Claire King: The Virgin Beauty

“I’m helping you on with your damn coat,” he said between his teeth.

Daniel was slowly buttoning up every button on her stupid coat. Winning the battle. His knuckles brushed her breasts as he reached the middle button, and he heard the slightest intake of her breath. His finger froze.

It was probably a little twisted, getting turned on while you were wrestling with a woman for the dubious privilege of helping her on with her coat, but Grace McKenna had been giving him the strangest ideas since the day he met her.

He watched his own fingers slowly unfasten the buttons on her coat, then he slid his hands inside.

“Daniel?”

“Don’t say it’s a mistake,” he whispered thickly. “Please don’t say it’s a mistake.”

She pulled his head up to hers. “I won’t….”

Dear Reader,

The 20 thanniversary excitement continues as we bring you a 2-in-1 collection containing brand-new novellas by two of your favorite authors: Maggie Shayne and Marilyn Pappano. Who Do You Love? It’s an interesting question—made more complicated for these heroes and heroines because they’re not quite what they seem, making the path to happily-ever-after an especially twisty one. Enjoy!

A YEAR OF LOVING DANGEROUSLY continues with Her Secret Weapon by bestselling writer Beverly Barton. This is a great secret-baby story—with a forgotten night of passion thrown in to make things even more exciting. Our in-line 36 HOURS spin-off continues with A Thanksgiving To Remember, by Margaret Watson. Suspenseful and sensual, this story shows off her talents to their fullest. Applaud the return of Justine Davis with The Return of Luke McGuire. There’s something irresistible about a bad boy turned hero, and Justine’s compelling and emotional handling of the theme will win your heart. In The Lawman Meets His Bride, Meagan McKinney brings her MATCHED IN MONTANA miniseries over from Desire with an exciting romance featuring a to-die-for hero. Finally, pick up The Virgin Beauty by Claire King and discover why this relative newcomer already has people talking about her talent.

Share the excitement—and come back next month for more!

Leslie J. Wainger

Executive Senior Editor

www.millsandboon.co.uk

To Suzie

The bravest, best woman I know.

A special thanks to Sue Vos

For her generous advice and the invaluable loan of her Merck Manual.

lives with her husband, her son, a dozen goats and too many cows on her family’s cattle ranch in Idaho. An award-winning agricultural columnist and seasoned cow-puncher, Claire lives for the spare minutes she can dedicate to reading and writing about people who fall helplessly in love, because, she says, “The romantic lives of my cattle just aren’t as interesting as people might think.”

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

Grace McKenna did not want to get out of her truck. Hadn’t wanted to for five minutes, and still didn’t want to. Didn’t suppose she’d ever want to, in fact. So she sat in the cab, considering her options.

She could drive back to her hometown in Washington State. People knew her there, were accustomed to the sight of her. She was hardly ever whispered about, hardly ever asked a single, stupid question about basketball or the weather “up there.”

Or she could go back to the practice she’d left in eastern Washington, where she stayed in the clinic most of the time, working with the animals, who didn’t care in the least what she looked like.

Or she could get out of this cramped pickup and start her new life and let the people talk. She knew from experience they’d find something else to talk about after a time. A year, maybe. Or twenty.

She sighed, looked around a little.

A new town.

It made her nervous. It always did. No matter where she went, she couldn’t escape who she was—didn’t really even want to. But she always dreaded the first day. Until people got used to the look of her, she felt something like a weed suddenly sprouted green and tall in the middle of an even field of wheat. The eye couldn’t help but be drawn to it, opinions formed, discussions begun. It was something to which she was certainly accustomed—having been a conspicuous weed kind of person since she was twelve years old—but she never got over the apprehension of it.

A new town, a new job. A thousand new faces and facts and places.

She looked around at the dusty little Western outpost. Well, maybe not a thousand.

She was on the main street; homey-looking and not too long, with grand winter skeletons of ash trees that in summer would shade it from the ruthless Idaho sun. On the one street was one grocery store, one supply store, one clothing store with fading Wrangler Jeans on sale in the front window. And a Dairy Queen, of course. She’d lived in the west all her life and had yet to see a town of any size without a Dairy Queen. Thank goodness, she thought as she smiled over at the jumble of old pickups and used sports cars in the parking lot. Every teenager west of the Mississippi would starve to death otherwise.

And that was about the size of Nobel, Idaho. She smiled again, a little more confidently. In a little town like this, people would quickly get used to the look of her. With any luck, she’d only spend the first year or so shaking off the whispers that had followed her since puberty.

Time to be brave, Gracie, she told herself. Time to meet your new town. Time to start your new life.

She unfolded herself from the front of her pickup, a rather long chore considering the length of her legs and her reluctance. She snagged two boxes of supplies from the bed of the truck, balanced them in one hand as she unlocked the glass front door of the small cinder-block-and-tin-roof building in front of her, and welcomed herself—there was no one else to do it—into her new home.

Nobel County Veterinary Clinic, here I am.

Daniel Cash leaned against the icy bumper of his pickup and watched her with narrowed eyes. Nice to know he was such a miserable jerk that he could hate a woman on sight, he thought to himself. His mother would swat him a good one if she knew just how much he wanted to stalk across the street to tell that amazingly long drink of water that she didn’t belong in his town, didn’t belong in his county, and she sure as hell did not belong in his building.

Yep. Hated her on sight. Too damn bad for him she was the most interesting-looking female he’d seen since…ever. Too bad she looked a mile long from where he was sitting, and most of that leg. Too bad her butt sat up as high as a fence post and her hips moved kind of slinky-like. That wasn’t going to make a bit of difference. She was in his building, doing his job, living his life. And he wasn’t happy about it.

He’d been waiting for her, brooding about her. When he’d drunk as much coffee as he could hold in the café across the street from the old vet clinic—the new vet clinic, he supposed people would call it now—he’d come back to the truck to brood in the cold spring wind, hoping it’d take the edge off. It hadn’t.