dark and inappropriate locations, on kitchen tables and the hood of her car. Hal was tall with black hair…like North.
And yet not like North at all.
North didn’t have all that much time for her. He kept much of himself hidden from her. He was steady and predictable when it came to his work, too tied to the responsibilities of his ranching empire and his duties to his legendary family.
Hal was wild and dangerous and free, insidiously attentive, and as faceless as an outlaw’s shadow.
North could give her the kind of safe, secure life her upper-middle-class mother could brag about.
Mostly her imaginary lover was a pirate on a ship who carried her off to sea. Sometimes he was a bandit or a highwayman who carried her to his hideout and robbed her of more than her gold.
Strip, my lady. Slowly. And every time she took something off, he would toss a gold coin at her feet.
Mostly she dreamed about him at night, but lately she’d been having the most lurid daydreams. The over-sexed phantom was becoming terribly distracting. One reason she was so anxious to get married was to send Loverboy packing. Once North made love to her, she would have a husband to dream about. What sane woman would chase a dream, when she had a man like North in her bed? Everybody, simply everybody told her North was the sexiest, hottest, richest cowboy prince in all of Texas.
North could have chosen any woman. He had chosen her.
“That’s not the way it was, Sugar-Baby,” purred Loverboy.
She hated to be called that. “Shut up, Hal!”
“I was there! And Melody was first!”
“Go away and leave me alone!”
“Never. I am not abandoning you till I find a more suitable companion for you.”
“Stay out of my love life!”
Suddenly a strange thing happened. The black sky turned pink, and she saw a lone black figure on a motorcycle off to her left silhouetted in a white cone of light. Pinkish-blue light pulsated around him. He was wearing a helmet, but the heat of his gaze was a visceral, physical connection. Even in that blurred, peripheral glimpse, she sensed that such a man in the flesh might prove wilder and more chaotically thrilling than any secret interior existence with Loverboy.
She knew better than to look at the biker, but some dark and dangerous force compelled her.
Curiosity kills more than cats.
The forbidden—especially in the tame, pampered life of a woman like Claire, who lived her life by rules the way some people paint by numbers—was the most powerful temptation. Besides, Melody’s dance and North’s dark mood had opened a crack in her heart and self-esteem.
She was on the brink of marriage to the most desirable of men. Never had she felt less sexually attractive, nor more afraid or vulnerable. What was the biker doing alone in a dark cemetery?
Jauntily, she turned toward him. For the space of a heartbeat her long-lashed eyes fixed on the black helmet that hid his face with an avidity that should have shamed her. Then with a will all its own, her glossily tipped fingernail tooted her horn.
He nodded. Her lips parted coquettishly. But when the biker skidded out onto the road after her, her heart jumped into her throat.
The thunder of his big bike racing to catch up to her was a fuse that lit a primal heat in every nerve in her body.
The biker left asphalt, caught up with her pursuers, spewing gravel on them before braking and then falling in behind them.
She knew he was bad.
Bad to the bone.
Why did she suddenly feel she was on a collision course with destiny? She turned her three-carat engagement ring backwards.
North was in Corpus, but the chase was on.
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