When he softened with remorse, when his hands slid over her arms in a caress, she shook her head sharply and kept her hands firmly on his mouth. “Please. Let me say this, I have to get it out. I thought I wanted safe love. The quiet, reserved kind that isn’t really love at all, but just a teaser for it.” She sighed and smiled into his eyes. “I was wrong, Bryan, that’s not what I want at all. I want true, heart-pounding, butterflies-in-the-stomach, real love.”

He pulled her fingers away from his mouth. “I can’t tell you how glad I am to hear that. But dammit, you risked your life today!”

“Exactly.” She grinned at him proudly. “So now I know I’m capable of taking a risk. I know I can do this.”

“Do…what exactly?” Damn, was he always going to be clueless around her?

“Silly man. Now I know I can love you.” She cupped his face and kissed him softly, so very softly his heart caught.

“You…love me.”

“Yeah.” Her eyes filled. “I tried to save the best for last.”

“Katie, sweetheart, do me a little favor.” He could hardly speak. “Say it again.”

“I saved the best for last.”

“The other,” he said as patiently as he could. “Repeat the other.”

Her eyes filled. One tear spilled over and as he gently swiped it away with his thumb, she said the words he’d been dying to hear.

“I love you, Bryan Morgan, with all my heart. Will you be mine? Forever?”

His own eyes stung, his throat burned. “That’s supposed to be my line.”

“Well then, say it already.”

Another tear spilled over his fingers and he had no idea now which of them it belonged to. “Will you be mine, Katie Wilkins? Forever and ever?”

“I will,” she promised, and they sealed the vow with a kiss.

“I guess your Christmas curse is over,” Holly said behind them.

Julie was also there, and she smiled. “From this point on, she’s Christmas blessed.”

Around them the rest of the staff gathered oohing and aahing over Katie’s erratic-and expensive-parking job.

Katie looked deeply and lovingly into Bryan’s eyes. “Next time, I promise to let you teach me to fly, in your airplane. Okay?”

He gazed into her beautiful eyes as he stroked her cheek. Behind them he could see the damage to the hangar, the torn wing on the airplane and quickly calculated the expenses. He thought lovingly of his own planes, and how much they were worth. Behind her back he crossed his own fingers. “Next time,” he said, and kissed her.

“Can I help you?” Riley asked.

Holly gave him the once-over, her gaze lingering on his badge. “Is this town actually big enough for a sheriff?” she questioned.

Her voice was smooth and cultured, and everything about her screamed “city girl.” “We’re big enough to court trouble,” he said lightly. “Can I help you find something?” Like the highway?

“Is this really the Café…Nirvana?” She tilted back her head and studied the stark blue sky, then the wide open landscape. Finally she shook her head. “It’s some sort of joke, right?”

She leveled those light blue eyes on him with what could only be described as hope. He slowly shook his head. “Nope. No joke.”

Briefly she closed her eyes. “Cosmic justice,” Riley heard her mutter.

Then she was walking away from him, but not out of his life. No, she went into the café, her look of determination as strong as her stride.

Hug Me, Holly!


Prologue

LOST IN THE DEPTHS of hell, Holly pulled over, tossed back an Evian water and contemplated her next move. She could consult the map that lay open on the passenger seat, but then she’d have to admit she didn’t know how to get to Little Paradise, which was the same thing as admitting she didn’t know where she was going, and she hated that.

Holly Stone always knew where she was going. Okay, and maybe because of that, she’d always been a tad bit stubborn, but she couldn’t help it. Much.

She could get out her cell phone and call…who? Her family? They’d get far too big a kick out of her being lost. Oh, there’s Holly, proving a beautiful blonde can’t find her way out of a paper bag again. That would be from her parents, who’d been patting her on the head, then shaking their own heads behind her back for years.

There she goes again, racing off without a plan and blowing it before she even gets started. That would be from her oh-so-loving siblings, who’d never taken her seriously, not once, not even when she’d really needed them to.

No, she wouldn’t be calling her family.

She could try a friend, if she’d managed to keep any over the years, which she hadn’t. Holly didn’t open up easily. For years this had disturbed her, but she learned to at least pretend it didn’t matter.

Bottom line-she didn’t play well with others, and she’d probably known it as early as kindergarten. It’d been reinforced in every job she’d ever had, and there’d been many. She’d been a banker, a photographer, a bookkeeper and most recently, an office manager for a private airport. She’d even almost had a boyfriend there, almost being the key word, though she’d worked very hard to get him. But then the boss’s daughter had caught the jerk’s eye and he’d decided he had bigger fish to fry. That was fine, because so did Holly.

At none of her jobs had she been particularly popular, which all came back to that getting along with others thing. Maybe she tried too hard, always pushing in order to accomplish her own agenda. People, especially men, didn’t seem to like that.

But she was who she was. With a fatalistic shrug, she got out of the car, stretching legs that had been protesting the long drive from Southern California to this godforsaken part of Arizona over the past eight hours. Her heels crunched on the sun-hardened sand. The material of her clothes immediately stuck to her. Ugh. To avoid squinting in the unbelievable glare of the sun-why court wrinkles before she was even thirty?-she slid on glasses and considered her options.

Unfortunately, they seemed to be few and far between.

There wasn’t another car in sight on the shimmering horizon.

The air felt thick with heat, despite the fact it was two days after New Year’s. And her silk skirt was wrinkled, dammit. Time to get a move on.

A very large lizard zipped across the ground, far too close to her toes. She might have screamed and jumped back a little, but since there was no one around for what looked like a gazillion miles, Holly would have denied it to her dying day.

Just because she was out in the middle of the Arizona desert, with nothing other than lizards and cacti and rolling tumbleweeds for company-oh, and no one under the sun to call if she needed to-didn’t mean she had to lose her cool.

She’d just do as she always did and take care of herself. She was good at that. She’d consult her map and finish her trek. It shouldn’t be far now.

Inside the car was much more livable than outside, and she cranked the air-conditioning again, spending a moment to lift some of the hair off her neck to cool herself down.

She’d always heard Arizona was hot, hot, hot, but this was a different kind of heat than she’d ever experienced in California. This was a weighted, dry sort that seeped right into her bones. It would destroy her skin in a week.

But she’d made a vow, and one thing Holly never did was back out on a promise, even if it was only to herself. She’d told her parents she’d be there, and though she knew they probably didn’t really expect her to come through, she intended to do just that. This was a turn in the crossroads for her, a new leaf. All her life she’d been blond, decent enough looking that she wouldn’t be cracking any mirrors…and seriously underestimated. She had to work hard to gain people’s trust and respect, something she’d never been willing to do.

Until now.

Putting the car in Drive, she put her hands on the wheel, doubly determined to see this thing through.

And that was when she saw it, the small green sign that read: Little Paradise, population 856.

Seems she wasn’t lost at all, but right where she was supposed to be. Little Paradise. The name must have been someone’s idea of a joke.

Because Little Paradise looked just like her vision of hell.

1

WHEN SHERIFF Riley McMann’s stomach rumbled for the third time in as many minutes, he finally gave in and looked at his watch.

Two o’clock. No wonder. He hadn’t eaten since dawn, when he’d been called out of bed to help rescue a cow from a ravine.

Just one example of his fine, exemplary duties.

Actually, he preferred climbing down a sharp, rocky cliff, eating dust, and nearly being kicked in the head by a panicked cow that was going to end up as the Tuesday special than doing paperwork, as he was now. Maybe being sheriff in a ranching community like Little Paradise wasn’t exactly challenging law enforcement, but he got to be outside most of his day, which he loved.

The slow-paced country life also gave him plenty of opportunity to work his own small ranch, which he also loved.

His stomach went off again.

With a sigh, he shoved away the mountain of paperwork surrounding him, stretched his long legs and wished he’d remembered to pack a lunch that morning.

He could have asked Maria to do it. After all, it wasn’t unreasonable to expect lunch to be a regular housekeeper’s chore.

But Maria was no regular housekeeper.

So he was hungry. Very hungry. With longing, he glanced through his small office window across the street at Café Nirvana, the one and only restaurant in town.

It had been there since the beginning of time. At least since the beginning of Little Paradise. But after fifty years of feeding the town, Marge and Edward Mendoza were calling it quits. They’d put the place on the market for their retirement money so they could move to Montana and be with family.

It was rumored that their daughter, who cleaned house for some rich doctors out in California, had arranged for someone to run the café until the place sold. No one had shown up yet, but supposedly they were due to arrive any day now. Riley, who liked a change as much as any other guy, had to admit he wished this was one thing that didn’t have to change.

Café Nirvana was the heart and soul of Little Paradise.

“Oh, stop staring at it and go on over there.” This from Jud, his sixty-five-year-old deputy, who came into the office. He hitched up his continuously falling pants. “I can hear your stomach growling from the front room.”

“I don’t have time for lunch.”

“Yeah, you never know when another cow emergency is going to come up.”

“I have paperwork,” Riley said with dignity.

Jud stepped around the potted cactus that currently sported a string of popcorn, making it the office Christmas tree. He shook his head. “You’ve had paperwork since the day you set your butt in that chair two years ago when your dad retired. He spent twenty-five years fighting that paperwork. It’s never going to change.”

True enough. Riley’s stomach growled loudly. Pork chops sounded good. So did meat loaf. So did…anything. “What’s the special over there today?”

Jud looked out the window and let out a long, soft whistle. “Looks like leggy blonde. Curves on the side.”

“What?” Riley moved next to Jud, and saw the older man was right. That was definitely a leggy blonde pulling herself out of a red Jeep. Tossing back her perfectly coiffed hair. Smoothing down the blouse and skirt that screamed sophistication. Grabbing the small, elegant handbag that matched her ridiculously high heels.

She might have stepped right off the glossy pages of a magazine. Not that Riley had a problem with looking at a woman like that, no sirree. After all he was a very healthy, red-blooded, thirty-two-year-old American male, but she seemed as out of place here as a white, snowy, icy Christmas would have been.

“Well ain’t she a fancy one.” Jud hitched up his sagging pants again.

Fancy was hitting the nail right on the head. The woman walked like she owned the planet, with her bodacious hips swaying gently, her long, toned legs striding with unfaltering confidence.

Riley disliked her on sight. Not very gentlemanly of him, and it wasn’t personal, but this woman had big city, big trouble written all over her, and he’d learned a woman like that and a place like Little Paradise didn’t mix. He had his mother as a fine example. She’d lasted in this small town until he’d been a whole week old.

“What do you suppose she wants here?” Jud asked.