Janice Sims - Escape with Me

Could the safest place be in his arms?

Desperate to escape the media firestorm surrounding her duplicitous late husband, San Francisco designer Lana Corday flees to the Outer Banks of North Carolina. Her idyllic seaside home is the perfect place for a fresh start…especially when Lana meets sexy hunk Tennison West. But is the enigmatic filmmaker a man she can rely on or just another disappointment waiting to happen?

Getting Lana to let down her guard will take patience…and passion. Their mounting desire threatens to blow Ten’s cover, yet neither of them wants to turn back now. But once Lana discovers why Ten really came to isolated Pea Island, how will the FBI special agent ever regain her trust? As danger looms, Ten must succeed in his most important mission, or risk losing the woman who’s claimed his heart….

Ten escorted her to the dance floor and pulled her into his arms. He knew this was a mistake.

She pressed her body close and they began moving in sync. He forgot she was off-limits, that this was a ruse to get a rise out of her now ex-husband. When she relaxed and laid her head on his chest, he closed his eyes and willed himself not to physically react to the smell of her hair and the feel of her skin. The dress she was wearing left her arms and part of her back bare and her skin was silky and warm. She smelled of honeysuckle, fresh. He breathed her in.

Lana’s body trembled slightly. Was there any turning back from this? Their first dance on her dad’s deck had been nothing like this. It felt like a prelude to lovemaking and not just lovemaking but hot, uncontrollable, mind-blowing sex.

She tilted her head up and as soon as she met his eyes, she knew: He felt it, too.

He wanted her, wanted her as much as she wanted him. She took a deep breath and let it out. “We’re in trouble, aren’t we?”

JANICE SIMS

is the author of twenty-one novels and has had stories included in nine anthologies. She is the recipient of an Emma Award for her novel Desert Heat and two Romance in Color awards: an Award of Excellence for her novel For Keeps and a Best Novella award for her short story in the anthology A Very Special Love. She has been nominated for a Career Achievement Award by RT Book Reviews and her novel Temptation’s Song was nominated for Best Kimani Romance Series in 2010 by RT Book Reviews. A longtime member of Romance Writers of America, she lives in Central Florida with her family.

Escape with Me

Janice Sims

www.millsandboon.co.uk

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Dear Reader,

How well do you know your significant other? I’ve been married for a lot of years, but just the other day my husband said something that made me rethink how well I really know him. Luckily, in most relationships, the secrets each partner keeps are not the sinister kind. In this story, however, Lana Corday is devastated by her husband’s secrets. Will she allow his behavior to derail her life? Or will she pull herself together and maybe even get a little payback in the process?

If, after reading Escape with Me, you’d like to send me a message you can email me at Jani569432@aol.com or visit my website, www.janicesims.com. I’m also on Facebook.

For those of you who’re not yet online, you can write me at Post Office Box 811, Mascotte, FL 34753-0811.

All the best,

Janice Sims

Thanks, again, to Shannon Criss, whose editorial assistance was very much appreciated. Also thanks to all the lovely people of the Outer Banks who were so friendly and didn’t mind answering my many questions about their home!

Contents

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

Epilogue

Chapter 1

“Do you want your life back?” Grant Robinson asked Lana Corday as he stared intensely into her big brown eyes. Lana swallowed hard and lowered her gaze.

Grant, impeccably dressed in a tailored suit, was her attorney and one of the few men she still trusted.

He sat behind his cherrywood desk while Lana, too restless to sit, stood. He observed her as she mentally wrestled with his question. She had a sprinkling of freckles across the bridge of her nose and wide-spaced eyes that made her face, if not classically beautiful, very appealing. Her nose was strong, which gave her character, and her full mouth with a plump lower lip made him wonder about her stamina in bed. An inappropriate thought, since he was her attorney. But he was also a man. She was five-nine, had mocha-colored skin, her eyes were a warm brown with gold striations in them, and she had chin-length burnt-auburn hair—a shade of which Grant had never seen on any other woman. Once he’d asked her where she’d gotten that shade of hair, she’d laughed and said her great-grandfather was Scottish.

Lana sighed and walked over to the huge picture window in Grant’s San Francisco office.

She could see the Golden Gate Bridge from there. A few luxury yachts were in the Bay along with commercial cargo ships. San Francisco was her dream city. She adored the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Loved traipsing all over Fisherman’s Wharf and often ending her visit with dinner at Alioto’s. And she never tired of the luxury of the Palace Hotel. But now the city had lost its charm for her.

She turned back to face Grant. He was watching her with a quizzical expression on his handsome, tanned face. In a gesture of frustration he ran his hand through his thick, dark brown wavy hair that had begun to gray at the temples. Sighing, he asked, “Are you ever going to answer me? He abandoned you, Lana. It’s time you admitted that.”

“He was blown up on his boat. That’s not abandonment, that’s death,” Lana said, still sticking to her assertion that Jeremy was deceased and not a criminal on the run as Grant and any number of other people, including the FBI, believed.

Looking out over the Bay again, her mind took her back to that fateful day nearly six months ago when Jeremy had kissed her goodbye and left for an outing on their yacht. “Just a few hours to clear my mind, babe,” he had jauntily said before disappearing from her life forever.

Minutes later she was racing down to the dock next to the boathouse at their Bay-area home and looking in horror at what was left of the yacht, smoldering, listing leeward in the water. It had blown up with Jeremy aboard before it had even gotten fifty yards from the dock.

“There’s no evidence Jeremy was onboard,” Grant reminded her doggedly. “Believe me, if he had been killed aboard that yacht, forensics would have found at least some of his DNA. In two days he was going on trial for fraud, and if he lost his case he was going to be locked up for a very long time. He didn’t want to go to prison so he blew up his own yacht and disappeared, hoping that desperate act would convince the authorities he was dead.”

Lana stubbornly shook her head. She clasped the gold locket around her neck, a gift from Jeremy. “No, he loved me. He wouldn’t have intentionally left me to face this on my own. He has to be dead.”