Cullen's Bride

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Authors: Fiona Brand

BOOK: Cullen's Bride
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“CULLEN'S BRIDE is a winner on all levels—it taps into our sense of truth, our need for justice, and the entire story keeps building towards the kind of love that puts real meaning into our lives—a deeply satisfying read.”
—International bestselling author Emma Darcy
Cullen turned toward her, and Rachel drew in her breath.
She had the definite impression he was going to touch her, maybe place his arm around her waist and help her upstairs.
 
But even as she watched, a subtle change took place, a closing-out of emotion, and she realised he was deliberately distancing himself from her. She should have been prepared for Cullen's coolness.
 
Despite that kiss outside the church, he'd made his position clear when he'd proposed this marriage.
 
The baby was his, and he was trying to be a gentleman. But did that include a future with her?
Dear Reader.
 
We've got a special lineup of books for you this month, starting with two from favorite authors Sharon Sala and Laurey Bright. Sharon's
Royal's Child
finishes up her trilogy, THE JUSTICE WAY, about the three Justice brothers. This is a wonderful, suspenseful,
romantic
finale, and you won't want to miss it.
The Mother of His Child,
Laurey's newest, bears our CONVENIENTLY WED flash. There are layers of secrets and emotion in this one, so get ready to lose yourself in these compelling pages
 
And then...MARCH MADNESS is back! Once again, we're presenting four fabulous new authors for your reading pleasure Rachel Lee, Justine Davis and many more of your favorite writers first appeared as MARCH MADNESS authors, and I think the four new writers this month are destined to become favorites, too Fiona Brand is a New Zealand sensation, and
Cullen's Bride
combines suspense with a marriage-of-convenience plot that had me turning pages at a frantic pace. In
A True-Blue Texas Twosome,
Kim McKade brings an extra dollop of emotion to a reunion story to stay in your heart—and that Western setting doesn't hurt!
The Man Behind the Badge
is the hero of Vickie Taylor's debut novel, which gives new meaning to the phrase “fast-paced.” These two are on the run and heading straight for love. Finally, check out
Dangerous Curves,
by Kristina Wright, about a cop who finds himself breaking all the rules for one very special woman. Could he be guilty of love in the first degree?
Enjoy them all And then come back next month, when the romantic excitement will continue right here in Silhouette Intimate Moments
 
Yours,
Leslie Wainger
Executive 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 Ene, Ont. L2A 5X3
CULLEN'S BRIDE
FIONA BRAND
Dear Reader,
 
Have you ever had a moment in your life when everything finally clicks into place and you know exactly what you want to achieve? In 1993 I
knew
I was going to write a romance. I was energized, confident and so eager to write that when I started out, I didn't care that all I had was a pen and notebook. I gave myself two years to get published.
 
Five years and several rejections later, Leslie Wamger from Silhouette Books called. She wanted to buy
Cullen's Bride.
The date in New Zealand was April 2. It briefly occurred to me that it was April 1 in the States—April Fools' Day. But it was no joke. I'd finally achieved my dream! Later on that same day, I had another phone call, telling me I was a Romance Writers of America Golden Heart finalist. The good news didn't stop there. It seems I'm not the only one who fell in love with Cullen and Rachel's story, because it kept winning prizes—three in all Down Under, including the Emma Darcy Award.
 
I hope you enjoy reading about Cullen and Rachel and the small town of Riverbend as much as I enjoyed writing about them. They came from my heart, and they live there still. And I can't wait to visit them all again. Soon!
 
Regards,
For Mum
Chapter 1
C
ullen Logan slammed on the brakes and swung out of his truck all in one smooth motion. He was dead bred, every muscle he owned ached, and his thigh throbbed where one of the bawling, bad-tempered steers he'd spent the day drenching had caught him a glancing blow.
At ten o'clock on one of Northland's humid summer evenings, most people wouldn't have noticed the frantic movement down the narrow side alley
Culled wasn't most people. It was second nature for him to probe the shadows, searching for a darkness he knew too much about. Swearing a low litany beneath his breath, he grabbed his keys, stuffed them in his jeans pocket, then loped across the deserted street. He would be damned if he was going to let another violent bastard get his rocks off by cornering a defenceless woman.
Defenceless? A gritty black humour surfaced as he entered the alley. The woman was holding her own, a spray can clutched in one band, a big straw bag swinging from the other like a primitive bludgeon. She'd succeeded so far in keeping the guy at bay, but she was too small, too slight, to come out the winner.
Cullen didn't bother speaking. In the murky half-light, he touched the man gently on one shoulder. The variety of ways he could end this encounter slid through his mind as smoothly as a well-honed knife gliding from its sheath. But when the man jerked around and Cullen got his first look at the glazed wildness in the overgrown youth's eyes, he bit out a curt Anglo-Saxon phrase and clipped him with surgical precision on the point of his chin.
It was no contest. The boy stumbled back against a concrete block wall, then slowly subsided until he was sitting in a crumpled heap on the dusty gravel drive.
The woman's jerkily expelled breath had Cullen turning in time to see her stumble. She cursed in a low, rich contralto as she overbalanced and landed on her rear.
“You all right?” he asked quietly, offering his hand.
“Apart from the piece of me I landed on,” she muttered with surprising humour, “I'm fine. Thanks to you.”
She gave him a smile that was a little shaky around the edges. Her fingers closed on his, baby-soft against his work-calloused palm, but there was a capable strength in her grip as he pulled her up. Cullen released her the second she was on her feet
The woman barely reached his shoulder. She stared up at him, gaze steady in a darkness that had taken on an odd intimacy.
“I'm Rachel Sinclair,” she announced huskily.
Cullen's eyes narrowed. The name Smclair was more than familiar—Cole Sinclair's expensively manicured acres eased right alongside his own wild piece of dirt. Sinclair wasn't that uncommon a name, but, in a town as small as Riverbend, the chances were better than even that she was some kind of relation.
“Will he be all right?” She nodded in the direction of the boy, who still hadn't stirred, then grimaced as a wave of dark hair slipped from its knot and flowed half over her face. She pushed the hair away, then began uncoiling and recoiling the silky mass with an unconscious, natural grace. Against the crude background of the alley, she was startlingly feminine and delicate, and with every movement of her arms and hair, her scent wove around Cullen—flowers and freshness and the subtle earthy warmth of woman It sank into him and hardened him with a primitive fierceness he hadn't experienced since his early teens.
Oh, man... Cullen almost groaned the words out loud as he backed off a step. Clamping his jaw tight, he forced himself to breathe evenly. Oh, baby, he forced himself to breathe. He was riding hell's own adrenaline rush. Nothing more. This was just some kind of weird reflex. He'd been alone too long and hadn't talked to a woman in weeks in any personal sense—let alone one who sounded like she could make a fortune just fueling men's fantasies with the sexy, honey-warm flow of her voice.
“I chin-tapped him,” he growled. “He's staying down because he's already wired on something else.”
“Something else? You mean he's—?”
“I don't know what he's taking,” Cullen stated, then instantly regretted his curtness He could feel the adrenaline fading, leaving him twice as tired but just as edgy. If he wasn't careful, he was going to end up scaring Rachel Sinclair more than the guy on the ground had. “I'm a little out of touch with what kids use to blank out the misery these days.”
Rachel stared at the man who'd despatched the youth with such ease. His cool statement had temporarily defused the nervous reaction twisting in her stomach, and she supposed she should be grateful for that. But the coldness in his deep, rasping voice was like a slap in the face, reminding her that he, too, was a stranger.
A raw shudder swept through her as she relived the moment when the boy's slurred demand had penetrated her fog of tiredness and she'd realised he'd wanted her bag. It had taken her precious seconds to assimilate that what was happening was real, that she was being attacked in her safe, sleepy little home town. She still felt dazed, disoriented. And in the confines of the alley, the man who'd saved her seemed inordinately big. Six foot four if he was an inch, maybe even taller, and all of it hard muscle barely contained by tight, faded denim. The streetlight outlined the long, powerful shape of his body, the mane of hair that grazed his big shoulders. The rest of the stranger was...darkness. Shadows clung to him, obliterating everything but the narrow glitter of his eyes, the skim of light across one harshly sculpted cheekbone and the strong sweep of his jaw. He smelt of horse and hard work and, with the restless prowling grace of his movements, looked infinitely more dangerous than the young guy he'd just decked.
But his touch had been...more than gentle. Her palm still held his warmth beneath her tightly curled fingers.
The breath lodged in her throat at the ridiculous notion. Deliberately, she opened her fingers to dispel the vital heat of the stranger's touch—the small act vanquishing the even more ridiculous urge to reach out and stake another claim on the hot strength that flowed through him with an almost visible force. Either she was going crazy or she must be more shaken than she'd thought; if there was one thing in life she'd learnt, it was how
not
to cling.
But now that the immediate danger had passed, the tiredness that had had her falling asleep over the day's accounts rolled over her again. Her tailbone throbbed from her heavy landing, and her palm began to sting where she must have scraped the skin off it. Logically, she knew she should pick up her bag, walk to her car, seek out light and safety. But she was loath to leave the security the stranger represented as he squatted beside the boy and checked his pulse with the calm efficiency of someone who'd had medical training.
Another shudder of reaction moved through her as her gaze skittered over the unconscious figure. “I'm glad you showed up,” she said tautly. “Even if he looks too young and thin to do anyone any damage now.”
The man shifted the intensity of his gaze back to her. The streetlight cast his features in frustrating shadow, but she didn't need light to see his impatience; it radiated from him, infusing his deep voice with a cutting edge.
“He was going to hurt you. Don't make the mistake of assuming that small towns are safe just because the big cities aren't. The next time you have to work late, leave by the front door and stick to the lighted areas.”
Methodically, he began gathering up the various items that had flown out of her bag and slipping them into the straw holdall she'd dropped when she'd fallen over. His unexpected consideration confused her. Especially since now that her dazed disbelief was fading, she was working up a healthy temper. She was twenty-seven, and the brand-new owner of her own hair salon. The only crime she'd committed tonight was stupidity.
She
hadn't tried to hurt or rip off anyone. “He was after my bag,” she retorted Ignoring her stinging palm and the swimmy sensation in her head, she snatched up her wallet and a crushed lipstick.“Maybe I should have given it to him, but I didn't think. And if I
had
taken time to think, I
definitely
wouldn't have handed it over. I've lost too much to give anything up easily, and I'll be damned if I was going to let him rummage through my personal things!”
Her words sank into silence. Mortification at just how much of her inner vulnerability she'd revealed burned through her. How on earth could she have let something so intensely personal slip out? The answer was more than obvious. On top of the physical exhaustion of uprooting her city existence and moving to Riverbend, she was now probably suffering from shock.
The glitter of his gaze swept over her again, and she felt an unsettling sense of being examined with stillness and patience and, oddly enough, empathy. Rachel blinked at that last notion. Oh, yeah. Now she
knew
she was going crazy. Next thing you know, she would be asking the guy for counselling services and sobbing her life story onto his considerable shoulder. Only somehow she didn't think her rescuer wanted to chew over just why it was that the people she loved could never seem to love her quite enough.
She swallowed, fiercely squashing the unwelcome urge to wallow in self-pity, recognising that the rigid control she'd garnered so carefully over the past two years was dangerously shredded. “Don't worry,” she said, injecting maximum frost into her voice “You won't be called on to rescue me again. If I make a mistake, I only make it once. Then I learn from it.”
He straightened and handed the holdall to her, carefully avoiding brushing her fingers with his.
For some reason, his detachment and unwillingness to touch her added to her distress. “I don't know your name. How can I thank you?”
His face, half in light, half out of it, froze her off. Something about the distinctive line of his profile, the slant of his cheekbones, tugged at her memory But the recognition was as elusive as it was fleeting. She'd never met him before; she was sure of it.
Striding over to the unconscious boy, he picked him up and draped him over one broad shoulder as if he weighed no more than a child. “You can thank me by going home before something else happens that your can of Mace can't handle.”
“It wasn't Mace, it was hair spray, and I didn't invite—”
“Hair spray?” He made a sound, halfway between amusement and disbelief.
Rachel's jaw clamped tight against a whole list of seductively horrible insults that she would normally never dream of using But anger was better than vulnerability. If she could keep her anger simmering, she could get through this. “It was better than the alternative.”
“Next time, Rachel Sinclair,” he growled in his shiveringly deep, rough-velvet voice, “try a little prevention.”
His footsteps echoed down the alley. Rachel stared after him, waves of temper pulsing through her as she watched him cross the deserted street with a stride that wasn't as smooth as she'd expected it to be—as if he were favouring one leg. He dumped his limp burden in the passenger seat of a dusty truck that was loaded down with fencing materials, climbed in behind the wheel and drove away without a backward look.
As the sound of the truck diminished, she glanced around the alley. The anger drained away, leaving her cold, almost dizzy with exhaustion and oddly bereft. While the big, objectionable man had been there, he'd blocked out the shock and terror of the attack. Now that he'd gone, she began to shake.
Squaring her shoulders, she forced herself to traverse the narrow length of the alley, eyes raking the pooling darkness either side of her in case there was another wild boy crouched ready to spring. The turn of the stranger's head replayed itself through her mmd, and that maddeningly elusive sense of familiarity tantalised her again before dissipating as abruptly as the shadows did when she walked into the warm yellow glow of the streetlamp
Damn it all. She still didn't know his name.
 
 
Cullen drove a couple of hundred yards down the road, made a U-turn and parked far enough down from the alley that Rachel Sinclair wouldn't notice him. Switching off the engine and lights, he waited while she gathered herself together enough to get in her car and drive home.
The click of her high heels sounded on the pavement as she hurried toward a small, classy hatchback, unlocked it and tossed in her bag. The creamy-coloured dress she was wearing crept up as she bent, revealing even more sleek, pale thigh. Her legs were smooth and long, like the dark hair that had slid out of the knot at her nape.
She made him think of silk and moonlight. Of delicious coolness coupled with a startling inner heat. God knows how, but some of that heat had sunk into him, leaving him hungry for more.
And she hadn't been all sweetness and light. Once he'd started in on her, her eyes had narrowed and the languid flow to her voice had been replaced by a clipped coldness that had been exactly what he'd needed to remind him to move his butt out of there before he did something he would have cause to regret. Like find out whether she was married or single, where she lived, and what her telephone number was.
Her keys jangled as they hit the road, and he heard another one of those muffled, completely unladylike curses as she retrieved the keys before slipping into her car, starting the motor, then accelerating way too fast down Riverbend's shotgun street.

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