Please Remember This (30 page)

 

WHAT MOM SAYS:

“If he’s living alone in the woods somewhere he’s probably not husband material!”

In
YOU NEVER CAN TELL
BY
Kathleen Eagle
Available May 2002
Heather Reardon learns that sometimes a man who’s been alone for a while has more than conversation on his mind!

 

Kole Kills Crow is the man of every woman’s fantasies—sensual and mysterious
… a
man who walked away from the limelight at the height of his fame. Now reporter Heather Reardon has sought him out. But you never can tell when a man’s right for you!

 

“Your cat looks pretty well fed,” she said, stroking affectionately.

“She’s an excellent hunter.”

“So am I.” Heather looked up from her ardent stroking to find Kole leaning over the back of his chair, his face closer to hers than she’d anticipated. “I found you, didn’t I?” She hadn’t meant to whisper, but that was how it came out.

“Let the feeding frenzy begin,” he whispered back
as he braced his left elbow on the back of the chair and cupped her face in his right hand.

His eyes were hard, hungry, resolute. She saw his kiss coming, but those eyes mesmerized her. She didn’t close hers until his lips covered her mouth, stealing her breath along with her senses. Good Lord, he was as demanding and as deft and as delicious as she’d imagined when she was a green girl watching him make news. His tongue tasted of beer and bread, but better, bolder, spiced with the zest of his masculinity. She sampled it with wonder, even as she stanched the urge to reach for him and take more than a sample. She kept her hands on the cat.

Kole came up smiling. “Your lyin’ lips taste very sweet.”

“I haven’t lied to you,” she said in a voice that was remarkably steady, considering she didn’t know where her next breath would be coming from.

“You said you weren’t hungry.”

“You’re misquoting me.” She met his amused gaze. “Something I promise never to do to you.”

“Promises don’t faze me, honey. I inherited a pretty good immunity to promises.”

“And I’m allergic to ‘honey.’ “

He drew back with a laugh. “Reporters always did bring out the smart-ass in me.”

“Not always,” she recalled. “But that was the role you generally played, wasn’t it? You were the tough guy.”

“How’d you come up with that?” “Short of checking in men’s drawers, I really
do
do my homework.”

“Good girl. If I had a red pencil, I’d give you an
A.” He pushed himself off the chair and turned to clean up the bread and cheese. “But you won’t be taking your report card home for a while.”

“I’ve been looking for you for a long time. Why would I want to go home now?” She reached for a slice of cheese, again politely shaking off his added offer of bread. “I wouldn’t mind going back to the lodge, though. I don’t see an extra bed here.”

“What you see is exactly what I’ve got. Do you prefer one side over the other?”

“I prefer, um …” She shared her cheese with the cat as she glanced from the bed to the recliner to the door.

“Exactly what I’ve got.”

She assessed him with a frank look. “If I decide to leave, you’re not going to stop me.” “Who says?”

 

WHAT MOM SAYS:

“Never talk to a man you have not been properly introduced to … after all, you don’t know if his intentions are honorable.”

In
BLACK SILK
BY
Judith Ivory
Available June 2002
Submit Channing-Downes breaks that rule …

 

Submit was young and proper—a woman who lived strictly within the guidelines of English society—when suddenly, because of a legacy in a will, she’s thrust into the embrace of a man she has just met. Aristocratic Graham Wessit is roguish, dangerous, and tempts Submit into sensuous surrender. Soon, she’s engaged in a tumultuous battle of wills with a man who is a most improper stranger.

 

“Is a small enough thing to ask.” Tate sighed.

Clouds rumbled distantly. The weather dwarfed the lawyer’s stature. Outside his book-lined office, he was an insignificant smear of color—yellows, reds, and browns on the grey steps to a grey building. The
woman in black was part of the darkening sky, her strength of purpose as palpable as the smell of rain in the air.

After a moment, he said, “All right, you’re going to take the box to him, as the will asked. But remember he’s a black sheep, if ever there was one. Don’t be misled by a glossy exterior.”

“Ah.” She lifted her head and gave an ironic little smile. “He is handsome.”

Tate made a gust of objection through his lips, the sound of a middle-aged, slightly paunched man trying to minimize such an attribute. “Just don’t be misled by that.”

“I won’t be. Nor put off by it.”

“Handsome men don’t have to account for themselves as often as they should.”

She thought about this. “You’re probably right.”

“And he’s worse than just handsome. He’s selfish. Unruly. A breaker of rules, a builder of nothing.”

“You don’t like him I take it.”

“I didn’t say that.” Tate paused, frowning. “He’s rather likable,” he corrected. “But he’s also one of the most frustrating young men I have ever met. Not your sort at all.”

“Ah, young too.” She smiled and looked down. “Young and handsome. No, definitely not my sort.”

Tate pulled a glum mouth, then contradicted himself. “Actually, he’s not so young anymore. He must be approaching forty.” After a pause, he added, “He’s one of those men one doesn’t expect to age very well: perpetually eight years old. He has no vocation, no avocation, no occupation—except drinking
and gambling and women. He lives with a married woman, an American.”

She laughed, gently shaking her head. “Arnold, having impugned the man’s character, you are now trying to slander his taste as well. Stop being so smug.” She continued to smile, not meanly but with a kind of teasing forbearance. “If the man is shallow or dissolute or immature or whatever you’re trying to say, I’m sure I’m not so stupid as to miss it. And in any event, I’m only delivering a harmless little box Henry wanted him to have.”

The lawyer clamped his mouth shut.

They stood in what would seem to be the silence of opposition, Tate frowning with a slight mouth, she looking down, trying to minimize her faint, intransigent smile.

Five minutes later, Graham sat in the vacant chair between his solicitor and barrister. He wedged himself into it, folding and bending a body never meant for the narrow, curved design. In uncomfortable situations, Graham became particularly conscious of his own height and double conscious of it when he saw others fidgeting and standing up straighter.

Tate rose and pushed his chair in, as if he would stand for the whole proceeding. Then he stretched, got books out from a case behind the desk, and laid them out on the desktop, three, four, eight, more; fortification.

Tate was balding man of perhaps fifty-five, of medium height, with a tendancy to carry slightly more than medium weight. He was squarely built and
bluntly shaped with small feet and short, spatulate hands. He had to strain at the high shelves, the heavy law. Graham could have spanned several volumes at once with his long fingers.

“Shall we begin?” The Q.C., in a valley of books, aligned papers on the desk.

Graham had a sense of the past repeating itself. The barrister still seemed the adversary. The sound of his voice—mellifluous, Olympian, full of sincerity—worked undoubtedly to his professional advantage, but it was not reassuring. It implied that truth could afford to be questioned.

Graham claimed one last trivial digression, a curiosity he couldn’t quite dismiss. “Her complete name,” he said “I should know—” He could vaguely recall old letters, bits of remembered conversation, and these memories made him want to smile for some reason. “You didn’t tell me her first name. I’m sure Henry told me once, yet I can’t recall—”

Tate looked up, his cheeks puffed as if he might blow Graham away.

“It is a sound, virtuous, old name,” he said. Then his cheeks sagged, as did his head. “Her first name is Submit.”

Acknowledgments

 

A
s I hope some of you realized, my inspiration for this book came from the 1988 excavation of the steamboat
Arabia
in Wyandotte County, Kansas. I have relied heavily on two books about the excavation. David Hawley’s
The Treasures of the Steamboat Arabia
provided glorious pictures, and his brother Greg Hawley’s
Treasure in a Cornfield: The Discovery and Excavation of the Steamboat Arabia
(Kansas City, Missouri, Paddle Wheel Publishing, 1998) gives a thoughtful, sensitive account of the daily joys and miseries of this adventure. I have used their equipment lists, their dewatering system, their artifact inventory, just about everything except their time line. There is no way that you can make fictional characters work as hard as these real people did.

The characters I put on board my boat are fictional, as are the elegant belongings of the Lanier family, but the actual artifacts from the
Arabia
—the shoes, the pickles, the doorknobs, the tools, the buttons, and the nails—are on display at the Arabia Steamboat Museum, 400 Grand Boulevard, Kansas City, Missouri
(www.1856.com).
Do go. It’s an extraordinary display.

I would like to thank fellow writers Mary Kilchenstein and Susan Elizabeth Phillips for their insightful responses to the manuscript. I have a special thanks for Beth Tanner and Tracie Baker. I only know them on-line from the Pattern Master Chatter list, but they answered many questions about discount shopping in the midwest.

Also by Kathleen Gilles Seidel

 

S
UMMER’s
E
ND

“You’re Nina Lane’s daughter, aren’t you?”

 

Tess froze. She felt her mouth grow dry. Her silence had answered Ned’s question. “I don’t have anything to say about her,” Tess said. “I don’t remember her at all, and my grandparents never talked about her. If I seem mysterious, it’s simply that I am a private person.”

“You are? You don’t seem like you would be.”

“I’m not shy, and I like other people a great deal. But neither of those is inconsistent with being private, with not needing to share everything with everyone.”

Or never having had anyone to share everything with.

“I suppose not,” he agreed. “But privacy’s not a big concept around here. Have you ever lived in a small town?” Tess shook her head. “It’s very easy to be sentimental about small towns, about how friendly and hospitable we are. And we are, but there’s a cost to all that friendliness. People are so used to stifling their thoughts and their preferences that no one knows how to be direct. It hits the women especially hard, and I think a lot of them seethe way down inside.”

“Until someone explodes,” Tess said.

Copyright

 

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

 

AVON BOOKS
An Imprint of
HarperCollins
Publishers
10 East 53rd Street
New York, New York 10022-5299

 

Copyright © 2002 by Kathleen Gilles Seidel
Excerpts from
Head Over Heels
copyright © 2002 by Susan Andersen;
Please Remember This
copyright © 2002 by Kathleen Gilles Seidel;
Love Will Find a Way
copyright © 2002 by Barbara Freethy;
Lola Carlyle Reveals All
copyright © 2002 by Rachel Gibson;
You Never Can Tell
copyright © 2001 by Kathleen Eagle;
Black Silk
copyright
© 1991, 2002 by Judy Cuevas
ISBN: 0-06-101387-0
www.avonromance.com

 

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

 

EPub Edition © MARCH 2011 ISBN: 978-0-062-09699-9

 

First Avon Books paperback printing: February 2002

 

Avon Trademark Reg. U.S. Pat. Off. and in Other Countries, Marca Registrada, Hecho en U.S.A.

 

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is a registered trademark of HarperCollins Publishers Inc.

 

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