A Bride For Abel Greene

by Cindy Gerard

  “You Advertised For A Bride. I Answered That Ad In Good Faith. And Now I Need You To Fulfill Your Obligations.”

  Letter to Reader

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Books by Cindy Gerard

  CINDY GERARD

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Copyright

  “You Advertised For A Bride. I Answered That Ad In Good Faith. And Now I Need You To Fulfill Your Obligations.”

  Heart pounding, she pulled out her trump card. With what she desperately hoped were seductive movements, she eased onto his lap and looped her wrists around his neck.

  “Just so there’s no question in your mind,” she whispered, “I want you to know that I intend to keep my part of the bargain. Every part of the bargain.”

  She brushed her lips against his slowly.

  “I want to be your wife, Abel Greene.”

  Dear Reader,

  Happy Valentine’s Day! This season of love is so exciting for us here at Silhouette Desire that we decided to create a special cover treatment for each of this month’s love stories—just to show how much this very romantic holiday means to us.

  And what a fabulous group of books we have for you! Let’s start with Joan Elliott Pickart’s MAN OF THE MONTH, Texas Moon. It’s romantic and wonderful—and has a terrific hero!

  The romance continues with Cindy Gerard’s sensuous A Bride for Abel Greene, the next in her NORTHERN LIGHTS BRIDES series, and also with Elizabeth Bevarly’s Roxy and the Rich Man, which launches her new miniseries about siblings who were separated at birth, THE FAMILY McCORMICK.

  Christine Pacheco is up next with Lovers Only, an emotional and compelling reunion story. And Metsy Hingle’s dramatic writing style shines through in her latest, Lovechild.

  It’s always a special moment when a writer reaches her 25the book milestone—and that’s just what Rita Rainville has done in the humorous and delightful Western, City Girls Need Not Apply.

  Silhouette Desire—where you will always find the very best love stories! Enjoy them all....

  Senior Editor

  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

  CINDY GERARD

  A BRIDE FOR ABEL GREENE

  This book is dedicated to my agent, Maria Carvainis,

  for her insight and support, and to my editor,

  Lucia Macro, for her vision and

  irrepressible enthusiasm.

  Books by Cindy Gerard

  Silhouette Desire

  The Cowboy Takes a Lady #957

  Lucas: The Loner #975

  *The Bride Wore Blue #1012

  *A Bride for Abel Greene #1052

  *Northern Lights Brides

  CINDY GERARD

  If asked “What’s your idea of heaven?” Cindy Gerard would say a warm sun, a cool breeze, pan pizza and a good book. If she had to settle for one of the four she’d opt for the book, with the pizza running a close second. Inspired by the pleasure she’s received from the books she’s read and her longtime love affair with her husband, Tom, Cindy now creates her own warm, evocative stories about compelling characters and complex relationships.

  All that reading must have paid off, because since winning the Waldenbooks Award for Bestselling Series Romance for a First-Time Author, Cindy has gone on to win the prestigious Colorado Romance Writers’ Award of Excellence, Romantic Times W.I.S.H. awards, Career Achievement and Reviewer’s Choice nominations, and the Romance Writers of America’s RITA nomination for Best Short Contemporary Romance.

  Northern Minnesota is a land of sparkling glacial lakes and forests that stretch as far as the eye can see. Fortunately, civilization has not yet marred its remote and intrinsic beauty. In any given spot, on any given lake, images of free-spirited Indian warriors riding spotted ponies through the tree line come unbidden, as the past collides with the present.

  Shadows of turn-of-the-century French fur traders and hardworking loggers weave like the wind through the pine. At night, in a secluded bay, when the moon dances on the water and the stars shimmer in an inky sky, the Aurora Borealis mystifies, intensifying the sense of wonder in this very special place.

  Come with us to Legend Lake, where its people are as in tune with the North Country’s uncompromising beauty as they are enmeshed in the past. And like many before them, become enamored by the mystery of the Northern Lights.

  Experience the beauty, and live all three captivating romances in the NORTHERN LIGHTS BRIDES TRILOGY as they unfold.

  One

  She’d been reduced to talking to herself. Out loud. It would have scared her, but that would have been redundant. She was already scared, good and scared, and she didn’t want her little brother to know it.

  “Maybe you’re being too dramatic. Maybe you really aren’t lost. Yeah, and maybe the sun doesn’t set in the west,” Mackenzie Kincaid mumbled to herself through chattering teeth and wondered when enough was finally going to be enough. In her opinion the irony was excessive. Only the cruelest twist of fate would lead them out of one life-threatening situation smack into the middle of another.

  “You’ve come too far to let a little cold and snow do you in now, Kincaid,” she told herself, in a staunch attempt to downplay the subzero windchill and deepening snow. Still, her brother’s crude take on the situation pretty well summed it up: it sucked...big-time.

  “There’s an up side here,” she insisted, again to herself, clinging by a hangnail to what was left of her optimism. “You’re getting an education.”

  In the past half hour, for instance, she’d learned that she’d never really had a handle on the word cold. Between this Minnesota snowstorm and her brother’s glacial glares, she had a dam good grip on it now. If the frigid wind and the snow, caked around her ankles and sticking to her jeans, didn’t freeze her solid, Mark, with the rebellious insolence only a brooding fifteen-year-old could master, would probably do the deed. Beside her, he plodded through two-foot drifts of white powder with all the enthusiasm of a member of the Donner party.

  “Is all this really necessary?” she asked skyward, wrestling with the weight of her desperate decision to bring them here, the weight of the lie she was about to tell—and the more tangible weight of the nylon duffel bag that held everything she owned. Mark, his dark straggly hair crusted with—surprise—more snow, struggled with his own duffel. His top priority, though, was clutched protectively against his chest: the boom box he’d lugged all the way from L.A. and now guarded like precious metal.

  Tugging the hood of her lightweight red jacket back into place, Mackenzie braced against a bone-chilling wind that took sadistic pleasure in whipping icy shards of snow in her face.

  “Buck up, Kincaid,” she demanded, making herself talk to keep panic from overtaking her. “You’re going to get through this. Yes, you’re cold. Yes, you’re exhausted. But you can’t let it beat you. Too much is at stake.”

  Not the least of which was their lives.

  It seemed like a lifetime since she’d dragged Mark onto that bus, both of them packing enough uncertainties to pave a transcontinental highway. The thirty-six-hour trip had been brutal as they’d left sunny Southern California behind, crossed miles of parched desert, untamed mountains and winter-barren Midwest plains to end up here: the edge of the Arctic, in
the guise of northern Minnesota.

  She’d counted on the location to be remote. Remote was the biggest part of its appeal. What she hadn’t counted on was getting caught in the middle of the storm of the century, or that they’d get lost in the brunt of it.

  “Some people would look at this as an adventure,” she suggested to Mark through chattering teeth, and she wondered if her lips were as blue as her brother’s.

  As a mood lifter, her suggestion was a major stretch. Mark wasn’t buying it. Not that he verbalized his opinion. Fortunately he’d stopped verbalizing about an hour ago—just before he’d managed to alienate himself from the only human being in the bus terminal who’d had a four-wheel-drive and a sympathetic smile. If he’d mouthed off one more time, the bushy but amiable logger they’d run into at the Canadian border in Bordertown might have withdrawn his offer to drive them the extra thirty miles to their final destination.

  “His cabin’s about half a mile down that lane,” the Paul Bunyon look-alike had claimed, after Mackenzie had told him where they wanted to go.

  Cabin. What was left of the romantic in her had brightened at the picture that word conjured, until he’d added, “I’d drive you down there myself, but the man’s a mite particular who he invites on his property. You folks don’t waste any time walking up that lane, now. This storm promises to be a beaut.”

  Promises to be? Mackenzie had thought, as the man dropped them at the narrow opening in the forest and ground the gears on his rural assault vehicle, sending snow flying in his wake. If what they were experiencing now was a promise, she wasn’t sure she wanted to stick around to see the real thing. And his repeated, “Now you’re sure it’s him you want to see?” had rattled her to the point that her doubts about coming here were now as numerous as the snowflakes.

  “Not that you can back out now,” she said as she hiked the duffel higher on her shoulder. “Not now that you’ve gotten this far.”

  And how far was that, exactly? She squinted through the wind-whipped snow. It had been a good half hour since the truck’s taillights had disappeared. They still hadn’t reached anything that resembled a clearing—let alone hinted at a sign of warmth or welcome.

  “Of course, considering that you can barely see your hand in front of your face,” she muttered, and made a swipe at the swirling, stinging snow that brought tears to her eyes, “you could have trudged past the Empire State Building and not spotted it.”

  Her feeble attempts at blowing off the seriousness of their situation were wearing thin. So was her hope. Ever since she’d lost the feeling in her toes, she’d been fighting panic, and she was afraid it might get the best of her until, moments later, she made out the outline of a roof nestled among the snow-shrouded pine and winter-barren birch. She took a stumbling step closer.

  “Thank you,” she whispered, near tears, when the frame of a cabin took shape.

  It wasn’t just your basic hermit’s cabin that she’d have gladly settled for at this point, either. It was a masterpiece of architectural design and beckoning warmth. Currier an Ives couldn’t have painted a prettier picture. A high, peake roof, laden with snow, topped the impressive log structure Pale, muted light shimmered from behind a multitude a tall, frosty windows; smoke spiraled from a massive stone and mortar chimney, promising a toasty warm welcome.

  Spirited high-fives would have been in order—if she hadn’t spotted the wolf a split second later.

  “Omigod,” she whispered and stopped breathing.

  The animal was huge. Every instinct she owned told her it was also hungry. Silver-gray eyes gleaming with predatory intent focused directly on her. Its charcoal and gray coat was matted with snow, yet the white of bared fangs was unmistakable—as was its low, warning growl. It stood at least four feet high at the shoulders, weighed over a hundred pounds. And for the life of her, Mackenzie couldn’t shake the hysterical notion that she must look like a nineties version of what had once been her favorite fairy tale.

  You had to wear red...and it had to have a hood, she thought fatalistically, as she shoved Mark behind her.

  “Don’t move,” she whispered around the lump that was her heart jammed in her throat. “Don’t...don’t do anything. Just...just stay calm.”

  Mark’s reed-thin body was as stiff as an icicle behind her. “What’s it doing?”

  “I...don’t know. Watching, I guess. Maybe it’s as afraid of us as we are of it.”

  Her brother’s snort relayed how much stock he took in that notion. Her common sense agreed, and when the wolf inched a slinking step toward them, she ditched her don’t move tactics like a bad habit.

  “Run!” she shouted and gave Mark a hard shove toward the cabin, some twenty yards away. Then she threw her duffel. The animal agilely sidestepped the flying nylon and stalked a step closer.

  She hadn’t had time to register that Mark hadn’t budged, when, in an unexpected show of concern, he stepped protectively in front of her.

  “Mark, no!”

  He wasn’t listening. He was busy launching his own duffel.

  Her hopes rose, then stalled out, when it, too, landed short of the target. The predator crouched lower, its belly dragging in the snow, and began to circle.

  She choked back a sob. She’d dragged Mark out of L.A., kicking and screaming, to keep him from getting killed—and now they both might die here instead. Die. The word rang with the finality of a funeral dirge, until Mark raised his treasured boom box over his head, hauled back and let it fly.

  The radio hit a glancing blow to the wolf’s back foot. Yipping in surprise, the animal crow-hopped into the cover of the forest.

  It was the only incentive she needed. “Run!” she shouted, grabbed Mark’s hand and stumbled at a labored sprint toward the cabin.

  They hadn’t gotten more than a few yards when she put on the breaks. A scream ripped from her throat as she jerked Mark to a stop beside her—then covered her mouth with her hand to stop another scream.

  A moving mountain stalked menacingly toward them.

  She couldn’t move. Couldn’t think past her shock, couldn’t see past her fear, as adrenaline and stark terror teamed up to form one hysteria-induced conclusion: Sasquatch lives!

  She felt like she was living through a badly edited montage of every horror movie she’d ever seen. Each corner they turned threw another threat in their path-—this last one might be the most dangerous of them all.

  Eyes as feral and black as a nightmare gleamed with unrelenting territorial anger beneath a knot of dark wool pulled low over his brow. A double-bladed ax was balanced over a shoulder that was as broad as a linebacker’s and as matted with snow as the rest of his bulky body. And just in case she had any doubt that he represented a threat to life and limb, a knife, the blade of which was long, mean and surgically sharp, extended below a broad leather belt that sheathed it.

  Compared to this ax-toting, frost-breathing, knife-wielding giant, the wolf seemed as threatening as a puppy.

  Long, terrifying moments passed before Mackenzie finally convinced herself she was confronting a man, not a monster. Not that it made much difference at this point. He looked mad and he looked mean. And as she stood there, thinking that she’d never weighed the merits of dying of fright versus getting hacked to death, Mark sprang into action. With a banshee yell that ricocheted through the forest, he launched himself at the giant’s midsection.

  She screamed Mark’s name.

  The man only grunted in surprise when Mark head-butted him, and with an effortless swipe of his arm he dumped him head-first into a snow drift.

  Mark came up spitting mad. He was wry and he was street smart, but he wouldn’t make a good match for a wind sock. He was also determined to get himself killed. He lunged again, this time wrapping his thin arms around the big man’s booted feet.

  The maneuver caught the man off guard. The ax went flying. With the momentum of a tree falling, he landed in the snow with a thud, Mark hanging on as tightly as a flea on a dog’s back.
<
br />   Mackenzie didn’t stop to wonder if the self-defense classes she’d recently taken were worth the money. She just knew that her little brother was in trouble. She pounced on the man’s back, hooked an arm over his eyes and locked her legs around his waist.

  “Let him go!” she shouted between frosty, labored breaths, and went to work on his throat.

  He growled something short and crude then reached over his head, grabbed her by her jacket and hauled her off his back like she wasn’t any more substantial than a lint ball.

  She landed beside Mark with an “uff” that knocked the wind out of her and sent a star or two twinkling around the perimeters of her vision. When she could breath again and focus, her gaze connected with eyes as black as onyx, as hard as flint.

  On his back next to her, still kicking and swinging like a featherweight, Mark spit snow and hurled names at the man who knelt above them.

  “Just hold still damn it,” he snarled, pinning them down with ease.

  Mackenzie swiped snow from her face with the back of her wrist and glared as if she wasn’t about to wet her pants with fear. “Let us go.”

  He didn’t budge. Not that she’d expected him to. And until he decided to ease up, their only hope for escape was her wits—which Mark would be quick to point out meant they were in deep weeds.

  “This is not a wise thing for you to do,” she blurted out with as much authority as she could muster. “Just...just let us go—right now—or you’re going to be in big trouble, mister.”

  A dark brow lowered beneath the black wool of his stocking cap. “I’m going to be in trouble? You may not have noticed. I’m the one on top.”