Mac winced at her tone.
‘You have yourself a deal.’ He pitched his words low, so they wouldn’t carry down the phone to Russ, but they still came out savage. He couldn’t help it. He held up one finger. ‘Give me one week.’
‘Hmm... Well, he’s looking a little peaky—as if he’s had the flu or a tummy bug.’
He seized her free hand. Startled sage eyes met his. ‘Please,’ he whispered.
The softness and warmth of her hand seeped into him and almost made him groan, and then her hand tightened about his and his mouth went dry in a millisecond.
When she shook herself free of him a moment later he let out a breath he hadn’t even realised he’d been holding.
‘I expect it’s nothing that a bit of rest, gentle exercise, home-cooked food and sun won’t put to rights in a week or two.’
He closed his eyes and gave thanks.
‘Nah, I promise. I won’t take any risks. I’ll call a doctor in if he hasn’t picked up in a few days. Here—you want to talk to him?’
And before Mac could shake his head and back away he found the phone thrust out to him.
He swallowed the bile that rose in his throat and took it. ‘Hey, Russ, how you doing?’
‘Better than you, by the sounds of it. Though it explains why you haven’t answered my last two calls.’
He winced. ‘It’s all I’ve been able to do to keep up with my email.’ I’m sorry, bro. He hadn’t been good for anyone. Least of all his brother.
‘Well, you listen to Jo, okay? She’s got a good head on her shoulders.’
He glanced at said head and noticed how the wavy dark hair gleamed in the sun, and how cute little freckles sprinkled a path across the bridge of her nose. She had a rather cute nose. She cocked an eyebrow and he cleared his throat.
‘Will do,’ he forced himself to say.
‘Good. I want you in the best of health when I come to visit.’
He choked back a cough. Russ was coming to visit?
‘Give my love to Jo.’
With that, Russ hung up. Mac stared at Jo. ‘When is he coming to visit?’
She shrugged and plucked her phone from his fingers.
‘Why is he coming?’
‘Oh, that one’s easy. Because he loves you. He wants to see you before he goes under the knife.’ She met his gaze. ‘In case he doesn’t wake up after the operation.’
‘That’s crazy.’
‘Is it?’
‘Russ is going to be just fine!’ His brother didn’t need to exert himself in any fashion until he was a hundred per cent fit again.
She stared at him for a long moment. ‘Are you familiar with the Banjo Paterson poem “The Man From Snowy River”?’
Her question threw him. ‘Sure.’
‘Can you remember what comes after the first couple of lines? “There was movement at the station, for the word had passed around that the colt from old Regret had got away...”.’
‘“And had joined the wild bush horses—he was worth a thousand pound, So all the cracks had gathered to the fray”,’ he recited. His class had memorised that in the third grade.
‘Wild... Worth... Fray...’ she murmured in that honeyed liquid sunshine voice of hers.
‘Why?’
She shook herself. ‘No reason. Just an earworm.’
She seized her suitcases and strode back towards the house with them, and he couldn’t help feeling his fate had just been sealed by a poem.
And then it hit him.
Honey! The ingredient he’d been searching for was honey.
Copyright © 2015 by Michelle Douglas
“I’m good at what I do.”
Cara’s gaze skittered across his mouth, lingering. “I’m pretty aware of the breadth of your skill set.”
Her voice had dropped, turning sultry, and Keith’s body hardened in an instant. Yeah, he remembered how hot their kisses had always been.
“Are you flirting with me, Cara?”
“Not in the slightest. Your best skill is walking away, and I took copious notes. Allow me to demonstrate what I learned.”
She pivoted and walked away, leaving Keith standing alone by the pool. With a tropical storm on the horizon and a grand reopening combined with a bridal expo in two days, Cara was a distraction he could not afford to indulge.
KAT CANTRELL read her first Mills & Boon® novel in third grade and has been scribbling in notebooks since she learned to spell. What else would she write but romance? She majored in literature, officially with the intent to teach, but somehow ended up buried in middle management in corporate America, until she became a stay-at-home mum and full-time writer.
Kat, her husband and their two boys live in north Texas. When she’s not writing about characters on the journey to happily-ever-after, she can be found at a soccer game, watching the TV show Friends or listening to ’80s music.
Kat was the 2011 Mills & Boon So You Think You Can Write winner and a 2012 RWA Golden Heart Award finalist for best unpublished series contemporary manuscript.
Even the sandpipers were getting more action than Cara Chandler-Harris.
But she was working at this Turks and Caicos resort instead of frolicking in the crystal-blue surf with a nearly naked, oiled companion. Cara would be the sole designer showcasing her fairy-tale-inspired wedding dresses to two hundred industry professionals at a three-day bridal expo. The wedding-dress fashion show was one of the premier events and Cara Chandler-Harris Designs, which was still in its fledging stages, was poised to explode with this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for exposure.
Adding testicles into the mix would only drive her to drink.
Cara swept a glance over the woman in white silk standing before her in the Ariel wedding dress and repositioned the model to face forward. Wincing as she knelt for the four hundredth time, Cara stuck another pin through the lace-trim edging of the mermaid
