Laurie

Director of marketing Tracy Perkins has spent her whole life trying to win her father’s approval and competing with her vivacious, domesticated younger sister. Even though her dad is dead, this ugly duckling still feels the need to prove herself in her career. She’s been rejected by every man in her life and has finally accepted her insecurities and inhibitions as a woman make her much too frustrating for any guy to love. She’s had her heart broken for the very last time.

Ethan Swann’s family tree turns into a genealogist’s nightmare when the overworked CEO discovers his half-sister needs a bone marrow transplant and his stepfather has another daughter he’s never told them about. She is none other than Tracy Perkins, the uptight prude Ethan’s stepfather asked him to hire eight years earlier. His half-sister’s leukemia has made Ethan face his own mortality, and suddenly he wants a child...but only if he can skip the I do. After witnessing the pain his stepfather endured in loving Ethan’s late invalid mother, he’s sworn never to open himself up to caring for a woman that much. Despite his family tree's tangled branches, one thing is perfectly clear to Ethan--he is in no way related to his stepfather’s love child. And it’s a darn good thing, too, because he suddenly finds himself inexplicably attracted to the sexually repressed puritan who works for him.

When Tracy’s overbearing hemorrhoid of a boss tells her his stepdad is her real father and they share a half-sister who needs her help, Tracy is naturally bitter--and horrified. But once they discover they’re each only half compatible as donors--and they have a one in four chance of conceiving a child who’s umbilical stem cells would match--she’s terrified. How can she possibly love a child when she’s never felt loved herself? Things just go from bad to worse when Ethan suggests fertility drugs to increase their odds. Now, the big jerk doesn’t just want Tracy to have a baby...he wants her to have two or three.

CHAPTER 1

Wile E. Coyote’s life seemed downright spectacular compared to hers that day. Tracy Perkins sighed as she wrapped a towel around herself and then wiped the fog off the bathroom mirror.

If she were lucky, she’d wake up tomorrow to discover she’d been transported into a scene from one of those awful horror flicks. Otherwise, it would mean Ethan Swann’s irate voice-mail threatening to fire someone’s butt was real. And the first gluteus maximus to go would be her skinny tush.

As Swann’s marketing and advertising director, she couldn’t simply tell the CEO of the upscale department store chain she worked for--Oops, one of my people screwed up.

She swiped the styling brush through her obstinate waves that looked as if some practical joker had built a bonfire on her head. Switching off the dryer, she flinched at the intermittent blast of the alarm shattering the silence. Oh, just shoot me now.

Old Mr. Simon had probably charred his dinner again. Tracy hugged her towel tighter and hurried out of the bathroom, encouraged by the absence of smoke. She didn’t know any other woman so self-conscious of her less-than-spectacular body that she’d risk being cremated alive rather than run out of a burning building nude.

Of course, other women hadn’t spent nearly thirty years listening to their fathers insinuate they bore a resemblance to Lucille Ball’s ghost on a hunger strike.

She opened her apartment door a crack to make sure she had time to put on some clothes. As she peeked out to the hall, a hand clamped around her wrist and yanked her into the corridor, pulling her toward the stairwell.

“Wait! Are you crazy?” she yelled at the broad back of the dark-haired Goliath dragging her. “I’m not dressed.”

Her breath caught in her chest as Ethan Swann turned his steely gaze back toward her and hollered above the ear-splitting alarm, “Better naked than barbequed. If you turn around, you’ll see there’s smoke coming from your neighbor’s door.”

An acrid odor assailed her nostrils as she dug in her heels and glanced back at the hazy curtain hanging between them and her apartment. It amazed her how rapidly the smoke had filled the corridor in the few moments it’d taken them to travel its length. He jerked his head toward the fire door. “Let’s go, before the fumes get to this end of the hall.”

While the CEO continued to haul her behind him, her stomach qualified for a Girl Scout merit badge in knot tying. Had Swann come to give her the axe? She clutched her slipping towel with her free hand as dozens of panicking residents shoved past them down the steps.

“Would you please get the lead out,” he snapped over his shoulder, tugging her down the stairs. “I really don’t relish being charbroiled.”

“If you’d let go of my arm, I could move a whole lot faster. I can’t hurry and hold on to this towel with only one hand.”

Whirling around, he scooped her up and carried her down the second flight. She squirmed in his arms as he burst outdoors at the bottom of the steps, and a warm June breeze kissed the bare cheeks of her behind.

“Would you put me down!” she screeched over the blare of the approaching sirens and clanging bells. “You’re showing the whole darn world my butt.”

“Don’t worry, no one’s looking. They’re all much too interested in the fire.”

She glanced around at several spectators whispering behind their hands and pointing at them. “I beg to differ with you. Quite a few people are staring at my bare behind--not to mention everything else I’ve got down there.”

He carted her to the other side of the street away from the honking fire trucks speeding up to the curb. “I guess what they say about redheads is true.” He smirked and lowered her feet to the ground. “If you’re not careful, Miss Perkins, that flaming temper of yours is gonna set that towel on fire. Then where will you be?”

She pulled her skimpy covering tighter and glared at him. “I would assume in the burn unit at Thomas Jefferson Hospital.”

“No, I don’t think so. In Philadelphia, they ship burn victims to Crozer-Chester Medical Center.”

“Why would you even know something that trivial?”

“Because it’s my job to be well-versed on emergency response procedures in the event of a disaster at the store.”

“Mr. Swann--”

“Call me Ethan.” He flashed his brilliant white teeth at her. “I generally dispense with formality by the time I get a woman down to wearing just a towel.”

She spun her back on the hemorrhoid rather than give him the pleasure of seeing how much he infuriated her. She didn’t know the CEO that well, but his lack of consideration for her personal life the previous summer had left her with an intense dislike for him, surpassed only by her loathing of hospitals and needles.

Looking up at her building, her eyes watered and her nose burned from the woodsy smell of the thick smoke shrouding the block. Judging from where the firemen directed their hoses, it was evident the blaze had already spread way past her apartment. Anything that didn’t burn would float away.

While volunteering at the homeless shelter two evenings a month, she’d often wondered how some of the well-educated people had ended up on the street. Now she knew. Had she actually had the ridiculous notion that things couldn’t get any worse?

That morning, just like every other ordinary Tuesday, she’d woken up, entertaining the outrageous fantasy that one day Adolf Swann would become delirious from a high fever and promote her to vice president.

Right. After the dozens of misprints in the sale flyer, she’d be lucky if she were still employed. Reprinting it would take a big bite out of the advertising budget.

Another woman might be more concerned with losing her home than her job, but Tracy had worked too hard to get where she had. Compared to her career, her yard-sale belongings were at the bottom of her can’t-live-without-it list.

The irony of possibly being fired in the middle of a fire hadn’t escaped her. However, she just couldn’t find any humor in it. Her car’s broken transmission, the virus on her computer, and her apartment burning down were bad enough. The CEO’s appearance had just compounded her misery.

At five-foot-eleven, she was accustomed to looking most men directly in the eye since wearing even low heels made her as tall as the average guy. Ethan Swann was in no way a typical man. Standing barefoot next to him would intimidate even The Hulk.

He dragged off his silk watercolor print tie and folded it before tucking it into the interior pocket of his designer suit. When he slipped off his jacket and unbuttoned his snowy dress shirt, she opened her mouth to make a wisecrack. Her scathing remark evaporated in her throat as he shrugged the garment off his broad shoulders, revealing sharply cut biceps and a crop of midnight hair dusting his chiseled chest.

His build was even better defined than Mike’s, which she hadn’t thought possible--especially on a man who lifted a brief case for a living. Her former fiancé’s rippling muscles came with his job as a building subcontractor. Whereas, the thirty-eight-year-old CEO of Swann’s had to be doing a whole lot more each day to develop those six-pack abs than pushing that Mont Blanc sticking out of in his jacket pocket.

Glancing back up at his face, Tracy mentally shook herself as one of his dark eyebrows lifted in amusement. Wonderful. The last thing she needed was her boss thinking she had the hots for him. She shot a cynical smile at him. “So, do you think, if you get as naked as I am, people will stop ogling me?”

“Ummm--no...” A corner of his mouth lifted. “Actually, I’d considered you and me dropping down right here on the sidewalk and really giving ‘em something to gawk at.”

As she opened her mouth, he held out his shirt for her to slip into it. “Relax, Tracy, I was merely trying to give you something to laugh about in this nightmare. Besides--” He shrugged one shoulder. “--you’re not my type. I like my women eager and uncomplicated.”

Despite how often men taunted her about her prissiness, their barbs never failed to sting. She wasn’t a prude. She was just extremely self-conscious about her scrawny body.

Sliding one arm at a time into his shirt, she switched hands to clutch her towel. “Yes, I met your type at Swann’s last Christmas party. The way your date kept groping you, I wondered if maybe the double-D, blonde bimbo had stashed her brain in one of your trouser pockets.”

Ethan bit back a laugh at Tracy’s cutting retort and watched her failed attempts to simultaneously close his shirt and still hold on to her towel. He couldn’t believe this feisty Amazon, with shimmery molten lava cascading over her shoulders, could be the same frigid woman he’d overheard one of his vice presidents poking fun at that afternoon. The man had attributed Tracy’s lily white complexion and icy reserve to living in a morgue and sleeping on a marble slab.

Hating to see her struggle a moment longer, Ethan brushed her fumbling fingers aside. “Let me do it.” He buttoned the shirt while she held her towel in place. When he got to her waist, her death grip on the terrycloth kept him from going any further. “You have to let that go if you want this closed all the way.”

She allowed the towel to drop to the ground and jumped away to finish fastening the shirt herself. The fluttering of her hands fed his curiosity. If her bone structure weren’t so delicate, he’d swear she was trying to hide the fact she was secretly a man. Lowering his gaze to the hem of his shirt, he watched her close the bottom button. No way could those incredible legs have anything but feminine equipment between them.

He’d never noticed before what a contradiction her beautifully manicured nails were to the rest of her. She kept them just the right length--not so long that they reminded him of a hawk’s talons, like on some of the women he knew, but long enough to sensually stroke a man’s back or pet his head.

Even though he’d personally hired Tracy, he wasn’t all that well acquainted with her. Eight years before, his stepfather had given him her resume and asked him to find a position for her if she seemed at all qualified. Ethan had placed her in the Manhattan store as a manager, reporting to Sam Walters, the vice president of marketing and advertising. Sam had been so impressed with her, two years ago, he’d transferred her to corporate and promoted her to director.

In Ethan’s superficial encounters with Tracy during staff meetings, he’d found her to be exactly like her coworkers had described her. Extremely competent and controlled--never a hair out of place--and her clothing buttoned up tighter than a spinster schoolteacher’s.

So it astounded him when he bent down to pick up her towel and discovered she even painted her toenails.

Forcing his gaze back to the inferno, he thanked God for getting him there when he had. Otherwise, the little prude might have foolishly taken time to get dressed and would’ve been burnt to a crisp by now. With his sister’s illness to deal with, his stepfather was in no frame of mind to handle hearing a feeble excuse like Sorry, Dad, Tracy incinerated before I could ask her.

Click on the titles to read other excerpts

A Little Bit of Déjà Vu The Memory of You The Most Precious Gift

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