by Lia Riley
What rubbish. “I did not set out to find the good in his lordship. The fact of his goodness came to me naturally, by way of his reputation. Even his servants cannot praise him enough. They are forever grateful for his benevolence. And I can find no fault in a man who would offer a position to a woman who’d been fired by her former employer and whose own father was taken to gaol.”
“Perhaps he wants your gratitude,” Lucan said, his tone edged with warning as he prowled nearer. “This entire series of events that has put you within his reach reeks of manipulation. You are too sensible to ignore how conveniently these circumstances have turned out in his favor.”
“Yet I suppose I’m meant to ignore the convenience in which you’ve abducted me?”
He laughed. The low, alluring sound had no place in the light of day. It belonged to the shadows that lurked in dark alcoves and to the secret desires that a woman of seven and twenty never dare reveal.
“It was damnably hard to get you here,” he said with such arrogance that she was assured her desires would remain secret forever. “You have no idea how much liquor Whitelock’s driver can hold. It took an age for him to pass out.”
Incredulous, she shook her head. “Are you blind to your own manipulations? It has not escaped my notice that you reacted without surprise to the news of my recent events. I can only assume that you are also aware of my father’s current predicament.”
“I have been to Fleet to see him.” Lucan’s expression lost all humor. “He has asked me to watch over you. So that is what I am doing.”
What a bold liar Lucan was—and looking her in the eye all the while, no less. “If that is true,” she scoffed, “you then interpreted his request as ‘Please, sir, abduct my daughter’? I find it more likely that he would have asked you to pay his debts to gain his freedom.”
“He declined my offer.”
She let out a laugh. “That is highly suspect. I do not think you are speaking a single word of truth.”
“You are putting your faith in the wrong man.” Something akin to irritation flashed in his gaze, like a warning shot. He took another step. “Perhaps those spectacles require new lenses. They certainly aren’t aiding your sight.”
“I wear these spectacles for reading, I’ll have you know. Otherwise, my vision is fine,” she countered, ignoring the heady static charge in the air between them. “I prefer to wear them instead of risking their misplacement.”
“You wear them like a shield of armor.”
The man irked her to no end. “Preposterous. I’ve no need for a shield of any sort. I cannot help it if you are intimidated by my spectacles and by my ability to see right through you.”
He stepped even closer. An unknown force, hot and barely leashed, crackled in the ever-shrinking space. She watched as he slid the blank parchment toward him before withdrawing the quill from the stand. Ignoring her, he dipped the end into the ink and wrote something on the page.
Undeterred, she continued her harangue. “Though you may doubt it, I can spot those snakes—as you like to refer to members of your own sex—quite easily. I can come to an understanding of a man’s character within moments of introduction. I am even able to anticipate”—Lucan handed the parchment to her. She accepted it and absently scanned the page—“his actions.”
Suddenly, she stopped and read it again. “As soon as you’ve finished reading this, I am going to kiss you.”
While she was still blinking at the words, Lucan claimed her mouth.
An Excerpt from
CHAOS
by Jamie Shaw
Jamie Shaw’s rock stars are back, and a girl from Shawn’s past has just joined the band. But will a month cooped up on a tour bus rekindle an old flame . . . or destroy the band as they know it?
“That was a hundred years ago, Kale!” I shout at my closed bedroom door as I wiggle into a pair of skintight jeans. I hop backward, backward, backward—until I’m nearly tripping over the combat boots lying in the middle of my childhood room.
“So why are you going to this audition?”
I barely manage to do a quick twist-and-turn to land on my bed instead of my ass, my furrowed brow directed at the ceiling as I finish yanking my pants up. “Because!”
Unsatisfied, Kale growls at me from the other side of my closed door. “Is it because you still like him?”
“I don’t even KNOW him!” I shout at a white swirl on the ceiling, kicking my legs out and fighting against the taut denim as I stride to my closed door. I grab the knob and throw it open. “And he probably doesn’t even remember me!”
Kale’s scowl is replaced by a big set of widening eyes as he takes in my outfit—tight, black, shredded-to-hell jeans paired with a loose black tank top that doesn’t do much to cover the lacy bra I’m wearing. The black fabric matches my wristbands and the parts of my hair that aren’t highlighted blue. I turn away from Kale to grab my boots.
“That is what you’re wearing?”
I snatch up the boots and do a showman’s twirl before plopping down on the edge of my bed. “I look hot, don’t I?”
Kale’s face contorts like the time I convinced him a Sour Patch Kid was just a Swedish Fish coated in sugar. “You’re my sister.”
“But I’m hot,” I counter with a confident smirk, and Kale huffs out a breath as I finish tying my boots.
“You’re lucky Mason isn’t home. He’d never let you leave the house.”
Freaking Mason. I roll my eyes.
I’ve been back home for only a few months—since December, when I decided that getting a bachelor’s degree in music theory wasn’t worth an extra year of nothing but general education requirements—but I’m already ready to do a kamikaze leap out of the nest again. Having a hyperactive roommate was nothing compared to my overprotective parents and even more overprotective older brothers.
“Well, Mason isn’t home. And neither is Mom or Dad. So are you going to tell me how I look or not?” I stand back up and prop my hands on my hips, wishing my brother and I still stood eye to eye.
Sounding thoroughly unhappy about it, Kale says, “You look amazing.”
A smile cracks across my face a moment before I grab my guitar case from where it’s propped against the wall. As I walk through the house, Kale trails after me.
“What’s the point in dressing up for him?” he asks with the echo of our footsteps following us down the hall.
“Who says it’s for him?”
“Kit,” Kale complains, and I stop walking. At the top of the stairs, I turn and face him.
“Kale, you know this is what I want to do with my life. I’ve wanted to be in a big-name band since middle school. And Shawn is an amazing guitarist. And so is Joel. And Adam is an amazing singer, and Mike is an amazing drummer . . . This is my chance to be amazing. Can’t you just be supportive?”
My twin braces his hands on my shoulders, and I have to wonder if it’s to comfort me or because he’s considering pushing me down the stairs. “You know I support you,” he says. “Just . . .” He twists his lip between his teeth, chewing it cherry red before releasing it. “Do you have to be amazing with him? He’s an asshole.”
“Maybe he’s a different person now,” I reason, but Kale’s dark eyes remain skeptical as ever.
“Maybe he’s not.”
“Even if he isn’t, I’m a different person now. I’m not the same nerd I was in high school.”
I start down the stairs, but Kale stays on my heels, yapping at me like a nippy dog. “You’re wearing the same boots.”
“These boots are killer,” I say—which should be obvious, but apparently needs to be said.
“Just do me a favor?”
At the front door, I turn around and begin backing onto the porch. “What favor?”
“If he hurts you again, use those boots to get revenge where it counts.”
An Excerpt from
THE BRIDE WORE DENIM
A Seven Brides for Seven Cowboys Novel
by Lizbet
h Selvig
When Harper Lee Crockett returns home to Paradise Ranch, Wyoming, the last thing she expects is to fall head-over-heels in lust for Cole, childhood neighbor and her older sister’s long-time boyfriend. The spirited and artistic Crockett sister has finally learned to resist her craziest impulses, but this latest trip home and Cole’s rough and tough appeal might be too much for her fading self-control.
Thank God for the chickens. They knew how to liven up a funeral.
Harper Crockett crouched against the rain-soaked wall of her father’s extravagant chicken coop and laughed until she cried. This time, however, the tears weren’t for the man who’d built the Henhouse Hilton—as she and her sisters had christened the porch-fronted coop that rivaled most human homes—they were for the eight multi-colored, escaped fowl that careened around the yard like over-caffeinated bees.
The very idea of a chicken stampede on one of Wyoming’s largest cattle ranches was enough to ease her sorrow, even today.
She glanced toward the back porch of her parent’s huge log home several hundred yards away to make sure she was still alone, and she wiped the tears and the rain from her eyes. “I know you probably aren’t liking this, Dad,” she said, aiming her words at the sopping chickens. “Chaos instead of order.”
Chaos had never been acceptable to Samuel Crockett.
A bock-bocking Welsummer rooster, gorgeous with its burnt orange and blue body and iridescent green tail, powered past, close enough for an ambush. Harper sprang from her position and nabbed the affronted bird around its thick, shiny body. “Gotcha,” she said as its feathers soaked her sweater. “Back to the pen for you.”
The rest of the chickens squawked in alarm at the apprehension and arrest of one of their own. They scattered again scolding and flapping.
Yeah, she thought as she deposited the rooster back in the chicken yard, her father had no choice now but to glower at the bedlam from heaven. He was the one who’d left the darn birds behind.
As the hens fussed, Harper assessed the little flock made up of her father’s favorite breeds—all chosen for their easy-going temperaments: friendly, buff-colored cochins; smart, docile, black and white Plymouth rocks; and sweet, shy black Australorps. Oh, what freedom and gang mentality could do—they’d turned into a band of egg-laying gangsters helping each other escape the law.
And despite there being seven chickens still left to corral, Harper reveled in sharing their attempted run for freedom with nobody. She brushed ineffectually at the mud on her soggy blue and brown broom skirt—hippie clothing, in the words of her sisters—and the stains on her favorite, crocheted summer sweater. It would have been much smarter to run back to the house and recruit help. Any number of kids bored with funereal reminiscing would have gladly volunteered. Her sisters—Joely and the triplets, if not Amelia—might have as well. The wrangling would have been done in minutes.
Something about facing this alone, however, fed her need to dredge any good memories she could from the day. She’d chased an awful lot of chickens throughout her youth. The memories served, and she didn’t want to share them.
Another lucky grab garnered her a little Australorp who was returned, protesting, to the yard. Glancing around once more to check the empty, rainy yard, Harper squatted back under the eaves of the pretty, yellow chicken mansion and let the half dozen chickens settle. These were not her mother’s birds. These were her father’s “girls”—creatures who’d sometimes received more warmth than the human females he’d raised.
Good memories tried to flee in the wake of her petty thoughts, and she grabbed them back. Of course her father had loved his daughters. He’d just never been good at showing it. There’d been plenty of good times.
Rain pittered in a slow, steady rhythm over the lawn and against the coop’s gingerbread scrollwork. It pattered into the genuine, petunia-filled, window boxes on their actual multi-paned windows. Inside, the chickens enjoyed oak-trimmed nesting boxes, two flights of ladders, and chicken-themed artwork. Behind their over-the-top manse stretched half an acre of safely-fenced running yard trimmed with white picket fencing. Why the idiot birds were shunning such luxury to go AWOL out here in the rain was beyond Harper—even if they had found the gate improperly latched.
Wiping rain from her face again, she concentrated like a cat stalking canaries and made three more successful lunges. Chicken wrangling was rarely about mad chasing and much more about patience. She smiled evilly at the remaining three criminals who now eyed her with concern.
“Give yourselves up, you dirty birds,” she called. “Your day on the lam is finished.”
She swooped toward a fluffy Cochin, a chicken breed normally known for its lazy friendliness, and the fat creature shocked her by feinting and then dodging. For the first time in this hunt, Harper missed her chicken. A resulting belly-flop onto the grass forced a startled grunt from her throat, and she slid four inches through a puddle. Before she could let loose the mild curse that bubbled up to her tongue, the mortifying sound of clapping echoed through the rain.
“I definitely give that a nine-point-five.”
A hot flash of awareness blazed through her stomach, leaving behind unwanted flutters. She closed her eyes, fighting back embarrassment, and she hadn’t yet found her voice when a large, sinewy male hand appeared in front of her, accompanied by rich, baritone laughter. She groaned and reached for his fingers.
“Hello, Cole,” she said, resignation forcing her vocal chords to work as she let him help her gently but unceremoniously to her feet.
Cole Wainwright stood before her, the knot of his tie pulled three inches down his white shirt front, the two buttons above it spread open. That left the tanned, corded skin of his neck at Harper’s eye level, and she swallowed. His brown-black hair was spiked and mussed, as if he’d just awoken, and his eyes sparkled in the rain like blue diamonds. She took a step back.
“Hullo, you,” he replied.
Copyright
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Excerpt from Last First Kiss copyright © 2015 by Lia Riley.
Excerpt from Close to Heart copyright © 2015 by Tina Klinesmith.
Excerpt from The Maddening Lord Montwood copyright © 2015 by Vivienne Lorret.
Excerpt from Chaos copyright © 2015 by Jamie Shaw.
Excerpt from The Bride Wore Denim copyright © 2015 by Lizbeth Selvig.
RIGHT WRONG GUY. Copyright © 2015 by Lia Riley. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
EPub Edition AUGUST 2015 ISBN: 9780062403780
Print Edition ISBN: 9780062403797
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