOURS, our successful freestanding continuity, in the Intimate Moments line. And that’s only a small taste of what lies ahead, so be here this month and every month, when Silhouette Intimate Moments proves that love and excitement go best when they’re hand in hand.
Leslie J. Wainger
Executive Senior Editor
Beautiful Stranger
Ruth Wind
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
For my sisters, Cathy Stroo and Merry Jordan,
who’ve each chosen to serve the teens of the world,
offering hands to hold, ears to listen, shoulders to cry on
and hearts so full of love no judgment can enter in.
I am so proud of you both.
RUTH WIND
is the award-winning author of both contemporary and historical romance novels. She lives in the mountains of the Southwest with her husband, two growing sons and many animals in a hundred-year-old house the town blacksmith built. The only hobby she has since she started writing is tending the ancient garden of irises, lilies and lavender beyond her office window, and she says she can think of no more satisfying way to spend a life than growing children, books and flowers.
Contents
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Epilogue
Prologue
The girl showed up on his doorstep, wearing nothing but an oversize windbreaker to protect her from the February cold. Her shoulders were painfully thin under the jacket. Her stomach bowed out in an unmistakable shape she tried to hide, a shape all wrong on a fifteen-year-old.
The long hair hadn’t been washed in a few days, and Robert could tell she was wearing the same makeup she’d set out with. Whatever belongings she’d carried with her were in a very small backpack.
When the knock came, it startled him into breaking a fragile bit of red glass he’d been fitting into a small frame, edging it with heat to ease it. Tsking, he flipped his safety glasses to the top of his head and went to the door. The girl was standing there on his step, her chin lifted at that cocky teenage angle that was all bravado, yet hid a scared little girl heart. She popped a big wad of gum. Long earrings glittered against her tangled hair, and her eyeliner was smeared, as if she’d slept in it.
“Hey, uncle,” she said, like she’d just come in from school. As if she wasn’t five hundred miles from home. Like he expected her.
Robert met that I-dare-you gaze for one long moment, seeing, with painful memory, himself at fourteen, fifteen, wanting somebody to—
Without a word, he opened the screen door. He didn’t yell or ask what the hell she was doing. He simply pushed the door aside, opened his arms and she fell against him, her twig arms fierce against his ribs, her relief an almost palpable presence. She didn’t have to tell him she was in trouble, that she’d run away, that she had nowhere else to go.
When her tough-girl facade cracked, it cracked wide open, and his fifteen-year-old niece, five months pregnant if she was a minute, burst into tears and sobbed like a baby. He just held on.
There wasn’t much room for her in his little house, and heaven knew he was the last man on earth who ought to be an example for anybody, but Robert held her while she cried, then sent her to take a shower while he made her a big bowl of soup. He made her eat, then put her to bed in his own room before he called his sister, Alicia, who responded pretty much as he’d expected—her new husband was more important to her than her daughter. Robert forgave her before he even hung up. They’d had the same mother after all.
He leaned in the doorway and watched Crystal sleep, a knot of pain in his chest. No matter how bad he’d be at the father thing, he was better than nobody. He’d managed to oversee a motley crew of soldiers through a war—how bad could one teenage girl be?
He set to work on cleaning up the back room, boxing up his tools and supplies so she would have a room of her own. Tomorrow they’d figure out the rest.
Chapter 1
As her classroom of twenty-seven ninth graders filed out of seventh hour—her last class of the day, thank heavens—Marissa Pierce grabbed her purse out of the desk drawer and bolted for the faculty rest room. In ten minutes, she had an appointment with the parent of a difficult student, and if she didn’t visit Mother Nature right now, she wouldn’t have a chance for another hour. Intolerable.
She bustled through the throngs of high schoolers in their baggy pants, and took pleasure in the simple fact of being able to bustle—an act that had been purely beyond her for a long time. It was still a little shock to zip up a pair of size-twelve slacks, but the best part of losing eighty-five pounds was this: being able to move lightly and without trouble through a crowd.
Just like a normal person.
The rest room was blessedly empty. Marissa tended to nature, readjusted her belt and peered at it in the mirror. All day long she’d felt odd about this belt. She knew she’d fiddled with it, touching it with her hand every so often to make sure the belly beneath it wasn’t sticking out a mile. But the mirror insisted the belly looked exactly the same as it had this morning—a little rounder than some, maybe, but ordinarily so. And there were no gobs of back fat pushing out her blouse in the rear.
It had taken eighteen months to lose the weight, and she still had a good fifteen or twenty pounds to go. They had been long, long months at times, sometimes very discouraging, and even now it seemed that a kind of ghost of her former self clung to her.
But there were moments like this one, when she saw herself in a mirror, with a shirt tucked into a pair of trousers, that she realized anew it had all been worth it. After fifteen years of being the fattest kid, then the fattest woman in any room, of ducking mirrors and dreading shopping malls, she took extraordinary pleasure in the simple act of not wincing when she bent to put a little fresh lipstick on her mouth.
Feeling much better, she went back to her room in the clearing halls and found Crystal already seated in her usual place, third seat in the fifth row, by the windows. And as she often did, the girl stared out that window as if some rescue was imminent—or at least, she wished it was. Kids this age were often a mass of tangled hungers and skewed logic, and pregnancy only made all of that about twenty times worse.
One of the reasons Marissa had chosen to teach this age group was because her own adolescence had been very difficult. To her surprise, she was very good at it. Her heart and soul were engaged by the delicate, topsy-turvy, exuberant and exasperating world of teens. Every so often, a particular child captured her—last year it had been a boy with such brilliance for math that she’d been challenged every single day to stay ahead of him.
Something about Crystal Avila had snagged Marissa hard. She found herself worrying about the girl at odd moments, just before she fell asleep, or in the shower. It wasn’t just that she was pregnant. Sadly, Crystal was far from the first pregnant teen to sit in this classroom.
No, it was deeper than that. There was such a depth of yearning, such sorrow in those dark eyes that it was sometimes hard to look at her. She’d lost something big in her old life, something more than her innocence. It plucked at Marissa in some odd way she couldn’t shake.
Dropping her purse back into the desk drawer, Marissa said casually, “Hey, kiddo. You can come sit up here if you like.”
She just shook her head, the long strands of straight black hair sticking on the coat she wore every minute, probably to hide her belly. She was a pretty little thing, small and delicate, her face adamantly Native American with broad cheekbones and narrow chin.
Marissa started the process of tidying her desk. “How was your day?”
Crystal made a grunting, you-are-so-stupid noise, and rolled her eyes. “What do you think?”
“I don’t know. That’s why I asked.”
“It sucked, as usual.” She bent her head, ran her thumbnail along the pencil holder carved into the desk. “I hate this place.”
It was a good opening. Marissa carefully focused on gathering scattered writing utensils and putting them in a square container another student had made for her in woodshop. “Did you like your old school better?”
“No.” A singularly surly word. “I hated it, too, but my mom didn’t make me go.”
“And you’re mad at your uncle because he makes you?”
She shrugged, probably not quite willing to be that disloyal with an outsider.
“Well, you know—” Marissa kept her body moving, unfocused and therefore unthreatening “—if you weren’t as smart as you are, I might think there were better ways for you to spend your time.” She erased calculations from the blackboard and turned around. “But anyone with a brain like yours really needs an education.”
“Oh, yeah,” she said, snorting, “I’m so smart. Can’t you see how smart I am?” She gestured with anger to her belly.
“Getting pregnant is a mistake, but it has nothing to do with brains.” When the girl only lowered her head, Marissa went on. “Lots of really smart women get pregnant by accident—even women who are trying to be careful, so you aren’t alone.”
Crystal began wiggling her foot, but she still didn’t have the blinders up. A surprise, but Marissa wasn’t about to waste a chance. “You really are smart, Crystal. I’d really like to help you see that, if you’ll give me a chance.”
The great dark eyes flickered up, flared briefly with hope, then lowered quickly again.
Oh, babe! Marissa thought, that familiar ache in her chest.
“None of my other teachers ever told me I was smart. What if you’re wrong?”
Marissa laughed softly. “I’m never wrong,” she said. “And I’m really smart myself. I know what I’m talking about.”
A knock sounded at the door, and Marissa straightened, turning to welcome the girl’s uncle into the room. But halfway to her feet, her heart slammed hard into her ribs and then settled into a painful thudding.
Red Dog.
That was what they called him, anyway, an army nickname. Marissa knew him through her association with the Forrest family—he was Jake Forrest’s best friend.
And one of the most intensely sexy men Marissa had ever seen. It was less a particular feature or even combination of features that made it so—it was the essence of him, a dangerous combination of brooding darkness and an appreciation of women that was like some devilish cologne seeping from his pores.
Marissa quickly turned and snatched a paper off her desk, seeking his real name. “Mr. Martinez?” With a degree of smoothness she would have thought beyond her at just that moment, she crossed the room and extended her hand, smiling warmly. “Come in. I’m so glad you could make it.”
“Please call me Robert.” Not a single flicker of recognition crossed his face as he clasped her hand with a firm, honest kind of grip. “Thanks for asking me here. Sorry I’m such a mess—I had to come right from work.”
“Not a problem.” And it wasn’t. His chambray shirt and jeans were dusty with a long day’s work in construction, but his long, graceful hands were clean. His hair, thick and inky, was pulled back into a long braid, highlighting the hard, high cheekbones and wide mouth. His eyes were serious, very dark, but she knew from watching him at various gatherings that they crinkled up when he laughed.
She struggled back into a professional demeanor. As they moved toward the middle of the room, Marissa liked the way his attention honed in on Crystal.
“Hi, honey,” he said, and raised a hand in a gesture of inclusion. “Why don’t you come on over here with us?”
The girl reluctantly slid out of her seat and shuffled over, dwarfed by her coat and baggy pants and all that hair sliding forward to hide her face. Her uncle slid an arm around her shoulders and embraced her quickly before he let her go.
They settled into chairs Marissa kept close to her desk for unruly kids. “Mr. Martinez—”
