Kitabı oxu: «Wedding Vows: With This Ring: Rescued in a Wedding Dress / Bridesmaid Says, 'I Do!' / The Doctor's Surprise Bride»

CARA COLTER lives in British Columbia with her partner, Rob, and eleven horses. She has three grown children and a grandson. She is a recent recipient of an RT Book Reviews Career Achievement Award in the Love and Laughter category. Cara loves to hear from readers and you can contact her or learn more about her through her website: www.cara-colter.com.

Chapter One

MOLLY MICHAELS stared at the contents of the large rectangular box that had been set haphazardly on top of the clutter on her desk. The box contained a wedding gown.

Over the weekend donations that were intended for one of the three New York City secondhand clothing shops that were owned and operated by Second Chances Charity Inc—and that provided the funding for their community programs—often ended up here, stacked outside the doorstep of their main office.

It did seem like a cruel irony, though, that this donation would end up on her desk.

“Sworn off love,” Molly told herself, firmly, and shut the box. “Allergic to amour. Lessons learned. Doors closed.”

She turned and hung up her coat in the closet of her tiny office, then returned to her desk. She snuck the box lid open, just a crack, then opened it just a little more. The dress was a confection. It looked like it had been spun out of dreams and silk.

“Pained by passion,” Molly reminded herself, but even as she did, her hand stole into the box, and her fingers touched the delicate delight of the gloriously rich fabric.

What would it hurt to look? It could even be a good exercise for her. Her relationship with Chuck, her broken engagement, was six months in the past. The dress was probably ridiculous. Looking at it, and feeling nothing, better yet judging it, would be a good test of the new her.

Molly Michaels was one hundred percent career woman now, absolutely dedicated to her work here as the project manager at Second Chances. It was her job to select, implement and maintain the programs the charity funded that helped people in some of New York’s most challenged neighborhoods.

“Love my career. Totally satisfied,” she muttered. “Completely fulfilled!”

She slipped the pure white dress out of the box, felt the sensuous slide of the fabric across her palms as she shook it out.

The dress was ridiculous. And the total embodiment of romance. Ethereal as a puff of smoke, soft as a whisper, the layers and layers of ruffles glittered with hundreds of hand-sewn pearls and tiny silk flowers. The designer label attested to the fact that someone had spent a fortune on it.

And the fact it had shown up here was a reminder that all those romantic dreams had a treacherous tendency to go sideways. Who sent their dress, their most poignant reminder of their special day, to a charity that specialized in secondhand sales, if things had gone well?

So, it wasn’t just her who had been burned by love. Au contraire! It was the way of the world.

Still, despite her efforts to talk sense to herself, there was no denying the little twist of wistfulness in her tummy as Molly looked at the dress, felt all a dress like that could stand for. Love. Souls joined. Laughter shared. Long conversations. Lonely no more.

Molly was disappointed in herself for entertaining the hopelessly naive thoughts, even briefly. She wanted to kill that renegade longing that stirred in her. The logical way to do that would be to put the dress back in the box, and have the receptionist, Tish, send it off to the best of Second Chances stores, Wow and Then, on the Upper West Side. That store specialized in high-end gently used fashions. Everything with a designer label in it ended up there.

But, sadly, Molly had never been logical. Sadly, she had not missed the fact the dress was exactly her size.

On impulse, she decided the best way to face her shattered dreams head-on would be to put on the dress. She would face the bride she was never going to be in the mirror. She would regain her power over those ever so foolish and hopelessly old-fashioned dreams of ever after.

How could she, of all people, believe such nonsense? Why was it that the constant squabbling of her parents, the eventual dissolution of her family, her mother remarrying often, had not prepared Molly for real life? No, rather than making her put aside her belief in love, her dreams of a family, her disappointment-filled childhood had instead made her yearn for those things.

That yearning had been drastic enough to make her ignore every warning sign Chuck had given her. And there had been plenty of them! Not at first, of course. At first, it had been all delight and devotion. But then, Molly had caught her intended in increasingly frequent insults: little white lies, lateness, dates not kept.

She had forgiven him, allowing herself to believe that a loving heart overlooked the small slights, the inconsiderations, the occasional surliness, the lack of enthusiasm for the things she liked to do. She had managed to minimize the fact that the engagement ring had been embarrassingly tiny, and efforts to address setting a date had been rebuffed.

In other words, Molly had been so engrossed in her fantasy about love, had been so focused on a day and a dress just like this one, that she had excused and tolerated and dismissed behavior that, in retrospect, had been humiliatingly unacceptable.

Now she was anxious to prove to herself that a dress like this one had no power over her at all. None! Her days of being a hopeless dreamer, of being naive, of being romantic to the point of being pathetic, were over.

Over and done. Molly Michaels was a new woman, one who could put on a dress like this and scoff at the beliefs it represented. Round-faced babies, a bassinet beside the bed, seaside holidays, chasing children through the sand, cuddling around a roaring fire with him, the dream man, beside you singing songs and toasting marshmallows.

“Dream man is right,” she scolded herself. “Because that’s where such a man exists. In dreams.”

The dress proved harder to get on than Molly could have imagined, which should have made her give it up. Instead, it made her more determined, which formed an unfortunate parallel to her past relationship.

The harder it had been with Chuck, the more she had tried to make it work.

That desperate-for-love woman was being left behind her, and putting on this dress was going to be one more step in helping her do it!

But first she got tangled in the sewn-in lining, and spent a few helpless moments lost in the voluminous sea of white fabric. When her head finally popped out the correct opening, her hair was caught hard in one of the pearls that encrusted the neckline. After she had got free of that, fate made one more last-ditch effort to get her to stop this nonsense. The back of the dress was not designed to be done up single-handedly.

Still, having come this far, with much determination and contortion, Molly somehow managed to get every single fastener closed, though it felt as if she had pulled the muscle in her left shoulder in the process.

Now she took a deep breath, girded her cynical loins, and turned slowly to look at herself in the full-length mirror hung on the back of her office door.

She closed her eyes. Goodbye, romantic fool. Then she took a deep breath and opened them.

Molly felt her attempt at cynicism dissolve with all the resistance of instant coffee granules meeting hot water. In fact everything dissolved: the clutter around her, the files that needed to be dealt with, the colorful sounds of the East Village awaking outside her open transom window, something called out harshly in Polish or Ukrainian, the sound of a delivery truck stopped nearby, a horn honking.

Molly stared at herself in the mirror. She had fully expected to see her romantic fantasy debunked. It would just be her, too tall, too skinny, redheaded and pale-faced Molly Michaels, in a fancy dress. Not changed by it. Certainly not completed by it.

Instead, a princess looked solemnly back at her. Her red hair, pulled out of its very professional upsweep by the entrapment inside the dress and the brief fray with the pearl, was stirred up, hissing with static, fiery and free. Her pale skin looked not washed out as she had thought it would against the sea of white but flawless, like porcelain. And her eyes shimmered green as Irish fields in springtime.

The cut of the dress had seemed virginal before she put it on. Now she could see the neckline was sinful and the rich fabric was designed to cling to every curve, making her look sensuous, red-hot and somehow ready.

“This is not the lesson I was hoping for,” she told herself, the stern tone doing nothing to help her drag her eyes away from the vision in the mirror. She ordered herself to take off the dress, in that same easily ignored stern tone. Instead, she did an experimental pose, and then another.

“I would have made a beautiful bride!” she cried mournfully.

Annoyed with herself, and with her weakness—eager to get away from all the feelings of loss for dreams not fulfilled that this dress was stirring up in her—she reached back to undo the fastener that held the zipper shut. It was stuck fast.

And much as she did not like what she had just discovered about herself—romantic notions apparently hopelessly engrained in her character—she could not bring herself to damage the dress in order to get it off.

Molly tried to pull it over her head without the benefit of the zipper, but it was too tight to slip off and when she lowered it again, all she had accomplished was her hair caught hard in the seed pearls that encrusted the neckline of the dress again.

It was as if the dress—and her romantic notions—were letting her know their hold on her was not going to be so easily dismissed!

Her phone rang; the two distinct beeps of Vivian Saint Pierre, known to one and all as Miss Viv, beloved founder of Second Chances. Miss Viv and Molly were always the first two into the office in the morning.

Instead of answering the phone, Molly headed out of her own office and down the hall to her boss’s office to be rescued.

From myself, she acknowledged wryly.

Miss Viv would look at this latest predicament Molly had gotten herself into, know instantly why Molly had been compelled to put on the dress and then as she was undoing the zip she would say something wise and comforting about Molly’s shattered romantic hopes.

Miss Viv had never liked Chuck Howard, Molly’s fiancé. When Molly had arrived at work that day six months ago with her ring finger empty, Miss Viv had nodded approvingly and said, “You’re well rid of that ne’er-do-well.”

And that was even before Molly had admitted that her bank account was as empty as her ring finger!

That was exactly the kind of pragmatic attention Molly needed when a dress like this one was trying to undo all the lessons she was determined to take from her broken engagement!

With any luck, by the end of the day her getting stuck in the dress would be nothing more than an office joke.

Determined to carry off the lighthearted laugh at herself, she burst through the door of Miss Viv’s office after a single knock, the wedding march humming across her lips.

But a look at Miss Viv, sitting behind her desk, stopped Molly in her tracks. The hum died midnote. Miss Viv did not look entertained by the theatrical entrance. She looked horrified.

And when her gaze slid away from where Molly stood in the doorway to where a chair was nearly hidden behind the open door, Molly’s breath caught and she slowly turned her head.

Despite the earliness of the hour, Miss Viv was not alone!

A man sat in the chair behind the door, the only available space for visitors in Miss Viv’s hopelessly disorganized office.

No, not just a man. The kind of man that every woman dreamed of walking down the aisle toward.

The man sitting in Miss Viv’s office was not just handsome, he was breathtaking. In a glance, Molly saw neat hair as rich as dark chocolate, firm lips, a strong chin with the faintest hint of a cleft, a nose saved from perfection—but made unreasonably more attractive—by the slight crook of an old break and a thin scar running across the bridge of it.

The aura of confidence, of success, was underscored by how exquisitely he was dressed. He was in a suit of coal-gray, obviously custom tailored. He had on an ivory shirt, a silk tie also in shades of gray. The ensemble would have been totally conservative had it not been for how it all matched the gray shades of his eyes. The cut of the clothes emphasized rather than hid the pure power of his build.

The power was underscored in the lines of his face.

And especially in the light in his eyes. The surprise that widened them did not cover the fact he radiated a kind of self-certainty, a cool confidence, that despite the veneer of civilization he wore so well, reminded Molly of a gunslinger.

In fact, that was the color of those eyes, exactly, gunmetal-gray, something in them watchful, waiting. She shivered with awareness. Despite the custom suit, the Berluti shoes, the Rolex that glinted at his wrist, he was the kind of man who sat with his back to the wall, always facing the door.

The man radiated power and the set of his shoulders telegraphed the fact that, unlike Chuck, this man was pure strength. The word excuse would not appear in his vocabulary.

No, Molly could tell by the fire in his eyes that if the ship was going down, or the building was on fire—if the town needed saving and he had just ridden in on his horse—he was the one you would follow, he was the one you would rely on to save you.

An aggravating conclusion since she was so newly committed to relying on herself, her career and her coworkers to save her from a disastrous life of unremitting loneliness. The little featherless budgie she had at home—the latest in a long list of loving strays that had populated her life—also helped.

The little swish of attraction she felt for the stranger made her current situation even more annoying. It didn’t matter how much he looked like the perfect person to cast in the center of a romantic fantasy! She had given up on such twaddle! She was well on her way to becoming one of those women perfectly comfortable sitting at an outdoor café, alone, sipping a fine glass of wine and reading a book. Not even slipping a look at the male passers-by!

Of course, this handsome devil appearing without warning in her boss’s office on a Monday morning was a test, just like the dress. It was a test of her commitment to the new and independent Molly Michaels, a test of her ability to separate her imaginings from reality.

Look at her deciding he was the one you would follow in a catastrophe when she knew absolutely nothing about him except that he had an exceedingly handsome face. Molly reminded herself, extra sternly, that all the catastrophes in her life had been of her own making. Besides, with the kind of image he portrayed—all easy self-assurance and leashed sexuality—probably more than one woman had built fantasies of hope and forever around him. He was of an age where if he wanted to be taken he would be. And if his ring finger—and the expression on his face as he looked at the dress—was any indication, he was not!

“Sorry,” Molly said to Miss Viv, “I thought you were alone.” She gave a quick, curt nod of acknowledgment to the stranger, making sure to strip any remaining hopeless dreamer from herself before she met his eyes.

“But, Molly, when I rang your office, I wanted you to come, and you must have wanted something?” Miss Viv asked her before she made her escape.

Usually imaginative, Molly drew a blank for explaining away her attire and she could think of not a single reason to be here except the truth.

“The zip is stuck, but I can manage. Really. Excuse me.” She was trying to slide back out the door when his eyes narrowed on her.

“Is your hair caught in the dress?”

His voice was at least as sensual as the silk where the dress caressed her naked skin.

Molly could feel her cheeks turning a shade of red that was probably going to put her hair to shame.

“A little,” she said proudly. “It’s nothing. Excuse me.” She tried to lift her chin, to prove how nothing it was, but her hair was caught hard enough that she could not, and she also could not prevent a little wince of pain as the movement caused the stuck hair to yank at her tender scalp.

“That looks painful,” he said quietly, getting to his feet with that casual grace one associated with athletes, the kind of ease of movement that disguised how swift they really were. But he was swift, because he was standing in front of her before she could gather her wits and make good her escape.

The smart thing to do would be to step back as he took that final step toward her. But she was astounded to find herself rooted to the spot, paralyzed, helpless to move away from him.

The world went very still. It seemed as if all the busy activity on the street outside ceased, the noises faded, the background and Miss Viv melted into a fuzzy kaleidoscope as the stranger leaned in close to her.

With the ease born of supreme confidence in himself—as if he performed this kind of rescue on a daily basis—he lifted the pressure of the dress up off her shoulder with one hand, and with the other, he carefully unwound her hair from the pearls they were caught in.

Given that outlaw remoteness in his eyes, he was unbelievably gentle, his fingers unhurried in her hair.

Molly’s awareness of him was nothing less than shocking, his nearness tingling along her skin, his touch melting parts of her that she had hoped were turned to ice permanently.

The moment took way too long. And not nearly long enough. His concentration was complete, the intensity of his steely-gray gaze as he dealt with her tangled hair, his unsettling nearness, the graze of his fingers along her neck, stealing her breath.

At least Molly didn’t feel as if she was breathing, but then she realized she must, indeed, be pulling air in and out, because she could smell him.

His scent was wonderful, bitingly masculine, good aftershave, expensive soap, freshly pressed linen.

Molly gazed helplessly into his face, unwillingly marveling at the chiseled perfection of his features, the intrigue of the faint crook in his nose, the white line of that scar, the brilliance of his eyes. He, however, was pure focus, as if the only task that mattered to him was freeing her hair from the remaining pearl that held it captive.

Apparently he was not marveling at the circumstances that had brought his hands to her hair and the soft place on her neck just below her ear, apparently he was not swamped by their scents mingling nor was he fighting a deep awareness that a move of a mere half inch would bring them together, full frontal contact, the swell of her breast pressing into the hard line of his chest…

The dress, suddenly freed, fell back onto her shoulder. He actually smiled then, the faintest quirk of a gorgeous mouth, and she felt herself floundering in the depths of stormy sea eyes, the chill gray suddenly illuminated by the sun.

“Did you say the zipper was stuck as well?” he asked.

Oh, God. Had she said that? She could not prolong this encounter! It was much more of a test of the new confidently-sitting-at-the-café-alone her than she was ready for!

But mutely, caught in a spell, she turned her back to him and stood stock-still, waiting. She shivered at the thought of a wedding night, what this moment meant, and at the same time that unwanted thought seeped warmly into her brain, he touched her.

She felt the slight brush of his hand, again, on delicate skin, this time at the back of her neck. Her senses were so intensely engaged that she heard the faint pop of the hook parting from the eye. She registered the feel of his hand, felt astounded by the hard, unyielding texture of his skin.

He looked like he was pure business, a banker maybe, a wealthy benefactor, but there was nothing soft about his hand that suggested a life behind a desk, his tools a phone and a computer. For some reason it occurred to her that hands like that belonged to people who handled ropes…range riders, mountain climbers. Pirates. Ah, yes, pirates with all that mysterious charm.

He dispensed with the hook at the top of the zipper in a split second, a man who had dispensed with such delicate items many times? And then he paused, apparently realizing the height of the zipper would make it nearly impossible for her to manage the rest by herself—she hoped he would not consider how much determination it had taken her to get it up in the first place—and then slid the zipper down a sensuous inch or two.

With that same altered sense of alertness Molly could feel cool air on that small area of her newly exposed naked back, and then, though she did not glance back, she could feel heat. His gaze? Her own jumbled thoughts?

Molly fought the chicken in her that just wanted to bolt out the open door. Instead, she turned and faced him.

“There you go,” he said mildly, rocking back on his heels. The heat must have come from her own badly rattled thoughts, because his eyes were cool, something veiled in their intriguing silver depths.

“Thank you,” she said, struggling to keep her voice deliberately controlled to match the look in his eyes. “I’m sorry to interrupt.”

“No, no, Molly,” Miss Viv said, and it was a mark of the intensity of her encounter with him that Molly was actually jarred by the fact Miss Viv was still in the room. “I called your office to invite you to meet Mr. Whitford. I’m going on an unscheduled holiday, and Mr. Whitford is taking the helm.”

Molly felt the shock of Miss Viv’s announcement ripple down a spine that had already been thoroughly shocked this morning. But even as she dealt with the shock, part of her mused with annoying dreaminess, helm. Pirate. I knew it.

“Houston Whitford, Molly Michaels,” Miss Viv said. The introduction seemed ridiculously formal considering the rather astounding sense of intimacy Molly had just felt under his touch.

Still, now she felt duty-bound to extend her hand, and be touched again, even as she was digesting the fact he was in charge. How could that be? Molly was always in charge when Miss Viv was away!

And Miss Viv was going on a holiday, but hadn’t told anyone? Second Chances was a family and far better than Molly’s family of origin at providing a place that was safe, and supportive, and rarely unpredictable.

“There are going to be a few changes,” Miss Viv said, cheerfully, as if Molly’s nice safe world was in no way being threatened. “And no one is more qualified to make them than Mr. Whitford. I expect Second Chances is going to blossom, absolutely go to the next level, under his leadership. I’m thrilled to pass the reins to him.”

But Molly felt the threat of her whole world shifting. Miss Viv was stepping down? The feeling only intensified when Houston Whitford’s hand—warm, strong, cool—touched her skin again. His hand enveloped her hand and despite the pure professionalism of his shake, the hardness of his grip told her something, as did the glittering silver light in his eyes.

He was not the usual kind of person who worked an ill-paying job at a charity. His suit said something his hands did not: that he was used to a world of higher finances, higher-power, higher-tech.

The only thing that was higher at Second Chances was the satisfaction, the feeling of changing the world for the better.

The cost of his suit probably added up to their operating budget for a month! He didn’t fit the cozy, casual and rather shabby atmosphere of the Second Chances office at all.

She felt the unmistakable tingle of pure danger all along her spine. There was something about Houston Whitford that was not adding up. Change followed a man like that as surely as pounding rain followed the thunderstorm.

Molly, her father had said, on the eve of leaving their family home forever, there is going to be a change.

And she had been allergic to that very thing ever since! She wanted her world to be safe and unchanging and that view had intensified after she had flirted with a major life change in the form of Chuck. Since then Second Chances had become more her safe haven than ever.

“What kind of changes?” she asked Miss Viv now, failing to keep a certain trepidation from entering her voice.

“Mr. Whitford will be happy to brief you, um, after you’ve changed into something more appropriate,” Miss Viv said, and then glanced at her watch. “Oh, my! I do have a plane to catch. I’m going to a spa in Arizona, my dear.”

“You’re going to a spa in Arizona, and you didn’t tell anyone?” It seemed unimaginable. That kind of vacation usually should have entailed at least a swimsuit shopping excursion together!

“The opportunity came up rather suddenly,” Miss Viv said, unapologetically thrilled. “A bolt from the blue, an unexpected gift from an old friend.”

Molly tried to feel delighted for her. No one deserved a wonderful surprise more than her boss.

“For how long?” she asked.

But the shameful truth was Molly did not feel delighted at her boss’s good fortune. Sudden change. Molly hated that kind more than the regular variety.

“Two weeks,” Miss Viv said with a sigh of anticipated delight.

Two weeks? Molly wanted to shout. That was ridiculous. People went to spas for a few hours, maybe a few days, never two weeks!

“But when you come back, everything will be back to normal?” Molly pressed.

Miss Viv laughed. “Oh, sweetie,” she said. “What is normal? A setting on a clothes dryer as far as I’m concerned.”

Molly stared at her boss. What was normal? Not something to be joked about! It was what Molly had never had. She’d never had a normal family. Her engagement had certainly not been normal. It felt as if she had spent a good deal of her life searching for it, and coming up short. Even her pets were never normal.

Molly’s life had been populated with the needy kind of animal that no one else wanted. A dog with three legs, a cat with no meow. Her current resident was a bald budgie, his scrawny body devoid of feathers.

“I’ve been thinking of retiring,” Miss Viv shocked Molly further by saying. “So, who knows? After the two weeks is up, we’ll just play it by ear.”

Molly wanted to protest that she didn’t like playing it by ear. She liked plans and schedules, calendars that were marked for months in advance.

If Miss Viv retired, would Houston Whitford be in charge forever?

She could not think of a way of asking that did not show her dread at the prospect!

Besides, there is no forever, Molly reminded herself. That was precisely why she had put on this dress. To debunk forever myths.

She particularly did not want to entertain that word anywhere near the vicinity of him, a man whose faintest touch could make a woman’s vows of self-reliance disintegrate like foundations crumbling at the first tremor of the coming quake.

Chapter Two

THE bride flounced out of the room, and unbidden, words crowded into Houston’s brain.

And then they lived happily ever after.

He scoffed at himself, and the words. Yes, it was true that a dress like that, filled out by a girl like Molly Michaels, represented a fairy tale.

But the fact she was stuck in it, the zipper stubborn, her hair wound painfully around the pearls, represented more the reality: relationships of the romantic variety were sticky, complicated, entrapping.

Besides, a man didn’t come from the place Houston Whitford had come from and believe in fairy tales. He believed in his own strength, his own ability to survive. He saw the cynicism with which he had regarded that dress as a gift.

In fact, the unexpected appearance of one of the Second Chances employees in full wedding regalia only confirmed what several weeks of research had already told him.

Second Chances reminded Houston, painfully, of an old-style family operated bookstore. Everyone was drawn to the warmth of it, it was always crowded and full of laughter and discussion, but when it came time to actually buy a book it could not compete with the online giants, streamlined, efficient, economical. Just how Houston liked his businesses, running like well-oiled machines. No brides, no ancient, adorable little old ladies at the helm.

He fought an urge to press the scar over the old break on the bridge of his nose. It ached unbearably lately. Had it ached ever since, in a rare moment of weakness, he had agreed to help out here? This wasn’t his kind of job. He dealt in reality, in cold, hard fact. Where did a poorly run charity, with brides in the hallways and octogenarians behind the desks, fit into his world?

“And that was our Molly,” Miss Viv said brightly. “Isn’t she lovely?”

“Lovely,” Houston managed. He recalled part two of his mission here.

Miss Viv had confessed to him she was thinking of retiring. She loved Molly and considered her her natural successor. But she was a little worried. She wanted his opinion on whether Molly was too soft-hearted for the job.

“Is she getting ready for her wedding?” On the basis of their very brief encounter, Molly Michaels seemed the kind of woman that a man who was not cynical and jaded like him—a man who believed in fairy tales, love ever after, family—would snatch up.

He didn’t even like the direction of those thoughts. The wedding dress should only be viewed in the context of the job he had to do here. What was Miss Michaels doing getting ready for her wedding at work? How did that reflect on a future for her in management?

The job he hadn’t wanted was getting less attractive by the second. A demand of complete professionalism was high on his list of fixes for the ailing companies he put back on the track to success.

“She’s not getting ready for her wedding,” Miss Viv said with a sympathetic sigh. “The exact opposite, I’m afraid. Her engagement broke off before they even set a date. A blessing, though the poor child did not see it that way at the time. She’s not been herself since it happened.”

At this point, with anyone else, he would make it clear, right now, he didn’t want to know a single thing about Molly Michaels’s personal life. But this job was different than any he’d ever taken on before. And this was Miss Viv.

Everybody was a poor child to her. His need to analyze, to have answers to puzzles, surprised him by not filing this poor child information under strictly personal, none of his business, nothing to do with the job at hand. Instead, he allowed the question to form in his mind. If a man believed in the fairy tale enough to ask someone like Molly Michaels to be his wife, why would he then be fool enough to let her get away?

Because the truth was lovely was an unfortunate understatement, and would have been even before he had made the mistake of making the bridal vision somehow real by touching the heated silk of Molly’s skin, the coiled copper of her hair.

Molly’s eyes, the set of her sensuous mouth and the corkscrewing hair, not to mention the curves of a slender figure, had not really said lovely to him. Despite the fairy tale of the dress the word that had come to mind first was sexy.

Was that what had made him get up from his chair? Not really to rescue her from her obvious discomfort, but to see what was true about her? Sexy? Or innocent?

He was no Boy Scout, after all, not given to good deeds, which was another reason he should not be here at Second Chances.

Still, was his need to know that about Molly Michaels personal or professional? He had a feeling at Second Chances those lines had always been allowed to blur. Note to self, he thought wryly, no more rescuing of damsels in distress.

Though, really that was why he was here, even if Miss Viv was obviously way too old to qualify as a damsel.

Houston Whitford was CEO of Precision Solutions, a company that specialized in rescuing ailing businesses, generally large corporations, from the brink of disaster. His position used all of his strengths, amongst which he counted a formidable ability to not be swayed be emotion.

He was driven, ambitious and on occasion, unapologetically ruthless, and he could see that was a terrible fit with Second Chances. He didn’t really even like charities, cynically feeling that for one person to receive the charity of another was usually as humiliating for the person in need as it was satisfying for the one who could give.

But the woman who sat in front of him was a reminder that no man had himself alone to thank for his circumstances.

Houston Whitford was here, at Second Chances, because he owed a debt.

And he was here for the same reason he suspected most men blamed when they found themselves in untenable situations.

His mother, Beebee, had suggested he help out. So, it had already been personal, some line blurred, even before the bride had showed up.

Beebee was Houston’s foster mother, but it was a distinction he rarely made. She had been there when his real mother—as always—had not. Beebee had been the first person he had ever felt genuinely cared about him and what happened to him. He owed his life as it was to her charity, and he knew it.

Miss Viv was Beebee’s oldest friend, part of that remarkable group of women who had circled around a tough boy from a terrible neighborhood and seen something in him—believed in something in him—that no one had ever seen or believed in before.

You didn’t say sorry, too busy in the face of that kind of a debt.

It had started a month ago, when he’d hosted a surprise birthday celebration for Beebee. The catered high tea had been held at his newly acquired “Gold Coast” condominium with its coveted Fifth Avenue address, facing Central Park.

Beebee and “the girls” had been all sparkle then, oohing over the white-gloved doorman, the luxury of the lobby, the elevators, the hallways. Inside the sleek interior of his eleven-million-dollar apartment, no detail had gone unremarked, from tiger wood hardwood to walnut moldings to the spectacular views.

But as the party had progressed, Miss Viv had brought up Second Chances, the charity she headed, and that all “the girls” supported. She confessed it was having troubles, financial and otherwise, that baffled her.

“Oh, Houston will help, won’t you, dear?” his foster mom had said.

And all eyes had been on him, and in a blink he wasn’t a successful entrepreneur who had proven himself over and over again, but that young ruffian, poor child, rescued from mean streets and a meaner life, desperately trying to live up to their expectation that he was really a good person under that tough exterior.

But after that initial weakness that had made him say yes, he’d laid down the law. If they wanted his help, they would have to accept the fact he was doing it his way: no interfering from them, no bringing him home-baked goodies to try to sway him into keeping things the very same way that had gotten the charity into trouble in the first place and especially no references to his past.

Of course, they hadn’t understood that.

“But why ever not? We’re all so proud of you, Houston!”

But Beebee and her friends weren’t just proud of him because of who he was now. No, they were the ones who held in their memories that measuring stick of who he had once been…a troubled fourteen-year-old kid from the tenements of Clinton, a neighborhood that had once been called Hell’s Kitchen.

They saw it as something to be admired that he had overcome his circumstances—his father being sent to prison, his mother abandoning him—but he just saw it as something left behind him.

Beebee and Miss Viv dispensed charity as easily as they breathed, but as well-meaning as they were, they had no idea how shaming that part of his life, when he had been so needy and so vulnerable, was to him. He did not excuse himself because he had only been fourteen.

He still felt, sometimes, that he was their poor child, an object of pity that they had rescued and nursed back to wellness like a near-drowned kitten.

Was he insecure about his past? No, he didn’t think so. But it was over and it was done. He’d always had an ability to place his life in neat compartments; his need for order did not allow for overlapping.

But suddenly, he thought of that letter that had arrived at his home last week, a cheap envelope and a prison postmark lying on a solid mahogany desk surely a sign that a man could not always keep his worlds from overlapping.

Houston had told no one about the arrival of that letter, not even the only other person who knew his complete history, Beebee.

Was that part of why he was sending her away with Miss Viv? Not just because he knew they could probably not resist sharing the titillating details of his past with anyone who would listen, including all the employees here at Second Chances, but because he didn’t want to talk to Beebee about that letter? The thought of that letter, plus being here at Second Chances, made him feel what Houston Whitford hated feeling the most: vulnerable, as if that most precious of commodities, control, was slipping away from him.

And there was something about this place—the nature of charity, Miss Viv and his history, Molly, sweetly sensual in virginal white—that made him feel, not as if his guard was being let down, but that his bastions were being stormed.

He was a proud man. That pride had carried him through times when all else had failed. He didn’t want Miss Viv’s personal information about him undermining his authority to rescue her charity, changing the way people he had to deal with looked at him.

And when people found out his story, it did change the way they looked at him.

He could tell, for instance, Molly Michaels would fall solidly in the soft-hearted category. She’d love an opportunity to treat him like a kitten who had nearly drowned! And he wasn’t having it.

“Let’s discuss Molly Michaels for a minute,” he said carefully. “I’d like to have a little talk with her about—”

“Don’t be hard on her!” Miss Viv cried. “Try not to judge Molly for the outfit. She was just being playful. It was actually good to see that side of her again,” Miss Viv said.

Playful. He liked playful. In the bedroom.

In the office? Not so much.

“Please don’t hurt her feelings,” Miss Viv warned him.

Hurt her feelings? What did feelings have to do with running an organization, with expecting the best from it, with demanding excellence?

He did give in to the little impulse, then, to press the ridge of the scar along his nose.

Miss Viv’s voice lowered into her juicy-secret tone. “The broken engagement? She’s had a heartbreak recently.”

It confirmed his wisdom in sending Miss Viv away for the duration of the Second Chances business makeover. He didn’t want to know this, at all. He pressed harder. The ache along the scar line did not diffuse.

“A cad, I’m afraid,” Miss Viv said, missing his every signal that he did not want to be any part of the office stories, the gossip, the personalities.

Despite his desire to remove himself from it, Houston felt a sudden and completely unexpected pulsing of fury.

Not for the circumstances he found himself in, certainly not at Miss Viv, who could not help herself. No, Houston felt an undisciplined desire to hurt a man he did not know for breaking the heart of a woman he also did not know—save for the exquisite tenderness of her neck beneath his fingertips.

That flash of unreasonable fury, an undisciplined reaction, was gone nearly as soon as it happened, but it still served to remind him that things did not always stay in their neat compartments. He had not overcome what he had come from as completely as everyone believed.

He came from a world where violence was the default reaction.

Houston knew if he was to let down his guard, lose his legendary sense of control for a second—one second—he could become that man his father had been, his carefully constructed world blown apart by forces—fury, passion—that could rise up in a storm that he had no hope of taming.

It was the reason Houston did not even allow himself to contemplate his life in the context of fairy tales represented by a young woman in a bridal gown. There was no room for a compartment like that in the neat, tidy box that made up his life.

There was a large compartment for work, an almost equally large one for his one and only passion, the combat sport of boxing.

There were smaller compartments for his social obligations, for Beebee, for occasional and casual relationships with the rare member of the opposite sex who shared his aversion for commitment. There were some compartments that were nailed shut.

But now the past was not staying in the neat compartment system. The compartment that held Houston’s father and his mother was being pried up, despite the nails trying to hold it firmly shut.

Houston’s father had written his only son a letter that asked nothing and expected nothing. And yet at the same time Houston was bitterly aware that how he reacted to it would prove who he really was.

After nineteen years, his father was getting out of prison.

And it felt as if all those years of Houston outdistancing his past had been a total waste of energy. Because there it was, waiting for him, right around the next bend in time.

The scar across his nose flared with sudden pain, and Houston pressed a finger into the line of the old break, aware he was entering a danger zone that the mean streets of Clinton had nothing on.

“Have a seat,” Houston invited Molly several hours later, after he had personally waved goodbye to Beebee and Miss Viv at the airport.

“Thank you.” She took a seat, folded her hands primly in her lap and looked at him expectantly.

It was his second encounter with her, and he was determined it was going to go differently than the first. It was helpful that Miss Viv was not there smiling at him as if he was her favorite of all charity cases.

And it was helpful that Molly Michaels was all business now, no remnant of the blushing bride she had been anywhere in sight. No, she was dressed in a conservative slack suit, her amazing hair pinned sternly up on her head.

Still, it was way too easy to remember how it had felt underneath his hands. He was not going to allow himself to contemplate the fact that even after untangling her from that dress several hours ago he was no closer to knowing her truth: was she sexy? Or innocent?

Not thoughts that were strictly professional. In fact, those were exactly the kind of thoughts that made a man crazy.

“I’m sorry about the dress. You must think I’m crazy.”

Damn her for using that word!

The nails holding a compartment of Houston’s past shut gave an outrageous squeak. Houston remembered the senior Whitford had been made crazy by a beautiful woman, Houston’s mother.

Who hadn’t she made crazy? Beautiful, but untouchable. Both of them had loved her desperately, a fact that had only seemed to amuse her, allowed her to toy with her power over them. The truth? Houston would have robbed a bank for her, too, if he’d thought it would allow him to finally win something from her.

The memory, unwanted, of his craving for something his mother had been unable to give made him feel annoyed with himself.

“Crazy?” he said. You can’t begin to know the meaning of the word. “Let’s settle for eccentric.”

She blushed, and his reaction was undisciplined, unprofessional, a ridiculous desire, like a juvenile boy, to find out what made her blush and then to make it happen often.

“So, you’ve been here how long?” Houston asked, even though he knew, just to get himself solidly back on the professional track.

“As an employee for several years. But I actually started here as a volunteer during high school.”

Again, unprofessional thoughts tickled at him: what had she been like during high school? The popular girl? The sweet geek? Would she have liked him?

Houston remembered an incident from his own high school years. She probably would not have liked him, at all. He shook off the memory like a pesky fly. High school? That was fifteen years ago! That was the problem with things coming out of their compartments. They could become unruly, pop up unannounced, uninvited, in moments when his concentration was challenged, when his attention drifted.

Which was rarely, thank God.

Since the memories had come, though, he exercised cool discipline over them. He reminded himself that good things could come from bad. His mother’s abandonment had ultimately opened the door to a different world for him; the high school “incident” had led to Beebee putting him in boxing classes “to channel his aggression.”

Houston was more careful than most men with the word love, but he thought he could honestly say he loved the combat sport of boxing, the absolute physical challenge of it, from the grueling cardiovascular warm-up to punching the heavy bags and the speed bags, practicing the stances, the combinations, the jabs and the hooks. He occasionally sparred, but awareness of the unexpected power of fury prevented him from taking matches.

Now he wondered if a defect in character like fury could lie dormant, spring back to life when it was least expected.

No, he snapped at himself.

Yes, another voice answered when a piece of Molly’s hair sprang free of the restraints she had pinned it down with, curled down the soft line of her temple.

She’d been engaged to a cad.

Tonight, he told himself sternly, he would punch straight left and right combinations into the heavy bag until his hands, despite punch mitts, ached from it. Until his whole body hurt and begged for release. For now he would focus, not on her hair or her past heartbreaks, but on the job he was here to do.

Houston realized Molly’s expression had turned quizzical, wondered how much of the turmoil of that memory he had just had he had let slip over his usually well-schooled features.

Did she look faintly sympathetic? Had she seen something he didn’t want her to see? Good grief, had Miss Viv managed to let something slip about him?

Whatever, he knew just how to get rid of that look on her face, the look of a woman who lived to make the world softer and better.

A cad could probably spot that gentle, compassion-filled face from a mile away! It would be good for her to toughen up.

“Let me be very blunt,” he said, looking at the papers in front of him instead of her hair, the delicate creamy skin at her throat. “Second Chances is in a lot of trouble. I need to turn things around and I need to do it fast.”

“Second Chances is in trouble?” Molly was genuinely astounded. “But how? The secondhand stores that provide the majority of our funding seem to do well.”

“They do perform exceedingly well. The problem seems to be in an overextension of available funds. Your department?”

Here it was: could she make the kind of hard decisions that would be required of her if she took over the top spot in the newly revamped Second Chances?

The softness left her face, replaced with wariness. Better than softness in terms of her managerial abilities. If that was good, why did he feel so bad?

“You can’t run an organization that brings in close to a million dollars a year like a mom and pop store. You can’t give everyone who comes in here with their hand out and a hard luck story everything they ask for.”

“I don’t!” she said. “I’m very careful what I fund.”

He saw her flinch from his bluntness, but at this crucial first stage there was no other way to prepare people for the changes that had to happen. Another little curl broke free of her attempt to tame her hair, and he watched it, sentenced himself to another fifteen minutes on the bag and forged on.

“Two thousand dollars to the Flatbush Boys Choir travel fund? There is no Flatbush Boys Choir.”

“I know that now,” she said, defensively. “I had just started here. Six of them came in. The most adorable little boys in matching sweaters. They even sang a song for me.”

“Here’s a check written annually to the Bristol Hall Ladies’ Lunch Group. No paperwork. No report. Is there a Bristol Hall Ladies’ Lunch Group? What do they do? When do they meet? Why do they get money for lunch?”

“That was grandfathered in from before I started. Miss Viv looks after it.”

“So, you’re project manager, except when Miss Viv takes over?”

“She is the boss,” Molly said uneasily, her defensive tone a little more strident.

“Ah.” He studied her for a moment, then said softly, “Look, I’m not questioning your competence.”

She looked disbelieving. Understandably.

“It’s just that some belt-tightening is going to have to happen. What I need from you as I do research, review files and talk to people is for you to go over your programming in detail. I need exact breakdowns on how you choose programs. I need to review your budgets, I need to analyze your monitoring systems.”

She looked like she had been hit by a tank. Now would be the wrong time to remember the sweet softness of her skin under his fingertips, how damned protective he had felt when he heard about the cad. Now he was the cad!

“How soon can you have that to me?” he pressed.

“A week?”

A chief executive officer needed to work faster, make decisions more quickly. “You have until tomorrow morning.”

She glared at him. That was good. Much easier to defend against than sweet, shocked vulnerability. The angry spark in her eyes could almost make him forget her hair, that tender place at her nape. Almost.

He plunged forward, eager to get the barriers—compromised by hands in hair—back up where they belonged. Eager to find out what he needed to know about her—professionally—so he could make a recommendation when the job here was done and move on.

“I’ve been sorting through paperwork for a number of weeks,” he told her. “I have to tell you, after a brief look, it’s quite evident to me that you’re going to have to ax some of your projects. Sooner rather than later. I’ve short-listed a few that are on the block.”

“Ax projects?” she said with disbelief. “Some of my projects are on the block?”

He nodded. He felt not the least like a knight riding in to rescue the business in distress. Or the damsel. He was causing distress, in fact. The feeling of being the cad intensified even though he knew in the long run this would pay off for Second Chances, guarantee their good health and success in the coming years and possibly decades if this was done right, if they had the right leader to move ahead with.

“Which ones?” She went so pale a faint dusting of freckles appeared over the bridge of her nose.

He was annoyed that his feeling of being the cad only deepened, and that she was acting as if he had asked her to choose one of her children to float down the river in a basket. He was aware of feeling the faintest twinge of a foreign emotion, which after a second or two he identified, with further annoyance, as guilt.

Houston Whitford did not feel guilty about doing his job! Satisfied, driven, take charge, in control. Of course, generally, it would be fairly safe to say he didn’t feel, period.

He used a reasonable tone of voice, designed to convince either her or himself that of course he was not a cad! “We have to make some practical decisions for the future of this organization.”

She looked unconvinced about his cad status, and the careful use of the we did not even begin to make her think they were a team.

She looked mutinous, then stunned, then mutinous again. Her face was an open book of emotion.

“Is it that bad?” she finally sputtered. “How can it be? Miss Viv never said a word. She didn’t even seem worried when she left!”

He had actually sheltered Miss Viv from how bad things were as he had begun to slug his way through the old gal’s abysmal record and bookkeeping systems. Miss Viv—and his mother, Second Chances’s largest patron—trusted him to fix this. He would. Neither of them needed to know the extent he had to go to. But Molly Michaels did, since the mantle of it all could quite possibly fall on her slender shoulders.

“Yes, it’s bad.” He closed the fuchsia cover on one of the project reports, the mauve one on another and put those files on the desk between them. “The Easter Egg hunt is gone. The poetry competition is out. And I’m looking at the prom dress thing, and—”

“Prom Dreams?” she gasped. “You can’t! You don’t know what it means to those girls.”

“Have you ever known real hardship?” he asked her, his voice deliberately cold. This job was not going to be easy no matter how he did it. Hard choices had to be made. And he had to see if she was willing to make them. There was no way she was going to be suited to taking over the top job at Second Chances if she was always going to be blinded by the stars in her eyes.

But cad that he was, his gaze went to the lip that she was nibbling with distraction. He was shocked that out of the blue he wondered if one of his hard choices was not going to be whether or not to taste those luscious lips before he made his escape!

She met his eyes. Stopped nibbling. Things that should be simple, cut-and-dried, suddenly seemed complicated. He wished she wasn’t looking at him as if she was remembering, too, that unguarded moment when two strangers had touched and the potential for something wild and unpredictable had arced in the air between them.

“My parents divorced when I was young,” she offered, softly. “I considered that a terrible hardship. The only one I’ve known, but life altering.”

Thank God she didn’t mention the cad! He could see the pain in her eyes. Houston reminded himself, sternly, that he likely had a genetic predisposition toward allowing women to make him crazy. Because he had no business thinking of trying to change the light in her eyes. But he was thinking of it, of how soft her lips would be beneath his own.

Why would that genetic predisposition toward crazy be surfacing now, for God’s sake? He’d been around many, many beautiful women. He’d always taken his ability to keep his emotional distance for granted, one of the few gifts from his chaotic childhood.

Don’t form attachments. Don’t care too deeply.

Except for his business and boxing. Both had rigid guidelines and rules that if followed, produced a predictable result. That made them safe things to care about. An occasional bruised knuckle or fat lip, a skirmish in the business world, those hazards were nothing compared to the minefields of becoming attached to people, where the results were rarely predictable.

No, he knew exactly where he was going to channel his substantial passion and energy.

He was being drawn backward, feeling shadows from his past falling over him, entirely against his will. He blamed the letter from his father and the unfortunate fact it coincided with the past weeks of going over files of people who were as desperate and as needy as his family had once been.

It was his annoyance at himself for allowing those thoughts into his business world that made his tone even sharper than it had to be, even if he was testing her ability to run a million dollar corporation.

“Have you ever been hungry?” But even as he asked it, he knew that question, too, stemmed not so much from professional interest as from a dark past he thought he had left behind.

“No,” she said, “but I think I can imagine the desperation of it.”

“Can you?” he said cynically.

Without warning a memory popped over the barrier of the thick, high wall he had constructed around the compartment of his childhood.

So hungry. Not a crumb of food in the house. Going into Sam’s, the bakery at the corner of his street, Houston’s heart beating a horrible tattoo in his chest, his mouth watering from the smells and the sights of the freshly baked bread. Looking around, it was crowded, no one paying any attention to him. Sam’s back turned. Houston’s hands closing around one of the still-warm loafs in a basket outside the counter, stuffing it under his thin jacket. Lifting his eyes to see Sam looking straight at him. And then Sam turning away, saying nothing, and Houston feeling the shame of the baker’s pity so strongly he could not eat the bread. He brought it home to his mother, who had been indifferent to the offering, uncaring of what it had cost him.

Molly was looking at him, understandably perplexed by the question.

Stop it, he ordered himself. But another question came out anyway, clipped with unexpected anger. “Out of work?”