Heading For Trouble!

“A kiss is just a kiss? Well, there’s one way to find out.”About the AuthorTitle PageCHAPTER ONECHAPTER TWOCHAPTER THREECHAPTER FOURCHAPTER FIVECHAPTER SIXCHAPTER SEVENCHAPTER EIGHTCHAPTER NINECHAPTER TENCHAPTER ELEVENCHAPTER TWELVECHAPTER THIRTEENCopyright

“A kiss is just a kiss? Well, there’s one way to find out.”

And before Morgan could back away, Richard Kavanagh’s arms closed around her, and he kissed her full on the mouth.

Morgan found her knees actually going weak at this new assault on her senses. Instinctively she clutched at him for support. And at this point, to her dismay, Morgan lost her head. She took a sideways turn, drew her arm back, and landed a powerful right jab on his eye.

Even now, nearly a year and a half later, she cringed at the memory. It had been so uncool. So unfeminine. Just about anything would have been better than punching him.

He had laughed softly and seized hold of her wrist. “If I were you, I’d think about whether I was so angry because I got something I didn’t want...” an index finger traced, with casual contempt, her tingling mouth “...or because got more than I bargained for.”

Linda Miles was born in Kenya, spent her childhood in Argentina, Brazil and Peru, and completed her education in England. She is a keen rider, and wrote her first story at the age of ten when laid up with a broken leg after a fall. She considers three months a year the minimum acceptable holiday allowance, but has never got an employer to see reason, and took up writing romance novels as a way to have adventures and see the world.

www.millsandboon.co.uk

CHAPTER ONE

AT FOUR-THIRTY on Good Friday afternoon Morgan Roberts stood halfway up a hill above Clive’s Scrap and Lumber and wondered where she’d gone wrong.

She’d come down from London to spend Easter weekend with her father and young stepmother on the family farm near the Welsh border—surely a simple enough plan. But nothing in Morgan’s life was ever simple.

Her decrepit alarm hadn’t gone off, she’d thrown on the first clothes that had come to hand, raced across east London to Liverpool Street, chewed her nails—the Circle Line had been ‘experiencing signalling problems’—and had almost missed her train out of Paddington. Not the best of starts. But she’d stepped demurely off the train three hours later filled with the very best intentions. Where had she gone wrong?

She’d meant to change the instant she got to the house, and here she was, three hours later, in a grey leotard which had once, long ago, been black, grey plimsolls which had once, long ago, been white, and a disreputable sarong which might, to an unsympathetic eye, have looked quite a lot like a recycled teatowel. She’d meant to behave with rigid conventionality from the word go, and instead...

‘Go on, Morgan, you can do it!’

‘It’s easy!’

Sarah and Jenny, the nine-year-old Twins from Hell by her father’s second marriage, took up a chorus they’d been repeating all afternoon.

‘It’s not scary!’ Six-year-old Ben, the long-awaited son, added this with just a hint of a swagger.

Morgan tugged absently on the glossy black plait which had wormed its way over her shoulder like a confiding snake. A tender spring breeze rippled through young grass; the spring sunlight seemed to bathe the scene in champagne; it was a perfect afternoon for rolling down a hill inside a tyre. But she’d promised Elaine...

‘This could be my chance of a breakthrough,’ her sister had sighed over the phone earlier that week. ‘No more breakfast TV for people who hate to get up in the morning. All right for some—they should try getting up in the middle of the night.’

Now Elaine had her eye on higher things—specifically on a place as co-host with Richard Kavanagh, the go-for-the-jugular presenter of Firing Line. There had been a short digression, which Morgan had heard dozens of times before, on his precocity, ratings, unheard-of salary and crazy fans—‘Did you hear about the girl who smuggled herself into his hotel room in Carlisle?’—and then the axe had fallen.

‘Someone from the studio’s coming down from London this weekend,’ Elaine had said mysteriously, refusing to name names, and had laid down the law in no uncertain terms. If Morgan didn’t give the wrong impression by dressing in teatowels, jousting on broomsticks and otherwise disgracing herself, the job could be Elaine’s for the asking.

‘Aren’t you going to try it even once?’ asked Ben.

Morgan shook her head.

‘It’s got to go back to the scrapyard anyway,’ Sarah said cunningly. ‘What difference does it make if you’re inside it?’

Morgan knew that she was being manipulated—it was well-known in the family that she never turned down a dare—but that didn’t make it any easier to resist temptation. Elaine and the mystery guest weren’t expected for hours—well, at least another hour. She looked longingly down at the inviting sand-hill at the foot of the slope, and sighed irritably.

She didn’t care what Elaine said; she didn’t really believe there could be a vacant seat on Firing Line. Morgan had met Richard Kavanagh only once, briefly, in circumstances that she would rather forget—but she considered herself something of an expert on his programme. Its coverage of controversial issues was undeniably addictive, and for the past three years she’d been getting weekly doses of the black-browed Boy Wonder of the box flaying alive the corrupt, the exploitative and the inefficient—but that didn’t blind her to the ruthless showmanship of its sardonic presenter.