Sandra Marton - The Dangerous Jacob Wilde

“That ranch you own? It’s worth exactly what you paid for it,’ Jake said. ‘Unless, of course, you put a higher price on what you gave old Charlie than those services were truly worth—”

Addison slapped his face.

Hard.

The imprint of her hand stood out on his cheek in crimson relief. His dumbfounded expression told her she’d just scored a perfect shot.

Why hang around and ruin it?

Addison turned her back and faced the crowd.

“Move,” she said, and a path opened like the parting of the Red Sea.

She stomped down that path … and stopped halfway to the front door. What the hell? she thought, and turned to face him one last time.

“You’re also a nasty, egotistical, despicable jerk.”

The crowd gasped again, then erupted in a frantic buzz of delighted whispers.

She’d given Wilde’s Crossing enough to talk about for the next decade.

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’d 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!

Look out for Caleb’s and Travis’s stories in 2013

SANDRA MARTONwrote 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:

SHEIKH WITHOUT A HEART

THE REAL DIO D’AQUILLA (The Orsini Brides) THE ICE PRINCE (The Orsini Brides) NOT FOR SALE

Did you know these are also available as eBooks? Visit www.millsandboon.co.uk

www.millsandboon.co.uk

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ALL HIS LIFE, Jake Wilde had been a man women wanted and men envied.

At sixteen, he was a football hero. He had his pilot’s license. He dated the Homecoming Queen … and all the princesses in her court, one at a time, of course, because he had scruples—and because, even then, he understood women.

He was smart, too, and ruggedly good-looking, enough so that some guy had once stopped him on the street in Dallas to ask if he’d ever considered heading east to sign as a model.

Jake almost decked him until he realized it wasn’t a come-on but a serious offer. He thanked him, said, “No,” and could hardly wait to drive his truck back to his family’s enormous ranch so he could laugh about it with his brothers.

In a word, life was good.

Time blurred.

College. Three years of it, anyway. Then, for reasons that made sense at the time, he’d enlisted.

One way or another, all the Wildes had served their country, Travis as a hotshot fighter pilot, Caleb as an operative in one of those alphabet-soup government agencies nobody talked about. For Jake, it had been the army and a coveted assignment, flying Blackhawk helicopters on dangerous missions.

Then, in a heartbeat, everything changed.

His world. His life. The very principles that had always defined him.

And yet—

And yet, some things did not change.

He hadn’t quite realized that until a night in early spring as he tooled along a pitch-black Texas road, heading for home.

Jake scowled into the darkness.

Correction.

He was heading for the place where he’d grown up. He didn’t think of it as home anymore, didn’t think of any place as home.

He’d been away four long years. To be precise, four years, one month and fourteen days.

Still, the road seemed as familiar as the back of his hand.

So had the drive from the Dallas-Fort Worth airport.

Fifty miles of highway, the turn onto Country Road 227, the endless length of it bordered on either side by fence posts, the cattle standing still as sentinels in the quiet of night and then, almost an hour later, the bashed-in section of fence that seemed to have always marked the juncture where a nameless dirt road angled off to old man Chambers’s spread.

And he’d only stopped to check for IEDs once.

A record.

Jake made the turn onto the road, even after all these years automatically steering the ‘63 Thunderbird around the pothole by the bashed-in fence that marked the Chambers boundary. It was on the old man’s land, which was why nobody had filled it in.

“Don’t need nobody messin’ with my property,” Elijah Chambers would mumble if anyone was foolish enough to suggest it.

Jake’s father despised the old guy but then, the General despised anybody who wasn’t into spit and polish.

Even his own sons.

You grew up with a four-star father, you were expected to lead a four-star life.

Caleb used to say that when they were kids. Or maybe it had been Travis.

Maybe it had even been him, Jake thought, and came as close to a smile as he had in a very long time, but he squelched it, fast.

A man learned to avoid smiling when the end result might scare the crap out of small children.

Jake drummed his fingers against the steering wheel.

Maybe his best move was to turn the car around and head for …

Where?

Not D.C. Not the hospital. If he never saw another hospital in his lifetime, it would be too soon. Not the base or his town house in Georgetown. Too many memories and besides, he didn’t belong on the base or in D.C. anymore, and he’d sold the town house, signed the papers just yesterday.