Kitabı oku: «A Lady For Lincoln Cade»

“The Boy.”

Ice clinked against an heirloom crystal glass as he took it from a wrought-iron table. Draining it, he poured another drink from a decanter he’d brought into the garden with him.

The boy. It was always that, never more. The child’s name was Cade. Yet for reasons he wouldn’t define, Lincoln Cade couldn’t bring himself to call Linsey’s son by his own name.

“Who is he, Linsey? Why is his hair dark like mine? Who gave him my name?”

Laughter from the street intruded. Adult amusement, but in it Lincoln heard the haunting laugh of a child.

But whose child?

Turning to the house, forsaking the garden and his search for peace he knew would elude him for a long time to come, Lincoln knew what he must do. He knew what he would do.

For Linsey, for himself.

For the boy.

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!

Fabulous BJ James brings you June’s MAN OF THE MONTH with A Lady for Lincoln Cade. In promising to take care of an ex-flame—and the widow of his estranged friend— Lincoln Cade discovers she has a child. Bestselling author Leanne Banks offers another title in her MILLION DOLLAR MEN miniseries with The Millionaire’s Secret Wish. When a former childhood sweetheart gets amnesia, a wealthy executive sees his chance to woo her back.

Desire is thrilled to present another exciting miniseries about the scandalous Fortune family with FORTUNES OF TEXAS: THE LOST HEIRS. Anne Marie Winston launches the series with A Most Desirable M.D., in which a doctor and nurse share a night of passion that leads to marriage! Dixie Browning offers a compelling story about a sophisticated businessman who falls in love with a plain, plump woman while stranded on a small island in More to Love. Cathleen Galitz’s Wyoming Cinderella features a young woman whose life is transformed when she becomes nanny to the children of her brooding, rich neighbor. And Kathie DeNosky offers her hero a surprise when he discovers a one-night stand leads to pregnancy and true love in His Baby Surprise.

Indulge yourself with all six Desire titles—and see details inside about our exciting new contest, “Silhouette Makes You a Star.”

Enjoy!

Joan Marlow Golan

Senior Editor, Silhouette Desire

A Lady for Lincoln Cade

BJ James

For Gay, a friend, a lady.

BJ JAMES’

first book for Silhouette Desire was published in February 1987. Her second Desire title garnered for BJ a second Maggie, the coveted award of Georgia Romance Writers. Through the years there have been other awards and nominations for awards, including, from Romantic Times Magazine, Reviewer’s Choice, Career Achievement, Best Desire and Best Series Romance of the Year. In that time, her books have appeared regularly on a number of bestseller lists, among them Waldenbooks and USA Today.

On a personal note, BJ and her physician husband have three sons and two grandsons. While her address reads Mooreboro, this is only the origin of a mail route passing through the countryside. A small village set in the foothills of western North Carolina is her home.

Contents

Foreword

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

FOREWORD

In the coastal Lowcountry of South Carolina where the fresh waters of winding rivers flow into the sea, there is an Eden of unmatched wonders. In this mix of waters and along the shores by which they carve their paths, life is rich and varied. The land is one of uncommon contrasts with sandy, seaswept beaches, mysterious swamps, teeming marshes bounded by ancient maritime forests. And the multitude of creatures that abide in each.

In this realm of palms, and palmettos, estuaries and rivers, shaded by towering live oaks draped in ghostly Spanish moss, lies Belle Terre. Like an exquisite pearl set among emeralds and sapphires, with its name the small antebellum city describes its province. As it describes itself.

Belle Terre, beautiful land. A beautiful city.

A very proper, very elegant, beautiful city. A gift for the soul. An exquisite mélange for the senses. With ancient and grand structures in varying states of repair and disrepair set along tree-lined, cobbled streets. With narrow, gated gardens lush with such greenery as resurrection and cinnamon ferns. And all of it wrapped in the lingering scent of camellias, azaleas, jasmin, and magnolias.

Steeped in an aura of history, its culture and customs influenced by plantations that once abounded in the Lowcountry, as it clings to its past Belle Terre is a province of contradictions. Within its society one will find arrogance abiding with humility, cruelty with kindness, insolence with gentility, honor with depravity, and hatred with love.

As ever when the senses are whetted and emotions untamed, in Belle Terre there will be passion, romance, and scandal.

One

“Linc! Ho, Lincoln.”

Long after the call faded, the pounding of a horse’s hooves sheared through the stillness settling over the west pasture of Belle Reve. Sighing for the calm of a lost moment, weary after another of too many days routinely beginning with his veterinary practice and ending with duties at his family’s historic plantation, Lincoln Cade wearily abandoned his inspection of a sagging fence. From the shade of his battered Stetson he stared into the canted light of the sun falling over lush, sprawling fields common in South Carolina’s lowcountry.

Horse and rider were only a dark shape galloping over rich grass. Concerned that this was more than Jesse Lee’s usual attack on life, Lincoln stepped forward, catching the horse’s bridle as it halted. Instinctively calming the spirited animal, he demanded, “What’s wrong, Jesse? Is it Gus?”

“No, boy. Ain’t nothing wrong with your dad,” the cowboy explained. “Nothing a mood-sweetening elixir wouldn’t fix.”

Lincoln laughed. “How many times has he fired you today?”

“A dozen.” The laconic answer accompanied a wry grin.

“How many times have you threatened to vamoose, leaving South Carolina in the dust on your way back to Arizona?”

Jesse Lee’s mouth widened, rippling the mass of wrinkles scoring his weathered face. “’Bout the same, I reckon.”

“If it isn’t Gus, then why the hurry?”

Slapping a pocket, Jesse drew out a packet he handed to Lincoln. “The postmaster in Belle Terre sent this special ’cause it was marked urgent by a postmaster in Oregon. I figgered it could wait till you came to the house for supper. But Miz Corey said not. And when Miz Corey says git, any man in his right mind gits.

“When he hired the lady to keep house at Belle Reve, I doubt Gus counted on getting a ramrod for the plantation and him, too. Anyway, she said pronto, and I hightailed it down here.”

The wrangler’s look strayed to the packet. Lincoln didn’t notice. He was hardly aware of anything but the postmark.

“Seems odd, don’t it?”

As the horse nuzzled at his shoulder, Jesse’s comment penetrated Lincoln’s distraction. “Odd?” he asked. “Why?”

“I dunno.” Jesse grumbled. “Just strikes me as peculiar coming from an Oregon postmaster. Hope it ain’t bad news. Bad news is terrible enough. Gittin’ it by mail is worse.”

Lincoln gripped the packet. “You think it’s bad?”

Jesse’s bleak look met Lincoln’s. “I don’t know who you know in Oregon, but I got a feelin’. The minute Miz Corey handed it to me, I felt the chill of it skittering down my spine.”

Oregon. Lincoln hadn’t thought of Oregon in a long time. He hadn’t let himself think of it. Until now.

He tried for a smile, remembering the old cowboy was obsessively superstitious. An obsession that went beyond black cats and ladders, and had nothing to do with the grief settling in his own chest. “I don’t feel anything, Jesse,” he lied. “So maybe everything’s all right.”

“There’s one way to find out.” The older man waited in a mix of worry and curiosity. “Ain’t you gonna open it?”

“When I’m done here.” Sliding the packet into his back pocket, wondering if Jesse’s dire prediction prompted a reluctance to open it in his presence, Lincoln took up the hammer he’d yet to use. “I’ll read it then.”

“In other words, good news or bad, you’ll read it alone.”

“Yes,” Lincoln admitted. “Good news or bad. And whoever.”

“Tarnation, why didn’t you say so?” Wheeling the horse around, Jesse set his hat more securely. “Ain’t none of this my business. Anyway, who do I know in Oregon?”

“I don’t know, Jesse,” Lincoln said mildly. “Who do you know in Oregon?”

Tapping the horse’s flank, Jesse set it into a run. Nearly lost in hoofbeats, one word drifted back, “Nobody.”

Horse and rider were beyond sight when Lincoln laid the hammer aside again and took the mail from his pocket. Head down, face shaded by the brim of his hat, he stared at the official cachet. Then, catching a breath, he broke the seal.

A form letter with an added hand-printed message, then two small envelopes banded with red string tumbled into his hand. Reining in clamoring concern, laying the banded letters on a fence post, Lincoln attended the official letter first.

“Dear Mr. Cade,” he read aloud, his gaze racing over the paper. “As acting postmaster, I offer my apologies for the delayed delivery of these letters. Due to the ill health of the former postmaster, unfortunately some pieces of mail were put aside and never processed. Among them, these bearing your address. I sincerely hope the delay causes no difficulties. Please be confident steps have been taken to assure…”

Lincoln stared at the envelopes with the absurd bit of string catching the light, gleaming against the creamy squares like a rivulet of scarlet. Bearing the postmark of the same tiny Oregon village, but two weeks apart, one was addressed in the scrawl of a man he’d known all his life, the second in the less familiar hand of a woman. A woman, despite the lies he told himself, he hadn’t forgotten in six long years.

Folding the apologetic form, he tucked it away before retrieving the mysterious lost letters. Untying the band of scarlet, letting it drift to the ground, he weighed his choices.

His hands were shaking as he traced the feminine script of one, but steadied again as he shuffled it aside. His decision was made—he would read them in the order of their postmarks.

With an ache in his heart, he lifted the flap of the first envelope and took out a single sheet of paper. When it was finished, he read the second as he had the first—slowly, his lips a sad, grim line. When he was done, his gaze lifted to the horizon, not seeing the sky in its shifting moods.

Time crept by with little variation in the long summer day. Yet for Lincoln it seemed to fly, too fast, too irrevocably. As life had with its changes, leaving things unsettled and things undone. Until it was too late.

Rousing, he gathered his tools, wrapped them, and tied them behind his saddle. The fence could wait. Tugging his horse’s reins from a nearby shrub, he stepped into the saddle. Out of habit the horse turned toward home. Toward Belle Reve. “Not yet, Diablo,” Lincoln muttered. “We have a stop to make first.”

Setting the stallion into a canter, he guided the massive animal over the pasture fence and onto a little-used path. Then, giving Diablo his head, trusting the old horse to recognize the land and remember the way to their destination, Lincoln let his mind wander to times past…and friends lost.

The passage from the west pasture of Belle Reve to the end of his journey was not long. But when horse and rider emerged from the wooded trail into a clearing, the sun had dipped below the trees, spangling leaves and limbs with dusty gold. This was Stuart land. The bane of land-hungry Cades, a haven for others.

With an eye for beauty and convenience, the first Stuart had set the farmhouse at the edge of a clearing by a narrow creek. A creek that marked Stuart-Cade boundaries as it meandered to the river and finally the sea.

Once there was hardly a day that Lincoln hadn’t spent a stolen hour or two in this forbidden place. Now, drawing Diablo to a halt as he surveyed the grounds bathed in the splendor of sunset, he realized years had passed since he’d sought its refuge.

Beyond a crop of weeds threading through volunteer flowers, herbs and vegetables still thriving in rich soil, the farm hadn’t changed. If one didn’t count the absence of life and laughter a change, he thought somberly, while dismounting by the steps. As he climbed the stairs, a rotting board broke beneath his weight, shattering the myth, reminding Lincoln that more than six years had passed since Frannie Stuart lived and died here. More than six years since she’d filled the house with love and laughter.

How many times had he raced across the west field as a boy, hurrying from a cold, forbidding plantation to the warmth and love that abounded in this small farm? How often had he envied his best friend the wonderful lady who was his mother?

But just as Frannie Stuart always had a hug for any of the Cade boys, and especially Lincoln, Lucky never resented it. With a heart as big and warm as his mother’s, Leland Stuart, christened Lucky by his friends, gladly and unselfishly shared.

Boot heels clattering in the silence, Lincoln climbed the rest of the stairs and crossed the porch. When he tried the door, it opened. Not surprising, for he couldn’t recall a time it had ever been locked. Ducking beneath the door frame, he stepped inside, into memories of the boy who had stood where a man stood now. Memories so vivid he could hear Lucky’s cry of welcome and smell Frannie’s cookies baking. Cookies meant to be snitched by hungry boys who had slipped away from chores to fish or hunt and play Tarzan in the swamp.

Drawing himself to his full height, Lincoln looked around him. There were cobwebs and dust everywhere. The musty scent of neglect mingled with a lingering hint of flowers. But nothing had been touched. Frannie and Lucky could have just stepped out intending to return, yet never had.

Wandering through the house, Lincoln paused at the door of the smallest bedroom. The trophies Lucky won in baseball still lined a single shelf. One of his own was there. So was a lure he’d made, and a photo taken when both he and Diablo were young. As if blinders fell from his eyes, Lincoln realized how much a part he’d been allowed to play, welcomed to play, in the Stuart home.

Lucky had no father, nor any recollection of ever having one. Lincoln had no mother. Perhaps that had first drawn them to each other. But the bond of affection and shared interests that made them friends and blood brothers, was much stronger.

From grade school, through Belle Terre Academy and the university, he and Lucky had been inseparable. Evidence of their friendship still lived in a simple farmhouse on a rich piece of land lying between a creek and the plantation called Belle Reve.

Like the Cades, the Stuarts were an old family, prominent in South Carolina’s lowcountry. And like the Cades, their early wealth had long been lost. By the time Frannie made her debut, little more than respect filled the Stuart coffers. They were an aging but cordial and modern-thinking people. She was their adventurous darling with places to go and things to do. Frannie was a few months past forty, with her daring adventures behind her, when she returned to Belle Terre with Lucky, a babe in arms.

Undaunted by the scandal of bearing an illegitimate child, she settled on the farm, living quietly, meagerly, as was apparent in her bedroom, which Lincoln realized now was pitifully lacking in the feminine pleasures that would have become her. Frannie might have been reduced to creating her own unforgettable fragrance of wild roses and dried flowers, but her capacity for love, her courageous sense of adventure, never faltered.

It was, instead, bequeathed to Lucky. And, as he stared at a photo, encased in a tarnished silver frame, Lincoln realized both had been Frannie’s ultimate gift to him, as well.

Caught up in recollections of two wide-eyed boys sitting before a fire, listening to stories of where she’d been and what she’d done, Lincoln continued his sentimental passage. As he came full circle, his lips tilted in a poignant smile for old memories and old friendships that could never be again.

When he returned to the porch, the last rays of the sun had painted the sky a deep vermilion, seeming to set the world ablaze. Lincoln hadn’t meant to stay, but, wrapped in light so familiar, he found himself drawn to the steps.

To sit where he’d sat with Lucky. To remember the dreams they’d dreamed on days like this. The days when they were so sure they would live forever and be friends forever and share every great adventure the world had to offer.

“Every great adventure, planned right here.” Lincoln looked at the photograph still clutched in his hand. “Even the last, the one that would destroy our friendship as we knew it.”

Wearily Lincoln stood. Making note of the step in need of repair, he crossed the overgrown yard to Diablo. Speaking quietly to the grazing horse, he mounted. Hesitating, he watched as light warming the walls of the house faded and darkened, leaving it in shadows. A lonely derelict, waiting.

“For what?” Lincoln wondered aloud. But he didn’t need to wonder. He knew.

“For want of love and laughter, a home becomes a house,” he whispered, quoting his beloved Frannie. “For want of life, a house becomes a hovel.”

Frannie Stuart had been dead nearly seven years. Lucky, for three months. He couldn’t change the past, but as he turned Diablo from the Stuart farm, Lincoln vowed that no matter how long it took, he would repay a debt incurred six years before.

A debt called in today, by a letter from the grave.

“Let’s go home, Diablo,” Lincoln murmured hoarsely. “I have work to do, a lady to find, and promises to keep.”

Two

“Special delivery.” Basket in hand, Haley Garrett stood in the open doorway, waiting for Lincoln to abandon his intense study of the evening sky. As she’d spoken, his shoulders tensed. When he turned, a pallor lay over his sun-darkened face.

“Lincoln?” Alarm threaded through Haley’s voice. “Is something wrong? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

Blinking, clearing his vision, Lincoln denied her concern. “Nothing’s wrong. My mind was wandering, I thought…”

“That I was her?” Troubled by his mood, Haley stepped into his office uninvited. “Yes, Lincoln, her. Linsey Stuart, the woman for whom you’ve searched for weeks.”

“How do you know about Linsey?”

Setting the basket laden with food on his desk, she smiled ruefully. “It would be hard not to know, since your search has been conducted by telephone and our office isn’t exactly soundproof.”

Lincoln moved to his desk. “I never meant to disturb you.”

“You didn’t. I haven’t said anything before because it was none of my business.” Haley tilted her head, negating the great difference in their size as she held his gaze. “As your veterinary partner and friend, I’m making it my business now.”

Lincoln grasped a pen, tapping it on his desk. “I haven’t held up my end of our agreement?”

Catching his hand, she stopped his drumming. “Just the opposite. You’re driving yourself. Take today, for instance. You were called to Petersens’ to deliver a breech colt at 3:00 a.m. To Hank’s dairy at 6:00 a.m. to deal with a sick cow.”

Releasing him, she ticked off more stops. “You admitted skipping breakfast, then lunch. If Miss Corey hadn’t worried and sent this basket, I suspect you would skip dinner.”

“How does skipping meals affect our partnership, Haley?”

“Partnership.” Haley emphasized her point. “That’s the key word. I could have made some of those calls. Given how hard you’ve been working, I should have made all of them.”

“Today was too much for me,” he drawled. “But not you?”

“Yes. Because I’m not consumed by a problem.” Taking a tarnished frame from his desk, she asked, “Is this Linsey Stuart?”

Lincoln’s gaze turned to the photo plundered from the Stuart farm. Where a step awaited repair. “Linsey, Lucky and me. In Montana, our last year at smoke jumpers annual training.”

“Linsey Stuart parachuted into forest fires?” The woman in the photograph was small, with an aura of elegance. Haley could believe an adventurous sportswoman, but not smoke jumping.

“No one believed she could do it then, either.” Lincoln’s mouth quirked in a melancholy smile at Haley’s disbelief. “But she did. We all did. That’s where our paths crossed— the first summer of jumper training. Lucky and I had been friends all our lives—the moment we met her, she fit.

“Linsey grew up in an orphanage, we became her family.” He glanced at the photo of three figures dressed for a jump, exhilarated by the challenge. “We were a team— Lucky Stuart, Linsey Blair, Lincoln Cade. We were called the Three L’s.”

“This was taken the last year—was it your last jump?”

Lincoln struggled to ease the constriction in his chest. “After the photograph was taken, Lucky was called home. His mother was ill. Two months later he came back. We jumped one more time.”

Haley wondered why only one. Lincoln loved jumping. It was in his voice. Even now. “What happened?”

Lincoln’s gaze lifted to Haley. But his mind, and perhaps his heart, had stepped back in time. Memories couldn’t be hurried. Keeping the gaze that saw another face, she waited.

“We were in Oregon.” His voice was distant, as if it came from the faraway place of his thoughts. “The fire had burned for weeks, with jumpers fighting winds as much as the blaze. We were backing each other, as always, when the current shifted and the fire turned, cutting us off from the rest of the crew.”

He fell silent; she waited. Again her wait was rewarded.

“Lucky had a knack for maps—he recalled a river. We ran for it and into a slide. Our radios were broken. A head injury left me confused, unsteady on my feet. I couldn’t walk out.”

“But Linsey and Lucky did?” Haley dared comment into the staccato retelling of a life-and-death drama.

“Only Lucky.” Lincoln turned to the window, seeing wind-fanned flames and falling earth beyond its panes. “The fire turned again, and we stumbled on a shack on secure ground. By then it was clear I’d suffered a concussion at the least. Lucky calculated that with burned ground, the slide, and the river as fire breaks, we had a little time before the blaze circled around. Leaving Linsey to look after me, he walked out alone.”

“Through the fire, Lincoln?”

“Through burned paths that could reignite at any time. If they had—” Halting, he turned a bleak face to Haley, then away again. “Lucky risked his life for mine.”

“And for Linsey,” Haley murmured, studying his profile. Seeing heartache he’d hidden from the world.

As her classmate in veterinary studies, he’d revealed nothing personal. He wouldn’t now, if he weren’t exhausted and hurting. Yet, because she knew Lincoln, she knew there was more. Something left unsaid. Haley went where intuition led. “You loved her.”

“We both did.”

“So you stepped aside.” When he didn’t respond, she asked, “Where is Lucky now?”

“Lucky died.” He looked away. “Four months ago.”

Haley blinked back tears for a grieving friend, for a stranger called Lucky. For a rare friendship. “I’m sorry.”

“Yeah.” A hand briefly shielded his eyes. “So am I.”

“And now you’re looking for his wife. To help.”

“For Lucky’s sake. I wasn’t there when he needed me, but I thought…” He seemed to lose himself in a mood. In a moment he spoke again. “Shortly after he died, Linsey left Oregon and dropped out of sight. With no family and no roots, she could be anywhere. Nobody I’ve hired has found a trace of her.”

Lincoln said nothing more, and Haley wouldn’t question his search for Lucky Stuart’s widow. Whatever his reason, it wouldn’t be to trade on the past, nor because he loved her still. Lincoln Cade wasn’t a man who would barter on grief.

No matter what prompted his search, Haley hoped he would find Linsey Stuart. If it was right, she hoped they would find love and peace together. But that was for another time, another place. And, she suspected, for reconciled lovers to discover.

“It’s late, Lincoln. You’re exhausted, and I’m famished. Shall we share this thoughtful repast and call it a day?”

He smiled at her ploy to entice him to eat. But as he accepted the sandwich she offered, Haley saw the laughter left the silver of his eyes untouched.

Lincoln considered the wire and the tuft of brown fur caught on a barb. For the third time in a week he’d checked the deteriorating west pasture fence and the second time he’d found evidence of an animal passing near or through the wire. His first thought was deer. Closer inspection suggested dogs.

Among the mongrels of Belle Reve, some were white, some blond, some black. None were brown.

The west pasture was isolated, bordered by two rivers, the sprawl of Belle Reve, and Stuart land. No inhabited houses or farms were close enough for straying pets or working dogs. That left the threat of a pack of lost or abandoned pets. Dogs that would run a horse to death for the joy of the chase.

The Black Arabian stock his brother Jackson kept in pastures at the plantation were far too valuable to dismiss suspicions of a pack gone wild. He decided he would warn Jackson and enlist his aid in trapping the animals. Catching the pommel of his saddle and stepping into the stirrup, Lincoln mounted Diablo.

His inspection complete, he sat for an indecisive moment, trying to resist the lure of the path beyond the fence. The path that would lead to the Stuart farm. In the end he succumbed to a need he’d battled for weeks.

“Won’t hurt to check the property.” As Diablo’s black ears flicked at the sound of his voice, with his palm Lincoln stroked the stallion’s mane. “Could be the pack settled in the barn. And there’s a step to measure for repair.”

Glancing at the sky, gauging the position of the sun, he tapped the horse with the reins. “A couple of hours of daylight left, Diablo. Time enough.”

Diablo was eager to run. Lincoln himself enjoyed the rush as the Arabian topped the fence and raced over the corridor that a century before had been the Stuarts’ wagon route to town.

Beyond sight of the farm, Lincoln slowed to a walk. If the dogs had made their den on the property, they would be gone before he could find it, if he came riding in like the Lone Ranger.

“Easy, boy. No sudden moves.” He walked the horse slowly, barely rustling the grass that grew knee high. “Don’t want to spook them if they’re here.”

With a grunt hardly stifled, he jerked to a startled halt. “What the devil?”

Bending in the saddle, peering through a copse of massive trees, he saw light. Light where there should be no light, gleaming through windows of the Stuart farmhouse.

Illusion? A trick of the sun glinting off glass? Intruders or looters after all these years of the farmhouse standing unlocked?

Maybe. He could persuade himself to accept that. But the creak of rusty hinges was neither a trick nor an illusion. Nor was the woman who pushed open the door and stepped onto the porch. With her hair gleaming like spilling gold, as she shaded her eyes against the glare of the sun, she was familiar and very real.

“Linsey?” Her name was a raw undertone lost in the prattle of breeze-stirred oaks. Yet, spoken in his own voice, it resounded in his mind. Like a man too long in the dark catching a glimpse of the sun, his gaze moved over her. With incredulous care, he committed to mind a memory, seeking first the differences imposed by time and living. Then the unchanging qualities six long years couldn’t sweep from his mind.

Her hair was still long. Still a mass of curls gathered brutally into a topknot by a clasp that never had a chance of holding it. The hand that pushed tumbling strands from her cheeks was still absently impatient.

Her chin still tilted in eternal determination. While her mouth curved in a smile that seemed joyfully childlike and sensual at once. Lincoln wondered if she still caught her lower lip between her teeth when she concentrated or when she worried.

Drawing himself from the aching study of her mouth and face, he matched this Linsey of flesh and blood to the woman he’d turned away from…for Lucky.

She stood tall, shoulders back, making the most of those few inches by which she topped five feet. And as the breeze that sent tiny oak leaves spiraling around him swept across the clearing, molding her supple shirt against her, Lincoln realized her breasts were rounder, fuller. A girlish innocence had given way to an earthy maturity, a beguiling voluptuousness. A metamorphosis making her jean-clad waist and hips seem slimmer.

He’d lost a girl six years ago. Today, he found a woman in full bloom.

To the rest of the world she’d always been a pretty girl full of life and courage. To Lincoln, she was breathtaking from the first. But not so beautiful as now. Never so beautiful he could hardly believe she was real, not illusion.

Just as he could hardly believe that, after hiring investigators to search all of Oregon, Montana, and as many locales in between as possible, he had found her here. Exactly where she should be, in Lucky Stuart’s South Carolina home.

The last place he’d thought to look in a month. The last place he would ever think to look, if the search hadn’t ended.