Ann Major - Wild Enough For Willa

Willa Longworth

Willa was a woman with one chance at destiny and she wasn’t going to let a man—or her longing for him—get in her way…or was she?

“Life’s like the weather. You can never be sure of it. That’s the miracle, don’t you see?”

Luke McKade

He had done all the right things for the wrong reasons—until he met Willa. From that moment, his life would never be the same.

“You owe me a romp in the hay, Mrs. Longworth.”

Little Red Longworth

This ailing heir wanted someone to care for him during his final days. He found an angel in Willa…and a wife.

“I went to kill me a lawyer and a bastard brother. I got a wife.”

Hesper Longworth

The spiteful sister-in-law doesn’t want Willa to get a single red cent.

“Your unfortunate past is hardly my concern, Willa dear. I’m here to buy you out.”

Brandon Baines

A powerful lawyer with an ego the size of Texas and a dangerous need to keep things—and Willa—quiet!

“It’s just me and you, sweetheart. We’re all alone in the middle of nowhere. Now, where’s the money?”

INSEPARABLE

www.mirabooks.co.uk

To my precious daughter, Kimberley Leta Cleaves, who is quirky, funny, warm, witty, young. And because she is all those things, she is a challenge to me as a mother.When somebody asks me, where do you get your ideas, I should tell them from my daughter, who is my very own adorable muse.Thank you for Willa, Kimberley.

I want to thank the following people:

To Tara Gavin and Dianne Moggy for more than I can say

To Karen Solem

To Patience Smith

To Ted, for realizing that dinners and a clean house don’t matter nearly as much as writing

To Karen Olsson and Meg Guerra, who told me about Laredo

To Dorothy Deaver, who decorated Willa’s house

To Steve Stainkamp and Geri Rice

To Chris Misner and Greg McKee for telling me about the computer business

To Patricia Patterson for streamlining my business affairs so I can write

If I were alone in a desert

And feeling afraid,

I would want a child to be with me.

For then my fear would disappear

And I would be made strong.

This is what life in itself can do

Because it is so noble, so full of pleasure

And so powerful.

But if I could not have a child with me

I would like to have at least a living animal

At my side to comfort me.

Therefore,

Let those who bring about wonderful things

In their big, dark books

Take an animal—perhaps a dog—

To help them.

The life within the animal

Will give them strength in turn.

For equality

Gives strength in all things

And at all times.

—Meister Eckhart (1260–1329)

(Author’s note: As a cat lover, I change dog to cat. When I go alone into my imagination to write, Kanka, my cat, goes with me to help by sitting on my manuscript.)

Book One Book One “What we call the ending is usually the beginning.”

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Book Two

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Book Three

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Book Four

Chapter 25

“What we call the ending is usually the beginning.”

Marcie, his gentle, beautiful wife…Dead?

And it was all his fault.

Luke McKade sat alone in his vast penthouse office in southwest Austin. He willed the silence and the dark of his new gorgeous, empty building—the building that Marcie had helped design and decorate—to devour him.

Driven, he always worked later than his employees. Not that tonight was about work.

“Sa-a-ve the baby,” Marcie had whispered in her pronounced Texas drawl with its elongated vowels. She’d gripped him fiercely when he’d knelt over her bed. Her final, hoarse cry was swallowed, strangled. Then she’d died in his arms.

His mind had raced. His heart had thundered. What baby? What baby?

“A son,” the white-coated doctor had confirmed after the autopsy.

Luke wearily massaged the back of his neck. Restless by nature, always on the move, he rarely sat behind his desk this long—and never to reflect on his own shortcomings.

Murder. He’d done murder.

She’d been so beautiful. So gentle. So classy. How he had loved looking at her. She had known how to dress. Other men had envied him, which is why he’d married her.

He pushed his fingers through his untidy wavy black hair. On top of today’s unread newspapers and his managers’ reports from yesterday lay several mangled scraps of paper—his phone messages. Kate, his freckle-faced, madcap secretary with corkscrew red curls, scrawled numbers and names on whatever she had handy.

Among other problems, the Feds were suing him for restriction of trade, and he was trying to float a new IPO. Luke thumbed through the fast-food napkins, Post-it notes, and a couple of pages she’d torn from her calendar, his tension heightening. His lawyers had called. So had his ranch foreman. The name of the president of a rival company was highlighted by a smear of mustard. But what charged Luke was the name, Brandon Baines.

Brandon Baines had called three times.

Baines, big criminal lawyer in Laredo.

Laredo was a border town. As such, it was too far from Mexico City and too far from Washington, D.C. for either nation’s laws to be taken too seriously. Men like Baines could prosper there.

Baines and he had gone to law school together. He’d been like most of their class—rich, handsome, lily-white, ultraconservative—a racist to the core, and worse things, too, underneath his politically correct exterior. Baines hadn’t much cottoned to McKade’s darker skin or rougher, cruder views about life—except where they concerned women.

Baines’s tenacity and killer instincts had brought him fame and fortune in the free and easy Laredo. He had a rare talent for getting down and dirty in the courtroom. No lawyer in Texas had gotten more criminals acquitted than he. With the rise in crime, especially in drug dealing, his talents were in demand. He never gave up on a case. Never. Even when all seemed lost for the guiltiest of his drug-dealer clients, his mantra was, “This is good.”

Luke had forgotten all about Little Red’s imminent release.

I’m gonna shoot myself a lawyer and a bastard.

Luke didn’t like Baines or Laredo even though the two men shared a common enemy.

Little Red Longworth. What was he now—twenty-three?

The Longworths would be happy to have their precious son and brother home in New Mexico again.

Luke swallowed, trying to rid himself of the sudden bad taste in his mouth.

He wadded Kate’s scribblings and pitched them in the trash.

Later. Tomorrow.

Tonight was for Marcie, for his guilt.

Maybe everybody else in the whole damned world thought Marcie had slammed head-on into that limestone cliff all by herself, but Luke McKade knew differently. He’d killed her, and their unborn baby boy, as surely as if his hand had been on her black leather steering wheel.