Peggy Moreland - Millionaire Boss

The moment the words were out, Penny clapped a hand over her mouth, her face draining of color. With a strangled sob she ran for her room.

Erik winced at the furious slam of the door.

A virgin? Had his mousy secretary just confessed to being a virgin?

He shook his head. No way, he told himself. She couldn’t be a virgin. Not with a body like that.

At the thought, an image pushed itself into his mind of her standing in the ballroom in that dress. The clingy, glittery fabric hugged her body like a second skin, accentuating a slender waist and full sensuous hips.

He groaned, knowing he’d never get to sleep that night. Not when he knew a virgin slept in the room across from his….

Dear Reader,

Welcome to the world of Silhouette Desire, where you can indulge yourself every month with romances that can only be described as passionate, powerful and provocative!

The always fabulous Elizabeth Bevarly offers you May’s MAN OF THE MONTH, so get ready for The Temptation of Rory Monahan. Enjoy reading about a gorgeous professor who falls for a librarian busy reading up on how to catch a man!

The tantalizing Desire miniseries TEXAS CATTLEMAN’S CLUB: LONE STAR JEWELS concludes with Tycoon Warrior by Sheri WhiteFeather. A Native American ex-military man reunites with his estranged wife on a secret mission that renews their love.

Popular Peggy Moreland returns to Desire with a romance about a plain-Jane secretary who is in love with her Millionaire Boss. The hero-focused miniseries BACHELOR BATTALION by Maureen Child continues with Prince Charming in Dress Blues, who’s snowbound in a cabin with an unmarried woman about to give birth! Baby at His Door by Katherine Garbera features a small-town sheriff, a beautiful stranger and the bundle of love who unites them. And Sara Orwig writes a lovely tale about a couple entering a marriage of convenience in Cowboy’s Secret Child.

This month, Silhouette is proud to announce we’ve joined the national campaign “Get Caught Reading” in order to promote reading in the United States. So set a good example, and get caught reading all six of these exhilarating Desire titles!

Enjoy!

Joan Marlow Golan

Senior Editor, Silhouette Desire

www.millsandboon.co.uk

published her first romance with Silhouette in 1989 and continues to delight readers with stories set in her home state of Texas. Winner of the National Readers’ Choice Award, a nominee for Romantic Times Reviewer’s Choice Award and a finalist for the prestigious RITA Award, Peggy has appeared on the USA Today and Waldenbooks bestseller lists. When not writing, she enjoys spending time at the farm riding her quarter horse, Lo-Jump. She, her husband and three children make their home in Texas. You may write to Peggy at P.O. Box 1099, Florence, TX 76257-1099.

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

It was the stuff romance novels were made of.

Man and Woman meet briefly during college, then go their separate ways after graduation.

Man dedicates his life to building a business and quickly establishes himself as a leader in the corporate world and as one of the most sought-after bachelors in the world.

Woman, having lost her heart to Man, resigns herself to being an old maid and devotes her life to keeping house for her widowed brother and caring for his three motherless children.

Ten years later Woman finds Man’s classified ad for a secretary and applies for the job, certain that it is destiny that she has found the advertisement at the precise moment when she’s decided her brother and his children have become too dependent on her and she needs to create a life of her own, separate from them.

Reunion takes place, where Man declares his undying love for Woman, and they live happily ever after.

Penny Rawley would have laughed at the clichéd plot and the pathetic heroine with her terminal case of unrequited love, if it wasn’t her own life she was reflecting on…well, except for that last scene, the one with the reunion and happily-ever-after. That particular drama had yet to be played out.

But it would soon, she thought, glancing uneasily at the elevator doors opposite her desk. Would he recognize her when he arrived? she wondered nervously. Would he remember the young college coed who had typed his term papers for him ten years ago?

Odd as it seemed, though she’d worked for Erik Thompson for almost a month, she had yet to meet with him face-to-face…at least, not in the recent past. He had been on a business trip in Japan when Eleanor Hilloughby, the secretary whom Penny had replaced, had hired Penny for the job. A dear, sweet lady, Eleanor had claimed she was retiring to spend more time with her grandchildren—though Penny suspected the woman might well be, at this very moment, cheerfully weaving baskets in some insane asylum and not doting on her grandchildren as she’d professed.

After less than a month in Erik’s employ, Penny was convinced that anyone who worked directly for the man was a prime candidate for a frontal lobotomy. He was disorganized, self-absorbed and communicated with his employees as if they were nothing but machines.

She huffed a breath at the reminder of the hundreds of e-mails he’d blasted to her computer from the far corners of the world. Nothing but fragments, the lot of them. Clusters of words thrown together without heed for syntax, spelling or punctuation. She found deciphering them as tedious as unraveling a secret code.

But what irked her more was that not once, in any of the e-mails he’d sent to her, had he commented on the change in his office staff or referred to her directly in any way. Each post he’d sent was addressed to mysecretary@cybercowboy.com. For all he’d indicated, Penny could be a monkey sitting behind what was once Mrs. Hilloughby’s desk, gleefully eating bananas while handling all his business and personal affairs.

She told herself that it didn’t matter, that the lack of remembrance didn’t hurt. Just because she remembered Erik, didn’t mean that he should remember her, as well. After all, she was Penny Rawley, poster child for wallflowers worldwide. Plain. Forgettable. Invisible. Whereas, he was the Erik Thompson. Computer genius. Entrepreneur extraordinaire. The most sought-after bachelor in Texas, if not the world. The self-proclaimed lawman who rode through cyber space on bandwidth rather than a horse, packing a keyboard instead of a six-shooter as he tracked down criminals in the relatively new frontier known as the Internet.

But it did hurt, she admitted, blinking back an unexpected rush of tears. If he didn’t recognize her when he arrived, or even acknowledge in some way that he’d once made her acquaintance, she feared she’d die of a broken heart…or, at the very least, suffer extreme humiliation.

To heck with her date with destiny, she told herself, already reaching for the purse she’d tucked within the kneehole space of her desk. She would quit. Leave before he arrived. Spare herself the heartbreak and humiliation. She’d find a new job. One with a lesser-known company, a less-infamous owner. One where she had no past connection with her employer.