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      CONTENTS

      CHAPTER ONE

      CHAPTER TWO

      CHAPTER THREE

      CHAPTER FOUR

      CHAPTER FIVE

      CHAPTER SIX

      CHAPTER SEVEN

      CHAPTER EIGHT

      CHAPTER NINE

      CHAPTER TEN

      CHAPTER ONE

      AVA was neither looking nor feeling her best. Chilled to the bone, her hair hanging around her face in semi-frozen rats’ tails, her hands and nose so numb they might just as well have been amputated, she huddled in the barn and watched Leo disappear into the swirling night.

      “Wait here,” he’d told her. “I’ll go raise someone at the farmhouse and persuade them to take pity on us.”

      The occasional stamp of hooves and warm animal smell told her there were horses in the stalls behind her. Somewhere beyond the paddock, on the other side of the fence, Leo’s Ford Expedition nestled nose-down and up to its rear axle in a snowdrift. And no more than fifteen miles away, her parents were waiting to welcome her to her first Christmas at home in over three years.

      A horse barn, however well-kept, was no more part of the plan than finding her one-time idol Leo Ferrante waiting to meet her flight when it touched down six hours late at Skellington Airport. He was supposed to be wining and dining his lady-love, not stranded up to his knees in snow with her best friend.

      Ava’s first reaction when she saw him towering head and shoulders over the sparse crowd at the arrivals concourse had been that he probably wouldn’t recognize her; her second, the fervent hope that he wouldn’t since, the last time they’d met, she’d been all of sixteen and so horribly ill-at-ease in her too tall, too skinny body that she’d given new meaning to the word “ungainly.” She liked to think she’d improved somewhat in the intervening twelve years and now commanded a presence so elegantly cosmopolitan that he’d look right past her in search of a more homely specimen.

      He’d dashed any such hope by striding forward the second he caught sight of her, and pinning her in a smile that sent a remembered skewer of pain through her heart. “Ava, I’d have recognized you anywhere!”

      Oh, terrific! she’d thought, crushing that belated and completely inappropriate stab of adolescent hero worship. He was Deenie’s lover—soon to be her fiancé, from everything she’d written in her latest letters—and Ava had come home for Christmas with her family, not to make a fool of herself by lusting after a man she couldn’t have.

      So she’d smiled a lot during the thirty mile drive to Owen’s Lake, and made polite small talk, and congratulated herself on projecting the image of chic professional taking time out from her adventurous life overseas to make a flying visit home. Until they’d had to abandon his vehicle mid-journey, that was, and slog their way across a windblown paddock, and her once-elegant leather shoes had been reduced to frozen blocks encasing her feet.

      Noticing the way she was floundering to keep up with him as he forged ahead, he’d clamped an arm around her shoulders and attempted to shield her with his body from the worst of the weather. The honed perfection of him beneath his sheepskin jacket had felt solid and safe and wonderful. His thigh brushing hers at each step had peeled away all her layers of acquired sophistication and left her palpitating with awareness of how deliciously masculine and strong he was: a world-class athlete-cum-movie idol dressed up as a small-town lawyer romancing the girl next door.

      He had never kissed Ava, never held her hand. Never by so much as a word or a glance intimated that he had the slightest interest in anything she did. She’d been nothing to him but the other girl who lived six houses away on upscale Charles Owen Crescent; the one who sometimes came with her mother and father to his parents’ place when they hosted a summer barbecue around the pool, or an open house at Christmas. The one who, with her friend Deenie, used to giggle and blush and whisper behind her hand whenever he put in an appearance.

      Cowering now in some stranger’s barn, it struck Ava as supremely unfair that, in less than an hour, he could compress all her accomplishments into a mere blot on her résumé, and reduce her once again to an unprepossessing heap of flesh beset by futile wanting.

      “Don’t go there, Ava!” she admonished out loud, slamming shut the door on such traitorous nonsense. “Leo Ferrante has never been more off limits.”

      A horse poked its head out of the nearest stall, gave a snuffling whinny, and regarded her reproachfully, as though to say, We’re trying to sleep in here, if you don’t mind!

      “Sorry if I disturbed you, handsome,” she crooned, moving close enough to stroke the long, velvety nose. “If it makes you feel any better, I’ll be gone soon.”

      “Don’t go making promises you can’t keep,” Leo advised her, letting himself into the barn just in time to overhear. “I’m afraid we’re stuck here for the duration.”

      She didn’t like what that implied. “And how long is the duration expected to last?”

      He shrugged. “Until daylight, at the very least.”

      “And you’re saying we have to spend the intervening time in here?” She stared in disbelief at their surroundings which, while unquestionably luxurious for horses, hardly amounted to much in the way of human comfort. “Wasn’t anyone home at the house?”

      “Only the very nervous young mother of a colicky baby. Seems her husband’s off helping a neighbor with a sick animal, and even if she’d been willing to admit a couple of strangers past the front door, her guard dogs weren’t.”

      “I’m sure if you’d explained—”

      “I did.” He pulled off his gloves and touched his hand to her cheek, a lovely, too brief contact. “Not exactly the welcome home you were expecting, is it, Ava? But at least I persuaded her to phone your folks and let them know you’re safe.”

      Actually, what she’d expected was taking a taxi from Skellington to the grand old house in Owen’s Lake where she’d been born, and finding her parents waiting to ply her with hugs, cocoa and questions. She’d envisioned the garden transformed into a fairyland by hundreds of coloured lights threaded among the trees and shrubs. She’d pictured the railing of the wraparound porch trimmed with pine branches held in place with red ribbons and silver bells.

      She’d looked forward to the scent of wood smoke, and the warm reflection of flames flickering over the cool white marble fireplace in the living room, and the ceiling-high Noble Fir Christmas tree filling the big bay window.

      She’d counted on having time to prepare herself to face the happy couple without betraying the envy eating holes in her heart. On being dressed to the nines in her smart Thai leather suit that was as soft and pale as whipped cream, or swaying into a room in the beaded silk dress she’d found in Hong Kong. In other words, she’d planned to be in command of herself and her situation, and look like a million dollars on the outside, regardless of how she might be feeling inside.

      Instead, she was being forced to spend the night with Leo. In a stable. And looking like something no respecting dog would dream of dragging in.

      It was enough to make her wish she’d accepted the marriage proposal offered through an intermediary by a grateful tribal chief whose son she’d nursed through a health crisis. At least he’d rated her on a par with his most prized water buffalo! From the way Leo was surveying her though, she might have been the bearded lady from a traveling sideshow!