Taken by Love (Love in Bloom: The Bradens #7)

by Melissa Foster

  “Thank you, Dad. I’m proud of you, too.” She was proud of him. Over the past few months, he’d taken an active part of his own recovery, and she knew it wasn’t easy.

  “Sweetheart.” Her mother held her close; then she touched the ends of Daisy’s newly blond hair. “I missed this. I missed you.” She hugged her again.

  “Me too, Mom. I’m here to stay, and I think the blond is, too.”

  She was passed from Kevin to Alice, to Janice and Margie, and when she finally found a gap in awaiting arms, she took a deep breath. She turned around and nearly ran into Wes.

  “I think I might need to make an appointment.” Wes wore a bright green button-down shirt streaked with dirt. He had a towel wrapped around his hand. Over the past few weeks, she’d bandaged, stitched, and splinted Wes’s injuries.

  Daisy shook her head. “Stitches?”

  “Maybe just glue?” Wes shrugged.

  “Wesley Braden, what have you done now?” Catherine, Luke’s mother, grabbed his arm. She was a few inches taller than Daisy, with intelligent eyes and thick brown hair she wore with a side part that hung past her shoulders in natural waves. She had the same wide smile as each of her children, and she radiated positivity.

  “Crap. I was hoping you wouldn’t see this.” Wes disappeared into the crowd.

  Daisy loved the way Luke’s family teased and loved so easily.

  Catherine embraced Daisy. “I’m proud of you, Daisy, and so happy you and Luke have come together.” She and Daisy had become close over the past few months, and it was easy to see how Luke had turned out to be such a loving and generous man. Catherine was those things and more. She was a positive light that glowed like the sun. “I guess you’ve figured out that my boys are all brawn on the outside, but sweet as kittens on the inside.”

  “Mom,” Luke complained.

  “Tigers, maybe,” Pierce said.

  “Meow,” Emily teased Pierce, and he swatted her.

  Luke caught Daisy’s eye, and the right side of his lips lifted in the most alluring little smile. She made her way toward him, her stomach fluttering like a schoolgirl again. He was talking with Wes. She hooked her finger into the waist of his jeans and felt his muscles shudder against it.

  “Wes…” He glanced at Daisy, and she moved closer, pressing the side of her hip to his. She loved teasing him, seeing him struggling to keep focused on his conversation. “Um…did you ever fill that…position?” Luke asked.

  “Not yet.” Wes narrowed his eyes, having clearly noticed Luke’s discomfort, and a grin spread across his face as he ran his eyes between them. “I’ve got a few interviews coming up. Believe it or not, five out of six are chicks.”

  “Hey, girls can run cattle and ride horses.” Emily pushed her way between her brothers with a feigned scowl on her face.

  Luke took the opportunity to draw Daisy against him, press his hips to hers, and whisper in her ear, “So unfair. Feel what you do to me.”

  Ross sidled up to them. “Glad you stuck around, Daisy. I’d hate to have to wipe Luke’s tears.”

  Luke shook his head, locking his dark, sensuous eyes on Daisy. “I would have followed her anywhere.”

  She knew he would have, and when Luke leaned down and kissed her, she had a hard time keeping the smile from her lips.

  “Sweet Lord, Dr. Daisy Honey,” Luke whispered. “What is that look in your eyes?”

  “Love. Happiness.” She pressed her cheek to his and whispered, “With a hint of lust.”

  The End

  Please enjoy a preview of the next

  Love in Bloom novel

  Fated for Love

  The Bradens

  Love in Bloom Series

  Melissa Foster

  Chapter One

  CALLIE BARNES PICKED through the new releases in the Trusty Town Library, where she’d worked as the assistant librarian for the last four weeks. She snagged the last copy of Kurt Remington’s newest thriller, Dark Times, and put it on top of the two others she was carrying. The cover depicted the silhouette of a man at the edge of a cliff, holding a bloody knife that glistened in the eerie moonlight. She turned the book over. She couldn’t even think about those types of situations, much less read about them. Callie’s first love was fairy tales. She loved the idea of knights on white horses and happiness coming when a person least expected it. Fairy tales were safe, and the princesses were always loved for who they were, flaws and all. Her second secret love was women’s fiction, specifically, chick lit and light romances, where the worst thing that a character encountered was a broken heel during an interview and all the sex scenes were left up to the reader’s imagination, as they should be. She didn’t need to read about some hunky hero touching a woman’s thigh…with his tongue. She felt her cheeks flush at the thought and wished she hadn’t worn her hair pinned up in a bun so she could hide behind it. She hugged the books to her chest, closed her eyes, and inhaled deeply. Puppies. Kittens. Ice Cream. Brownies. Chocolate syrup…oh yes…all over his—

  “Hey, Callie. You okay?”

  Cripes! She clenched her eyes shut. Wes Braden’s voice sent a shudder through her entire body. Of course he’d come in when she was thinking about chocolate syrup all over…Stop, stop, stop! This was the best—and the worst—part of Thursdays. She mustered a smile and turned around. He stood a few inches away, which brought her face oh so close to his broad, muscular chest. She could press her cheek to it and hear that big heart of his pounding beneath all those layers of muscle.

  Holy cow.

  She lifted her gaze and met his slightly amused dark eyes.

  “Hey.” His eyes landed on the books she was still clutching against her chest. “Those for me?” Wes came into the library every Thursday to pick up the latest thrillers and an occasional biography.

  Callie’s body pulsed with anticipation over the few minutes they shared each week—so much anticipation that when she was alone in bed in the dark of night, it was Wes’s face that appeared in her mind and his voice that whispered in her ear. It was his full lips and his piercing dark eyes that made her heart race and her body so hot she couldn’t help but satisfy the urges he stirred deep within her.

  Callie opened her mouth to answer, but his masculine scent surrounded her dirty thoughts, shooting her hormones into overdrive and gluing her tongue to the roof of her mouth, which she was pretty sure was a godsend, because otherwise she might have drooled all over him. She shoved the books into his hands and was rewarded with a grateful smile that made her legs turn to wet noodles.

  Wes’s eyes lingered on her high-collared blouse, which was buttoned up to her neck; then he lifted his eyes to hers again.

  She felt her nipples harden under his hot stare, and of course her cheeks flushed again. She wished she could disappear into one of those books right there and then.

  “Thanks, Callie. Any interesting plans this week?” He’d asked the same question every week for the past four, and each week she answered with the titles of the books she was reading, which was not only all she could manage, but it was also the truth.

  There were no two ways about it. Callie’s life was boring. She heard it from her girlfriends all the time; of course, that was because none of them lived in the tiny town of Trusty, Colorado, where she’d moved to take her dream job of working in a library. They still lived in Denver, where Callie and her friends had grown up and gone to college, but after four years of working in jobs she didn’t enjoy, the assistant librarian position opened up in Trusty, and she’d jumped at it. And while it might be miles away from her real-life friends and family, at least she was surrounded by more fictional friends than she could ever hope for. Besides, when Alice Shalmer, the head librarian, finally retired, she’d be next in line for the position. She hadn’t expected the added weekly bonus of being able to ogle all six foot something of delicious Wes Braden, the hottest man she’d ever set eyes on.

  Totally worth being away from my friends.

  Finally she was in a positio
n to give Wes a more exciting answer.

  “My friends are taking me to a spa for a few days.” She bit her lower lip to keep from grinning like a kid going to Disney World. She couldn’t wait to spend a few days with her friends, where being pampered meant plenty of reading time. It would be a perfect long weekend.

  Wes arched a thick, dark brow, leaned one hand on the bookshelves beside her head, and gazed down at her with a sexy, dark stare. “A spa? Now, that does sound interesting. Which one?”

  She could barely breathe with him leaning in like that, bringing his clean-shaven, chiseled face, full lips, and…Her heart went a little crazy.

  “Yeah,” she whispered. Callie’s stomach fluttered, and she realized she must be gazing at him with a horrifyingly dreamy look in her eyes. She turned back to the books—and away from the badass guy who taught hunting and fishing and made her sharp mind numb.

  “Um.” She tried to remember what the question was. Spa. Which spa? “I’m not sure which one, or even where it is. They’re surprising me.” Her girlfriends had scheduled this trip before she began working for the library, and Alice was kind enough to give her the time off even though she’d been there for only a month.

  “What do girls do at a spa for a long weekend?” he asked over her shoulder.

  Did he really expect her to think with him standing so close? She could feel his hot breath on the back of her neck. “Um…Massages.” Jeez! I might as well have said, Have strangers touch us all over! She took a deep breath, which helped exactly none since his scent took shelter in her nose and lungs.

  She forced herself to finish answering. “Uh…read, take walks.” She stumbled back a step and knocked a book from the shelf. When she bent to pick it up, her darn too-tight pencil skirt trapped her knees together halfway to the floor. She made a mental note to stop eating ice cream as a replacement for those dirty things she was trying not to think about.

  Wes retrieved the book, and their eyes met and held for a long, hot beat. He handed it to her and rose to his full height again. “Well, that sounds a lot more relaxing than spending a week with a group of people who are probably afraid of heights, spiders, and snakes.” He tucked the books she’d given him under his arm, ran his hand through his short, dark hair, and shrugged, causing all those hard muscles in his shoulders to flex beneath his tight shirt.

  “If you add deep water to that list, you’ve described me perfectly.” Callie didn’t know much about Wes, other than he liked thrillers and biographies, he turned the heads of every female in the library, and he taught alpha male stuff, like hunting, fishing, and…She had no idea what else, but the thought of guns and deep water made her dizzy. Or maybe that was a side effect of being around him. She wasn’t sure.

  “Wes?” Tiffany Dempsey ran her eyes up and down Wes’s body with an appreciative smile, like a mountaineer revisiting a familiar peak.

  It had taken Callie a week to realize why Tiffany appeared in the library every Thursday but never took home a single book or said a word to Callie.

  Wes smiled at Tiffany in a way that made Callie blush. His eyes were as seductive as his voice. “Hey, Tiff.”

  Tiffany flipped her long blond hair over her shoulder and ran her finger down his forearm. “How’s it going? Oh, I see Callie picked out some good books for you again.”

  Callie was surprised that she knew her name.

  “Callie knows her books.” Wes smiled down at Callie.

  Knows her books. Callie watched him walk away with Tiffany, then banged her forehead against the bookshelf, wishing she could be anyone but the girl who knew her books. No, that wasn’t really true. She loved books—everything about them, from the weight of them in her hands to the smell of the pages and the worlds they held between their covers. The world she loved to climb into, live vicariously through, and where she hid away from the world. She had no idea what to wish for. She was who she was and she liked who she was, even if she’d never be the type of woman a guy like Wes Braden would be interested in. She glanced around the quiet library. There were two women sitting at a table staring at Wes like he was made of gold. In the reference aisle, she noticed another woman, who, she realized, also came in only on Thursdays. She was peering out of the aisle at Wes, too. And then there was Tiffany, stealing every ounce of Wes’s attention in three seconds flat. Callie sighed. She’d never be like Tiffany. Callie sucked at the whole one-touch-turn-on thing that Tiffany had down pat. Tiffany was tall and lean, and every outfit she wore was tight and revealing in the all the right ways. Callie would feel silly in the tight, black minidress Tiffany wore like a second skin. She somehow managed to look sexy and strong, which was probably nothing more than her brazen personality. Callie was petite and far from athletic. Even though she did her Jillian Michaels DVD religiously, she could never do the things she imagined Wes doing, like wrangling cattle or riding bulls.

  Though, I wouldn’t mind riding him.

  She shivered with the painfully unrealistic thought. She needed that damn massage, and she hoped the masseuse was tall, dark, and handsome. Maybe she’d throw caution to the wind and do all those behind-closed-doors dirty things she wished she could do with Wes and had been trying not to fantasize about.

  Her damn cheeks flushed again.

  She looked up at the ceiling and wondered if there was a handbook for nerdy girls who fantasized about badass men to learn to take the reins and land their men.

  Stick to fairy tales, Callie.

  WES SHOVED A stack of papers to the side of his desk, yanked open the file drawer, and weeded through the hanging file folders. Shit. Where are they? He didn’t have time for this. Wes and his partner, Chip Shelton, owned The Woodlands, a dude ranch about an hour outside of Trusty, in the Colorado Mountains, and he was meeting a group there just before dinnertime. If he could only find the itineraries he’d put together, he could get on the damn road so he wouldn’t be late.

  He moved around the desk and looked down at the fifteen-week-old bloodhound sleeping soundly beneath his desk. “Hey, Sweets. Any idea where I put those itineraries?” He hoped he hadn’t left them at his house. Wes split his time between his house in Trusty and his cabin at The Woodlands, and the last thing he needed was to make an additional trip before getting on the road to the ranch.

  Sweets turned sad eyes up at him and yawned, then laid her head back down on her cushy bed. Wes had found Sweets a few weeks earlier on the side of a remote mountain trail, all skin and bones and sick with distemper. With the help of his brother Ross, the Trusty veterinarian, he nursed her back to health and fell in love with probably the only bloodhound on earth that had no sense of smell. Zero. None. A bloodhound that couldn’t track a lost person would be of little use if a client turned up missing, but he loved her so damn much that even her missing sense didn’t make her any less amazing.

  Wes leaned down and loved up Sweets; he scratched her belly and pressed a kiss to her forehead. Then he sat in his chair and rubbed his eyes with his forefinger and thumb.

  “What’s that piss-ass look for?” Chip stood in the doorway, his shaggy blond hair hanging in his eyes. He’d been Wes’s business partner since they opened the dude ranch doors eight years ago, and Wes’s best buddy since second grade.

  Wes sighed and set a dark stare on Chip’s annoyingly amused baby blues. They were two peas in a pod—no risk was too big, no job was too difficult, and no woman was worth more than a night or two. Chip knew as much about Wes as his own five siblings did, and Wes loved him like a brother, but love wasn’t the emotion that was currently brewing in his gut.

  “Have you seen my itineraries for the new group?”

  Chip flopped into the chair across from Wes’s desk, the amused look in his eyes now coupled with a smirk. He stretched his long legs and clasped his hands behind his head. “How can a guy who’s overprepared for anything outdoors be so frickin’ unorganized with paperwork?”

  “Either tell me where they are or get out.” Wes went to the file cabinet near the win
dow and tugged the top drawer open.

  “Dude, you do this every other week. Just admit it: You have an aversion to paperwork.”

  “Shut up.” Wes slammed the file cabinet closed. He peered out of his office door and hollered down the hall. “Clarissa?”

  “I don’t have them!” Clarissa Simmons, their secretary and bookkeeper of three years, hollered.

  Chip laughed.

  Wes slid him another narrow stare. “If you’re not going to help me look for the damn things, get out.”

  Chip pushed to his feet. “Did you look in your put-off-until-later pile? That would be my guess.” Chip lifted his chin toward a pile of papers currently holding down the edges of an open map on top of a table in the opposite corner of Wes’s office.

  Wes stalked across the floor and snagged the top file in the stack. The itineraries.

  “I’ll refrain from telling you I told you so.” Chip snickered as he glanced over the map, checking out Wes’s trail for the overnight with his group. “You’re all set for your days in female hell?”

  “Yeah. You want to take them?” Wes loved running the dude ranch and he enjoyed taking charge of the outings, but they’d recently lost Ray Mulligan, a key employee who ran a third of the overnight trips, which left Wes and Chip to pick up the slack until the position was filled. They had flipped for the lead on this group, and Wes had lost.

  Chip held his hands up in surrender. “I’m taking the day trips, remember?” He tapped his finger on his chin. “I’m thinking big burly broads who are out to show you how little you know.” He shrugged. “You know, out for a week of fun.”

  “Or four women who think that I’m part of the package.” As much as Wes loved women, fending them off during the outings had lost its charm about two months after they opened The Woodlands. He realized exactly what women must feel like when guys like him sized them up for a quick lay.