Reckless

by Ruth Wind

  “There is no peace, is there? Not anywhere.”

  Letter to Reader

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Books by Ruth Wind

  About the Author

  Excerpt from the diary of Louise Forrest...

  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

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Teaser chapter

  Copyright

  “There is no peace, is there? Not anywhere.”

  Jake’s voice was ragged.

  Ramona could do nothing but reach for him.

  “There is peace, Jake,” she whispered. “Right here. Right now...let go of the pain, Jake.”

  He moaned. “I want you, Ramona.”

  It was her turn to close her eyes. To resist. His soul was bleeding, as was his heart, and he needed her. She ached to give him what he thought he wanted, but her instincts told her it would be wrong. “No, Jake. Not like this...”

  Dear Reader,

  I hope you’ve got a few days to yourself for this month’s wonderful books. We start off with Terese Ramin’s An Unexpected Addition. The “extra” in this Intimate Moments Extra title is the cast of characters—lots and lots of kids—and the heroine’s point of view once she finds herself pregnant by the irresistible hero. The ending, as always, is a happy one—but the ride takes some unexpected twists and turns I think you’ll enjoy.

  Paula Detmer Riggs brings her MATERNITY ROW miniseries over from Desire in Mommy By Surprise. This reunion romance—featuring a pregnant heroine, of course—is going to warm your heart and leave you with a smile. Cathryn Clare is back with A Marriage To Remember. Hero and ex-cop Nick Ryder has amnesia and has forgotten everything—though how he could have forgotten his gorgeous wife is only part of the mystery he has to solve. In Reckless, Ruth Wind’s THE LAST ROUNDUP trilogy continues. (Book one was a Special Edition.) Trust me, Colorado and the Forrest brothers will beckon you to return for book three. In The Twelve-Month Marriage, Kathryn Jensen puts her own emotional spin on that reader favorite, the marriage-of-convenience plot. And finally, welcome new author Bonnie Gardner with Stranger in Her Bed. Picture coming home to find out that everyone thinks you’re dead—and a gorgeous male stranger is living in your house!

  Enjoy them all, and don’t forget to come back next month for more of the most exciting romantic reading around, right here in Silhouette Intimate Moments.

  Yours,

  Leslie Wainger

  Senior Editor and Editorial Coordinator .

  Please address questions and book requests to:

  Silhouette Reader Service

  U.S.: 3010 Walden Ave., P.O. Box 1325, Buffalo, NY 14269

  Canadian: P.O. Box 609, Fort Erie, Ont L2A 5X3

  RECKLESS

  RUTH WIND

  For Chuck Walker, who is fondly remembered

  and often missed.

  Books by Ruth Wind

  Silhouette Intimate Moments

  Breaking the Rules #587

  *Reckless #796

  Silhouette Special Edition

  Strangers on a Train #555

  Summer’s Freedom #588

  Light of Day #635

  A Minute To Smile #742

  Jezebel’s Blues #785

  Walk In Beauty #881

  The Last Chance Ranch #977

  Rainsinger #1031

  *Marriage Material #1108

  *The Last Roundup

  RUTH WIND

  is the award-winning author of both contemporary and historical romance novels. She lives in the mountains of the Southwest with her husband, two growing sons and many animals in a hundred-year-old house the town blacksmith built. The only hobby she has since she started writing is tending the ancient garden of irises, lilies and lavender beyond her office window, and she says she can think of no more satisfying way to spend a life than growing children, books and flowers.

  Excerpt from the diary of Louise Forrest...

  Jake is at it again! He’s lived in these mountains all his life, and he knows better than to go climbing on rotten rock, especially half-drunk. That’s a tourist stunt. And it isn’t the first time lately he’s done something like that.

  It’s as if he’s asking for trouble all the time: driving too fast, drinking and partying too much with a different woman every night. Just being reckless. He isn’t sleeping or eating, either. And he hasn’t cut his hair in months. Could be I’m making too much out of it, but a mother has her instincts. When he was younger, the army—the honor and the discipline—was his entire life, and I don’t think he took much time to sow his wild oats. So, if he was enjoying himself...well, maybe I could understand. But he hates it! You can see it in his eyes.

  Something’s gone deeply wrong in my oldest son’s life. Wrong enough to make him give up the military and bury himself in that sterile apartment of his. Maybe I’ll have Ramona Hardy talk to him. She’s a doctor, and she’s done a lot of work with veterans. Besides, there’s something so peaceful about her....

  She may be the last chance I have to find my son again.

  Chapter 1

  Jake Forrest had not slept well last night In fact, he hadn’t slept at all. He’d lain in bed and stared at the ceiling, thinking that if he could only rest, he might not look so haggard for his brother’s wedding. Twice, he’d nearly gotten up for a belt of whiskey—that usually put him out—but he’d been afraid he might just stay up drinking till dawn. It had happened before, when the demons were on him.

  And the demons were on him now. They had been for more than a week, climbing from the trunk where he managed to periodically wrestle them and tormenting him with haunting memories and visions burned forever into his mind.

  Now, standing beside the altar as his brother took his vows, Jake swayed in exhaustion. He held himself rigidly erect, focusing on Lance and on the joy that shone in his eyes as he kissed his brand-new bride. In spite of himself, Jake smiled. Wasn’t that something? Lance married. Jake had honestly believed his brother would never settle down.

  But then nothing was turning out the way Jake thought it would.

  Tyler, supposedly the happy family man, had walled himself off up on his mountain, shunning women as if they were rats carrying plague. Lance, the footloose ladies’ man, was married with a child. And Jake was supposed to be the soldier. Likely a lieutenant colonel by now if he hadn’t bailed out four years before he could have retired in style.

  No, things were not turning out the way he had imagined.

  The wedding party started their march down the aisle. Jake automatically held out his arm for the woman he was paired with—a small brown wren with a bosom that could hardly be contained in the unfortunate choice of bridesmaid’s dress. The rest of the bridesmaids looked like confections in the simple yellow satin. This woman was a little too round for it, a little too pale to be wearing that sunny shade.

  She smiled at him, and he felt ashamed of his critical thoughts. In return, he managed to muster something like a smile. She squeezed his elbow as if offering support. “Are you all right?” she whispered.

  Jake scowled. What had she seen? Did he look as haggard as he felt? He’d forgotten to get his hair cut, and it was too long, and he’d nicked himself shaving, but he thought the black tux made him look a bit like his old self. Maybe not.

  “Just tired,” he said. The words came out on a gruff note he h
adn’t intended, making him sound worse than he felt.

  The woman—what was her name?—nodded. There was something empathetic in her eyes, something that made him feel annoyed and hungry all at once. How dare she look at him as if she knew his thoughts? As if she knew it wasn’t a hangover that made him feel miserable, but days and days without a single restful minute of sleep. He swallowed the fury it roused in him.

  “We’re almost finished here,” she said. “Then we eat.”

  Judging by her rounded shape, she probably looked forward to that, he thought darkly. Again, his meanness shocked him. In repentance, he tried to find something he liked about her as they stood on the church steps waiting for the limos that would take them to the reception.

  For one thing, she wasn’t really overweight. She was, as his mother would say, buxom. With generous hips and breasts, and arms that were a little fuller than the current emaciated standard. He didn’t like buxomness particularly, but looking at her, he had the sudden feeling she would be very soft. Warm and soft and easy to hold close in the darkness of a sleepless night.

  Her name suddenly popped into his mind: Ramona. Ramona Hardy. She was one of Tamara’s friends, but he didn’t know much more than that.

  “Lance has done this up right, hasn’t he?” she asked with a grin. “And Tamara looks like Cinderella.”

  Jake looked at his new sister-in-law. She wore an elaborate white gown, covered with beads and lace and pearls. Her dark hair was swept into a knot on top of her head. As he watched, Lance put his hands on his bride’s face and kissed her, pulling away with an expression of stunned wonder on his face. Tamara glowed.

  And just like that, Jake wasn’t standing on the church steps on a bright, late-spring day in Colorado. He was in a Kuwait village still smoking from the missiles that had tumbled buildings to rubble. Somewhere, a child screamed, and Jake couldn’t find it. Couldn’t find it until he ducked into the half-standing ruin of a house and saw the boy pinned—

  He shuddered violently at the flashback, slamming back to the happy noise of the wedding party. He blinked hard to clear the dry graininess of his eyes and tried to hold himself upright. To hide the trembling of his hands, he shoved them into his pockets.

  Ramona looked at him, steadily, clearly. Her eyes were big and brown, as big as a doe’s, and once again he thought she saw more than she should. She didn’t say anything, just kept her small hand on his elbow. He was absurdly grateful.

  “He’s spent a damn fortune on this wedding,” Jake managed to say aloud.

  “From what I understand, he can well afford it. What good is money if you can’t spend it on something like this once in a while?”

  Jake shrugged. “They look like Barbie and Ken.”

  Ramona smiled gently. “I think that’s the whole idea.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “Barbie and Ken and picket fences and the whole happily-ever-after game.” Jake stared at the bride and groom with a fierce, hollow ache in his chest. “I don’t believe in happily ever after.”

  “Not for anyone?”

  “I’ve never seen one.” Jake looked at her. “You make plans and have big dreams, and everybody tells you hard work makes things happen. And there you are one day, thinking you built something solid, something concrete you could put your hands on, and what happens? Life has a way of turning concrete dreams into a house of cards.” He spoke out of his despair, unaware he was giving voice to his thoughts. “No,” he repeated, “I don’t believe in happily ever after.” His words held a harsh rasp born of his weariness.

  Her small, strong hand tightened on his upper arm, and those wide, sympathetic—no, empathetic—eyes saw far more than he wanted them to see. Appalled that he’d been so brutally honest at a moment when he should have been taking pleasure in the joyful wedding of his brother, Jake looked away.

  And to his amazement, Ramona said nothing at all. Nothing placating or soothing or nullifying. As if she knew how he felt.

  The roiling disturbance in his chest increased in intensity. How dare she think she knew anything? He stiffened, pulling himself away from her, but that small hand stayed firmly wrapped around his arm, almost stubbornly giving him comfort and a measure of strength he didn’t want to accept.

  The limos arrived, sleek and black, hired out of Denver at an outrageous price. “See,” Ramona said mildly. “That wasn’t so terrible, was it?”

  “Better hurry up,” Jake said, moving forward. “Before they turn back into pumpkins.”

  At the reception, Ramona watched Jake Forrest carefully. Her instincts screamed that he was in trouble. Big trouble, judging by the hollows under his eyes. Gauntness had whittled away the handsome boyishness she remembered from high school, turning his face into something coyote-hungry.

  Ramona cornered Louise Forrest as the older woman left the dance floor, flushed from waltzing with an amiablelooking Latin man Ramona didn’t know. Smiling at the color in Louise’s cheeks, Ramona teased, “New boyfriend?”

  “Oh, heavens, no!” Louise protested. The ruddiness in her cheeks deepened. “I’m well past the age of boyfriends. He’s just a wonderful dancer.”

  “I saw that.” Ramona glanced over her shoulder. The man, short and spare, with a thick black mustache, watched Louise depart with a twinkle in his dark eyes. “Who is he? I haven’t met him.”

  Louise snagged a paper napkin from the buffet table and blotted her lips. “Alonzo Chacon. Lance hired him a couple of months ago. He does authentic adobe bricks, the old way.”

  “I’ll have to go see how he does it,” Ramona said, and meant it. She admired craftsmen.

  “You should.” Louise looked straight at her. “What’s on your mind, honey? That boy of mine got you worried?”

  “Yes.” Ramona wasn’t surprised at Louise’s perception. She halfway suspected it was no accident she and Jake had been paired in the wedding party. “You’re worried, too, aren’t you?”

  “You bet your life I am. For one thing, I don’t think he ever sleeps, not unless he’s flat-out drunk.”

  “That’s pretty evident.” Ramona glanced at Jake. He stood at the bar, a glass of something amber in his hand, giving his trademark grin to a slim, leggy blonde. “I thought he might pass out on the church steps.”

  Louise scowled at her son. “He hasn’t got a lick of sense about women lately, either. They’re all a bunch of loose, fast girls with only one thing on their minds.”

  Ramona smiled. Leaning negligently against the bar, tall and well formed, with his carelessly long, dark hair and vivid eyes, Jake looked like a movie star. “Well, you have to admit he’s a very attractive man.”

  “Who’s going to get himself killed if he doesn’t make peace with himself.” Louise thumped her empty glass on the table. “I saw the same thing happen to my father, when he came home from World War n. They called it combat fatigue back then: He was among those troops who went into Dachau, and he had nightmares that made him wake up screaming night after night. He didn’t eat. He couldn’t work. It was a terrible thing.”

  “Did he get well?”

  Louise pursed her lips in an ironic expression. “I’ll never know. He went off to look for work one morning and never came back.”

  Ramona put her hand on Louise’s arm. “I’m sorry.”

  “Ancient history,” Louise said with a shrug. “But I don’t aim to lose my son the way I lost my daddy, you understand?”

  “Of course.” She inclined her head. “I have the feeling you think I might be able to help him, and I don’t think you understand that I’m a G.P., not a psychologist or psychiatrist. I treat bodies, not minds.”

  Louise made a scoffing noise. “I know that. I’m not that dumb.”

  “Do you want a referral for a good counselor? I know the man who leads the support groups at the VA home.”

  “Nope,” Louise said firmly. “He won’t go to one. I want you to help.”

  Ramona grinned. Few women could be as steadfastly stubborn as Louise Forrest once she
’d made up her mind to something. Patiently, Ramona said, “I’m not qualified to treat him.”

  “So why do you spend all that time out there with those old coots at the VA home, huh?”

  “Some of those old coots are in pretty bad shape physically. They need medical doctors.”

  “Mmm-hmm. You think I don’t remember your daddy?”

  Ramona looked away. “I don’t.”

  “I know you don’t, honey. You were pretty little when he went off to war. And it’s a terrible thing that you lost him to it, but look what good things have come out of it.”

  Ramona felt a small clutch of emotion in her throat. The reasons for her devotion to the vets at the home were a lot more complicated, but Louise would not know all that. Lightly, Ramona said, “There are no mysteries about my psyche, are there? I’m a doctor because I wish I could go back and save him.”

  “That’s what I mean, sugar. God can turn anything into a positive.”

  “Maybe.” Ramona wasn’t entirely sure about that, but a wedding reception hardly seemed the place to hold a philosophical debate.

  “Listen.” Earnestly, Louise took her hand. “I’m not asking you to perform miracles, but Jake’s out there at the VA home a lot. He goes in the evenings. Maybe once in a while, you could just...be there.”

  Ramona waited.

  “You having a calming way about you, Ramona. It might be real nice for him just to have a woman friend—” she shot a dark glance toward the bar “—he could talk to.”