Suzanne Carey - When Love Walks In

And so hungry! Its insatiability poured comfort into her empty places, even as it drove her to a peak of wanting him. Mother, daughter-in-law, teacher, neighbor, she’d forced herself to focus on self-sacrifice, ignoring her innermost yearnings. Yet, incredibly, the rule-breaking teenager she’d been, the sensuous young woman who’d dared to accept his love despite her parents’ wishes, had lived on inside her, waiting to re-emerge.

I’m going to drown in him, Cate thought. Lose sight of what’s best for all the people I love. With a little shiver of apprehension, she realized Danny still fit into that category.…

Dear Reader,

Welcome back to Special Edition, where a month of spellbinding reading awaits you with a wonderful lineup of sophisticated, compelling August romances!

In bestselling author Jodi O’Donnell’s memorable THAT’S MY BABY! story, When Baby Was Born, a pregnant woman with amnesia meets a cowboy she’ll never forget! Beloved author Ginna Gray sweeps us away with another installment of her miniseries, A FAMILY BOND. In her emotional book In Search of Dreams, a woman with a scandalous past tries to say no to the man who vows to be in her future. Do you think a reunion that takes seventeen years to happen is worth waiting for? We’re sure you’ll say yes when you read When Love Walks In, Suzanne Carey’s poignant story about a long-ago teenage passion that is rekindled—then a secret is exposed. When the hero of Carole Halston’s Because of the Twins… needs help caring for his instant brood, the last thing he expects is a woman who turns his thoughts to matrimonial matters, too! Also this month is Jean Brashear’s Texas Royalty, in which a tough, once-burned P.I. seeks revenge on the society girl who had betrayed him—until she manages to rekindle his desires again! And finally, Patricia McLinn kicks off her compelling new miniseries, A PLACE CALLED HOME, with Lost-And-Found Groom, about a treacherous hurricane that brings two people together for one passionate live-or-die night—then that remembered passion threatens to storm their emotional fortresses once and for all.…

All the best,

Karen Taylor Richman

Senior Editor

www.millsandboon.co.uk

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Silhouette Special Edition

When Love Walks In #1341

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A Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Lake Forest College, Lake Forest, Illinois, and a former reporter who covered local politics and criminal courts as well as undertaking investigative and feature assignments, Suzanne Carey has been writing novels for Silhouette Books since the early 1980s. Though she was born in Illinois, she has been a resident of Florida for many years. She and the man in her life, a clinical psychologist who is now a university professor, reside in Sarasota, on Florida’s Gulf Coast.

Prologue

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

August, Seventeen Years Ago

It was the kind of cricket-dense night when the moon is full and the woods are replete with leafy undergrowth, when Danny Finn parked his beat-up Ford in some tall weeds near Ohio’s Brush Creek and came around to help seventeen-year-old Cate Mc-Donough from the passenger seat.

Her face upturned to his in the moonlight, she came into his embrace. After much longing and many discussions about the ethics of their situation, she’d agreed to let him make love to her. He was on fire with anticipation now as he caressed her back and shoulders, the sweetly rounded shape of her buttocks through the thin, flower-sprigged cotton fabric of her dress.

A former star on Beckwith High School’s varsity basketball team who’d “dated” a number of other girls before Cate, Danny hadn’t understood the true nature of desire until his had focused on her. As he claimed her now, mutely acknowledging his need and the deep love he felt, she radiated a corresponding heat, the firm conviction that whatever they’d do together would be right and beautiful.

Since becoming interested in boys in the seventh grade, she’d been crazy wild in love with him. Yet for three and a half years, he hadn’t so much as glanced in her direction. It had made her ache to watch him drape a possessive arm around some undeserving girl’s shoulders, oblivious to the way that same girl mocked his eccentric grandmother and combat-traumatized uncle behind his back and flirted with other boys when he wasn’t available.

Then, one gray December afternoon, he’d literally bumped into Cate, almost knocking her off her feet on the salt-pocked but still-slippery sidewalk outside her father’s hardware store. The temperature had been twenty-three degrees and plummeting, her cheeks apple-red with cold, her naturally curly brown hair thickly encrusted with snowflakes.

When he’d offered to buy her a hot chocolate at Rudy’s, she’d accepted. From that moment on, they’d been inseparable, despite her parents’ strong disapproval of him. “The Finns are trash,” her father had raged when he’d found out that they were dating. Danny had been in trouble with the law. His family was eccentric. He wasn’t worthy of her.

Though she couldn’t deny Danny had been fined for underage drinking on one occasion and received several speeding tickets during his junior year, Cate had argued that the infringements were minor ones. He’d settled down since then. As a senior, he’d earned good grades, worked hard at a variety of after-school jobs and stayed out of trouble.

Nothing she’d said had changed Jack McDonough’s opinion of him. When her parents had ordered her not to see him again, she’d pretended to go along with their wishes while stubbornly following her heart.

Her best friend, Brenda Hale, who “lacked supervision” according to Cate’s mother, had covered for Cate whenever she and Danny could arrange to be together. Remaining a good girl in the sense that she was still a virgin, Cate had flirted on numerous occasions with going all the way. Each time, she’d pulled back from the brink, denying herself and Danny the intimacy they craved.