Almost To The Altar

by Neesa Hart

  Table of Contents

  Cover Page

  Excerpt

  Dear Reader

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Nees A Hart

  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

  Copyright

  Only one woman on earth had eyes the color of a winter sea, eyes that could burn a man’s soul if she set her mind to it. And she was looking right at him.

  Wil had to fight for breath as he called to her. “Elsa?”

  Elise flinched at his use of her old name and contemplated the wisdom of dashing away. It couldn’t be Wil Larsen staring at her. Fate wouldn’t play this kind of trick on her.

  Briefly she closed her eyes, willing him to disappear. When she opened them again, his gaze remained fixed on her. Under its scrutiny, she felt ten years of protective walls begin to crumble. She’d spent a very long time trying to put Wil Larsen—a man she’d once loved with a soul-consuming intensity—behind her.

  So why, after all this time, did the mere sight of him threaten to tumble her into chaos?

  Dear Reader,

  Happy New Year! I hope this year brings you all your heart desires… and I hope you enjoy the many books coming your way this year from Silhouette Special Edition!

  January features an extraspecial THAT SPECIAL WOMAN!—Myrna Temte’s A Lawman for Kelly. Deputy U.S. Marshal Steve Anderson is back (remember him in Myrna’s Room for Annie?), and he’s looking for love in Montana. Don’t miss this warm, wonderful story!

  Then travel to England this month with Mistaken Bride, by Brittany Young—a compelling Gothic story featuring two. identical twins with very different personalities…. Or stay at home with Live-In Mom by Laurie Paige, a tender story about a little matchmaker determined to bring his stubborn dad to the altar with the right woman! And don’t miss Mr. Fix-It by Jo Ann Algermissen. A man who is good around the house is great to find anytime during the year!

  This month also brings you The Lone Ranger, the initial story in Sharon De Vita’s winsome new series, SILVER CREEK COUNTY. Falling in love is all in a day’s work in this charming Texas town. And watch for the first book by a wonderful writer who is new to Silhouette Special Edition—Neesa Hart. Her book, Almost to the Altar, is sure to win many new fans.

  I hope this New Year shapes up to be the best year ever! Enjoy this book, and all the books to come!

  Sincerely

  Tara Gavin

  Senior Editor

  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

  Almost To The Altar

  Neesa Hart

  To Joyce Flaherty, for sharing the dream; to Denise Little for sharing the vision; to Deb Dixon, for sharing her wisdom;

  to Mom, who fixed everything and…

  To the grease—covered heroes at Ferry Farm Automotive who made sure I got everywhere I needed to go—and who never charge $50 to screw in a light bulb.

  NEES A HART,

  who writes contemporary romances under her own name, and historical romances as Mandalyn Kaye, lives outside Washington, D.C., where, she says, “Truth really is stranger than fiction.”

  An avid romance fan for years, she got hooked while majoring in international affairs and geography in college. “Romances,” she said, “were always more fun, more informative and more relaxing than anything I was supposed to be reading for class.” After a brief political career, including a Senate-confirmed appointment to the President’s Council on Women’s Educational Programs, Neesa abandoned the hectic world of politics to pursue her dream as a full-time author. “Nothing,” she says, “could be better than telling stories for a living.”

  Her interests, other than writing and reading, include volunteering at her church, collecting Barbie dolls, and playing the banjo.. One day, she hopes to learn to pick “Oh, Susannah.”

  Neesa loves to hear from her readers. You can write to her at: 101 E. Holly Avenue, St. 3, Sterling, VA 20164.

  Chapter One

  Mud and a wet woman, he decided, had to be one of the sexiest combinations on earth.

  As Wil Larsen splashed through the convenience-store parking lot, he studied the bedraggled woman awaiting him by the pay phone. In the two months since she’d hired him for a major restoration of twenty vintage automobiles, Wil hadn’t actually spoken to her. He’d cursed her plenty of times, but he’d left the person-to-person contact up to his father, his business partner. Her law firm was handling the auction of the vehicles as part of an estate liquidation, and she’d driven his father crazy with her demands for constant invoicing, supervision and status reports. If the job hadn’t been so big, and if her business hadn’t mattered quite so much to their business, Wil would have told her to take a flying leap a long time ago.

  His father, Jan, had insisted, however, that he could handle her, that her excruciating addiction to detail, her obsession with minutiae, merely reflected an appreciation of the rare cars’ value. Wil had an entirely different spin on the situation but, heretofore, had managed to keep his notso-kind opinion to himself.

  The restoration project was enormous, and as he and his father were continuing to build a reputation in auto refurbishment, Jan had wisely advised that they’d be foolish to turn it down simply because the inimitable Ms. Christopher was a royal pain in the butt. To keep peace, Jan had even agreed to handle all the contacts with her himself, the only saving grace in the situation.

  This very afternoon, in the pouring-down rain, his seventy-two-year-old father was out scrounging in a junk-yard, looking for a part that Ms. Christopher had insisted must be original. It didn’t matter that a perfectly usable fabrication was available for half the price and a tenth of the effort, nor did it matter that the fabrication would in no way lessen the resale value of the car. Elise Christopher wanted it done one way and one way only.

  The mere thought made Wil furious. His father had no business being out in weather like this, but despite Wil’s considerable efforts to volunteer for the errand himself, Jan had insisted he would do the search. As it turned out, providence must have played a hand in the old man’s stubbornness. Elise Christopher needed a tow, and Wil needed to let off steam. He was about to accomplish both ends.

  The curtain of rain blurred her figure where she huddled in the shallow phone booth. He didn’t need to see her face to know she was miserable. A pathetic excuse for an umbrella made a valiant attempt to shield her from the rain. Water dripped from her hair. Mud caked her navy trench coat.

  Latent frustration still pumped through him when he thought of the hours of unnecessary aggravation this woman had caused them. At times he could picture her, subdued, sophisticated, aloof, phoning their garage from her high-rise office in the heart of Chicago to issue her latest unreasonable edict. He’d known plenty of women just like her, knew how they operated, how they thought. Elise Christopher was just one more professional broad who thought herself too good for the rest of them.

  This morning’s long walk in the rain to the pay phone had probably wounded her pride more than her body. The thought should have satisfied him. But it didn’t.

  He raked another glance over her disheveled appearance. It didn’t satisfy him at all.

  It turned him on.

&nbs
p; Maybe it was the feeling of revenge, or the simple male satisfaction of seeing her, a woman with as much tact as Attila the Hun, in such a predicament. He wasn’t sure. He just knew that the sight of her set his nerve endings on five. The thought made him chastise himself for his lack of civility. For the past two months, he’d been cursing her to high heaven, but that didn’t seem to stop him from ogling her like a hormone-driven teenager.

  With a brief shake of his head, he guided his white tow truck through the obstacle course of potholes. If she knew what he was thinking, she’d probably deck him. At the thought of telling her she looked sexy with her stockings caked in mud and her clothes pasted to her body, he almost laughed out loud. Granted, most women—hell, most men—in her predicament wouldn’t find the matter very laughable, but there was something extrasweet about seeing Elise Christopher meet the real world.

  As he neared her position by the pay phone, he almost allowed himself to feel a twinge of sympathy. Up close, she looked more like a drowned cat and less like a temptation. His gaze slid to her mud-splattered legs. Not much less, true, but less. Rolling his truck to a stop five feet from the phone booth, he lowered the passenger window with a press of a button. “Elise Christopher?” he asked.

  She dropped the umbrella enough to meet his gaze. At the wide-eyed look of stunned horror she gave him, a look in eyes that were unmistakably familiar, unmistakably known to him, the breath left his lungs in a whoosh. Only one woman on earth had eyes the color of a winter sea; eyes that could burn a man’s soul if she set her mind to it. And she was looking right at him. The impact of that gaze began to stir a long-dormant tempest, like a storm coming to life. Wil had to fight for breath as he mentally subdued the first wave of undiluted panic.

  “Elsa?”

  She flinched. “Wil?”

  Elise was contemplating the wisdom of dashing away into the rainstorm. It couldn’t be Wil Larsen staring at her from the warm haven of that truck. Fate wouldn’t play this kind of trick on her.

  Briefly she closed her eyes, willing him to disappear. When she opened them again, his fog-colored gaze remained fixed on hers. Under its scrutiny, she felt ten years of protective walls begin to crumble. She’d spent a very long time trying to put Wil Larsen—a man she’d once loved with a soul-consuming intensity—behind her. Her life was different now, together, ordered. So why did the mere sight of him, after all this time, threaten to tumble her into chaos?

  Of all the things in the world she wasn’t prepared to deal with this afternoon, a confrontation with Wil Larsen topped the list. Why, oh, why hadn’t his father come to fetch her? What was he doing here in Valdona, instead of in Chicago, where he belonged? And how the hell was she supposed to avoid getting into that truck with him?

  “Are you getting in?” he asked, his tone harsh, almost as if he wished she’d say no.

  Despite the very real possibility that she might drown if she refused, Elise considered telling him she’d changed her mind about the tow. But the warm breeze from the truck’s heater beckoned like a tropical sea, and before her courage could desert her, she mentally braced herself, then climbed into the truck. She refused to give him the small victory of knowing he’d scared her away. She was an adult. She’d act like one.

  Shaking the water from her umbrella, she studiously avoided his gaze. “I—Thanks so much for coming to get me,” she told him. “This storm is horrible.”

  “You didn’t look very pleased to see me.”

  Shocked had been more like it. “I was expecting your father.”

  His scrutiny seemed to bore into her. She had to force herself not to squirm. He’d always had an uncanny ability to make her feel awkward. Summoning up years of self-discipline, she said, “I’m sorry you had to come out in this rain.”

  “I’m not the only one out in this mess. My father,” he told her, his voice harsh, “is scrounging around in a junkyard for a Diana radiator cap.”

  “Oh.” She gave him a stricken look. “I didn’t mean for him to go today. Stevenson would have held it for him until Monday.”

  “Funny, Pop didn’t see it that way.”

  Elise frowned. She didn’t like the thought of Jan Larsen out in this downpour. He’d always been susceptible to damp weather. “I wish I’d made that more clear. I just thought he’d like to know that I’d found an original part.”

  “It’s our job to find the parts.” Disapproval dripped from his tone, making the atmosphere inside the cab as damp as the afternoon.

  Elise mentally counted to three. She refused to let him goad her into an argument. They’d done all the arguing she could stand the day he threw her out of his life. “I know that,” she said, in much the same tone she used to pacify irate judges and irrational clients. “I just happened to stumble on this. Still, I hadn’t meant for Jan to make the trip today.” The dreary sky seemed to close in on them. “No one should be out in this.”

  She was looking at her drenched hair and mud-splattered clothes. “Especially not you,”’ he said.

  She refused to consider what he might have meant by the comment. Wil, she knew, felt any number of things about her, and none of them were good. He’d made that clear enough the day he broke off their relationship. Shivering, she wrapped her arms around her middle. The best she could do was try to make light of the situation. The sooner they got her car towed and on the road, the sooner she could be away from this infuriating, frustrating man. “This whole thing wouldn’t have been so bad,” she continued, hoping her voice sounded at least partially normal, “if this place had been open.” With a flick of her wrist, she indicated the closed convenience store. “If I’d known the owner’s daughter was getting married this weekend, I’d have picked a different place for my car to break down.”

  The joke fell flat. An impassive expression remained firmly in place as he continued to watch her. Since she’d last seen him, his face had hardened. His thick blond hair should have lessened the severity of his determined features, buta quick glance at his face dispelled any hope she had that years had lessened the impact of his expression. It was still as hard as granite, as welcoming as a stone barricade.

  When his gaze caught hers and refused to let go, she felt the umbrella slip from her cold fingers. It tumbled to the floor mat with a dull thud. She wondered if her imagination was playing tricks on her, or if the expression in his eyes really did cause the windows to fog.

  Instinctively her fingers gripped the worn leather pocket calendar she still clutched in her hand. Besides the umbrella, she’d carried nothing else with her from the car on the long trek to the pay phone. Jan’s number was scrawled in the back of the small organizer. Elise ran her fingers over the carved leather cover, finding a strange solace in the familiar feel of it. The cover had been a high school graduation gift from Wil, almost twenty years ago. It was one of the few links she kept to a time long past. If his hard expression was any indication, the time was not just past, it was forgotten.

  “Elise Christopher,” he said again, as if testing the sound of her name. She’d never heard it carry so much anger. Instinctively she leaned as far from him as possible, not because she feared him physically, but because the hardness in his voice threatened to hurt her emotionally. Her arm pressed into the door. If he noticed, he ignored her discomfort. “Were you and Pop planning to tell me, or was I going to get strung along for two more months?”

  “Tell you what?” At the question, his firm mouth pressed into a thin line, and the sight made her stomach quiver. She mentally berated herself for being ridiculous. Wil might be angry, but she had no reason to be afraid of him. He’d hurt her as much as he ever could ten years ago.

  “Nobody thought that maybe I should know that the Elise Christopher who’s been driving us crazy for the past eight weeks is really the Elsa Krestyanov who drove me crazy ten years ago?”

  Stunned by the accusation in his voice, she frowned. “It never occurred to me that you didn’t know.”

  His eyebrows lifted a fraction.
“You’ve been issuing orders to Pop left and right. Didn’t you think I’d find out sooner or later?”

  Pushing her damp bangs off her forehead, she said, “Wil, I—well, I really don’t know why you think you should have been involved in this.”

  “Involved?”

  “Yes. I mean, my business with your father is just thatbusiness. I had a job that needed to be done. Your father was competent and available. I knew he’d been servicing the cars for my client for years, and it simply made sense to get him to complete the restoration for the auction. I was very glad I could give him the business, but it never occurred to me that you might get involved.”

  His gaze narrowed to an edge so sharp she felt impaled against the window. “Great plan, Elsa,” he told her, then jammed the truck into gear. “Which way’s your car?”

  Evidently he wanted the encounter over as much as she did. Seeing no reason to argue, she pointed south. “Back that way. About a mile, I think.”

  Without looking at her again, Wil shoved the heater button to the defrost position, then headed for the deserted stretch of highway. For several long seconds, the only sound in the cab came from the heater fan and the steady drone of the windshield wipers.

  Elise drew four or five calming breaths, while mentally chiding herself for not realizing the risk she’d taken by calling Jan Larsen for a tow. When she phoned his garage, it had never occurred to her that the man barking at her through the receiver would be Wil. She should have realized that he might be home for the weekend, that no one else would be manning the shop while Jan was out.