Blaylock's Bride. Cait London
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Letter to Reader Letter to Reader Title Page Acknowledgments 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 Copyright
Dear Reader-Friend,
I am so pleased to be a part of Silhouette Desire’s 10th anniversary MAN OF THE MONTH promotion, and to return to the Blaylocks, the family in Midnight Rider (SD #726) and The Seduction of Jake Tallman (SD #811). Readers have often requested a return to the Blaylocks. Jake is a Blaylock cousin, and we met the Blaylock family in Dan’s book, Midnight Rider. The bachelor brothers were just too tempting, and Blaylock’s Bride, Roman’s story, reopens the saga of the Blaylock family; Rio’s story is next. The setting is unique: smalltown Jasmine, Wyoming (similar to the towns I travel through every summer), filled with ranchers and farmers from the valley, stuffed with wonderful characters and surrounded by the Rocky Mountains.
Poor Roman. A darkly brooding hero, he’s given up on love, hoarding himself in his work and ranch. He was just too fascinating to leave moldering. So I tossed Kallista—an exciting, furious woman out for revenge—into his lap and, as a writer, enjoyed the fireworks.
I hope you enjoy the Blaylock family, bound by love and land, and I look forward to hearing from you, my reader-friends.
Dear Reader,
April brings showers, and this month Silhouette Desire wants to shower you with six new, passionate love stones!
Cait London’s popular Blaylock family returns in our April MAN OF THE MONTH title, Blaylock’s Bride. Honorable Roman Blaylock grapples with a secret that puts him in a conflict between confiding in the woman he loves and fulfilling a last wish.
The provocative series FORTUNE’S CHILDREN: THE BRIDES continues with Leanne Banks’s The Secretary and the Millionaire, when a wealthy CEO turns to his assistant for help in caring for his little girl.
Beverly Barton’s next tale in her 3 BABIES FOR 3 BROTHERS miniseries, His Woman, His Child, shows a rugged heartbreaker transformed by the heroine’s pregnancy. Powerful sheikhs abound in Sheikh’s Ransom, the Desire debut title of Alexandra Sellers’s dramatic new series, SONS OF THE DESERT. A marine gets a second chance at love in Colonel Daddy, continuing Maureen Child’s popular series BACHELOR BATTALION. And in Christy Lockhart’s Let’s Have a Baby!, our BACHELORS AND BABIES selection, the hero must dissuade the heroine from going to a sperm bank and convince her to let him father her child—the old-fashioned way!
Allow Silhouette Desire to give you the ultimate indulgence—all six of these fabulous April romance books!
Enjoy!
Joan Marlow Golan
Senior Editor, Silhouette Desire
Please address questions and book requests to:
Silhouette Reader Service U.S.: 3010 Walden Ave., P.O. Box 1325, Buffalo, NY 14269 Canadian: P.O. Box 609, Fort Erie, Ont. L2A 5X3
Blaylock’s Bride
Cait London
CAIT LONDON lives in the Missouri Ozarks but loves to travel the Northwest’s gold rush/cattle drive trails every summer. She loves research trips, meeting people and going to Native American dances. Ms. London is an avid reader who loves to paint, play with computers and grow herbs (particularly scented geraniums right now). She’s a national bestselling and award-winning author, and she also writes historical romances under another pseudonym. Three is her lucky number, she has three daughters, and the events in her life have always been in threes. “I love writing for Silhouette,” she says. “One of the best perks about all this hard work is the thrilling reader response and the warm, snug sense that I have given readers an enjoyable, entertaining gift.”
Together again—To my new editor at Silhouette,
Joan Marlow Golan. Thank you, Joan, for giving me my start in writing, for your patience in teaching me how to write many moons ago.
Thank you, Melissa Senate, for being you, for being
supportive, for building my career and for the wonderful years we’ve had together.
A special thank-you to my dear readers, who have asked
to see more of the Blaylock family after reading Midnight Rider and The Seduction of Jake Tallman.
Author’s Note: The research for the Bisque Cafe was
done at the Paint Cafe in Springfield, Missouri, where I painted my first smiling, belly-up hippopotamus.
Prologue
“You’re safe here with me, little bit...here on Llewlyn land,” Boone said to the little girl holding his hand. The wind sweeping across Llewlyn land was chilly, Wyoming’s early September ablaze with fiery quaking aspens amid the fir and pine trees; fur thickened on the animals now, a natural preparation for winter. On the Rocky Mountains above Llewlyn Ranch, the bears were fat with summer berries and fish and honey stolen from wild beehives.
Boone Llewlyn lifted his head, letting the wind—filled with the scent of the land, of the pines and earth and fields—now through his shaggy gray hair and caress his leathered skin.
He was old now, bent by age and shame. Boone kept the little girl’s fragile hand cradled in his large, rough palm, his scarred heart filling with love.
This was his grandchild, Kallista May. Her green eyes and sleek silky hair came from his mother, that stubborn edge along her jaw from Llewlyn blood. At six, and dressed in her favorite red jacket and boots, she was too thin, and had seen too much of life’s dirty ways.
To remind Boone who had the legal claim to the little girl, her mother