Out of Town Bride

“Wow! Kara Lennox’s BLOND JUSTICE series has it all—smart, determined heroines, ya-gotta-love-’em macho heroes, taut suspense and romance that will steam your glasses while it melts your heart. Each book is a winner; together they’re pure magic.”

—USA TODAY bestselling author

Merline Lovelace

Dear Reader,

There’s almost nothing more stressful than a wedding. Sonya Patterson has the added stress of a mom in the hospital, a con-man groom after her millions, a reporter hunting for scandal, and the man she’s loved and hated her whole life suddenly becoming more than her dutiful bodyguard.

I had a lot of fun wrapping up the BLOND JUSTICE series. If you’ve enjoyed watching The Blondes get the best of slippery con man Marvin Carter, you’ll be delighted with their brand of ultimate justice. But I hope you’ll also take pleasure in watching Sonya and John-Michael work through barriers of wealth, social class and a painful history to reach the happy ending they deserve.

Please let me know what you think! I love hearing from readers. Visit me at www.karalennox.com or write me at [e-mail].

All my best,

Out of Town Bride

Kara Lennox

www.millsandboon.co.uk

MILLS & BOON

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For the Thursday Lunch-’n-Starbucks crowd—Victoria Chancellor, Judy Christenberry, Kay Dykes, Tammy Hilz and Rebecca Russell. Y’all keep me sane.

Books by Kara Lennox

MILLS & BOON AMERICAN ROMANCE

934—VIXEN IN DISGUISE*

942—PLAIN JANE’S PLAN*

951—SASSY CINDERELLA*

974—FORTUNE’S TWINS

990—THE MILLIONAIRE NEXT DOOR

1052—THE FORGOTTEN COWBOY

1068—HOMETOWN HONEY†

1081—DOWNTOWN DEBUTANTE†

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

Epilogue

Prologue

Airplane seats were way too small and too crowded together. Sonya Patterson had never thought much about it before, since she’d always flown first class in the past. But this was a last-minute ticket on a no-first-class kind of plane.

She’d also never flown on a commercial airline with her bodyguard, which might explain her current claustrophobia. John-Michael McPhee was a broad-shouldered, well-muscled man, and Sonya was squashed between him and a hyperactive seven-year-old whose mother was fast asleep in the row behind them.

She could smell the leather of McPhee’s bomber jacket. He’d had that jacket for years, and every time Sonya saw him in it, her stupid heart gave a little leap. She hated herself for letting him affect her that way. Didn’t most women get over their teenage crushes by the time they were pushing thirty?

“I didn’t know you were a nervous flyer,” McPhee said, brushing his index finger over her left hand. Sonya realized she was clutching her armrests as if the plane were about to crash.

What would he think, she wondered, if she blurted out that it wasn’t the flying that made her nervous, it was being so close to him? Her mother would not approve of Sonya’s messy feelings where McPhee was concerned.

Her mother. Sonya’s heart ached at the thought of her vibrant mother lying in a hospital bed hooked up to machines. Muffy Lockridge Patterson was one of those women who never stopped running all day, every day, at full throttle with a to-do list a mile long. Over the years Sonya had often encouraged her mother to slow down, relax and cut back on the rich foods. But Muffy seldom took advice from anyone.

Sonya consciously loosened her grip on the armrests when McPhee nudged her again.

“She’ll be okay,” he said softly. “She was in stable condition when I left, and Tootsie was with her.”

“Tootsie? Is that supposed to comfort me?” Tootsie Milford, Muffy’s best friend since boarding school, was a consummate snob who never did a kindness for anyone unless she thought she could get something out of it—usually attention.

Sonya said little else to McPhee during the short flight, and he returned the favor. It was only after the limo picked them up at Hobby Airport that they spoke openly, safe from curious eavesdroppers.

“Do you want to go home first?” McPhee asked.

“No, of course not. Tim,” she said, addressing the chauffeur, “let’s go straight to the hospital, please.”

Tim hit the gas as Sonya fastened her seat belt. McPhee, as usual, didn’t bother. Sonya tried her best to ignore him. She rooted through her suede bag for her compact and busied herself powdering her nose and refreshing her lipstick. Other people might consider her vain, worrying about her appearance during a crisis. But grooming rituals had always given her comfort. That was something she and her mother shared. The world might be crashing down around her ears, but that didn’t mean she had to take it with a shiny nose and flyaway hair.

“Are you going to tell me what you were doing in New Orleans with your ‘sorority sister’?” McPhee asked, apparently unwilling to be ignored.

So, he hadn’t bought her cover story. But she’d had to come up with something quickly when McPhee had tracked her down hundreds of miles away from where she was supposed to be. She’d already been caught in a bald-faced lie—for weeks she’d been telling her mother she was at a spa in Dallas, working out her prewedding jitters.

“I was shopping in New Orleans for my trousseau,” she tried again. “Brenna’s a fashion consultant.”

McPhee laughed out loud at that one. “Lord help us if you start dressing like her.”

All right, so Brenna was a little avant-garde with her spiky hair, miniskirts and platform shoes.

“Anyway,” McPhee continued, “why would a fashion consultant be wanted by the FBI? Come on, Sonya, who is she? And don’t tell me she’s an old friend. I know all your old friends.”

“You think you know everything about me, don’t you? Well, you don’t. I met Brenna at the spa.”

“I checked with Elizabeth Arden. You haven’t been there in over three years.”

“I went to a different spa this time.” The lies were stacking up—and none of them were flying with McPhee.

He didn’t respond, merely stared her down with those incongruously dark-brown eyes. His eyes had always fascinated her, so dark when his hair was blond, and so blasted knowing, as if he could see straight to her most intimate thoughts.

She resisted the urge to squirm under his gaze. She was an adult, she reminded herself. “I have private reasons for my trip to New Orleans, and they don’t concern you.”

“Very well, Miss Patterson,” he said in his Jeeves-the-butler voice. “Forgive me for overstepping my bounds.”

She hated it when he accused her of acting like mistress of the manor. She wasn’t the class-conscious one around here, after all. In fact, she’d once tried to erase the social and financial barriers that separated them. McPhee was the one who had erected most of those barriers, making them more unbreachable than a twenty-foot concrete wall.

“What are you going to do about the wedding?” McPhee asked, abruptly changing tacks. “It’s only two months away.”

Sonya felt a hot flush at the mention of the wedding. Oh, Lord, she should have called it off a long time ago. “We’ll consider the wedding on hold until we have an idea when my mother will recover.”

“I think that’s wise.”

“You sound almost pleased. I thought you were looking forward to being unemployed.” Muffy had agreed that, much as it pained her, McPhee’s services would no longer be needed after Sonya was married.

“I don’t plan to be unemployed,” McPhee said curtly. “You might want to talk to June. She’ll have to find a way to announce the wedding postponement without raising any alarms.” June was her mother’s secretary, who always dealt with anything having to do with the media.

“Has the press been nosing around?” Sonya asked.

“June issued a statement that Mrs. Patterson was going in for routine tests. But there’s been one persistent magazine reporter who isn’t buying it.”

“Let me guess. Leslie Frazier?”

“That’s the one.”

Ugh. Leslie Frazier had a nose for scandal, and she worked for Houston Living, a gossipy society magazine. If she got wind of Sonya’s disappearing act, she’d have a field day. And when she found out the truth—that the marriage would never take place at all, followed by the truth about her purported fiancé, Marvin Carter III—she would turn Sonya into a laughingstock.

Sonya knew she couldn’t stop the real story from coming out eventually. It was only a matter of time. But she wished she could have some control over how and when the news broke.

The truth was, Marvin Carter III was a con man with multiple “fiancées.” Weeks earlier, Marvin had disappeared from Sonya’s life, along with her jewelry, her furs and all her money.

Yet she hadn’t found the courage to tell her mother she’d been jilted and fleeced, and wedding plans continued like a runaway train.

Chapter One

Two weeks later John-Michael McPhee watched Sonya silently for a few moments. She sat at her mother’s bedside, holding Muffy’s limp hand, head bowed. Her artfully highlighted blond hair, which she usually kept pinned up in some elaborate arrangement, had long ago fallen from its confines and now hung in shimmering waves to her shoulders, reminding him of when she was a teenager.

At first, it had seemed that Muffy would recover quickly from her heart attack. She’d been doing so well, in fact, that Sonya had felt it was okay to leave town for a couple of days to help her mysterious new friend, Brenna, out of a jam up in Dallas. But as soon as Sonya had returned, Muffy had undergone bypass surgery, and her recovery hadn’t gone well. She’d contracted a persistent infection that had kept her in Intensive Care.

John-Michael hadn’t seen Sonya so devastated since her father’s death when she was ten. Back then, the transformation of that bright, sunny chatterbox to the thin, solemn, pale little wraith floating about the estate had nearly broken his teenage heart, and he’d tried everything in his power to make her happy again.

Now, however, there wasn’t much he could do; she wasn’t a child to be distracted—especially not by him. He was one of her least favorite people these days.

He cleared his throat. Sonya looked over at him, for once open and vulnerable. She hadn’t expressed that much feeling in years—not around him, anyway.

“You really should go home and get some sleep,” John-Michael said. Sonya had been sitting by Muffy’s bedside for almost twenty-four hours.

“But she woke up and spoke to me a few minutes ago. She said she was…sorry for getting sick so close to my wedding.” Sonya’s eyes filled with tears. “That was the first thing she wanted to say to me.”

John-Michael felt the urge to put his arms around Sonya and comfort her. He knew she felt guilty for being gone when her mother was suddenly struck ill, and for not returning his urgent calls. And there was no one else she could turn to for comfort. Muffy and Sonya had no other family. They had no siblings in either generation.

But Sonya would not welcome comfort from him.

Her fiancé should be with her now, John-Michael thought with a surge of anger. But Marvin, the insensitive lout, was halfway around the globe and apparently couldn’t be bothered.

“Your mother wouldn’t want you to wear yourself to a frazzle,” John-Michael said.

“I’m staying,” she said stubbornly. “If you’re tired, go on home. I’ll be fine.”

John-Michael gritted his teeth. For ten years he’d hovered over Sonya, knowing her whereabouts at all times. He’d followed her at a discreet distance whenever she dated; he’d slept in his car outside strange houses when she’d elected to spend the night away from home. He’d sat in doctors’ waiting rooms and outside college classrooms, watching as she lived her life, wondering if he would ever get to live his.

Sonya hadn’t needed a bodyguard. She’d never been threatened or stalked, and she was in no more danger than any other wealthy young woman. But Muffy couldn’t bear to take chances with her only daughter, not after her husband had been kidnapped and killed, targeted due to his wealth. The murderers were safely in prison, but Muffy worried it could happen again.

It wasn’t likely John-Michael would abandon Sonya now, when Muffy was lying in Intensive Care.

Instead, he resumed his vigil on a padded bench in the ICU waiting area, a bench he’d been warming on and off since the day he brought Sonya here from New Orleans.

Thirty minutes later, Sonya emerged from the ICU. “The nurses kicked me out. I guess I’ve been trying their patience, abusing their visitors’ rules.”

“They probably just want you to get some sleep.”

She eyed the lumpy bench he was parked on. “I could sleep there.”

“Sonya…”

“Oh, all right. I guess it wouldn’t hurt for me to catch a couple of hours’ sleep at home. The nurses have my cell number. They promised to call if there’s any change.” She gave him a rare, sympathetic look. “You look bushed. You don’t really have to stay here with me all the time.”

“Marvin’s the one who should be with you.”

She glanced away, a sure sign she was about to tell a lie. “I told you, he’s somewhere in China right now. I can’t get hold of him.”

“Can’t you call his company?” John-Michael said as they walked toward the elevator. “Surely they know how to reach him. And there are satellite phones, you know.”

“He’s working on an important deal, and I don’t want to worry him unnecessarily. He calls me every few days. I’ll let him know the situation next time he calls.”

John-Michael sure wished he knew what was going on with her. He’d never known Sonya to be so secretive—or to tell so many lies. He and Sonya had had their differences, sure, but she’d always been able to trust him. He’d never told Muffy about those frat parties she used to attend that were little more than drunken orgies. Or about the time he’d had to rush Sonya’s best friend, Cissy Trask, to the hospital when she’d had a miscarriage. No one but he and Sonya had known she was pregnant, and no one ever would.

Why now had Sonya decided he couldn’t be trusted?

Once they reached the Patterson estate, Sonya disappeared without a word up the curved staircase, her delicate heels noiseless on the Chinese silk carpeting.

John-Michael retreated to his own quarters, a small apartment above the five-car garage. But he was too keyed up to sleep. Instead, he pulled on a pair of gym shorts.

The Patterson estate had its own mini health club, with state-of-the-art exercise equipment, an indoor lap pool, wet and dry saunas and whirlpool.

Foregoing the fancier equipment, John-Michael went a few rounds with a punching bag.

As he moved through a series of jabs and kicks, he thought about the easy friendship he and Sonya had enjoyed when they were kids. Though he was only the gardener’s son and Sonya was five years his junior, she’d been his sidekick, his little pest, always trailing after him, wanting to hang out with him and his friends. And sometimes he’d let her slum with him. He’d shown her how to work on his motorcycle and, at Muffy’s insistence, how to handle the gun Sonya now kept in her nightstand.

When Muffy decided Sonya needed a bodyguard. John-Michael was the logical choice. He’d just graduated from the police academy, planning a career in law enforcement. Muffy offered him a higher salary than any of the local police departments paid, and she’d promised to send him to an elite bodyguard-training school. He’d cheerfully accepted, never realizing he was putting a noose around his own neck.

Muffy had a secondary motive for hiring John-Michael. She’d needed him close at hand to handle any “difficulties” that came up with Jock, her gardener—who happened to be John-Michael’s father.

The job had gone okay until one night when Sonya attended her first sorority party. John-Michael had gone with her, lurking in the shadows like always, watching as she tried to assert her independence by getting drunk on margaritas. He’d pulled her away from the party before things had gone too far.

She’d been spitting angry with him at first, spouting off about how she was an adult, it was a free world, she would have her mother fire him. Then, when they’d reached the car, she’d surprised the hell out of him by throwing her arms around his neck and pressing her lush body up against his. “I really am a bad girl, aren’t I?” Before he could answer, before he’d been able to think, she’d clamped her sweet little mouth over his.

His body had sprung to life, and for the first time he’d realized that his charge was no longer a child. She had a woman’s body, a woman’s moves….

After thirty seconds of hot kisses and body rubbing, he’d pulled himself together and gently pushed her away.

“What?” she’d objected, loudly enough to wake the whole neighborhood. “Don’t tell me you don’t want me. You do. I could feel it.”

Dear God. At that moment he’d seen the utter folly of what he’d done, what he’d been about to do. Having sex with his charge, the girl he was supposed to be protecting, would be the grossest sort of irresponsibility he could imagine, not to mention a very short path to losing his job.

The only way to deal with this situation, he’d decided, was to end it in a way that was harsh and final, so it would never happen again. So he would never be tempted again.

He gave his punching bag a series of savage jabs as he remembered how difficult it had been to be cruel to her.

He’d forced himself to laugh at her. “You don’t actually imagine I would be interested in a spoiled little brat like you,” he’d said, deliberately filling his voice with derision.

The insult had cut, as it was meant to do. Her eyes filled with tears. “You kissed me back,” she accused.

“I’m a man,” he said harshly. “I have hormones. But I also have a brain, thank God, and I’m not stupid enough to get it on with Muffy Patterson’s daughter.”

“She would never know,” Sonya said in a last-ditch effort to salvage the situation. And it almost worked. Seeing her standing there, more sober now than drunk, her blond hair mussed, her lips full from kissing, he’d almost grabbed her and kissed her again. And he wouldn’t have stopped with kissing.

Savagely he turned his back on her and opened the passenger door of her BMW—her high school graduation present from Muffy. “Get in the car. You’re embarrassing yourself.”

“Do you have a girlfriend?” she asked, sounding devastated at the thought.

“That’s none of your business.” He hoped she would think that meant yes.

“I’ve never seen you with a girl.”

“No girlfriend of mine is going to watch while a child orders me around.”

He hadn’t had a girlfriend. When would he have had time to find one? He’d spent every hour either watching over Sonya or dealing with the disasters his father created. But his ploy had worked. Sonya didn’t say another word. And she never again tested her feminine wiles on him.

Back in the present, he took one final swing at the bag. He was out of breath and dripping with sweat, more so than the easy workout should have caused. Time hadn’t lessened the intensity of his memories one bit.

Unfortunately, his formerly easygoing friendship with Sonya had been a casualty of that ill-begotten evening. She’d never forgotten, or forgiven, his rejection. For almost ten years, he’d had to endure her coldness and hide the desire he felt for her, a desire that had only grown fiercer as she’d matured into an intriguing woman.

He’d tried to resign, and Sonya had tried to fire him—numerous times. But gradually, John-Michael had come to understand the complex dynamics of his job. If he wasn’t employed in a position that kept him constantly on hand to handle Jock, then Jock would have to go.

And to send Jock away from the Patterson estate, the only home he’d ever known, would kill him.

SONYA HADN’T REALIZED how tired she was. When next she woke, it was dark outside. She checked her clock and was horrified to discover it was after two in the morning.

Her first thought was that they’d been protecting her from bad news—“they” being John-Michael; Tim, the chauffeur; June, the secretary; and possibly Matilda, the housekeeper. Muffy’s staff had always sheltered Sonya from all unpleasantries.

She sat up, rubbed the sleep from her eyes and switched on a lamp. Her cell phone was right there next to her, with no messages. Grateful that she’d had the foresight to put the ICU’s phone number into her cell’s memory, she dialed.

“Your mother is actually doing much better,” the night nurse told her. “The new antibiotic therapy is working. She’s been drifting in and out of sleep, but she did wake up long enough to drink some water. She asked about you.”

Sonya was already on her feet. “I’ll be there in twenty minutes.”

“No, you don’t have to do that,” the nurse said firmly. “I asked your mother if she wanted me to call you, and she said no, absolutely not, that you needed your sleep.”

That sounded like Muffy, Sonya thought with a frown. The benevolent dictator, issuing orders from her sick bed.

“She’s fine, really,” the nurse insisted. “In fact, they’ll probably move her out of ICU tomorrow.”

That news brought a flood of relief. Sonya hesitated, then decided it probably would serve no good to rush to the hospital in the middle of the night if Muffy was sleeping and in no immediate danger. “If she wakes again, tell her I’ll be there first thing in the morning,” she said. “Unless she needs me sooner.”

After the call, Sonya felt better, but there was no way she was going back to sleep. She was, in fact, hungry. She’d hardly eaten a bite since Muff’s surgery several days ago. She threw on a robe and wandered downstairs to the enormous, restaurant-grade kitchen, certain there would be several tasty dishes in the fridge. That was something she could always count on.

As she entered the huge white-tile-and-chrome room, she flipped on a light so bright it hurt her eyes. The stainless steel appliances gleamed with a recent polish, and the room smelled faintly of fresh-baked bread. As top dog among Houston society mavens, Muffy often gave elaborate dinner parties, for which she had Eric, a Cordon-Bleu-trained chef, prepare gourmet delights that were sure to be written up on the society page and in the food section. And for every day, they had Eric’s mother, Matilda, a traditional Southern cook down to her bones.

The glass-fronted refrigerator was crammed with dozens of ceramic storage dishes, neatly stacked and labeled with the contents and the throwaway date. Sonya perused the labels, wrinkling her nose. She was not in the mood for Eric’s dill-crusted sea bass with Parmesan cream sauce, or marmalade-glazed pork medallions and shiitake mushrooms. Then she spotted something that appealed to her—Matilda’s macaroni and cheese. Pure comfort food and a guilty indulgence she and her mother sometimes ate when they were dining alone.