The Pretender
Authors: Kathleen Creighton
What’s one little white lie?
Struggling actress Abigail Lingren feels it’s her duty to notify her roommate’s family of Sunny’s murder. Problem is, a tangled web including lies, a reclusive grandfather and an inheritance makes things more than complicated. Impersonating Sunny in the mountains of California—just for a while—is part of the plan. Getting tangled up with sexy rancher
Sage Rivera is not.
Sage stands to lose it all. He doesn’t need an attachment to Sunny or her well-kept secrets. He can’t shake the feeling she’s hiding something big. But she needs a protector, a friend, a lover to give her the passion she’s been missing…and he decides he’s the only man for the job.
It had been a good day, he thought.
And at least for the most part, he’d managed to keep his hands off Sam’s granddaughter.
He hadn’t counted on Sunny all of a sudden turning to him and throwing her arms around his neck.
“Thank you,” she whispered.
“Really?” he croaked, brilliantly. Which was about when it occurred to him where his own arms were and what
they were doing.
“Really,” she murmured. She was touching his face… Her hand lay softly along his jaw.
He looked back at her and knew he would kiss her now. And knew it was right and inevitable, and that it didn’t matter if he’d only known her a couple of days—didn’t know her at all, in fact—and she was Sam Malone’s granddaughter and heir. Kissing her seemed like the most natural thing
in the world to do…like taking his next breath.
* * *
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Dear Reader,
Welcome once again to June Canyon Ranch in the beautiful southern Sierra Nevada Mountains of California, where eccentric and reclusive billionaire “Sierra” Sam Malone continues to try to form the elusive bonds of family that have eluded him for most of his nearly one hundred years. This is the second book in the series The Scandals of Sierra Malone. It should have
been Sunny’s story, but as you will see, it isn’t really hers after all.
When I first began writing this book, I thought it was about choices, those that, whether easy or difficult, for better or for worse, shape the pathways of our lives. But as time went by, I began to realize it was about family, and roots, and what it means to a child to grow up surrounded by love and acceptance…or without
it. Of course, families come in all shapes and sizes, and if you are lucky enough to have one, no matter how ungainly or embarrassing or eccentric it may be, I hope you will say a little prayer of thanksgiving…and perhaps also ask for the patience to put up with them, the strength to forgive them, and the wisdom to appreciate all they’ve given you.
Kathleen Creighton
Kathleen Creighton
The Pretender
Books by Kathleen Creighton
Harlequin Romantic Suspense
‡Sheriff’s Runaway Witness
#1656
‡The Pretender
#1693
Silhouette Romantic Suspense
*
The Awakening of Dr. Brown
#1057
*
The Seduction of Goody Two Shoes
#1089
Virgin Seduction
#1148
*The Black Sheep’s Baby
#1161
Shooting Star
#1232
**The Top Gun’s Return
#1262
**An Order of Protection
#1292
**Undercover Mistress
#1340
**Secret Agent Sam
#1363
The Sheriff of Heartbreak County
#1400
The Rebel King
#1432
Lazlo’s Last Stand
#1492
†Danger Signals
#1507
†Daredevil’s Run
#1523
†Lady Killer
#1559
†Kincaid’s Dangerous Game
#1563
†Memory of Murder
#1607
*Into the Heartland
**Starrs of the West
†The Taken
‡
Scandals of Sierra Malone
Other titles by this author available in ebook format.
KATHLEEN
CREIGHTON
has roots deep in the California soil but has relocated to South Carolina. As a child, she enjoyed listening to old-timers’ tales, and her fascination with the past only deepened as she grew older. Today, she is interested in everything—art, music, gardening, zoology, anthropology and history—but people are at the top of her list. She also has a lifelong passion for writing, and
now combines all her loves in romance novels.
For My Family,
(which has turned out to be even more far-flung and eclectic than I could have imagined),
but especially for those members of it who would never dream of living anywhere else but in the Kern River Valley.
Prologue
From the memoirs of Sierra Sam Malone:
I
never thought I would live so long. For the fact that I have done so I must give credit to the Man Upstairs, I suppose, but also to three beautiful women, all of whom loved me a damn sight more than I deserved. Lord knows I never did right by any of them, but maybe there is still time before I die to make up for some of the
wrong I did. I sure do mean to try.
Telling the story—the whole truth—well, I reckon that’s as good a place to start as any.
That day outside of Barstow when the railroad bulls beat me senseless and threw me off the train and left me to die in the desert wasn’t the first time Death came for me and went away empty-handed. Not the first time, but I thought sure it was the last, and my
last day on earth before I’d reached the ripe age of eighteen.
For some reason—instinct, I reckon, or Divine Guidance, or maybe it was just because, being a mountain boy born and bred from the green hills of West Virginia, I had no wish to die in the desert—and so I didn’t try to follow the tracks back to Barstow but instead kept stumbling my dogged way toward the mountains I could see off
in the distance. Could just as well have been a mirage, but it wasn’t. It was mountains, real ones, and something in me told me there might be water there, somewhere.
Well…there was water, and I don’t know what led me to find it, hidden deep in the gold mine that belonged to a sweet bit of a girl named Elizabeth. (I’d say it was the Hand of God that guided me, but I can’t for the life of
me think why the Good Lord would bother to save the miserable life of the likes of me, Sam Malone. That is a mystery I’ve not been able to figure out to this day.) But find it I did, and with it the greatest treasure any man could wish for.
Ah, Elizabeth. I was too young and stupid to know it then, but you were the real thing…the treasure I had in my hands, that I threw away to go chasing
after Fool’s Gold.
In my defense, I will say that she was beautiful, more beautiful than anything I’d ever seen. As beautiful, I thought then, as an angel.
But, I see that I am getting ahead of my story, so if you will bear with me, I will proceed with it.
Part Two—Barbara
Elizabeth found me in that mine, and for some reason decided against shooting me for a trespasser.
Instead, she took care of me and brought me back to good health, and I married her for her trouble. We worked the gold mine her daddy had left her, worked it together, and she could swing a pickax as well as any man. There wasn’t a lot of gold left in that mine, but it was enough to keep us comfortable, and after she bore me a son, a bright and beautiful boy we named Sean—for her daddy, not mine—we
had everything anyone could possibly need in order to be happy.
Except, me being the kind of man I am, I wanted more. Maybe I always had that restlessness, that something or other that kept me with one ear cocked to the distant call of adventure. So when the movie people came to our corner of desert and I heard they were looking for horses and men who could ride them, the excitement drew
me like a moth to flame.
Well, sir, it wasn’t long before those people discovered I could not only ride, but was more than a little foolhardy. In no time at all I was doing stunts for the likes of Duke Wayne, and Coop and Alan Ladd. Westerns were big back then—somebody was always filming something out there in Red Rock, or up at Lone Pine, or over on the Kern River—Roy Rogers and Gene Autry,
Bill Boyd—you’d maybe know him better as Hopalong Cassidy—all the great ones. I got to know ’em all, and I had as much work as I could handle. Elizabeth, she got tired of it after a while and went back to our home and the raising of our son, Sean. But I’d got hooked on the glamour of it…the excitement. And, I confess, on all the temptations that went with that.
Then came the War. I went
to join up when I heard what had been done at Pearl Harbor, but those railroad bulls—or maybe all the spills I’d taken doing the movie stunts—had inflicted more damage on me than I’d thought, enough that the army wouldn’t take me. Which was a disappointment at the time, me being like any other man too young and dumb to value his own life, but it turned out to be one more piece of Good Fortune I didn’t
deserve. Because ’round about that time something was discovered in that played-out gold mine of ours, something I’d never heard of before, that was worth far more than gold or the bodies of brave young men. Something called
Uranium.
By the time the war ended I was a rich man. I still loved the movie business, but I’d quit falling off horses and was making my own movies now. I moved Elizabeth
and Sean into town, set them up in a big house up there in the Hollywood Hills, even though I knew she’d never be happy there. And I confess I didn’t spend much time with my wife and child during those days, being too busy hobnobbing with the glamorous and beautiful people that surrounded me day and night. I know the stories must have found their way back to her, though, about the booze and
drugs and beautiful women. Oh, my Lord, the women…
Then one day I walked onto the set—we were shooting interiors for
Sierra Gold,
I believe it was—and there she was. No, not the most beautiful woman in the world, God knows, because I’d seen more than my share of those already. But there was something about her… She had hair like flame and dark, tragic eyes, which was something of a contradiction,
something of a mystery, and that beguiled me from the first. She had skin like rose petals and a smile like an angel’s, so sweet it made your heart ache…and then when she spoke or sang, her voice was cigarettes and whiskey and dark dive bars full of pure sin.
There’d been women before—I think I’ve made that plain enough. But she was different. For her, I gave up everything.
Elizabeth,
it’s true you were the earth, the world, practical and real and as vital as food and drink to me. But, they say a man can’t live on bread alone, and she…well, she was the food of my spirit. My soul. Her name was Barbara Chase, and I flew to her, and for a time, God help me, I did believe I’d found heaven.