âYou feel so good,â Barry murmured in Meganâs ear
He pulled her back farther into their hiding place behind the bushes, burying his face in the side of her neck.
âOh, Barry,â she moaned.
Hello? A moan? Already? Heâd barely touched her. Still, he did have that effect on womenâ¦. âDid you miss me?â
âI feel so alive! Iâm breaking rulesâ¦and I like it!â Megan shivered against him. âThe adrenalineâmy heart is pounding and all my nerves are hyper aware. This is what you feel, too, isnât it?â
âI get a zing, yeah.â
She turned in his arms, which caused a zing of a different kind. âThis is so much more than a zing! I feel hot. So, so hot.â She wrapped her arms around his neck and planted a quick, hard kiss on his open mouth as she ran her hands over his chest. âWhy didnât you tell me it was like this?â
Barry was dealing with his own heat issues. âWho knew breaking the law would be such a turn-on?â he quipped.
And who could have guessed, Barry thought as he bent to kiss her, that the biggest turn-on would be breaking the lawâ¦with a cop!
Dear Reader,
Iâve always felt that a fail-proof way to test whether you want to spend the rest of your life with someone is to go on a long car trip together. Even better if you can borrow two children under the age of five to take with you. Inevitably, something will go wrong and that will be when you truly get to know the other person.
Under pressure, relationships can develop quickly in a short timeâsay 24 HOURSâwhich is the idea behind this new miniseries from Harlequin Temptation. And whatâs more stressful than a wedding? How about a wedding with a missing groom? Find out where he is, and join three couples who find love in a day beginning with Falling for You in March, followed by Kiss & Run by Barbara Daly in April, and Jane Sullivanâs One Night in Texas in May.
Also watch for my next Harlequin Temptation novel, Never Say Never, in June 2005, and visit my Web site, www.HeatherMacAllister.com, for news about other upcoming books.
Best wishes,
Heather MacAllister
FOR A GUY WHOSE PARENTS named him after the male lead in the seventiesâ sobfest Love Story, Barrett Sutton was not at all romantic. He could be if the situation called for it, but he had a talent for avoiding those kinds of situations.
Unfortunately, weddings were exactly those kinds of situations and Barry currently couldnât avoid them, not after being busted from crime reporter to the society section or âLifestyleâ section as the staff there liked to call it. Whatever they called it, it was now his job to report every little freaking detail about society weddings. And in Dallas, Texas, the society types had big, detail-filled weddings.
He hated it. Even worse, he was good at picking just which details to write about. Really good at it. And why not? He was a professional. A professional whoâd grown up with sisters. However, if he didnât start misspelling some names or messing with the bridal-gown descriptions, he would never get back to reporting crime for the Dallas Press.
But this wedding wasnât the place to start misspelling anything. This wedding was the Shipley-Hargrove wedding. Yeah, the bride was party girl Sarah, better known as Sally, Shipleyâand try saying that three times fast. The society reporters had gone into mourning. Their favorite photo-op princess was settling down. Even worse, over the course of the year-long engagement, her posse of party-girl friends was settling down, too. Skirts were longer, tops were opaque, men were sober and parent-approved. Apparently this was round two for Miss Shipley, who'd actually been jilted before. Nobody was taking chances this time.
Barry hadnât been reporting society doings during the Sally heydays so there was considerable resentment when heâd drawn her wedding and the rehearsal assignment.
Yes, his life had sunk to this: professional jealousy over writing about lace, flowers and cake.
Hang the self-respect, he had to get his old job back before he lost all his contacts. It had taken him years to slide into a world where informants would trust him enough to talk. Now, instead of spending his nights buying rounds of the hard stuff in bars, he drank warm leftover champagne and tried to think up fresh ways to describe wedding cake and white dresses.
As he drove through Dallas, he gripped the steering wheel and allowed himself a moment of regret for the days of not so long ago, when a Saturday morning would find him finishing a story of murder and mayhem from the night before, and then heading home to sleep. Sure, some Friday wedding parties ran late, but stories about bacon-wrapped shrimp and âextravagantly massed nosegays of buff rosesâ didnât have the same urgency, even if he did file them while wearing a tux.