Love Me True

“Does That Blush Go All Over, Honey?” Letter to Reader Title Page Dedication About the Author Letter to Reader Prologue Chapter One Chapter Two Chapter Three Chapter Four Chapter Five Chapter Six Chapter Seven Chapter Eight Chapter Nine Chapter Ten Chapter Eleven Copyright

“Does That Blush Go All Over, Honey?”

Joey’s grin was too conceited for words. “Let me see.”

He yanked at Heather’s blanket, but gently, just to tease her. She held on ferociously.

“You’re in a different mood this morning, my pet,” he said.

“I’m not...your pet...”

“Last night you were most...affectionate. You couldn’t get enough of me. You were...we were...well, pretty incredible.”

Her gut twisted in fresh shame. “I don’t believe you.”

“Fine. Suit yourself.” He chuckled, but her words had wiped that tender eagerness from his gaze. “Your head hurts, I’ll bet. You probably don’t remember much.... Lucky for you, I remember everything. So, if you get curious, I could describe our night together in the most vivid detail. In fact, I’d love to do so.”

She clamped her hands over her ears. “I’m living in a nightmare.... How could you sink so low as to seduce me?”

“You have it all backwards. You seduced me. For your information, I put up one hell of a fight defending my...er...virtue.”

Dear Reader,

This May we invite you to delve into six delicious new titles from Silhouette Desire!

We begin with the brand-new title you’ve been eagerly awaiting from the incomparable Ann Major. Love Me True, our May MAN OF THE MONTH, is a riveting reunion romance offering the high drama and glamour that are Ann’s hallmarks.

The enjoyment continues in FORTUNE’S CHILDREN: THE BRIDES with The Groom’s Revenge by Susan Crosby A young working woman is swept off her feet by a wealthy CEO who’s married her with more than love on his mind—he wants revenge on the father who never claimed her, Stuart Fortune A “must read” for all you fans of Daphne Du Maurier’s Rebecca!

Barbara McMahon’s moving story The Cowboy and the Virgin portrays the awakening—both sensual and emotional—of an innocent young woman who falls for a ranching Romeo But can she turn the tables and corral him? Beverly Barton’s emotional miniseries 3 BABIES FOR 3 BROTHERS concludes with Having His Baby. Experience the birth of a father as well as a child when a rugged rancher is transformed by the discovery of his secret baby—and the influence of her pretty mom. Then, in her exotic SONS OF THE DESERT title, The Solitary Sherkh, Alexandra Sellers depicts a hard-hearted sheikh who finds happiness with his daughters’ aristocratic tutor. And The Billionaire’s Secret Baby by Carol Devine is a compelling marriage-of-convenience story

Now more than ever, Silhouette Desire offers you the most passionate, powerful and provocative of sensual romances. Make yourself merry this May with all six Desire novels—and buy another set for your mom or a close friend for Mother’s Day!

Enjoy!

Joan Marlow Golan

Senior Editor, Silhouette Desire

Please address questions and book requests to:

Silhouette Reader Service

U.S. 3010 Walden Ave., PO. Box 1325, Buffalo, NY 14269

Canadian: PO Box 609, Fort Erie, Ont. L2A 5X3

Love Me True

Ann Major

www.millsandboon.co.uk

To my late father, Millard Holland Major,

who taught me to love the written word

About the Author

ANN MAJOR loves writing romance novels as much as she loves reading them. She is a proud mother of three children, who are now in high school and college. She lists hiking in the Colorado mountains with her husband, playing tennis, sailing, enjoying her cats and playing the piano among her favorite activities.

Dear Reader,

I love writing for the MAN OF THE MONTH promotional miniseries in Silhouette Desire, and I’m especially honored that my hero Joey Fasano is Desire’s 125th MAN OF THE MONTH!

If I could have three wishes, one of them would be to hop into my man’s brain, so I could figure out once and for all what makes him do and say all those illogical things that drive me crazy. Writing from the male point of view is the next best thing.

I think I get a little carried away with this sometimes. I tend to invent heroes who are larger-than-life, difficult and pushy. My guys love deeply and completely, especially when they don’t want to. They have trouble with the “no” word. They want what they want, and they go after it. In short, they are every bit as maddeningly adorable as the real man in my life.

No-fantasy haunts me more than the man from the past showing up on the heroine’s doorstep and turning her life topsy-turvy.

My hero in this latest story, Joey Fasano, bad boy turned movie star, has become a force unto himself. He’s never forgotten Heather, his first love, and once he sees her again, he realizes how empty his life and soul are without her. He can’t go on, if he doesn’t win her. Such a love is worth fighting for.

I hope you enjoy Joey and Heather’s story.

Best,

Prologue

Maybe everybody was right after all. Maybe Joey Fasano was too wild and too passionate and too damned no-account for his own good.

Whatever.

Joey was too scared about Heather to care one way or the other.

The weather was as blustery and uncertain as his foul mood. It was raining intermittently. Every so often, the moon would break out from its wispy cover and put a stop to the nonsense.

Joey was damn sure driving like a demon from hell. His knuckles shone like bright white bones as he whipped the steering wheel to the right and swerved his daddy’s battered Chevy onto the wet hospital drive.

Massive and ink-black, the rectangular building looked as forbidding as a prison as it loomed in stark relief above a black fringe of live-oak trees and was backlit by that violent, moon-dark, Texas sky.

Heather was in there somewhere...maybe dying.

His gut cramped in sick, demoralizing fear. Her powerful family would stop at nothing to keep him from seeing her.

Let them try.

He slammed on the brakes, got out of the car he’d taken without permission and ran, heedless of the soft rain that had begun to fall again, uncaring that he’d left the door wide open and the headlights blazing into the empty blackness like twin cones.

With a callused brown hand, he shielded his eyes against flashing red and white lights of an ambulance. More sirens screamed from the distant interstate, jarring him in his panicky confusion as raced toward the E.R. entrance.

His mouth twisted when he spotted the same scowling deputy who’d all but accused him of killing Ben a week ago. Ben, his best friend; Ben, Heather’s brother. Ben, whose lifeless head he’d cradled in his lap. Ben, whose grave he’d visited less than an hour ago to plead for forgiveness.

Nod Smile at the uniformed jerk. Stay cool.

Joey shot the officer a tense grin that must have passed muster. Then he shouldered his way through the sliding glass doors like a surly outlaw. Inside, heads swiveled as rain dripped off his black hair. He slicked the thick stuff back, out of his scalding eyes. A pretty teenager gasped coyly and then gave him one of those fluttery smiles all the girls gave him. He saw her father’s hand clench warningly on her slim shoulder and draw her out of Joey’s path.

Half boy, half man, Joey moved too fast, as if he hadn’t quite grown accustomed to his long, rugged body. Still, he was hunky and gorgeous. His voracious sex appeal made him suspect with all parents and teachers, and with any other guy his age who had a girlfriend.

“You’re every teenage girl’s dream lover and every daddy’s worst nightmare,” Coach Howard had teased him when he’d been voted Most Handsome in high school.

“When I was your age I had pimples. I envy the hell out of you, kid. Looks like yours will open all sorts of doors.”

Behind a cluttered desk a nurse ignored a stack of charts and blinking lights on her phone and licked pizza crust off her fingers.

But she couldn’t ignore him.

No woman ever could, especially if he smiled.

But when he tried, the skin on either side of his mouth tightened painfully.

“Save the fake charm. Visiting hours are over, sonny.”

She obviously had a teenage daughter.

Joey froze. “Please, Ma’am.... I’ve gotta find somebody.... She’s real sick.”

The nurse shook her head in curt dismissal, sucked a last crumb, and then punched a button on her telephone to tend to more important business.

Joey’s cold wet hand grabbed the receiver from her

“Heather Wade,” he rasped, suddenly seeming older and scarier than his twenty years. “The senator’s daughter.... What room is she in?”

“Your pretty face has got you way too cocky, sonny. You may be hot stuff to some little girls foolish enough to go for tall and dark and dangerous, but a Wade wouldn’t wipe her pretty feet on the likes of you...even if you did get her pregnant.”

His broad shoulders sagged. Joey’s tough stance wilted. “Where—?” he pleaded in a desperate, breathless voice, a boy’s voice now.

Her stare hardened. Then she seized the phone from him. “Get outta here, sonny, before you get yourself into real trouble. The senator’s been down here. He told me all about you and to be on the watch-out—”

When Joey didn’t budge, she hollered off-handedly, “Officer! It’s him! It’s that Joey Fasano guy.”

Joey took off in a dead run.

So did the deputy.

As Joey sprinted like a crazed rat through a maze of endless white corridors, the big deputy lumbered at his heels.

The bastard would probably throw the book at him.

Let him. All that mattered was finding Heather...before it was too late.

Then Joey slammed through a double set of swinging doors only to find himself trapped in a dead-end hall on the seventh floor.

His heart beat like a tom-tom when he pivoted wildly just as the deputy banged through the doors and smiled.

Behind Joey, Senator Wade’s voice thundered, “What the hell are you doing up here, Fasano?”

“I came to see Heather.”

“Over my dead body, punk.”

Shock and disapproval rippled through the grim clump of fashionably-dressed people standing outside Heather’s door.

“You better let me see her!” Joey screamed her name like a crazy man. “Heather!”

Heather’s mother opened the door. “She doesn’t want to see you.”

“You’re lying!”

Vaguely Joey was aware of her mother’s pitying gaze as he stumbled past her. Suddenly he felt that he moved in weird slow motion. The white walls closed in on him like a surrealistic nightmare.

Was that frail, thin creature veiled in curtains and swaddled in white sheets like a mummy in that far corner really his lively Heather?

The blinds were down. The room was gray and shadowy.

“Babe.... What have they done....” He choked. His voice died. “Oh, God...what have I done?”

Her amethyst eyes that usually brightened at the sight of him, were dull and painfilled. Dark circles of grief and exhaustion ringed them. She stared at him as if he were a ghost. Then she twisted her head away from him and lay as still as death.

Even in this state, he thought she was the prettiest girl in the world. He sat down beside her and took her slim hand. A shock went through him. Her fingers cold and stiff and lifeless. Just as Ben’s had been.

“You okay, babe?”

“I’m fine,” she whispered.

Fine? Her tone cut him. Ever after he would hate that word.

There was scarcely a pulsebeat in her slender, blue-veined wrist. Her icy skin was almost translucent.

She was so changed, so lifeless, fear squeezed his heart like a vice.

“Please...just go away,” she whispered in a strange almost thready voice.

He lifted her hand and laced his brown fingers through hers. “What about our baby?”

Her voice broke on a sob. “There is no baby.”

His own eyes filled with tears. Fighting them, he squeezed her hand and held on tightly. He gasped for air. He gasped again. He felt like a drowning man with nothing to hold on to. “But—”

“I want you out of my life, Joey. It’s the only way.”

“Heather.” He felt sick at his stomach and unable to breathe in the dark, airless room. “You listen to me. We’re still getting married—”

“No,” she said in a rehearsed, robotlike tone. “I want to start over... fresh.”

“With some rich guy like Roth that your daddy—”

“Daddy says if this gets out, me having been pregnant, people won’t understand. They’ll judge him. He says that I’ve been difficult my whole life.”

“He’s difficult and demanding. Not you. You’re not supposed to be some perfect doll who follows all his orders. You’ll shrivel up and die...if you do that.”

“He says that just this once I need to think about him and act like a normal daughter, that I have to do the predictable, respectable things, that I have to finish school... and...and forget you.”

“Yeah. Well, you tell him it’s not that easy. ’Cause I won’t ever, ever forget you. And I won’t ever let you forget me, either.”

“Don’t make this harder, Joey. Please—If you and I hadn’t dated, Ben would still be alive.”

“Is that what they say? What he says?”

“I can’t hurt them any more than I already have, especially Daddy, especially right now.”

“It’s not like I planned Ben’s death or I wanted to get you pregnant,” Joey cried. “I didn’t want to hurt them. I love you.”

He felt her fingertips flick through his thick, black hair that had probably dried into unruly tangles and then withdraw as if she were afraid to touch him because she wanted to so much. “Daddy says I’ve gotten into more trouble than ten kids.”

“You haven’t gotten into nearly as much trouble as me, babe,” he said, attempting his old teasing tone.

“Daddy says you’re a bad influence.”

The soft finality in her stone-calm voice as she kept quoting her daddy killed something inside him.

“I thought you loved me.”

Slowly she unlaced their joined fingers and shut her eyes.

“Heather—”

Tears leaked through her lashes and wet her white cheeks.

“Heather ....”

She bit her lips.

“Don’t do this, babe. Don’t leave me. You know I can’t make it without you. You’re all I’ve got. All I ever want. You’re everything.”

The door opened. “Fasano, you’ve had your time with her. Now get the hell out of here before I sic the law on you.”

Her father was standing beside Laurence Roth in the doorway. Her other relatives were peering at him like he was some kind of wild beast they’d run to ground and were about to slaughter.

“You all think you know so much. You don’t know her. You’re killing her. You’re killing both of us.”

“Get out, Fasano, before I lose my patience. You’ve already cost me one child. You’d better leave quick, boy, before I decide to use my considerable power to break you for what you’ve done to Heather.”

“Joey....” Her pleading whisper came from behind him. Joey turned back to Heather. Her eyes were closed, and tears streamed silently down her cheeks. “Go....”

He’d hurt her. He’d made her cry. Her family had never thought he was good enough. She’d always hated having to sneak around to see him. Now, because of Ben and the baby, they really hated him.

He’d lost her. How would he go on? He wasn’t rich or important like they were. She was everything to him. Everything.

More than anything, he wanted to take her into his arms and hold her till she stopped crying. He wanted to press his head into her breasts, to rock her back and forth, to never let her go. Travis Wade would probably kill him if he touched her.

Joey tossed his head back at a cocky angle and swaggered past Wade and Roth with the silent, insolent pride of a kid who had nothing else.

Joey didn’t know where he was going.

Without Heather, he didn’t care.

All he knew was that he was leaving Texas. And he wasn’t coming back till he was as rich and powerful as all of these arrogant bastards.

Then he’d make them pay.

One

A lot of smart people don’t believe in the devil, but Heather Wade knew better. Because sure as shooting, the very same devil who sent the snake to Eve also sent Joey Fasano slithering her way. It was easy for other rich girls whose daddies were senators to be good. It was hard for Heather.

Impossible when Joey was around. He brought out the worst in her. That’s why she’d fallen in love with him as a girl.

That’s why she was determined to forget him now that she was a full-grown woman on the verge of matrimony.

Tall and broad-shouldered, black-eyed and black-haired, Joey Fasano had been born sinfully handsome. He’d been as smolderingly intense as a box-office sensation years before he became one.

Maybe some seven-year-old little girls would not have found the various sorts of devilment he proposed in his hideout as exciting as she. Not all would have thought it a lark to snatch the Reverend Scott’s wife’s lacy panties off her clothesline after Joey pointed out how they snapped like a fat pirate’s pantaloons in the wind. But then it never did take much more than a sexy wink and devil-may-care grin to show her how much more fun the crooked path with the likes of him was than the straight and narrow with more staid folk.

And now, six years after she’d given that gorgeous snake in hunk’s clothing up for good, whose scalding eyes should be burning a hole out of her television screen and setting her blood afire?

Ignore those coal-bright dark eyes fringed with dense sable lashes.

Ignore how they made her feel singed to the core and shivery and alive for the first time in years.

Somehow the way Joey looked at her was more real than anything in her bedroom, more substantial than the Aubusson carpet she was curled up on, more sensual than the glass of red wine and the tall, black bottle beside the untidy pile of bridal magazines stacked on her low table, more tantalizing than the red chiffon skirt that fell so softly over her long, shapely legs.

She stared at that shock of black hair tumbling across his dark brow, her wayward heart thumping as eagerly as a hungry rabbit’s who’d seen a carrot. Every time Joey whispered her name, she punched the pause button and gasped for breath.

Turn him off. Go to bed.

No way.

This wasn’t the first time her life had swerved disastrously off course because of Joey. Not that she was about to admit, even to herself, that it had.

One minute she had been a normal bride-to-be returning home from one of those stuffy society affairs. Bored and tired, she’d stepped into her vast bedroom with the familiar, rose wallpaper, high ceilings, antebellum furniture, and tall windows. Then she’d punched a button on her answering machine and her mother’s shrill voice had jolted her into this new reality. Until then Heather had convinced herself she really could marry Larry Roth and make Daddy, who was up for re-election, very happy.

That was before Joey Fasano, bad-boy movie star, had stomped back into her life with his usual vengeance.

Except for Joey, nobody had ever known, least of all her parents, what to make of their mercurial, free-spirited, unpredictable daughter. As a baby she’d gotten into so much mischief during naptime—like the afternoon she’d pushed a stool to the stove, stood on her tiptoes, and turned on the gas jets because they smelled funny—that her mother had been forced to tie a net over her crib.

Not that a net and a few red satin tie-downs could contain a spirit as lively as the nimble-fingered Heather’s. The very next afternoon she escaped her netted prison and poured all the soap powder onto the bathroom floor and played in it like it was a sand pile.

If the adult Heather had a bad case of bridal jitters after her mother’s message, maybe it was natural under the circumstances.

It isn’t every night that your old boyfriend, who just happens to be the sexiest movie star in the universe, wins an Oscar and throws your life into a tailspin. Leave it to Joey to clasp that golden statuette to his heart and confess to millions in that low, choked voice that he couldn’t forget her.

Not that she’d caught his memorable performance live. No, to please her mother she’d hosted a fund-raiser and had taped the show. She’d come home exhausted only to be drawn into Joey’s seductive web by that little red message light.

Her mother had been frantic.

How come Joey Fasano, the big, bad movie star, thanked you, you of all people? My daughter? How come he said you were unforgettable? You promised you wouldn’t see him again! Have you been in contact with him, Heather Ann? Your father’s very upset. Call me. We have to talk. Oh, this is your mother. I don’t care how late you get in. Call!

Heather hadn’t won her unpredictable, mercurial stripes by doing what her mother told her. She yanked the phone off the hook, kicked off her high heels, and fast-forwarded the videotape. Sinking to the floor, she watched Joey collect his prize—over and over again, scarcely daring to breathe. Every time, he rasped her name and then the word, unforgettable. In fact, even though she was headachy with exhaustion, she might have watched him again if a twig hadn’t scratched her barred window.

Her hand froze on the remote, her nerves responding on some instinctive, primitive level. With a keenly honed ear for danger she strained forward, listening to the night sounds outside the mansion. There was only the wind rushing through the trees along the bayou. Only the distant hoot of a solitary owl. Then a tugboat’s light flashed through the avenue of oaks, and lurid shadows leapt against her window shade.

She jumped up, thinking to race to the hall to check on Nicky again.

The dark shape dissolved. Nothing was out there. They weren’t in any real danger as they had been two years ago. She reminded herself of the high fences girdling the grounds, of the bodyguard patrolling those fences.

Unforgettable, rasped Joey’s low voice in her tired, incredulous brain.

Joey was the reason she was so jumpy. It had taken her years to get over him. Not that it was easy; he was America’s number one sex symbol. Posters of him in skin-tight black leather were plastered all over the world.

Joey doesn’t matter. Who cares what he said about you tonight on national television.

You are in Louisiana a million miles away from him, a million worlds away from him. You are getting married. He’s a movie star. You’re a single mom. He forgot you years ago.

Heather wasn’t used to wine, or the almost mystical clarity it can bring to confused thoughts and repressed emotions. Her cheeks were flushed. Her long-lashed violet eyes were misty as she felt things and knew things she’d refused to deal with—like the real reason for the string of unsuitable boyfriends that had followed Joey till she’d finally settled on Larry.

Her father was worried about the upcoming election. She lifted a snapshot of Nicky and shivered at the thought of what Joey might do if he found out she had a son.

Not if.

When.

Men like Joey Fasano should come with warning labels tattooed on their foreheads at birth—too sexy to handle. Or danger—testosterone overload. Girls with too many hormones should be locked up in a nunnery till they were wise enough to deal with boys like Joey.