His Best Mistake

by Lucy King

  “I thought there was something wrong with me,” she said, her voice cracking and slamming him back to the present.

  What? What? His chest tightened. “Wrong with you?” he said, the realisation of how badly he must have hurt her just about killing him. “There’s nothing wrong with you at all. I’m the one who has something wrong with him.”

  “One minute you were trying to get me into bed, the next you were telling me you wanted me to go. I thought you were on my side, Jack, and then I discovered you weren’t.”

  “I will always be on your side,” he vowed, and he’d never meant anything more. “Always.”

  “But what if I’m not good enough?” she said, her eyes clouding over for a second.

  “Not good enough for what?”

  “Not what. Who.”

  A streak of pure protectiveness shot through him then and he felt his hands curl into fists. “Did someone make you feel you aren’t good enough?” he growled. “Who? Your parents?”

  “Yes.”

  “Brad?”

  “Yes.”

  “Me?” he said and paled slightly.

  “For a little while.”

  “God, I’m sorry,” he said gruffly. “Who else? Tell me and I’ll hunt them down and string them up.”

  “You’d really do that, wouldn’t you?”

  “Just give me names and a couple of weeks.”

  “It doesn’t matter now.”

  Jack shook his head. “Not good enough?” he echoed in disbelief. “Not good enough? You are everything, my darling. You’re the moon and the bloody stars and if people can’t see that then that’s their loss. You’re brave and wonderful and you have no idea how much I admire absolutely everything about you. You’re astonishing, and I badly want us to make a go of this. It’s not going to be easy, I know that. You and I both carry enough baggage to sink a ship and it’s all happened rather fast, but I’ve never been surer of anything in my life.” He took a step towards her, his heart thundering, a cold sweat breaking out all over his body, and he went dizzy at the realisation of how much he wanted her to feel the same way about him as he did about her, how much he feared she might not. “Let me be there for you, Stella. And our baby. And be there for me. Let’s do this. Together. Take a gamble on us. What do you think?”

  *

  “What do I think?” said Stella, her throat tight and her eyes prickling. She thought it was just about the loveliest speech she’d ever heard in her entire life. Jack loved her and he wanted her, and she ached with the force of her response to it. It was everything she’d ever dreamed of and had come from a man she was potty about, a man she thought she’d lost but who had trekked across the country to find her, who was still wearing his suit, which meant he’d presumably come straight from the office, and oh, now a lump was lodging in her throat.

  “Well, yes,” he said and he gave her a smile that did nothing to distract from the hint of nervousness and vulnerability she saw flicker in the depths of his eyes. “What do you think? I’m laying my heart and everything else on the line here,” he said, his voice breaking a little. “If you’re going to steamroller it, please be gentle.”

  “I wouldn’t dream of steamrollering it,” she said, her heart swelling to bursting point. “I love you too much to do that. I’ve been falling for you from practically the first moment we met too and I’ve missed you so much. I thought I was going to have to do this all on my own, and while that would have been fine and I’d have done it, it would be so much better to do it with you. And I’m more than ready to take a gamble on us, only it wouldn’t that much of a gamble when the odds are so firmly stacked in our favour. I love you, Jack, and no, you’re right, it may not be easy at first, but I reckon we can handle it. I think together we can handle pretty much anything.”

  She stopped and held her breath and then Jack was tugging her off the wall and into his arms. “Oh, thank God for that,” he muttered, gathering her into an embrace so tight she could feel the thunder of his heart against her cheek. “I thought I’d blown it. I’m sorry I’ve been such a fool.”

  “I understand.”

  He pulled back and looked down at her, his eyes blazing with emotion. “You do, don’t you? You’re quite, quite magnificent.”

  Stella grinned and wound her arms round his neck, every cell of her body filled with such happiness she could scarcely believe it. “Magnificent,” she said with a shaky smile, her throat tight. “I think I like that.”

  “I intend to spend the rest of my life reminding you of just how magnificent you are.”

  “So what happens now?” she said, pressing closer and feeling the heat begin to build as desire rose inside her.

  Jack’s eyes darkened and his gaze dropped to her mouth. “Since it’s been way too long,” he said, taking her face in his hands and lowering his head so achingly slowly she thought she might pass out with longing. “This.”

  As their mouths met and they kissed, softly at first, then more greedily, more frantically, Stella closed her eyes and gave in to it, her brain frying and her heart thundering. This was what she’d been looking for and waiting for her whole life. Him. Jack. The man who would always be at her side and on her team. The man who was now sliding his hands down to the buttons of her jeans and brushing aside her protests that if they went any further they’d scare the sheep with the very reasonable argument that given what the sheep had done to him all those weeks ago it seemed only fair. The man she loved and wanted so wholly she was never him letting go.

  Epilogue

  Six months later

  Lying propped up on the bed in the private room at London’s top maternity hospital, Stella grinned as Jack, who held the two-day-old seven-pound bundle of baby that was their daughter in the crook of one arm, tapped the bottle of champagne with the spoon he was holding in the hand of the other.

  “Everyone,” he said over the chatter that swiftly hushed, “meet Grace Isobel Maclean. Gracie, sweetheart, these are your grandparents, Edward and Joanna Maclean. And this is your Auntie Cora and your soon-to-be Uncle Lucas. Say hello.”

  In response Gracie wrinkled up her tiny perfect nose, while Stella just watched as her in-laws cooed around Jack and the baby. The emotion that blasted through her made her heart turn over and her throat tighten.

  How had she ever got so lucky? she wondered, her eyes stinging as she welled up for the third time in as many minutes. She had a husband she adored and who seemed to adore her back, and now with a baby, the family she’d always dreamed of.

  It hadn’t been an entirely bump-free journey to get here, though. Her parents hadn’t changed. Despite their continued lack of interest in her – and God only knew where they were at the moment, somewhere in the Azores, quite possibly – she’d kept them up to date with the progress of the pregnancy, mainly because she felt she owed it to her baby to keep the lines of communication open; but she genuinely no longer cared what they did. Why would she when she had Jack and had been embraced so warmly by his family?

  That had taken a while. When he’d told his parents about her and the baby they’d initially been stunned. Confused. And understandably appalled for Cora. But in time they’d reached acceptance and then delight, and when Jack and Stella had married three months ago it had been his mother who’d helped her organise the small but intimate ceremony. Cora, who’d returned from Spain in a totally different frame of mind to when she’d gone, had been her maid of honour.

  Shortly after the honeymoon, she and Jack had moved into a house with enough bedrooms to accommodate Gracie’s future siblings, apparently, and a garden that boasted a swimming pool and a tennis court. And soon after that she’d had a call to say that her coffee table book would be published the following year.

  It had been quite a twelve months, and looking back Stella could hardly believe everything that had happened. Last Christmas she’d spent lost and alone. This Christmas she’d be with Jack and Gracie and surrounded by so much love she sometimes thought she’d explod
e with it. She’d come so far. Achieved so much. And it was all down to Jack and his rock-solid belief in her. Jack, who always had her back, and who was now handing their daughter to his sister and walking over to her, so gorgeous it made her catch her breath every single time.

  “Happy?” he murmured, smiling as he bent down to brush her lips with his in a way that never failed to make her heart beat faster.

  “Deliriously.”

  “I love you.”

  “I love you too.”

  He looked deep into her eyes, kissed her again, then said, just for her, “The moon and stars, my darling. The moon and the bloody stars.”

  The End

  The Maclean Family Legacy series

  Book 1: His Best Mistake

  Jack Maclean’s story

  Buy now!

  Book 2: Her Forbidden Warrior

  Cora Maclean’s story!

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  Here’s a sneak peek of Her Forbidden Warrior, book 2 in the bestselling Maclean Family Legacy series!

  Lucy King

  Copyright 2018

  Buy now!

  Lucas Hart sat at his desk in his penthouse office on the tenth floor of the central London building that housed his company, utterly gripped by the real-time action unfolding on the monitor in front of him.

  Somewhere in the middle of a desert several thousand miles away, half a dozen men were running towards the square shape of a hut, their blurry white shapes moving swiftly across the grey sea of sand. As they reached the building, they fanned out to surround it, and then, once in position, they held absolutely still – until a moment later, when one of them lobbed in a smoke bomb and that patch of screen went white.

  Every muscle in Lucas’s body tightened as he waited for the screen to clear, experience automatically filling in the blanks as the seconds ticked by until the hut became visible once more.

  What the hell was taking so long? he wondered with a frown as the men failed to emerge. What were they doing in there?

  Possible scenarios flashed through his head, making his pulse race and adrenaline surge, and then there they were, exiting the building and heading back in the direction they’d come from, making for the helicopter that would bring them home. Only now, he could now make out the shapes of seven individuals, which meant that the operation had been a success, and God, was that a relief.

  Lucas sat back and rubbed a hand along his jaw, the tension easing from his shoulders as he watched the progress of the men with continued fascination and not a small degree of envy. Only a handful of people knew that inside the hut had been an oil executive who’d gone missing four weeks ago, much to the distress of his colleagues and family. The same handful of people knew that Lucas’s company had been hired to negotiate with his kidnappers and, when that had failed, to locate and rescue him.

  Fewer people than that, though, knew that once upon a time Lucas would have been one of those dark, shadowy men, parachuted in to extract the subject with the minimum of fuss, following orders, no questions asked.

  These days, as owner and CEO of Hart Solutions, a global business providing services that ranged from corporate fraud investigation to political risk analysis to crisis response, Lucas gave the orders rather than received them, but that didn’t mean he didn’t occasionally miss the thrill of danger and the wits by which he’d lived on and off for nearly a decade.

  More than occasionally, if he was being brutally honest, which was why the infra-red footage that was being captured by an overhead drone and streamed live to his desktop was so compelling.

  When the dissatisfaction had begun to set in he didn’t know. He’d left the army to set up his business four years ago, and it had been very much the right decision at the right time. Growth had been rapid, the learning curve steep. When he’d realised he lacked gravitas and experience in the civilian world he’d brought it on board, and now his company was number one in its field and his reputation was solid.

  He had nothing whatsoever to complain about, yet despite his success, he’d woken up one morning a couple of months ago with the niggling feeling that something was missing. Initially he’d dismissed it as absurd since his life was pretty much exactly the way he wanted, but it refused to go away, gnawing at him with increasing persistence until it had become virtually impossible to ignore.

  Maybe he needed to take a break, he thought, frowning as he glanced away from the screen to pick up the phone that was ringing and vibrating its way across the desk. Maybe working virtually non-stop for four years had consequences he would now be wise to heed.

  “Yes?” he muttered, eradicating the possibility of burnout the instant it entered his head because of course he wasn’t burning out. In all likelihood some time off would fix this ridiculously inappropriate ennui.

  “Boss? It’s Felipe.”

  “What’s up?”

  “We may have a problem.”

  Stifling a sigh of frustration, Lucas swivelled round, reluctantly cutting from view the still-flickering images in order to focus. Felipe was the operative who, thirty-six hours ago, he’d assigned to watch both an empty villa in Marbella and the man who’d broken into it and made it his temporary home. The job, which had started off as a simple matter of tracking down two missing persons and one stolen family heirloom, and which he was doing as a favour to an old school friend and should have been a walk in the park, had been a problem from the start. Judging by the tone of Felipe’s voice it sounded like that wasn’t going to change any time soon. “What kind of a problem?” said Lucas, just about managing to keep a lid on his frustration.

  “The target just had a visitor.”

  “Who?”

  “A female. Brunette. Mid to late twenties, I’d estimate. Approximately five-seven, slim, well dressed. She entered the house at 1804 and left at 1856, local time. I believe she poses a significant risk to the operation and as a result of her visit could be in danger.”

  “Why?” said Lucas, the frown creasing his forehead deepening. “What was she doing there?”

  “I’ll email over the audio file. It’s all there.”

  “Any idea who she might be?”

  “His ex-fiancée, it would seem. First name, Cora, surname unknown.”

  As the information hit his brain Lucas nearly dropped his phone. All thoughts of desert operations and dissatisfaction fled from his head, and every sense he possessed jumped to full alert because what the ever-loving hell? He must have heard that wrong. “Say again?” he said sharply.

  “First name, Cora,” said Felipe. “Charlie, omega, romeo, alpha. Surname unknown.”

  Damn, Lucas thought grimly as irritation and disbelief blasted through him. Apparently he hadn’t misheard. And her surname wasn’t unknown to him. Not bloody unknown at all. What was unknown was what Cora Maclean was doing in Spain this afternoon when only yesterday evening they’d agreed on the phone that she’d stay put in London while he dealt with her increasingly shifty-looking ex in Marbella.

  “Want me to send over a photo?” said Felipe, and Lucas scowled as the image of her slammed into his head.

  “No need,” he muttered. He may not have seen her in a while, but he knew damn well what she looked like. What she felt and tasted like, too, not that he ever thought about that hour they’d spent together all those years ago. “She’s the client,” he added, ruthlessly obliterating the images flashing unbidden through his head, of hands and mouths and so much damn heat because that was all she was now. The client. Nothing else.

  “Any change to my instructions?”

  “Not for now. Stay on Brad. I want details of who he meets and where. Don’t let him out of your sight. Keep me posted with any developments.”

  “And the girl?”

  “I’ll take care of her.”

  Find out what happens next in Her Forbidden Warrior…

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  About the Author

  Lucy King has been writing contemporary romance since 2009 and honestly can’t think of a better job to have. Creating swoon-worthy heroes, sassy heroines and heart-melting happy ever afters definitely beats the fund management and corporate fraud investigation she worked in before.

  Originally from London, Lucy lives in south-west Spain with her family where she spends much of the time reading, failing to finish cryptic crosswords and trying to convince herself that the beach really is the best place to work.

  For more from Lucy:

  Visit her website at LucyKingBooks.com

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