www.millsandboon.co.uk

      TERESE RAMIN

      lives in Michigan with her husband, two children, two dogs, two cats and an assortment of strays. When not writing romance novels, she writes chancel dramas, sings alto in the church choir, plays the guitar, yells at her children to pick up their rooms (even though she keeps telling herself that she won’t) and responds with silence when they ask her where they should put their rooms after they’ve picked them up.

      A full-fledged believer in dreams, the only thing she’s ever wanted to do is write. After years of dreaming without doing anything about it, she finally wrote her first romance novel, Water from the Moon, which won a Romance Writers of America Golden Heart Award in 1987 and was published by Silhouette in 1989. Her subsequent books have appeared on the Waldenbooks romance bestseller list. She is also the recipient of a 1991 Romantic Times Magazine Reviewer’s Choice Award. She hasn’t dreamed without acting for a long time.

      For all those who are just learning to claim

       their power as a woman

       and for

       All those who are old enough to have claimed theirs.

       May you all seek what you find.

      To my own best beloved, Bill,

       guardian angel to children and little old ladies

       everywhere.

      And to Ann Leslie Tuttle,

       whose patience should be named Legion.

      Contents

      Chapter 1

      Chapter 2

      Chapter 3

      Chapter 4

      Chapter 5

      Chapter 6

      Chapter 7

      Chapter 8

      Chapter 9

      Chapter 10

      Chapter 11

      Chapter 12

      Chapter 13

      Chapter 14

      Chapter 15

      Chapter 16

      Chapter 17

      Chapter 1

      The sight of the jogger’s tush stopped Allyn Meyer’s meandering thoughts on a dime, swiveled her attention a hundred eighty degrees.

      Whoa, baby! her libido breathed. Never in her life had she seen anything to match it—or at least anything like it that had caught her attention. Perhaps it was the brief black shorts that gave her such a perfect view of where she suddenly and uncharacteristically wanted to place her hands. Or perhaps it was the length of muscular thigh and calf visible beneath, or the narrow waist and the expanse of broad, heavily bronzed, sweaty, shirtless back above, the straight shock of hair above that as black as his shorts, that took her breath and turned her cave woman enough to state without question, He’s mine.

      Or perhaps it was simply that omniproblematical twin thing, that telepathic—for want of a better term—connection she and twin sister Becky had always had; that thing that had made Allyn feel it when Becky burned her hand on the frying pan or gave her morning sickness before Becky even knew she was pregnant.

      That thing that had caused Becky to experience the sensation of drowning the time Allyn actually had been during a freak mishap with a faulty tank during one of Allyn’s research dives. Or that caused them to call each other to share in the good news before the one who was getting the news even knew there was some.

      That thing that had forced Allyn to build psychological walls that were high, steep and thick enough to prevent her from, er, feeling some of the things Becky shared with her husband, to allow her sister privacy.

      Or made them choose to take two completely separate paths, then suddenly wind up with the same seven-year itch and the desire for sudden and drastic change.

      Anyway, perhaps it was only that coupled with Becky’s ever unruly hormones, blending with Allyn’s, mixing Allyn up and turning her into a lust-starved woman she didn’t recognize. Even though her love life had ever only included her husband, it was Becky who’d allowed herself fantasies enough for the two of them—then told her best friend-confidante-sister Allyn about them so that Allyn would be indirectly forced to use her imagination on something besides a life spent researching dolphins, whales or some as yet undiscovered reef fungus or freshwater mollusk.

      Whichever, for the first time in her life, Allyn knew without doubt she’d finally spotted a man who majorly kick started impulses she’d never before entertained, and here she was driving on by and never going to meet him ever even once in her life. And all she’d seen of him so far was the rear view.

      Lord, she’d led a spinster’s life, hadn’t she, getting hot and bothered over a guy in running shorts with a tight rear? Maybe Becky was right. Maybe it was time Allyn left academics behind for a while and explored the lustier side of the world. At least let herself