of Yesterday #68
Image of Love #91
The Hawk and the Honey #111
Late Rising Moon #121
Stormwatch #169
The Tender Barbarian #188
Matchmaker’s Moon #212
A Bird in the Hand #234
In the Palm of Her Hand #264
A Winter Woman #324
There Once Was a Lover #337
Fate Takes a Holiday #403
Along Came Jones #427
Thin Ice #474
Beginner’s Luck #517
Ships in the Night #541
Twice in a Blue Moon #588
Just Say Yes #637
Not a Marrying Man #678
Gus and the Nice Lady #691
Best Man for the Job #720
Hazards of the Heart #780
Kane’s Way #801
*Keegan’s Hunt #820
*Lucy and the Stone #853
*Two Hearts, Slightly Used #890
†Alex and the Angel #949
†The Beauty, the Beast and the Baby #985
The Baby Notion #1011
†Stryker’s Wife #1033
Look What the Stork Brought #1111
‡The Passionate G-Man #1141
‡A Knight in Rusty Armor #1195
Texas Millionaire #1232
The Bride-in-Law #1251
§A Bride for Jackson Powers #1273
DIXIE BROWNING
celebrated her sixty-fifth book for Silhouette with the publication of Texas Millionaire in 1999. She has also written a number of historical romances with her sister under the name Bronwyn Williams. A charter member of Romance Writers of America, and a member of Novelists, Inc., Dixie has won numerous awards for her work. She lives on the Outer Banks of North Carolina.
Contents
Prologue
“This is my first diary, and I don’t know exactly where to start. Mama always kept one, but I never did. She told me to read hers after she was gone so I would understand, but her personal things were packed away and I couldn’t get to them for a long time.
“My name is Cynthia Danbury. I am fourteen and a half years old.”
Fourteen and a half. Ten years ago. How very young I was then, she mused now.
“I’m called Cindy, which probably should be spelled Sendy because people are always sending me on errands. In case anyone ever reads this, I want it on record that Daddy was an inventor. He died before he could invent anything important that people would pay money for, but that didn’t mean he never amounted to anything. Mama worked real hard at the truck stop to earn money for Daddy’s experiments. She was not a worthless shantytown tramp who ruined a perfectly decent boy, like Aunt Stephenson told Uncle Henry she was, which is one of the reasons I’m writing this. To set the record straight.”
Looking back, Cindy could remember as if it were yesterday the first time she’d met her aunt Stephenson, her father’s sister. Cindy had been about seven years old. They had just moved to Mocksville. Her father had taken her to a large white house, with a wide porch and stained glass panels beside the front door, to meet her aunt Lorna.
They’d been standing in the front hall, only now it was called a foyer. Her father had introduced her to a large woman in a black silk dress and told Cindy that this was her “Aunt Lorna.”
“You may call me Mrs. Stephenson,” the woman had corrected coldly. Her father had been furious. Cindy remembered hiding behind him and clinging to his hand. Over the years they had reached a compromise, she and her father’s sister. Cindy called her Aunt S.
Picking up the diary again, she skipped a few pages and continued to read. “Mama never went with us when we visited. I didn’t understand why until years later, when I read her diary a long time after the accident.
“The accident was when Daddy and I were taking Mama to work, and this tank truck blew a tire and ran us off the road. Daddy was killed instantly. My hip was damaged. A nurse said it was crushed, but if that had been the case I’d have had to have a new one, and I didn’t. Just a patch job.
“Anyway, Mama and I were both in the hospital
