Stay... Read online

  Dear Reader,

  In the spirit of blossoming love, Special Edition delivers a glorious April lineup that will leave you breathless!

  This month’s THAT’S MY BABY! title launches Diana Whitney’s adorable new series duet, STORK EXPRESS. Surprise deliveries bring bachelors instant fatherhood…and sudden romance! The first installment, Baby on His Doorstep, is a heartwarming story about a take-charge CEO who suddenly finds himself at a loss when fatherhood—and love—come knocking on his door. Watch for the second exciting story in this series next month.

  Two of our veteran authors deliver enthralling stories this month. First, Wild Mustang Woman by Lindsay McKenna—book one of her rollicking COWBOYS OF THE SOUTHWEST series—is an emotional romance about a hard-luck heroine desperately trying to save her family ranch and reclaim her lost love. And Lucky in Love by Tracy Sinclair is a whimsical tale about a sparring duo who find their perfect match—in each other!

  Who can resist a wedding…even if it’s in-name-only? The Marriage Bargain by Jennifer Mikels is a marriage-of-convenience saga about a journalist who unexpectedly falls for his “temporary” bride. And With This Wedding Ring by Trisha Alexander will captivate your heart with a tale about a noble hero who marries the girl of his dreams to protect her unborn child.

  Finally, Stay…by talented debut author Allison Leigh is a poignant, stirring reunion romance about an endearingly innocent heroine who passionately vows to break down the walls around her brooding mystery man’s heart.

  I hope you enjoy this book, and each and every story to come!

  Sincerely,

  Tara Gavin

  Senior Editor and Editorial Coordinator

  ALLISON LEIGH

  STAY…

  For my husband and my father; two men who truly know

  what those words mean. And for my mother…

  I hope I do as good a job as you.

  ALLISON LEIGH

  cannot remember a time when she was not reading something, whether cereal boxes or “Hardy Boys” mysteries. It seemed a natural progression that she put her own pencil to paper, and she started early by writing a Halloween play that her grade-school class performed for her school. Since then, though her tastes have changed, her love for reading has not. And her writing appetite simply grows more voracious by the day.

  Born in Southern California, she has lived in eight different cities in four different states. She has been, at one time or another, a cosmetologist, a computer programmer and an administrative assistant.

  Allison and her husband currently make their home in Arizona, where their time is thoroughly filled with two very active daughters, full-time jobs, pets, church, family and friends. In order to give herself the precious writing time she craves, she burns a lot of midnight oil.

  A great believer in the power of love—her parents still hold hands—she cannot imagine anything more exciting to write about than the miracle of two hearts coming together.

  Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Epilogue

  Prologue

  “Don’t let him send me away.” Her young voice was muffled against the saddle blanket hugged against her chest. “Please, Jefferson, don’t let him. I’ll die in that school. I know I will.”

  His eyebrows lowered and he gently pried her fingers from the soft blue-gray plaid. “Don’t say that.”

  Bereft of the blanket that he’d tossed over the stall door, she crossed her arms protectively across her chest. “If you’d just talk to him. I don’t need some school to teach me how to be a girl—”

  His eyes flickered over her short, dark brown hair and down her sweat-stained shirt to her torn jeans. Her rough ’n tumble appearance couldn’t hide the developing curves. She wasn’t the little seven-year-old anymore who’d been his constant shadow. Who’d followed his every step, asking a million questions, or just chattering away in her sweet little-girl voice.

  She was fourteen now. And rapidly developing into a hellion that easily rivaled any one of his brothers. The problem was, she wasn’t a boy. And something needed to be done. His father was at his wit’s end. “It’s not up to me,” he said softly.

  “But he’d listen to you—”

  “It’s not up to me,” he repeated gently. Inflexibly.

  Hot tears flooded her eyes and she turned away. “If I was a boy, he wouldn’t send me away.”

  He cursed softly, but didn’t disagree. He wouldn’t lie to her. He couldn’t change the situation. Hell, he had to catch a flight to Turkey first thing in the morning, and his mind was humming with the hoard of details involved. This brief stopover hadn’t been in his plans at all.

  He studied the young female. A sister. Yet not his sister. His cousin. Yet not. But family, nevertheless. “That boarding school might not be so bad, you know,” he murmured, reaching past her hunched form for the bridle she’d thrown to the concrete floor a few minutes earlier in a fit of temper. “You’ll meet kids your own age. Make some new friends.”

  “Tris’s my own age,” she replied, exaggerating only slightly. “And I have all the friends I need.” She swiped her sleeve beneath her nose. “Matthew and Daniel—”

  He sighed. “Girls. You’ll meet girls your age.”

  The snort she gave was decidedly unfeminine. As was the explicit word she spat in opinion of his words. He raised one eyebrow. “That’s one of the reasons you’re going.”

  She swore again, and whirled around like a dervish, kicking her dusty boot against a wooden post. The metal bucket hanging from a nail in the post rocked loose and clattered to the floor, narrowly missing the dog who’d been sleeping in the corner near the tack room. The dog shot to his feet, barking furiously.

  Frustrated…angry…but most of all scared, she kicked the fallen bucket and it crashed against the stone wall opposite them, toppling a pitchfork onto its side where it missed crowning the dog by mere inches. Yelping, the dog skittered for shelter. Every curse word she’d ever heard poured from her. And being raised among five boys, she knew more than a few.

  Long arms wrapped around her waist, and Jefferson lifted her right off her feet. Twisting, she pushed at him. “I won’t go,” she gritted.

  She was held firmly, high against his hard chest. His breath was warm against her ear as he whispered softly. Soothing. Calming her in the same way he’d often done whenever she’d awakened from a bad dream when she was little. She wasn’t so little now, though, and the wide chest pressed against her cheek set off all sorts of new feelings.

  “You’ll go.”

  Her head reared back, ready for another round. But his dark blue eyes met hers steadily and the words died. Her head collapsed against his chest and she sobbed brokenly.

  In the end she went.

  Chapter One

  Twelve years later

  Emily Nichols downshifted the car’s gears and nudged her sunglasses a speck up her nose. She checked her mirrors, but the traffic on the freeway’s four lanes was solid. And stopped, dead cold. So much for getting home in time to make a trip out to the stable before dark.

  She shifted into neutral, and rolled her head slowly from side to side, working out the kinks from sitting at a computer all day long. Grimacing at the traffic report coming from the car radio, she flipped open the case containing an assortment of cassette tapes.

  Tristan kept telling her to switch to CDs. But she’d b
een collecting these cassettes since she’d been fourteen when she’d received the first two as a Christmas gift. More than a decade later, and she was still cherishing each and every tape. She sighed at that thought and popped a Zeppelin tape in and turned up the volume.

  Since the sun was still high in the cloudless blue sky, she thought about putting up the top of her convertible and turning on the air-conditioning. The cars in front of her began inching forward before she could put the idea into action, and she shifted into gear to follow suit. With one hand she twisted her long hair off her neck and held it up, hoping for a whiff of cool air. But she let go after a moment. Sitting in the middle of a gridlocked freeway in downtown San Diego during rush hour wasn’t the likeliest place to catch a fresh ocean breeze.

  The traffic continued inching forward, and though she was still miles away from the exit ramp closest to the house she shared with Tristan, she flipped her turn signal on and worked her way off the freeway. Driving surface streets, even with all the congestion and stoplights, was better than sitting like a lump on the freeway.

  Maybe she’d also stop and pick up a pizza for supper. Tristan wasn’t likely to be there, anyway. And even if he was, he wouldn’t be likely to turn up his nose at pizza. Even frozen pizza. It was food, after all. Cardboardlikeness notwithstanding. And he could pack it away like nobody she’d ever seen.

  A few miles away from home, she pulled into a grocery store and put the top up on her precious Mustang. She shrugged out of the off-white jacket she’d worn over a matching vest and slacks and tossed it over the seat before heading into the store. When she emerged again, she carried more than a mere box of pizza, and by the time she had arranged the half dozen grocery bags in the trunk, the sun was lowering toward the horizon. And the air had begun to cool. Thankfully.

  The weather in San Diego was usually pleasant year-round. But the middle of August was generally miserable. No matter what part of the country you lived in. Even Matt, who was running the Double-C Ranch up in Wyoming, had been complaining recently about the sweltering temperatures.

  Emily stood beside the trunk, looking over the sea of cars parked in the huge parking lot of the supermarket complex. Deep, bone-thumping vibrations suddenly accosted her, and she looked over her shoulder at the old sedan slowly driving past. The car’s stereo was so loud it made her chest hurt. The driver sneered at her, pitching his cigarette out his window and right at her feet.

  Staring right back at the driver, who probably wasn’t more than seventeen years old despite the world-wise look in his dark eyes, she slowly ground her foot over the burning cigarette. Her keys were locked between her fingers, jutting out in four jagged weapons. Sighing faintly, she turned away from the car, aware of it continuing on its way. She climbed into her own car, switched the cassette to a soothing Mozart and drove home.

  An unfamiliar black car sat in the driveway, blocking the garage. “Girlfriend number 310,” she muttered, and whipped the car into a U-turn to park on the street along the curb. Tristan must be home after all. And since he couldn’t get his girlfriends to park in the street, as Emily was forever asking, he could carry in the darn groceries himself.

  She shoved open the car door, reaching back for her slender gray briefcase and the jacket. The massive black front door opened as she headed up the terraced steps. A dark blond male head appeared as she stooped to pick up that morning’s newspaper. “I don’t know how that kid always manages to nail the flowers,” she complained as she extracted the half-buried paper from a glorious display of white petunias. She straightened and picked a velvety bloom out of the rubber band. “Groceries are in the car,” she called out. “You can have the honors, since it’s your fault I’m parked on the street.”

  “You’ve developed a bossy streak,” the man said, stepping outside and into the fading, golden twilight.

  Emily’s fingers loosened spasmodically at the man’s voice, and she nearly dropped the newspaper right back into the flowers. Her heart clenched and she was grateful for the sunglasses shading her eyes as they flew to him, shocked.

  Jefferson Clay was back.

  Her fingers dug into the newspaper, tearing jagged little holes in the outermost page. She didn’t notice. It was all she could do to contain the urge to turn tail and race back to her car. Instead, she stood rooted right where she was, her greedy eyes not willing to look away from him.

  His hair was longer than it had been the last time she’d seen him, more than two years ago. It now hung past his shoulders in wild disarray. On most men, it would have looked feminine. But not on him. Not with his face. Hard. Masculine. And thinner than it had been the last time she’d seen him. In fact, he was probably fifteen pounds thinner. It made him look even more carved. More unapproachable than he’d seemed before.

  “Aren’t you even going to say hello, Em?”

  She drew in a steadying breath, gathering her composure, then climbed the last few steps leading into the house. “Hello, Jefferson,” she said, managing to present a slight smile. Even in her high-heeled pumps, she had to reach up to drop a light kiss on his cheek. Her lips tingled from the impact of his five-o’clock shadow, and she slipped past him into the house, telling herself she wasn’t breathless from just that little peck. “What are you doing here? Is Squire okay?”

  She set the paper, her jacket and the briefcase on the narrow hall table and pretended to study the pile of mail that Tristan had left lying there.

  “He’s fine. As far as I know.”

  Her eyebrows rose and she looked over her shoulder at him.

  “I haven’t talked to him in a while,” he said.

  She nodded, unsurprised, and turned her attention back to the mail. But it was Jefferson’s image imprinted on her mind that she saw. Not the collection of bills and circulars she was paging through.

  No man had a right to look that good. It simply wasn’t fair to the women of the world.

  “Your hair’s grown.” His voice was low. Husky.

  She closed her eyes for a moment. “So has yours.” She gave up on the mail and tossed it beside her jacket. “Is Tristan here?”

  “He’s on the phone.”

  She nodded. Finally she simply gave in again and let her eyes rove over him. From the tailored fit of his pleated black trousers to his narrow waist to the single unfastened button of his white shirt at his brown throat. She wanted to ask him where he’d been all this time. Why he hadn’t called. Written. “When will you be leaving?”

  The corner of his mouth tilted, causing the slashing dimple in his cheek to appear briefly. “Here’s your hat, what’s your hurry,” he murmured.

  Emily felt the flush rise in her cheeks. Considering that Jefferson’s presence in her life for more than ten years had been a brief series of arrivals always followed by an indecently hasty departure, she wasn’t, however, feeling inclined to apologize. Her lips twisted. Facts were facts.

  “Ah, Em…”

  His soft voice seemed filled with regret. She wondered if he’d known she was living here before he’d come. A fanciful, wishful thought on her part, no doubt. Annoyed with herself, she pulled off her sunglasses and dropped them alongside the mail before turning toward the kitchen. What was she going to fix for supper? Jefferson was a meat-and-potatoes kind of guy and she wasn’t sure they had anything—

  “Darn it,” she grumbled, swiveling about on her heel. The groceries.

  Jefferson stood right behind her, and he warded her off with a raised hand, keeping her from plowing into him. “Whoa.”

  Then she noticed it. The carved, wooden cane. She stared at it. At his long brown fingers, curved over the rounded handle. How she’d ever missed it in the first place was a testament to how stunned she was to see him at all. “Oh, my God,” she fell back a step. “What’s happened?”

  His lashes hid his expression, and his lips compressed. “Little accident.”

  Swallowing an abrupt wave of nausea, Emily strode across the foyer into the great room and flipped on a l
amp. In the light, she studied him more closely. He’d been collecting little scars on his face ever since she could remember. But he’d added a few new ones since she’d seen him last. The thin line slicing along his angular jaw was still faintly pink. As was the crescent outlining the corner of his right eye. “How little?”

  She watched his expression deliberately lighten. And the grin that flirted with his lips almost convinced her. But she’d known him too long. “Jefferson?”

  He shrugged and moved across the room to lower himself onto the long caramel-colored couch. “Cracked some ribs.” He lifted his left leg onto the coffee table and propped the cane on the couch beside him. “Broke a few bones. All healed up now.”

  He was making light of his injuries. She knew it. And he knew she knew it. “What did you do? Fall off some bridge you were building or something?”

  He was quiet for a moment. “Or something.”

  Shaking her head, she crossed over to him and grabbed a throw pillow. She bent over him and tucked it beneath his knee, scooting the table closer to the couch to provide more support. Her long hair fell over her shoulder and drifted across his pant leg and he tucked it behind her ear. She froze, half-bent over him.

  “It’s good to see you, Emily.” His finger skipped from her ear to her bare arm, then away.

  Irrational tears burned behind her lids, and she straightened abruptly, moving away. Far away. “I’ve got groceries in the car,” she muttered, and left the room.

  Jefferson watched her practically run from the room. He’d have offered to help, but in his shape, he’d be more of a hindrance. He closed his eyes wearily and dropped his head back against the butter-soft couch. He didn’t like second-guessing his decisions, but maybe it had been a mistake for him to come here. Even after all this time. Wasn’t there a saying somewhere that you could never go home?

  “You look like someone rode you too hard then put you up wet.”