Katherine Garbera - In Bed with the Devil / High-Society Mistress

In Bed with the Devil by Susan Mallery

To The Samurai –

If you’re all reading this, it means you survived your month here at the lodge. I bet you thought it was going to drive you crazy, right? None of us were ever the type to settle down for long. That’s why I made those twenty million dollars dependent on your sticking around. Money talks, brothers. I’m glad you all made it.

Meri always said I was the guy who kept you all together, and she was afraid that after I was gone, The Samurai would be no more. Well, I wasn’t about to let that happen. When I got sick I discovered what really mattered. Have you worked it out yet?

Yeah, I thought so.

Hunter

High-Society Mistress by Katherine Garbera

He was all arrogant male .

Totally sure of himself and his impact on her. And she wished she could prove him wrong. Wished she could take a step away from him and dismiss him with a snooty comment that would put him in his place.

He smelled even better up close than he had when she’d shaken his hand. He crowded closer to her and she fought not to back up. But in the end her need for personal space won out and she inched away from him.

“You’re crowding me,” she said carefully. She was completely out of her element with this man.

“Good.”

“Why good?”

“I like it when you get your back up.”

“I don’t ‘get my back up.’ I’m a well-bred young lady.”

“I’m not a well-bred man,” he said.

SUSAN MALLERY

is a bestselling and award-winning author of over fifty books. She makes her home in the Los Angeles area with her handsome prince of a husband and her two adorable-but-not-bright cats.

Dear Reader,

I’ve always believed that friends are the family we make. That belief carries over to my writing, where I tell stories about friends.

The MILLIONAIRE OF THE MONTH series has been about friends. In my book, Jack and Meredith were once good friends. Then time and distance got in the way. Meri thinks she’s back to get closure and maybe a little revenge, but she’s wrong. She’s back because she’s still in love with her friend.

In Bed with the Devil wraps up the series, but don’t worry if you’ve missed the other books. I wrote it to stand alone. However, if you’ve become a fan of the series, you’ll enjoy catching up with all the previous characters. And meeting Hunter…

One of the coolest parts about being a romance writer is meeting other writers. These women are intelligent, caring and incredibly funny – qualities I want in my friends. It was a pleasure to work with them.

Happy reading,

Susan Mallery

SUSAN MALLERY

KATHERINE GARBERA

www.millsandboon.co.uk

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To the fabulously talented authors in this series. Thank you so much for inviting me along for the ride. It was wonderful fun and I would do it again in a heartbeat!

One

Eleven years ago …

Meredith Palmer spent the afternoon of her seventeenth birthday curled up on her narrow bed, sobbing uncontrollably. Everything about her life was a disaster. It was never going to be better—and what if she was one of the unlucky people who peaked in her teenage years? What if this was the best it was going to be?

Seriously, she should just throw herself out her dorm room window and be done with it. Of course, she was only on the fourth floor, so she was not going to actually kill herself. The most likely event was maiming.

She sat up and wiped her face. “Given the distance to the ground and the speed at impact,” she murmured to herself, then sniffed. “Depending on my position…” She reached for a piece of paper. “If I fell feet first—unlikely, but it could happen—then the majority of the stress would be on my…”

She started doing the calculations. Bone density versus a hard concrete landing or a softer grass landing. Assuming a coefficient of—

Meri threw down the pencil and paper and collapsed back on her bed. “I’m a total freak. I’ll never be anything but a freak. I should be planning my death , not doing math. No wonder I don’t have any friends.”

The sobs returned. She cried and cried, knowing that there was no cure for her freakishness. That she was destined to be one of those scary solitary people.

“I’ll have to get cats,” she cried. “I’m allergic to cats.”

The door to her room opened. She kept her face firmly in her pillow.

“Go away.”

“I don’t think so.”

That voice. She knew that voice. The owner was the star of every romantic and semisexual fantasy she’d ever had. Tall, with dark hair and eyes the color of the midnight sky—assuming one was away from the city, where the ambient light emitted enough of a—

Meri groaned. “Someone just kill me now.”

“No one’s going to kill you,” Jack said as he sat next to her on her bed and put a strong, large hand on her back. “Come on, kid. It’s your birthday. What’s the problem?”

How much time did he have? She could make him a list. Given an extra forty-five seconds, she could index it, translate it into a couple of languages, then turn it into computer code.

“I hate my life. It’s horrible. I’m a freak. Worse, I’m a fat, ugly freak and I’ll always be this way.”

She heard Jack draw in a breath.

There were a lot of reasons she was totally in love with him. Sure, he was incredibly good-looking, but that almost didn’t matter. The best part of Jack was he took time with her. He talked to her as if she was a real person. Next to Hunter, her brother, she loved Jack more than anyone.

“You’re not a freak,” he said, his voice low.

She noticed he didn’t say she wasn’t fat. There was no getting around the extra forty pounds on her five-foot-two-inch, small-boned frame. Unfortunately he also didn’t tell her she wasn’t ugly. Jack was kind, but he wasn’t a liar.

Between her braces and her nose—which rivaled the size of Io, one of Jupiter’s moons—and her blotchy complexion, she had a permanent offer from the circus to sign on up for the sideshow.

“I’m not normal,” she said, still speaking into her pillow because crying made her puffy and she didn’t need for Jack to see her looking even more hideous. “I was planning my death and instead I got caught up in math equations. Normal people don’t do that.”

“You’re right, Meri. You’re not normal. You’re way better than that. You’re a genius. The rest of us are idiots.”

He wasn’t an idiot. He was perfect.

“I’ve been in college since I was twelve,” she mumbled. “That’s five years. If I was really smart, I’d be done now.”