Showdown at Lizard Rock (20 page)

“What do you say we follow Matilda’s lead?” King whispered suggestively in Kaylyn’s ear as his hand innocently caressed the breast hidden by her flowers. “Quick!”

Kaylyn nodded, repositioned her huge bridal bouquet in front of them, and innocently slipped her hand into King’s pocket.

King gasped, turned toward his bride, and pulled her into his arms. His kiss was urgent and passionate, allowing his great joy to be recorded for the world to see.

Iris gulped visibly and let the mike slip sideways in her hand. Inadvertently it picked up the conversation of an elderly man leaning over a woman in a wheelchair.

“Well, what’d you draw, Luther?” the woman asked.

“I’ve got a boy, in October. Pays twenty-five dollars. What about you?”

“Me?” The woman beamed. “Ha! I hit the jackpot. I’ve got twins in September for fifty big ones.”

The television director quickly cut back to the springs. The picture of the Lizard glistened in the bright December moonlight. The camera angle gave an entirely different look to the great stone creature. This time his long snout seemed to curve upward, giving every suggestion of a satisfied smile.

Welcome to Loveswept!

Whether you’re on the beach, in the park, or sitting poolside, there’s nothing like spending a warm summer day reading a good book – especially one that has romance, sizzling passion, and deeply felt emotion. Luckily, we have just the thing to make your summer even more sweltering – in the very best way.

Samantha Kane’s captivating regency romance,
TEMPTING THE DEVIL
, is an erotic tale of secrets and temptation, and after reading it, you’ll be reaching for that fan for a whole ‘nother reason! And we’re also incredibly excited about Mary Ann Rivers’s sexy debut contemporary romance novella,
THE STORY GUY
, where Wednesdays turn into a day of temptation and pleasure for a mild-mannered librarian who responds to the most intriguing personal ad.

We also have some classics that you won’t want to miss:

Sandra Chastain’s exceptional stories,
SILVER BRACELETS
and
DANNY’S GIRL
, Ruth Owen’s riveting
AND BABIES MAKE FOUR
, Jean Stone’s moving
SINS OF INNOCENCE
, Iris Johansen’s thrilling
TIL THE END OF TIME
, and Katie Rose’s irresistible
A HINT OF MISCHIEF
.

If you love romance … then you’re ready to be
Loveswept
!

Gina Wachtel

Associate Publisher

P.S. Watch for these terrific Loveswept titles coming soon: August heats up with three e-originals: Stacey Kennedy’s intoxicating
CLAIMED
, Elisabeth Barrett’s blazing
SLOW SUMMER BURN
, and Toni Aleo’s red-hot
BLUE LINES
, as well as Sandra Chastain’s stirring
SURRENDER THE SHADOW
, Katie Rose’s unforgettable
COURTING TROUBLE
, Adrienne Staff’s alluring
CRESCENDO
, Iris Johansen’s tantalizing
YORK, THE RENEGADE
and Ruth Owen’s ultra-sexy
BODY HEAT
. September arrives with more timeless stories for you – Three enticing stories from Sandra Chastain,
THE JUDGE AND THE GYPSY, FIREBRAND
, and
THE LAST DANCE
, beloved author Iris Johansen’s
THE DELANEY’S OF KILLAROO
, Fran Baker’s enchanting
SEEING STARS
, as well as two original stories: Lauren Layne’s seductive
AFTER THE KISS
, and Mira Lyn Kelly’s sexy and sweet
TRUTH OR DARE
. Don’t miss any of these extraordinary reads. I promise that you’ll fall in love and treasure these stories for years to come.…

“Yes,” Katie said, gripping the steering wheel harder. “Uh-huh, yes, I get it.” She glanced in the rearview mirror, signaled left, and changed lanes. The traffic was getting thicker as they approached Louisville.

Her brother kept talking, his voice robbed of its customary power by the cheap speakers of her cell phone, which sat in a cup-holder mount and broadcast Caleb’s warnings upward at her head. “If you have the slightest indication that there’s danger attached to this threat, you’re going to call me, and—”

“Yesssssss,” she droned.

The drama was wasted on Caleb, who was going to give her this lecture for the seventeenth time whether she wanted to hear it or not.

It was wasted on Katie’s traveling companion, too. Sean didn’t react to anything she did. Ever.

Katie glanced at the man in the passenger seat of her Jetta, just to be sure. His expression as he stared out the windshield matched the bleak, featureless expanse of southbound I-71. He was like a human wall of granite, completely impervious to everything about her.

A stern, gorgeous cliff face.

Suppressing a sigh, she tuned back in to Caleb’s speech. “—you to be in charge of anything along those lines, Sean. This is a trial run for Katie. I’m only letting her go because Judah insists she’s the one he wants to work with. You got that, Katie? It’s Sean’s show. I need you to play nice and stay out of his way.”

“Yes,” she confirmed. “I know the deal. I agreed to the deal. I am on board with the deal. Now can we stop talking about it, please?”

She flinched at the way her voice came out, sharper than she’d meant to sound. It was only because she was nervous about this trip. Her palms had gone clammy and slimed the leather wheel cover, so uncomfortable did it make her to venture into an unknown city to do an unfamiliar job with a man who didn’t like her.

She had a tendency to bristle when nervous.

One more bad habit she needed to make an effort to tame. Better to be professional. What Katie really needed to figure out was how to act cool and icy like some kind of Bond Girl assassin, slinking around and poisoning people by slipping strychnine into their drinks.

Except without the poisoning. Her goal was to win herself a promotion from office manager to agent for Caleb’s security company, not to become an assassin. Not unless her ex-husband strolled into town needing assassinating.

“We’ll stop talking about it when I’m positive you’re going to cooperate,” Caleb said. “Right now, you sound like you’re blowing smoke up my ass.”

“I’m not,” she replied levelly. “I promise. I understand that this is your company and Sean’s assignment, and I’m just a companion on this trip. I promise I’ll be quiet and helpful and learn things, okay?”

“I need you to be safe.”

She made a face, then immediately regretted it. Wrinkling her nose and pursing her lips in response to Caleb’s babying only proved she deserved to be babied. Not the way she wanted Sean to see her.

She flicked another glance in his direction. If he saw her at all, he gave no sign.

“I’m safe,” she said.

“I care about you, Katelet.”

“I know you do,” she replied. “I care about you, too.”

“And it’s only because I care about you that I’m going to say this again …”

Katie tapped her fingertips against the steering wheel and stopped listening.

She understood his worry. Ever since she’d confessed that she was married and needed to locate her spouse so she could get divorced, Caleb had become all concerned and brotherly. She kept waiting for him to go back to the way he’d been before, but so far, no luck.

Five years older than her, her brother was a born nice guy who had spent most of his adulthood in the Military Police before moving home a year ago to help take care of their parents after their dad had a stroke. Katie had been living in his house rent-free at the time, working as a bartender nights and spending her days in elastic-waist pants, moping and watching daytime TV. Her husband, Levi, had cleaned her out and dropped her like a bad habit, and she’d returned from the life they’d built in Alaska in defeat. She’d practically regressed to adolescence by the time Caleb pulled her out of her self-pity slump.

He gave her a job running the office of his new company, Camelot Security, and after the first month or so, Katie had started to feel useful again. Competent. She’d discovered she had some get-up-and-go left in her after all. That she actually wanted to
do
something with herself.

Caleb was also the one who’d encouraged her to enroll in a couple of online classes. He’d even appointed himself her personal trainer, helping her whip her body into its best shape in years.

He was a great brother, but Katie was done with the coddling. She’d turned over a new leaf. He needed to get with the program.

“Sean, are you hearing all this?” he asked.

Sean nodded. He was invisible to Caleb, but the two of them apparently had a man-telepathy thing going, because Caleb said, “Great. Give me a call after you’ve talked to Pratt. I want to hear the details of these threats he’s supposedly getting. And if you can, find out why he’s brought this case to us instead of giving it to his security team from Palmerston, because—”

“Caleb,” Katie interrupted.

“What?”

“Give it a rest.”

“I just—”

“We’ve been over this and over this. Sean gets it.
I
get it. We’ll call you. Now let us do the job.”

Her brother exhaled explosively, which made Katie smile a little. “Aren’t you supposed to be taking today off?” she asked. “Go home and help Ellen with wedding arrangements or something.”

Caleb and Ellen had met on a job and gotten engaged about six minutes later. He pretty much lived over at her place now, and he’d become more of a father to her son, Henry, than the two-year-old’s real father ever had.

“God, no. She won’t let me near any of the wedding stuff. But I did tell Henry I’d take him to the hardware store.”

“So why aren’t you doing that?”

Katie spotted an exit and swerved toward it, weaving nimbly through three lanes of traffic. The gas tank was getting low.

“I’ve got payroll to figure out first.”

She caught herself right before the words left her mouth.
I can do that when I get back.

It was the kind of thing a self-sacrificing doormat would say, not a slick professional. A decade of specializing in being a doormat had left her rumpled and ground down, with boot prints on her forehead.

Time to stop jumping to the rescue.

“You should hire somebody else to do payroll, now that I have a new job,” she said instead.

At the end of the off ramp she turned—a little too fast, perhaps, because she got distracted by the fact that Sean was looking directly at her. Somehow he made looking look like not-looking. As though he could see her, but he couldn’t be bothered to
see
her.

How was she supposed to concentrate on Caleb talking about payroll when Sean was not-looking at her that way?

She didn’t know what the guy’s deal was. It seemed as if he didn’t approve of her—though what it was about her he disliked, she had no idea. Her personality, her being on the job, her existence?

Sean had been working for her brother since the summer, and in that time he and Caleb had grown thick as thieves. He spent hours every week in Caleb’s office, a solid panel of pine muffling the mingled sound of their voices as they bent their heads over some obscure security challenge and Katie tried to get her work done at the reception desk a few feet away.

Then he would come out, fix her with that blue stare, nod like a robot, and leave.

She’d tried being nice to him, reminding him they’d gone to high school together and sat by each other in Algebra II and Trig. She’d tried ignoring him. She’d tried glaring at him and even, one embarrassing day, flirting with him. Nothing made a difference.

He didn’t speak to her. Not at all, not ever, not under any circumstances. It was extremely weird, and it drove her nuts.

Caleb was way too casual about it.

Don’t send me to Louisville with him
, she’d begged.
He hates me.

No, he doesn’t
, Caleb had said.
I’m positive he doesn’t hate you. You two just need to work it out between you.

She didn’t know how to work it out, but she refused to let Sean get to her. This job was the big chance she’d been waiting for—her opportunity to get out of Camelot and see new places, rub elbows with interesting people, become somebody independent of Levi and Caleb. Her
own
somebody.

Judah Pratt saw her potential. The singer-songwriter had asked for her specifically. And okay, yes, maybe Judah’s interest in her was largely carnal, but an opportunity was an opportunity. She’d only been in his Chicago apartment for half an hour when it arrived: he’d announced that he would hire Camelot Security, but only if he could have Katie.

He’d said it just like that, too.
Only if I can have Katie.
A week later, the memory retained the power to send shivers skittering up her spine.