Marked For Marriage. Jackie Merritt

       www.millsandboon.co.uk

      JACKIE MERRITT

      is still writing, just not with the speed and constancy of years past. She and her husband are living in southern Nevada again, falling back on old habits of loving the long, warm or slightly cool winters and trying almost desperately to head north for the months of July and August, when the fiery sun bakes people and cacti alike. She has written dozens of novels for Silhouette Books.

      Contents

      Prologue

      Chapter One

      Chapter Two

      Chapter Three

      Chapter Four

      Chapter Five

      Chapter Six

      Chapter Seven

      Chapter Eight

      Chapter Nine

      Chapter Ten

      Chapter Eleven

      Chapter Twelve

      Chapter Thirteen

      Chapter Fourteen

      Prologue

      Dr. Noah Martin, internal specialist and surgeon extraordinaire, pulled his dark-green SUV to a stop directly in front of Mark Kincaid’s home. Instead of immediately getting out of his vehicle, Noah left the engine and heater running—the outside temperature on this early-February day was hovering in the low twenties. He frowned uneasily at the house, as though the attractive structure—blue-gray siding, red brick trim—contained something ominous. In truth, the only thing it contained—beyond furnishings and personal possessions belonging to Mark and his bride, Darcy—was a young woman named Maddie who happened to be Mark’s sister.

      Noah’s promise to look in on Maddie while Mark and Darcy were on their honeymoon weighed about ten thousand pounds, and at the moment Noah would give almost anything to have stumbled upon some reason for not doing this favor for Mark. It would have to be something feasible, of course. Noah didn’t have a trainload of friends, mostly due to his loner personality and disdain for the human race in general, but he and Mark had hit it off from their first meeting, unusual for Noah.

      Truth was, Mark Kincaid was the closest thing Noah had to a real friend in this little backwater town of Whitehorn, Montana, to which he’d moved to escape the ghosts of a love gone sour. He had learned, of course, that changing one’s residence did not eradicate memory—a painful lesson in the implacability of human emotion. There were moments when the image of beautiful, sophisticated Felicia, his former fiancée and the love of his life, was so real in his mind that it seemed as though he could reach out a hand and touch her. The utter foolishness of that sort of mind game never failed to anger him, and there were many, many days when he did his job without smiling even once.

      Not that he would take Felicia back if she suddenly appeared in Whitehorn and pleaded with him to mend their broken relationship. She’d left him flat, announcing with her regal chin high in the air in a symbolic effort to look down on him—ridiculous when she was five foot five and he was six feet tall—that she was tired of playing second fiddle to his medical career. It was over for her, and nothing he’d said had altered her decision.

      The whole thing—giving a woman everything he had to give, rushing to comply with her slightest whim, worrying that he loved her far more than she loved him, and on and on ad infinitum until the breakup—had created a brand-new Noah Martin. As a snake sheds its skin, Noah shed all ties to the past—or so he’d believed when he traded San Francisco for a small town in Montana.

      He’d found out differently, and while he did his best to combat bitterness, it was an undeniable part of his personality. He angered easily, resented trivial slights that he wouldn’t even have noticed before meeting Felicia and ultimately falling under her spell. And perhaps most unfortunate of all, his former commendable bedside manner had vanished, and other than the medical side of his relationship with patients, he really didn’t like them.

      Now, on this raw February afternoon, staring broodingly at the front of Mark’s house he again regretted a promise he couldn’t get out of keeping. It didn’t alleviate Noah’s bad mood to realize that the main reason he’d agreed to this annoying interruption in his regular routine was Mark’s worried comments about Maddie having had some kind of accident during a rodeo. The details had slid through Noah’s mind, but the gist of the conversation had been that he and Darcy could not leave on their scheduled honeymoon without someone dependable keeping an eye on Maddie.

      “I’ll tell you now,” Mark had said, “Maddie’s a handful. But I think you just might be the one person around who can handle her.”

      Noah narrowed his eyes and wondered exactly what “handling Maddie Kincaid” would entail. He sure as hell didn’t need another woman enforcing her will over his. In fact, since the charade with Felicia, he’d made it a point to stay completely away from the opposite sex. Except in a professional setting, of course.

      Thinking that Mark was going to owe him big-time for this, Noah turned off the ignition and got out. The outside cold, made more penetrating by a gusting north wind, turned his breath to freezing fog. There was a thin layer of snow on the ground—frozen into tiny ice pellets, Noah was certain—and every step he took made a uniquely wintry crunching sound. He walked to the front door and rang the bell. No one came to the door, nor could Noah hear any movement from inside.

      Frowning, he left the small front porch and walked around the house to the side door. From there he could see a long white trailer and a strikingly handsome white one-ton pickup truck residing in the extra parking space Mark had behind his garage. The truck sparked Noah’s interest. It had chrome running boards and tail pipes, chrome rooftop lights, and probably every other conceivable add-on, Noah decided. It was an obviously costly vehicle, and when he gave the trailer another look, he thought the same about it. Apparently Mark’s sister was not here because of a lack of funds, but then no one had said she was. She was here to recuperate from an accident. A rodeo accident, Noah thought, puzzling about something that he probably should already know,