Wild Enough For Willa
One night Willa Longworth found a fortune…and a manWhat does a woman do when she finds cold hard cash at her feet? With a family against her, a son to nourish and a passion to extinguish, Willa did what any woman would do–she took the money and ran.But the past was at her heels in the form of dangerously handsome Luke McKade–a man who would follow her to the ends of the earth and make her pay for her sins. A man who had demons…and a fierce need for Willa's heart and soul.In a moment of danger and surprise, Luke discovered Willa's soft spot–him. But when all was resolved, would Willa find her real treasure? Would true love–and a million or two–be too wild a ride for Willa…or just wild enough?
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Willa Longworth
Willa was a woman with one chance at destiny and she wasn’t going to let a man—or her longing for him—get in her way…or was she?
“Life’s like the weather. You can never be sure of it. That’s the miracle, don’t you see?”
Luke McKade
He had done all the right things for the wrong reasons—until he met Willa. From that moment, his life would never be the same.
“You owe me a romp in the hay, Mrs. Longworth.”
Little Red Longworth
This ailing heir wanted someone to care for him during his final days. He found an angel in Willa…and a wife.
“I went to kill me a lawyer and a bastard brother. I got a wife.”
Hesper Longworth
The spiteful sister-in-law doesn’t want Willa to get a single red cent.
“Your unfortunate past is hardly my concern, Willa dear. I’m here to buy you out.”
Brandon Baines
A powerful lawyer with an ego the size of Texas and a dangerous need to keep things—and Willa—quiet!
“It’s just me and you, sweetheart. We’re all alone in the middle of nowhere. Now, where’s the money?”
Also available from ANN MAJOR and MIRA Books
INSEPARABLE
DEDICATION
To my precious daughter, Kimberley Leta Cleaves, who is quirky, funny, warm, witty, young. And because she is all those things, she is a challenge to me as a mother.When somebody asks me, where do you get your ideas, I should tell them from my daughter, who is my very own adorable muse.Thank you for Willa, Kimberley.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
I want to thank the following people:
To Tara Gavin and Dianne Moggy for more than I can say
To Karen Solem
To Patience Smith
To Ted, for realizing that dinners and a clean house don’t matter nearly as much as writing
To Karen Olsson and Meg Guerra, who told me about Laredo
To Dorothy Deaver, who decorated Willa’s house
To Steve Stainkamp and Geri Rice
To Chris Misner and Greg McKee for telling me about the computer business
To Patricia Patterson for streamlining my business affairs so I can write
POEM
If I were alone in a desert
And feeling afraid,
I would want a child to be with me.
For then my fear would disappear
And I would be made strong.
This is what life in itself can do
Because it is so noble, so full of pleasure
And so powerful.
But if I could not have a child with me
I would like to have at least a living animal
At my side to comfort me.
Therefore,
Let those who bring about wonderful things
In their big, dark books
Take an animal—perhaps a dog—
To help them.
The life within the animal
Will give them strength in turn.
For equality
Gives strength in all things
And at all times.
—Meister Eckhart (1260–1329)
(Author’s note: As a cat lover, I change dog to cat. When I go alone into my imagination to write, Kanka, my cat, goes with me to help by sitting on my manuscript.)
Contents
Book One
“What we call the ending is usually the beginning.”
1
Marcie, his gentle, beautiful wife…Dead?
And it was all his fault.
Luke McKade sat alone in his vast penthouse office in southwest Austin. He willed the silence and the dark of his new gorgeous, empty building—the building that Marcie had helped design and decorate—to devour him.
Driven, he always worked later than his employees. Not that tonight was about work.
“Sa-a-ve the baby,” Marcie had whispered in her pronounced Texas drawl with its elongated vowels. She’d gripped him fiercely when he’d knelt over her bed. Her final, hoarse cry was swallowed, strangled. Then she’d died in his arms.
His mind had raced. His heart had thundered. What baby? What baby?
“A son,” the white-coated doctor had confirmed after the autopsy.
Luke wearily massaged the back of his neck. Restless by nature, always on the move, he rarely sat behind his desk this long—and never to reflect on his own shortcomings.
Murder. He’d done murder.
She’d been so beautiful. So gentle. So classy. How he had loved looking at her. She had known how to dress. Other men had envied him, which is why he’d married her.
He pushed his fingers through his untidy wavy black hair. On top of today’s unread newspapers and his managers’ reports from yesterday lay several mangled scraps of paper—his phone messages. Kate, his freckle-faced, madcap secretary with corkscrew red curls, scrawled numbers and names on whatever she had handy.
Among other problems, the Feds were suing him for restriction of trade, and he was trying to float a new IPO. Luke thumbed through the fast-food napkins, Post-it notes, and a couple of pages she’d torn from her calendar, his tension heightening. His lawyers had called. So had his ranch foreman. The name of the president of a rival company was highlighted by a smear of mustard. But what charged Luke was the name, Brandon Baines.
Brandon Baines had called three times.
Baines, big criminal lawyer in Laredo.
Laredo was a border town. As such, it was too far from Mexico City and too far from Washington, D.C. for either nation’s laws to be taken too seriously. Men like Baines could prosper there.
