Allison Leigh - A Weaver Baby

If her face got any hotter, her blood was going to steam right out of her ears. “Nothing, and good night, Mr Forrest. You should go play with your debutantes,” JD said as she turned to go.

His hand on her shoulder stopped her dead in her tracks. “I’m not interested in any debutantes.”

She sent up a breathless prayer for her fleeing common sense to get back where it belonged. But the light touch of his fingers on her shoulder didn’t move away, nor did her common sense trot on back to the barn. “Mr Forrest–”

“Most of the crew calls me Jake.” His fingers finally moved, sliding down her shoulder, grazing over her bare elbow beneath the short-sleeved shirt, only coming to a stop when they reached her wrist. He pressed his thumb against her frantic pulse. “But not you, not even after all these years. Why is that?”

“I like to keep things professional.” Unfortunately, her low, husky voice sounded anything but.

by

www.millsandboon.co.uk

ALLISON LEIGHstarted early by writing a Halloween play that her school class performed. Since then, though her tastes have changed, her love for reading has not. And her writing appetite simply grows more voracious by the day.

She has been a finalist for the RITA® Award and the Holt Medallion. But the true highlights of her day as a writer are when she receives word from a reader that they laughed, cried or lost a night of sleep while reading one of her books.

Born in Southern California, Allison has lived in several different cities in four different states. She has been, at one time or another, a beautician, a computer programmer and a secretary. She has recently begun writing full time after spending nearly a decade as an administrative assistant for a busy neighbourhood church. She currently makes her home in Arizona with her family. She loves to hear from her readers, who can write to her at PO Box 40772, Mesa, AZ 85274-0772, USA.

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Available in September 2010

from Mills & Boon®

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For my family.

“Heads up.” The warning came in accented English. “He’s got her highness with him.”

J. D. Clay gave Miguel a wry smile. “She can’t be that bad.” The man who owned the thoroughbreds she and Miguel Perez worked with had married the “highness” after all. Jake and Tiffany Forrest even had twin sons, though in the short time since Miguel had hired J.D. to work in the stables at Forrest’s Crossing, she hadn’t yet seen the boys.

“She’s worse,” Miguel said under his breath as he put a wide smile on his face while the couple in question strode along the hectic shed row toward them. “Beautiful an’ no good for da boss.”

J.D. frowned a little, but she’d quickly learned that gossip and rumor were always ripe in the stables, particularly when it came to Jake and his beauty-queen wife. They looked like they belonged on a movie screen rather than here, with dirt under their feet and the perfume of horse manure in the air.

Tiffany Forrest was ivory skinned and black haired. A modern-day version of Snow White, only this one had an elaborate race-day hat perched on her head that would have cost the dwarfs their entire mine. And her tall, athletically built husband, Jake, was simply the description in the dictionary beneath TallDarkandHandsome. Together, the two were—well, striking didn’t even come close.

They stopped next to the stalls that had very tasteful bronze FC plaques on them, and J.D. watched the man’s brown, intensely sharp gaze rove over his thoroughbreds there. One, Metal Cross, was running in the Kentucky Derby later that afternoon. His stable mate, June Cross, had won the Kentucky Oaks—a race for fillies only—the day before. “Everything set to go, Miguel?”

“Sí, sí.” Miguel was head trainer for Forrest’s Crossing and the diminutive Peruvian grinned widely. “Metal here, he gonna do it for us this year. Bring you the roses jus’ like when your daddy won ’em.”

“That’s what I want to hear.” Jake’s coffee-brown eyes skipped over Miguel’s head. “J.D.,” he greeted. “Everything looking good with our filly, there?”

Before J.D. could offer a response, the glossy woman at his side looked up at him with a smile that was only exceeded in brilliance by the jewels draped almost nonchalantly around her throat. “Jake, everyone’s waiting for us up top,” she reminded.

“We’ve got time,” Jake assured. He was still looking at them and missed the sexy pout his wife aimed his way.

J.D. didn’t. “Junie’s in great shape, Mr. Forrest,” she said as she ducked under June’s neck and moved to the far side, running the soft brush over the beautiful filly’s flank. She didn’t need to see the superior glint in Mrs. Forrest’s eyes to confirm that she was much more suitable inside the stable, than outside of it. “Metal’s going to run just as great as Junie did, yesterday.”

Jake’s smile was slightly crooked as he tucked his hand around his wife’s rail-thin waist and turned to go. “Then we’ll see you in the winner’s circle, won’t we?”

“Oh, Jake.” J.D. could hear Tiffany laughing lightly as she walked away with her husband. “Don’t go getting that poor girl’s hopes up. She’s not going to be there with us.”

J.D. kept grooming June. She already knew that if Metal ran his way to the winner’s circle, it would only be the owners, their trainer and the jockey smiling for pictures and accepting trophies and winnings. She’d be back here, mucking out the stalls and polishing up tack.

She was part of the stable woodwork while the couple was definitely Millionaire’s Row.

They were welcome to it.

Give J.D. horses any day of the week. They never disappointed her. And she never disappointed them.

Five years later

“You didn’t go out with the rest of the boys?” Jake’s voice was deep and in some fanciful part of J.D.’s mind, she imagined it felt like a soft blanket sliding down her bare skin.

“I didn’t want to cramp their style.” She sent him a smile over her shoulder, but the wryness of it was mostly for herself. As the only female in the entire stable crew at Forrest’s Crossing, she’d never been one of “the boys.” She was simply an assistant horse trainer on Jake’s sizable payroll who—according to Miguel—usually had one too many opinions of her own.