A Bride For Crimson Falls

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Authors: Cindy Gerard

BOOK: A Bride For Crimson Falls
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“I Don’t Have Casual Affairs, And We Both Know That’s All This Could Ever Be.”
 
Colin’s arms tightened around her. “I know. And I’m sorry. I wish it could be otherwise.”
 
Scarlett turned to him. “You’ve nothing to be sorry for.”
 
Colin searched her face as she stood there. He couldn’t remember ever wanting a woman more—or when he’d made a mistake as big as pulling her into his arms.
 
“You’re so wrong,” he whispered, too low for her to hear. He did have something to be sorry for. For the first time in his life, he was truly sorry he couldn’t offer a woman—that he couldn’t offer
this
woman—what she needed....
Dear Reader,
 
A book from Joan Hohl is always a delight, so I’m thrilled that this month we have her latest MAN OF THE MONTH,
A Memorable Man.
Naturally, this story is chock-full of Joan’s trademark sensuality
and
it’s got some wonderful plot twists that are sure to please you!
 
Also this month, Cindy Gerard’s latest in her NORTHERN LIGHTS BRIDES series,
A Bride for Crimson Falls
, and Beverly Barton’s “Southern sizzle” is highlighted in
A Child of Her Own
. Anne Eames has the wonderful ability to combine sensuality and humor, and
A Marriage Made in Joeville
features this talent.
 
The Baby Blizzard
by Caroline Cross is sure to melt your heart this month—it’s an extraordinary love story with a hero and heroine you’ll never forget! And the month is completed with a sexy romp by Diana Mars,
Matchmaking Mona.
 
In months to come, look for spectacular Silhouette Desire books by Diana Palmer, Jennifer Greene, Lass Small and many other fantastic Desire stars! And I’m always here to listen to your thoughts and opinions about the books. You can write to me at the address below.
 
Enjoy! I wish you hours of happy reading!
Lucia Macro
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 CRIMSON FALLS
This book is dedicated to the “Kabby Krew”:
Carol (Ben), Carole (Sparky), Denise (Tunes),
Karen (Sticks), and Sue (Bear Bait). Here’s to past
“perdicaments,” present plans, and future foolishness—and
many more summer vacations together at Kamp Toga.
 
Your Captain
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
*A Bride for Crimson Falls #1076
 
*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 Best Selling 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 takes 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 or the Northern Lights.
 
Experience the beauty, and live all three captivating romances in the NORTHERN LIGHTS BRIDES TRILOGY as they unfold.
Prologue
W
ith a defeated sort of longing, Scarlett Morgan let her gaze drift lovingly around the once elegant, but now sadly shabby, dining room of the Crimson Falls Hotel. “I don’t know why I let you talk me into this.”
“Hey, you asked for ideas,” her friend J. D. Hazzard reminded her defensively. “All I did was deliver.”
“Yeah, well, asking was my first mistake. Listening was my second.” She shook her head, disgusted by her lack of foresight. “A raffle was one supremely lousy idea.”
“It was a
desperate
idea,” J.D. said. “And it worked,” he added, doing his best to look affronted. He slumped back in an ancient oak chair and snagged a sweating glass of lemonade from the top of an equally antiquated round oak table—one of a dozen that graced the threadbare carpet covering the uneven surface of the hotel’s dining room floor. “You needed money to keep the hotel going. The raffle provided it. The corporations who bought the losing tickets got the tax write-off they wanted. The lucky winner got the same, plus a piece of an historic hotel. And ultimately you got the forty grand you needed. Everybody won.”
Beside him, J.D.’s wife, Maggie, nursed her own lemonade and shared his worry over Scarlett. He sent a pleading look her way.
Dive in any time the spirit moves you, sweetheart...like now
, his harried frown implored.
Before Maggie could toss in a bid to settle her down, though, Scarlett revved up again
“If everybody won, why do I feel like the big loser?” She waved the letter she’d just received under J.D.’s nose. The ominous mail had arrived by boat yesterday informing her that the winner of the raffle—aka her new
partner
, Colin Slater—would be arriving in Northern Minnesota tomorrow from New York.
“Just listen to this.” She scanned the letter, then read an excerpt aloud to underscore how offensive she found it. “‘I’ll arrive on the fifth to spend some time in residence.’
“In
residence
,” she sputtered, her temple flaring as hot as the July sun beating down on the hotel’s red-shingled roof. “Like he’s some land baron lording it over his peasants. Good night, J.D.! What possessed you to sell a ticket to this joker? He may be your friend, but he sounds like a prize pain in the—”
“Whoa,” J.D. protested with a scowl. “Colin’s a good guy or I never would have let him in on the raffle. Come on, Scarlett, you can’t blame him for wanting to check out his investment.”
She pitched the letter onto the table. “He sounds like some potbellied, cigar-smoking, boardroom baby boomer who can quote the Dow Jones like a rosary and plan a corporate takeover like Stormin’ Norman can orchestrate a frontal assault. But I’d bet my dwindling bankroll he knows nothing about what it takes to run a hotel—especially one as unique as Crimson Falls.”
“It was your dwindling bankroll that prompted you to hold the raffle in the first place,” J.D. reminded her carefully. “And do I dare mention that you didn’t know anything about running a hotel when you packed up, lock, stock and barrel and moved from St. Paul to the north woods to buy it six years ago? That didn’t stop you from trying it, anyway.”
Beside him Maggie cringed.
Scarlett narrowed her eyes. “Is that your tactless little way of informing me it was because I didn’t know anything about the business that it’s buried in red ink?”
“Scarlett,” Maggie cut in, running interference. “J.D. wasn’t implying that your management skills have anything to do with your financial bind. He simply meant to point out that your finances are dangling by a shoestring here.”
Maggie paused, her voice softening as grim acceptance cooled the anger in Scarlett’s eyes. “He meant to remind you,” she went on, gently reinforcing her point, “that you ran the raffle because you needed money to keep Crimson Falls going,
and
that even though Slater’s business is extremely lucrative, he still paid big bucks for his ticket. It’s only logical he’d want to check out his investment.”
“But coming here wasn’t part of the deal,” Scarlett insisted stubbornly. “He was not supposed to poke his nose into my business. He’s a city dweller. This is the deep woods. Who’d have thought he’d bother to make an appearance.”
“You’d just as well face it, sweetie. The man has a right,” J.D. said, feeling bolstered by his wife’s support. “Don’t you glare at me,
Ms
. Too-Proud-for-Her-Own-Good. This all could have been avoided.”
Blinking back unexpected tears of frustration, Scarlett turned her back on her friends. She walked to the picture window that offered a breathtaking view of Crimson Falls in the distance, the watershed that had given the hotel its name.
Yes, she could have avoided this hassle. J.D. and Maggie had offered to float her a loan big enough to cover the renovations and operating capital she needed to put her huge, old white elephant in order. And yes, she knew they had the money to do it. Between J.D.’s prosperous air freight business and the mint Maggie had earned as one of the most sought-after models in the fashion industry, the money they offered her wouldn’t have made a dent in their amassed revenues.
“I may be desperate,” she admitted with the prideful defiance J.D. had pointed out, “but I will
not
leach off my friends. Not even if it means I might lose Crimson Falls.”
“Scarlett.” J.D. walked up behind her. He and Maggie had fought this fight with her a hundred times. A hundred times they’d lost. Placing his hands on her slim shoulders, he turned her to face him. “It’s going to be all right.”
She stared at the floor between them, then angled a softly smiling Maggie a weary look. Giving up, she linked her arms around J.D.’s waist and leaned into his companionable hug. He was a good friend. So was Maggie. No matter how many times she saw them together—Maggie with her sleek, classic beauty and J.D. with his blond good looks and lumberjack height and build—Scarlett was always taken with how stunning and how right they looked together. The love they shared also reminded her of all she’d never found in a relationship. Of all that had been lacking in her ten-year marriage to a control freak who had yet to figure out he’d let a good thing go when he’d left her and their daughter, Casey, six years ago.
“Too bad you don’t have a clone, hotshot,” she said against the warmth of J.D.’s chest. “The world could use a few more good men like you.”
“Exactly what I was telling Maggie last night,” he said, deadpan.
“And the night before,” Maggie put in, joining them by the window and slanting her handsome husband an indulgent smile. “Give Colin a chance, Scarlett. I don’t know him as well as J.D. does, but if he says Colin’s okay, I’d take it to the bank. And remember, he did take a chance on you.”
Scarlett slipped out of J.D.’s brotherly embrace and drew in a bracing breath. “I know you’re right,” she said, and wished her heart was in the admission. The sad truth, however, was that she was afraid. Next to Casey, the hotel was the most important thing in her life. It may not be much by some people’s standards—fifteen guestrooms, a sometimes leaky roof and sagging floors—but she didn’t want to lose it. Worse than losing it, was the prospect of losing control of it. She’d given up control only once in her life. That mistake had cost her more than a failed marriage. It had cost both her pride and her independence, and had taken her the last six years to recover. Now Slater’s interference in her life, coupled with Dreamscape Development’s plans to tear up the forest and erect condos near the falls—yet one more thing she had no control over—threatened her peace of mind again.
“I promise I’ll give him a chance,” she conceded. “But so help me, if he comes in here with a briefcase full of quality-management, profit-margin breakdowns and wants to turn Cnmson Falls into a fivestar hotel, he’s going to find himself
accidentally
dunked in the drink.”
An hour later, as Scarlett watched the Hazzards fly off to their summer cabin across the clear glacial waters of Legend Lake in J.D.’s float plane, she took small pleasure in visualizing shoving Mr. Colin Stuffed-Shirt Slater off the end of the dock.
It turned out, though, that even the small pleasures were going to be denied her. The boat bringing her new partner radioed ahead the next day. When it docked late in the afternoon she was waiting on the hotel’s porch steps.
Roughly two city blocks separated the hotel from the new dock and the lakeshore. At that distance she couldn’t make out the features of the man wearing a dark suit and a loosely knotted tie, but as he placed one foot gingerly onto the long wooden dock, she knew it had to be Slater.
When the boat rocked in its own wake, the unexpected motion caught him off balance. Suspended between solid footing and the swaying boat, he slipped, stumbled, and with a flailing grab at thin air, fell over backward into the bay.
Her spirits rose marginally as he went under with a thrashing splash and a gurgled, “I can’t swim!”
She shook her head. If it took him over ten seconds to figure out he was “not swimming” in less than four feet of water, he wasn’t worth the effort of saving.
“Hi, sweetheart,” she said, when Casey joined her on the steps.
A gleeful grin tilted up one corner of her fifteen-year-old daughter’s mouth as she, too, watched Slater flounder around like a beached whale. “Is that Mr. Money?”
“’Fraid so.” Scarlett turned her attention back to Slater with a mixture of amusement and weary acceptance. “Do me a favor, will you, hon? Go fish our new partner out of the lake. But be slow about it, would you? It’s a hot day. Let the man have his fun in the water.”
With a last, long-suffering look, she walked back into the hotel, to see if her guests were okay, and prayed she had the strength to get through this.

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