The Perfect Gift Read online

  HIS WICKED WAYS

  by Samantha James

  CAMERON FACED HER, HIS HEAD PROPPED ON AN ELBOW. His smile was gone, his expression unreadable. He stared at her as if he would pluck her very thoughts from her mind.

  “It occurs to me that you have been sheltered,” he said slowly, “that mayhap you know naught of men…and life.” He seemed to hesitate. “What happens between a man and a woman is not something to be feared, Meredith. It’s where children come from—”

  “I know-how children are made!” Meredith’s face burned with shame.

  “Then why are you so afraid?” he asked quietly.

  It was in her mind to pretend she misunderstood—but it would have been a lie. Clutching the sheet to her chin, she gave a tiny shake of her head. “Please,” she said, her voice very low. “I cannot tell you.”

  Reaching out, he picked up a strand of hair that lay on her breast. Meredith froze. Her heart surely stopped in that instant. Now it comes, she thought despairingly. He claimed he would give her time to accept him, to accept what would happen, but it was naught but a lie! Her heart twisted. Ah, but she should have known!

  “Your hair is beautiful—like living flame.”

  His murmur washed over her, soft as finely spun silk. She searched his features, stunned when she detected no hint of either mockery or derision.

  She stared at the wispy strands that lay across his palm, the way he tested the texture between thumb and forefinger, the way he wound the lock of hair around and around his hand.

  Meredith froze. But he stopped before the pressure tugged hurtfully on her scalp…and trespassed no further. Instead he turned his back.

  His eyes closed.

  They touched nowhere. Indeed, the width of two hands separated them; those silken red strands were the only link between them. Meredith dared not move. She listened and waited, her heart pounding in her breast…

  … Slumber overtook him. He slept, her lock of hair still clutched tight in his fist.

  Only then did she move. Her hand lifted. She touched her lips, there at the very spot he’d possessed so thoroughly. Her pulse quickened as the memory of his kiss flamed all through her…She’d thought it was disdain. Distaste.

  But she was wrong. In the depths of her being, Meredith was well aware it was something far different.

  Her breath came fast, then slow. Something was happening. Something far beyond her experience…

  What could be more beautiful than a holiday trip to the English countryside? Snow Jailing on the gentle hills and thatched roofs…villagers singing carols, then dropping by the pub for hot cider with rum.

  In Christina Skye’s THE PERFECT GIFT, Maggie Kincade earns a chance to exhibit her beautiful jewelry designs at sumptuous Draycott Abbey, where she dreams of peacefully spending Christmas. But when she arrives, she learns she is in danger and discovers that her every step will be followed by disturbingly sensuous Jared MacNeill. He will protect her from those who would harm her, but who’ll protect Maggie from Jared?

  THE PERFECT GIFT

  by Christina Skye

  JARED HAD WORKED HIS WAY OVER THE RIDGE AND DOWN through the trees when he found Maggie Kincade sitting on the edge of the stone bridge.

  Just sitting, her legs dangling as she traced invisible patterns over the old stone.

  Jared stared in amazement. She looked for all the world like a child waiting for a long lost friend to appear.

  Jared shook off his sense of strangeness and plunged down the hillside, cursing her for the ache in his ribs and the exhaustion eating at his muscles.

  He scowled as he drew close enough to see her face. Young. Excited. Not beautiful in the classic sense. Her mouth was too wide and her nose too thin. But the eyes lit up her whole face and made a man want to know all her secrets.

  Her mouth swept into a quick smile as he approached. Her head tilted as laughter rippled like morning sunlight.

  The sound chilled him. It was too quick, too innocent. She ought to be frightened. Defensive. Running.

  He stared, feeling the ground turn to foam beneath him.

  Moonlight touched the long sleeves of her simple white dress with silver as she rose to her feet.

  He spoke first, compelled to break the spell of her presence, furious that she should touch him so. “You know I could have you arrested for this.” His jaw clenched.

  Her head cocked. Poised at the top of the bridge, she was a study in innocent concentration.

  “Don’t even bother to think about running. I want to know who you are and why in hell you’re here.”

  A frown marred the pale beauty of her face. She might have been a child—except that the full curves of her body spoke a richly developed maturity at complete odds with her voice and manner.

  “Answer me. You’re on private property and in ten seconds I’m going to call the police.” Exhaustion made his voice harsh. “Don’t try it,” Jared hissed, realizing she meant to fall and let him catch her. But it was too late. She stepped off the stone bridge, her body angling down toward him.

  He caught her with an oath and a jolt of pain, and then they toppled as one onto the damp earth beyond the moat. Cursing, Jared rolled sideways and pinned her beneath him.

  It was no child’s face that stared up at him and no child’s body that cushioned him. She was strong for a woman, her muscles trim but defined. The softness at hip and breast tightened his throat and left his body all too aware of their intimate contact. He did not move, fighting an urge to open his hands and measure her softness.

  What was wrong with him?

  Imagine for a moment that you’re a modern woman; one minute, you’re living a fast-paced, hectic lifestyle…the next minute, you’ve somehow been transported to another time and you’re living a life of a very different sort.

  No one does time-travel like Constance O’Day-Flannery. In ONCE AND FOREVER Maggie enters a maze while at at Elizabethan fair, and when she comes out she magically finds she’s truly in Elizabethan times! And to make matters more confusing, the sweep-her-off-her-feel hero she’s been searching for all her life turns out to be the handsomest man in 1600’s England!

  ONCE AND FOREVER

  by Constance O’Day-Flannery

  MAGGIE LOOKED UP TO THE SKY AND WISHED A BREEZE would find its way into the thick hedges; she couldn’t believe she was in this maze, sweating her life away in a gorgeous costume and starving. Thinking of all the calories she was burning she wondered, who needs a gym work out? Maggie stopped to listen for anyone, but only an eerie silence hovered.

  Suddenly, she felt terribly alone.

  Spinning around, she vainly searched for anyone, but saw and heard nothing. “Hello? Hello?” Her calls went unanswered. She stopped abruptly in the path. She felt weak. Her heart was pounding and her head felt light. Grabbing at the starched collar, she released the top few buttons and gasped in confusion. Okay, maybe she could use that shining knight right about now. She didn’t care how or where he appeared, as long as he led her out, for the air was heavy and still, and Maggie found it hard to breathe.

  “Help me…please.”

  Silence.

  Her heart pounded harder, her stomach clenched in fear, her breath shortened, her limbs trembled and the weight of the costume felt like it was pulling her down to the ground.

  Spinning around and around, Maggie experienced a sudden lightness, as if she no longer had to struggle against gravity and push herself away from the earth. Whatever was happening was controlling her, and she was so weary of struggling…flashes of her ex-husband and the alimony, her failed job interviews, the bills, the aloneness swirled together. It was bigger, more powerful than she, and she felt herself weakening, surrendering to it. The hedges appeared to fade away and Maggie instinctively knew she had to get out. Gathering her last essence of strength, she started running.

  Miraculously, she was out. She was gasping for breath, inhaling the dust and dirt from under her mouth when she heard the angry yell that reve
rberated through the ground and rattled her already scrambled brain.

  She dare not move, not even breathe. If this were a nightmare, and surely it couldn’t be anything else, she wasn’t about to add to the terror. She would wake up any moment, her mind screamed. She had to!

  Drawing upon more courage than she thought she had left, Maggie slowly lifted her head. She was staring into the big brown eyes of a horse.

  A horse!

  She heard moans and looked beyond the animal to see a body. A man, rolled on the side of a dirt path, was clutching his knee as colorful curses flowed back to her.

  “Spleeny, lousey-cockered jolt head! Aww…heavens above deliver me from this vile, impertinent, ill-natured lout!”

  Pushing herself to her feet, Maggie brushed dirt, twigs and leaves from her hands and backside, then made her way to the man. “How badly are you hurt?” she called out over her shoulder.

  The man didn’t answer and she glanced in his direction. He was still staring at her, as though he’d lost his senses.

  Shoulder-length streaked blond hair framed a finely chiseled face. Eyes, large and of the lightest blue Maggie had ever seen stared back at her, as though the man had seen a ghost. He was definitely an attractive, more than average, handsome man…okay, he was downright gorgeous and she’d have to be dead not to acknowledge it.

  Wow… that was her first thought.

  Everyone knows that ladies of quality can only marry gentlemen, and that suitable gentlemen are born—not made. Because bang a gentleman has nothing to do with money, and everything to do with upbringing.

  But in Judith Ivory’s THE PROPOSITION Edwina vows that she can turn anyone into a gentleman…even the infuriating Mr. Mick Tremore. Not only that, she’d be able to pass him off as the heir to a dukedom, and no one en society would de any wiser. And since Edwina is every inch a lady, there isn’t a chance that she’d find the exasperating Mick Tremore irresistible. Is there?

  THE PROPOSITION

  by Judith Ivory

  “SPEAK FOR YOURSELF,” SHE SAID. “I COULDN’T DO ANYTHING”—she paused, then used his word for it—“unpredictable.”

  “Yes, you could.”

  “Well, I could, but I won’t.”

  He laughed. “Well, you might surprise yourself one day.”

  His sureness of himself irked her. Like the mustache that he twitched slightly. He knew she didn’t like it; he used it to tease her.

  Fine. What a pointless conversation. She picked up her pen, going back to the task of writing out his progress for the morning. Out of the corner of her eye, though, she could see him.

  He’d leaned back on the rear legs of his chair, lifting the front ones off the floor. He rocked there beside her as he bent his head sideways, tilting it, looking under the table. He’d been doing this all week, making her nervous with it. As if there were a mouse—or worse—something under there that she should be aware of.

  “What are you doing?”

  Illogically, he came back with, “I bet you have the longest, prettiest legs.”

  “Limbs,” she corrected. “A gentleman refers to that part of a lady as her limbs, her lower limbs, though it is rather poor form to speak of them at all. You shouldn’t.”

  He laughed. “Limbs? Like a bloody tree?” His pencil continued to tap lightly, an annoying tattoo of ticks. “No, you got legs under there. Long ones. And I’d give just about anything to see ’em.”

  Goodness. He knew that was impertinent. He was tormenting her. He liked to torture her for amusement.

  Then she caught the word: anything?

  To see her legs? Her legs were nothing. Two sticks that bent so she could walk on them. He wanted to see these?

  For anything?

  She wouldn’t let him see them, of course. But she wasn’t past provoking him in return: “Well, there is a solution here then, Mr. Tremore. You can see my legs, when you shave your mustache.”

  She meant it as a kind of joke. A taunt to get back at him.

  Joke or not, though, his pencil not only stopped, it dropped. There was a tiny clatter on the floor, a faint sound of rolling, then silence—as, along with the pencil, Mr. Tremore’s entire body came to a motionless standstill.

  “Pardon?” he said finally. He spoke it perfectly, exactly as she’d asked him to. Only now it unsettled her.

  “You heard me,” she said. A little thrill shot through her as she pushed her way into the dare that—fascinatingly, genuinely—rattled him.

  She spoke now in earnest what seemed suddenly a wonderful exchange: “If you shave off your mustache, I’ll hike my skirt and you can watch—how far? To my knees?” The hair on the back of her neck stood up.

  “Above your knees,” he said immediately. His amazed face scowled in a way that said they weren’t even talking unless they got well past her knees in the debate.

  “How far?”

  “All the way up.”

  About the Author

  CHRISTINA SKYE lives on the western slopes of the Macdowell Mountains in southern Arizona. She has never hitchhiked through Bora Bora, trained porpoises in Hawaii or been struck by a runaway horse and suffered massive amnesia. Well, almost never.

  The Perfect Gift is her seventh book in the Draycott Abbey series and her thirteenth book overall. The night she finished writing The Perfect Gift, a family of coyotes trotted to a nearby wash and carried on an eerie serenade until dawn.

  She is sure it was just a coincidence.

  Well, almost sure.

  Be sure to visit the abbey online at www.christinaskye.com.

  Marston always has tea on hand.

  Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins authors.

  Praise for the novels of CHRISTINA SKYE

  “A lively sensual Christmas story that features well-crafted characters, a sprinkle of humor, an intriguing plot, and a wonderfully misty Scottish setting.”

  Library Journal on Season of Wishes

  “The hauntingly beautiful world of Draycott Abbey will totally seduce you.”

  Virginia Henley

  “Complex and multi-faceted…Skye has written one finely crafted, very romantic love story.”

  Publishers Weekly on Bride of the Mist

  “A guaranteed keeper that will be looked upon by future generations as classic literature.”

  Affaire de Coeur on Bridge of Dreams

  Other Books by Christina Skye

  BRIDE OF THE MIST

  HOUR OF THE ROSE

  KEY TO FOREVER

  Copyright

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  AVON BOOKS

  An Imprint of HarparCollinsPublishers

  10 East 53rd Street

  New York, New York 10022-5299

  Copyright © 1999 by Roberta Helmer

  Excerpt from Someday My Prince copyright © 1999 by Christina Dodd Excerpt from Married in Haste copyright © 1999 by Catherine Maxwell Excerpt from His Wicked Ways copyright ©1999 by Sandra Kleinschmit Excerpt from The Perfect Gift copyright © 1999 by Roberta Helmer Excerpt from Once and Forever copyright © 1999 by Constance Day-Flannery.

  Excerpt from The Proposition copyright © 1999 by Judith Ivory Inside cover author photo by Bill Morris Studio Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 99-94806

  ISBN: 0-380-80023-3

  www.avonromance.com

  THE PERFECT GIFT. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form
or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins ebooks.

  First Avon Books printing: October 1999

  Avon Trademark Reg. U.S. Pat. Off. and in Other Countries, Marca Registrada, Hecho en U.S.A.

  HarperCollins® is a trademark of HarperCollins Publishers Inc.

  EPub Edition © APRIL 2013 ISBN: 9780062285270

  About the Publisher

  Australia

  HarperCollins Publishers (Australia) Pty. Ltd.

  Level 13, 201 Elizabeth Street

  Sydney, NSW 2000, Australia

  http://www.harpercollins.com.au

  Canada

  HarperCollins Canada

  2 Bloor Street East – 20th Floor

  Toronto, ON, M4W, 1A8, Canada

  http://www.harpercollins.ca

  New Zealand

  HarperCollins Publishers (New Zealand) Limited

  P.O. Box 1

  Auckland, New Zealand

  http://www.harpercollins.co.nz

  United Kingdom

  HarperCollins Publishers Ltd.

  77–85 Fulham Palace Road

  London, W6 8JB, UK

  http://www.harpercollins.co.uk

  United States

  HarperCollins Publishers Inc.

  10 East 53rd Street

  New York, NY 10022

  http://www.harpercollins.com