The Lady's Man Read online

  “I don’t have to tell you you’re an incredibly attractive woman,”

  Letter to Reader

  Title Page

  Books by Linda Turner

  About the Author

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Epilogue

  Copyright

  “I don’t have to tell you you’re an incredibly attractive woman,”

  Zeke began, “but I’m supposed to be working. Instead, I’m thinking about ways to talk you into going out with me. Every time you turn me down, it only encourages me to ask you again. If you really want me to stop, say yes.”

  It was the most convoluted reason Elizabeth had ever heard for going out with a man. “Let me get this straight. I’m supposed to go out with you so you’ll quit asking me? Is that what you’re saying?”

  “Pretty much,” he retorted. “Think about it. If we go out, we may discover that we don’t even like each other. In that case, whatever chemistry there is between us will die a swift death, and we can forget that we ever looked twice at each other.”

  If any other man had suggested such a thing, Elizabeth might have thought he was crazy. But this was Zeke McBride....

  “All right,” she said. “How about Thursday night?”

  Dear Reader,

  I’m always getting letters telling me how much you love miniseries, and this month we’ve got three great ones for you. Linda Turner starts the new family-based miniseries, THOSE MARRYING McBRIDES! with The Lady’s Man. The McBrides have always been unlucky in love—until now. And it’s wedding-wary Zeke who’s the first to take the plunge Marie Ferrarella also starts a new miniseries this month CHILDFINDERS, INC is a detective agency specializing in finding missing kids, and they’ve never failed to find one yet. So is it any wonder desperate Savannah King turns to investigator Sam Walters when her daughter disappears in A Hero for All Seasons? And don’t miss Rodeo Dad, the continuation of Carla Cassidy’s wonderful Western miniseries, MUSTANG, MONTANA

  Of course, that’s not all we’ve got in store Paula Detmer Riggs is famous for her ability to explore emotion and create characters who live in readers’ minds long after the last page is turned. In Once More a Family she creates a reunion romance to haunt you Sharon Mignerey is back with her second book, His Tender Touch, a suspenseful story of a woman on the run and her unwilling protector—who soon turns into her willing lover. Finally, welcome new author Candace Irvin, who debuts with a military romance called For His Eyes Only. I think you’ll be as glad as we are that Candace has joined the Intimate Moments ranks

  Enjoy—and come back next month, when we once again bring you the best and most exciting romantic reading around

  Yours,

  Leslie J Wainger

  Executive Senior Editor

  * * *

  Please address questions and book requests to

  Silhouette Reader Service

  U S. 3010 Walden Ave, PO. Box 1325, Buffalo, NY 14269

  Canadian PO Box 609, Fort Erie, Ont L2A 5X3

  * * *

  LINDA TURNER

  THE LADY’S MAN

  Books by Linda Turner

  Silhouette Intimate Moments

  The Echo of Thunder #238

  Crosscurrents #263

  An Unsuspecting Heart #298

  Flirting with Danger #316

  Moonlight and Lace #354

  The Love of Dugan Magee #448

  *Gable’s Lady #523

  *Cooper #553

  *Flynn #572

  *Kat #590

  Who’s the Boss? #649

  The Loner #673

  Maddy Lawrence’s Big

  Adventure #709

  The Lady in Red #763

  †I’m Having Your Baby? #799

  †A Marriage-Minded Man? #829

  †The Proposal #847

  †Christmas Lone-Star Style #895

  ‡The Lady’s Man #931

  *The Wild West

  †The Lone Star Social Club

  ‡Those Marrying McBrides1

  Silhouette Desire

  A Glimpse of Heaven #220

  Wild Texas Rose #653

  Philly and the Playboy #701

  The Seducer #802

  Heaven Can’t Wait #929

  Silhouette Special Edition

  Shadows in the Night #350

  Silhouette Books

  Silhouette Christmas Kisses 1996

  “A Wild West Christmas”

  Fortune’s Children

  The Wolf and the Dove

  A Fortune’s Children Christmas 1998

  “The Christmas Child”

  LINDA TURNER

  began reading romances in high school and began writing them one night when she had nothing else to read. She’s been writing ever since. Single and living in Texas, she travels every chance she gets, scouting locales for her books.

  Chapter 1

  The beat of her windshield wipers echoed the thumping of her heart as Elizabeth Davis gripped the steering wheel tighter and peered through the windshield, searching through the blowing snow for the faded center line of the road. It was nowhere to be seen. Swearing softly in the gathering darkness, she realized too late that she should have shut down the office and left for home at least an hour ago. She’d known a late-winter storm was bearing down on western Colorado, but she’d thought she had plenty of time to finish up some paperwork, then make it home before it hit. She’d been wrong. She’d hardly climbed into her car and left the city limits of Liberty Hill behind when the first snowflakes started to fall.

  Even then she hadn’t been worried. She’d grown up in the Rockies and knew how to drive in the snow. Her Jeep had four-wheel drive and was as dependable as the sunrise. Granted, she hadn’t lived in the area for very long, only three months, but she drove the fifteen miles between town and her small rental house twice a day and could chart every curve and dip of the road in her sleep. Finding her way home shouldn’t have been a problem.

  But the snow was wet and heavy and fell faster than her windshield wipers could sweep it away. Barely five o’clock, it was already nearly dark. Familiar landmarks quickly became lost in the blowing snow and deepening night, and visibility shrank to almost whiteout conditions. Her eyes trained unblinkingly on what she prayed was the road in front of her, she kept her foot light on the accelerator and inched her way carefully up one hill and down the next.

  Her headlights the only light in the all-encompassing darkness, they cut a narrow swath through the storm, illuminating nothing but a tunnel of snow-covered trees that seemed to stretch for miles. With tension crawling up her back, she leaned forward over the steering wheel and strained to see. Had she missed the turnoff to her house? She couldn’t, in all honesty, even say if she’d come to it yet. With her attention focused on the road directly in front of her, she could have driven right past it without even seeing it.

  Another time she would have laughed at the idea of being lost on the very road she lived on, but there was nothing the least bit funny about a blizzard. She’d heard of people getting turned around in the snow and freezing to death between the walk from their garage to their front door.

  “Think, Elizabeth!” she said out loud, breaking the tense silence that engulfed her. “The house has to be around here somewhere. The drive is a half mile past the McClusky place, and even in a blizzard you can’t miss those fancy gates of theirs. So have you passed them or not?”

  The words were hardly out of her mouth when her headlights picked
out a break in the trees that lined the right side of the road. And there in the darkness were the elaborate iron gates that marked the entrance to her neighbor’s property. She’d always thought they were more than a little ostentatious, but at that moment she’d never seen anything more beautiful in her life.

  The last half mile to her driveway passed in a blur. Tired and hungry, she crept along at a snail’s pace and finally spied the oversize mailbox at the edge of her drive. It wasn’t until then that she realized she really hadn’t expected to make it home at all. Trees went down all the time in storms this bad, and all it would have taken was one across the road to send her back to the office for the night.

  Her breath escaping in a sigh of relief, her thoughts jumping ahead to the pot of homemade soup that was waiting for her in the refrigerator, she turned... and misjudged where the edge of the road was under the snow. Her right-front wheel slipped off the pavement and immediately skidded on a patch of ice. Before she could hit the brakes, she bounced up and over a boulder and came to a jarring stop just a whisper from the edge of the drainage culvert on the side of the road.

  Her heart thundering, Elizabeth sat there, stunned, her hands locked tightly around the steering wheel and her widened eyes trained on the drop-off right in front of her bumper. Another few inches and gravity would have pulled her right over the edge.

  Close, she thought, shaken. That was just a little too close for comfort. The ditch was only six feet deep, but she had no desire to inspect the bottom of it in her Jeep. Carefully shifting into reverse, she eased down on the accelerator. Nothing happened. Frowning, she checked to make sure the vehicle was in four-wheel drive, then tried again, only to swear softly when the vehicle didn’t move so much as an inch. She was stuck!

  And John Wayne, unfortunately, was nowhere in sight. The road was deserted in either direction, her house, less than a quarter of a mile down the drive, too far to walk in such dangerous weather. So if she was going to make it home tonight, she had to get unstuck all by herself. Great, she thought with a groan. Just great! Grabbing the flashlight she kept stored under the seat, she zipped her down parka up to her chin and stepped out into the storm.

  Howling like a banshee, a frigid wet wind immediately slapped her in the face and stole her breath. In the half hour that had passed since she’d left work, the temperature had dropped at least another fifteen degrees, and despite her winter gear, it was colder than hell. Chilled to the bone, she dropped down on one knee and swept the beam of her flashlight under the Jeep to see what the problem was.

  At the sight of the rock wedged under the transfer case, she felt her heart sink to her toes No wonder she couldn’t move! One of the front wheels wasn’t even touching the ground, and the two back ones were sitting on ice, unable to get any traction. She could sit on the accelerator until doomsday and she wasn’t going to go anywhere. Damn!

  Sitting at an odd angle far off the shoulder of the road, the Jeep was nearly lost in the dark, blinding snow. Zeke, in fact, wouldn’t even have seen it but for the faint glow of the taillights as he swept past. Too late, he realized that it wasn’t an abandoned car but probably someone in trouble. Why else would they be parked that far off the road during the worst blizzard to hit Colorado in five years?

  Swearing, he touched his brakes and pulled over as quickly as he could manage on the snow-covered road, but he was still fifty yards past the vehicle before he brought his Suburban to a stop. A heartbeat later, he was backing up.

  He expected to find the driver holed up in the car with the heater running. Instead, he was down on his knees in the snow near the right-front tire, struggling with a fallen tree branch.

  “You okay, buddy?” he called out as he approached the parka-shrouded figure. “Looks like you had a little trouble. Here...let me help you with that.”

  Even as he spoke, he moved to help the man, but that was as far as he got. At the first sound of his voice, the dark figure scrambled to his feet and whirled, the blinding beam of his flashlight hitting Zeke right in the eyes. It wasn’t until the other driver spoke that he realized it was a woman.

  “That won’t be necessary. My husband’s on his way.” Her voice was cool and competent and had “back-off” written all over it. “He’s the Falls County sheriff. He should be here any minute.”

  Surprised, Zeke shielded his eyes and tried to see around the flashlight beam, but all he could make out was the dark silhouette of a slender figure lost in a down parka. So she was married to Nick Kincaid, was she? he thought with a snort. And he was Roger Rabbit. He might not have lived in Liberty Hill for years, but he knew Nick, knew that he’d never married. There was only one woman he loved—though it was a well-guarded secret he hid well—and that was Zeke’s sister, Merry. As long as she walked the earth, he’d never look at another woman.

  So why the devil was this woman pretending to be someone she wasn’t? He only had to think about the long, lonely stretch of dark road leading away from them in either direction to have his answer. There wasn’t another living soul in sight and not likely to be on such a cold, miserable night. She was a woman alone and in trouble. And he was a stranger.

  He could have told her she had nothing to fear from him, but he doubted she would have believed him. So he did the only other thing he could to make her feel more comfortable—he went along with her lie.

  Dropping the hand he held up to shield his eyes from the flashlight, he gave her a charming smile that came as easily to him as breathing. “Begging your pardon, ma’am, but he could be a while in this weather. Unless you want to be here most of the night, maybe you’d better let me help you.”

  “Oh, but that’s not necessary!”

  “No trouble,” he assured her, and stepped around her to go down on one knee and inspect the underside of her Jeep. “Looks like you’re stuck on a rock. What happened? D’you swerve to miss a deer, or what?”

  Normally, Elizabeth wouldn’t have had a problem admitting she’d misjudged her own driveway. But she had no intention of telling a man she didn’t know from Adam where she lived. Just last month, a woman over in Wilson County was raped by a man who stopped to help her change a flat on a deserted road. From what Elizabeth remembered, that man had looked nothing like this one with his rugged, dark good looks, but she wasn’t taking any chances.

  Standing well back away from him, she said, “Something like that. Look, I don’t mean to be rude—and I really appreciate you offering to help—but this really isn’t your problem—”

  “And you’d feel a lot better if I’d just go on and leave you here to solve it yourself,” he finished for her as he pulled back from under the car and shot her a knowing look.

  She didn’t bother to deny it. “Actually, yes, I would. I don’t know you—”

  “That’s easily remedied. I used to live around here—my family still does. You might have heard of them. The McBrides? I’m Zeke. I’ve got ID if you’d like to see it.”

  He reached for his wallet and drew out his driver’s license, but Elizabeth hardly spared it a glance. Surprised, she echoed, “McBride? You’re Merry’s brother?”

  He grinned. “Whatever she said about me, it’s not true. You know how sisters are—just because a guy put a frog in their bed when they were ten, they hold it against him for life. If you want the real skinny on me, talk to my mother. She’ll tell you I’m harmless.”

  Elizabeth hadn’t met his mother—or the rest of his family, for that matter—just Merry, who was a veterinarian with U.S. Fish and Wildlife when her services were needed. Merry had never mentioned her prodigal brother, but then again, they weren’t best friends, just acquaintances who waved when they passed each other in town Not that it mattered. Elizabeth didn’t need any testimonials from Zeke’s relatives to know just what kind of man he was. She’d recognized him the second he smiled at her.

  He was a flirt. The evidence was there in the twinkle in his eyes, in the grin that appeared on his handsome face at the sight of a woman... any woma
n. And that made him far from harmless.

  Her father had that same charm, and when she was a child, she’d thought he was the grandest man on earth. He was fun and loving and had the knack for making her feel as though she and her mother were the only two females on the planet. Then, when she was twelve, she’d discovered that he didn’t reserve his intimate, loving smiles for just his family. There were other women.

  To this day Elizabeth could still feel the shock, the hurt. His betrayal shook the security of her childhood to its very foundation, and nothing had ever been the same since. In an instant, her trust in her father was gone, the family unit compromised. She expected her mother to bring up the dreaded “D” word, but divorce was never mentioned. Instead, when Connor Davis promised he’d never so much as look at another woman again, her mother found a way to believe him and all was forgiven.

  The peace the family found after that couldn’t last, of course. Not when her father strayed again. And again. He just couldn’t seem to help himself. And each time, her mother forgave him. They’d been together for thirty-five years, and even though her father continued to stray, their marriage seemed stronger than ever.

  If that was love, Elizabeth had decided long ago, she wanted no part of it. Oh, she adored her father—how could she not? At sixty, he was still attractive and fun and the life of the party. But he didn’t know the meaning of the word commitment, and that was the last thing she wanted in a man.

  Which was why she made it a habit to date the serious, studious types. They might not be wildly exciting or make her heart thud wildly with excitement, but they weren’t distracted by every skirt that walked by, either. And that was just the way she wanted it. If she hadn’t fallen in love with any of them, it was just because she hadn’t met the right one yet. He would come along eventually, and when he did, he wouldn’t be anything like her father or the oh, so charming Mr. McBride. He would be faithful and dependable, and when he told her he loved her, she could believe him.