Marie Ferrarella: Lily and the Lawman

Max allowed himself just one touch of her hair. “I like them with shining black hair and legs so long they make you want to fall to your knees and thank God you’re alive.”

Damn it, her heart had shifted again. Now it was in her throat, making it hard to breathe. Still, Lily raised her chin defiantly. Willing him to do something to prove her wrong.

“I don’t believe you.”

He shrugged as if it made no difference to him one way or another.

“Believe what you want. But, woman, you have stirred up something inside of me I’ve never felt before and I think that for both our sakes, we should walk away from this here and now, before we both do something that there’ll be no walking away from….”

www.millsandboon.co.uk

To

Julie Barrett,

Welcome to the fold

earned a master’s degree in Shakespearean comedy and, perhaps as a result, her writing is distinguished by humor and natural dialogue. This RITA ®Award-winning author’s goal is to entertain and to make people laugh and feel good. She has written over one hundred books for Silhouette, some under the name Marie Nicole. Her romances are beloved by fans worldwide and have been translated into Spanish, Italian, German, Russian, Polish, Japanese and Korean.

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

“I hate men. I hate tall men, I hate short men, I hate old men, I hate young men. I hate men!”

Alison Quintano held the phone away from her ear for a moment. Distance hardly muted her older sister Lily’s tirade. It was as if the petite woman who had dominated a large portion of Alison’s childhood was standing right here in Hades’s lone medical clinic rather than far away, in her own trendy Seattle apartment.

“You. Men. Hate. Got it,” Alison quipped, trying to get Lily’s voice down to a level that didn’t threaten to shatter her eardrum. Lily had called her about three minutes ago and had been carrying on like this from the moment she’d answered the phone. “Now calm down and tell me what brought this on.”

Even as she said it, Alison had a sneaking suspicion she knew what the problem was. Or rather, who.

Lily steamrolled right over the question, not hearing her sister. She was just too angry and trying very, very hard not to be hurt. But the pain was there, hot and biting.

How could she have been this blind?

“I especially hate sneaky plastic surgeon men.”

Ah, now they were getting to it, Alison thought. Lily’s fiancé, Allen, was a plastic surgeon. Alison felt guilty over the sense of relief she was experiencing. But it was there nonetheless. She had never liked Allen. None of them had.

“Does this mean the wedding’s off?” Alison could just see their older brother, Kevin, doing a little jig.

Of the three of them, Kevin, who had raised them ever since their father had died, had disliked Allen the most. The artificial surgeon was the way he referred to Allen whenever he mentioned the man to the rest of them.

But, Lily being Lily, none of them had said anything to her. It would have only made her dig in her heels. Now, it looked as if her heels had been naturally dislodged.

It was hard for Alison to keep from cheering.

Feeling like a caged animal, Lily paced the length of her kitchen, a headset sitting like an appendage on her straight black hair. Normally, being around the various state-of-the-art appliances in her kitchen soothed her. But nothing was soothing her now. Short of filleting her fiancé.

Ex-fiancé, she amended with a vengeance. How could he? How could he?

“Not only is the wedding off, but I very nearly came close to taking his head off, as well.” She huffed angrily, struggling to keep the skewering feeling of betrayal at bay. “Not that he needs his head since he seems to rely very heavily on the Braille system of doing things.”

With the telephone wedged against her shoulder and her ear, Alison tallied up a bill for the burly miner who had just walked out of examining room one. It took her a second to decipher her brother Jimmy’s illegible handwriting. Even for a doctor it was awful, she thought.

“Does this come with any subtitles, Lily, or am I going to have to figure out what you’re talking about on my own?”

Alison’s words bounced off Lily’s brain like so many cascading beads. Nothing was making sense right now. Lily looked around her, searching for a way to siphon off some of the anger she was feeling.

It was as if she were a kettle with the top about to blow.

She’d never been so angry in her life. Never. She’d given that narcissistic idiot some of the best entrées of her life.

Taking a breath, she tried to begin at the beginning. “Allen kept complaining about how predictable I was, how all I ever thought about was work, that I was never spontaneous.” Lily ground her teeth together, thinking what a fool she’d been. Had this kind of thing really been going on under her nose all the time? “So I was spontaneous. I got Arthur to take over for me at Lily’s, grabbed a bottle of our finest champagne from the wine cellar, packed a picnic lunch of nothing less than my finest fare and came over to his apartment to surprise him.”

Finding herself in the living room without the slightest idea how she got there, Lily sank down onto the sofa as if all at once all the air had been let out of her body.

“I surprised him, all right. In bed with one of his former patients. The breast enhancement one.” She spat the words out. There was no comfort in the fact that the woman had looked as though she’d been wearing a flotation device.

Lily blinked. Were those tears she felt on her lashes? No, damn it, she wasn’t going to waste tears on that jerk. “He was trying to get closer to his work, no doubt.”

Handing the miner his receipt, Alison nodded as the man paid her and took his leave. Poor Lily, she thought. But thank God the so-called gift to the medical profession wasn’t going to be part of the family, after all. “I get the picture, Lil.”

Lily tossed her head and then grabbed the headset as it threatened to slide off. “Well, picture him and his cutie wearing the lobster Newburg I threw at them.”

Alison knew her sister was very capable of pitching things when she got angry. She laughed, tickled as she envisioned the sight. “Good for you. I never liked Allen anyway.”

Frowning, Lily stood up and began to pace again. To think of all the time she’d wasted on that man… “Well, you don’t have to try to like him anymore. The wedding is off.” She blew out a long breath, feeling empty and trying not to. Where had all this sadness come from suddenly? “My life is off.”

Alison knew a dramatic tirade in the making when she heard one. She tried to head her off before Lily picked up another full head of steam. “Lily.”

Standing beside her audio system, Lily flipped a switch. The song playing on the radio had memories attached to it. Bitter ones now. Lily flipped the switch off again. “I should have never thought that I could give love a try.”

Alison tried again. “—Lily.”