Nancy Morse - Panther On The Prowl

Rennie asked, her voice barely a whisper.

John emitted a long, low breath he’d been holding trapped in his lungs. “The Seminole Indians believe that it is what you do with your life that determines your fate.”

She moistened her lips and tilted her face up to him. “And what do the Seminoles say about two people coming together for only one night? Would they call that fate?”

His whole body tensed. “They would say that a man and a woman coming together can change the course of the world, and must not be taken lightly.”

“I don’t want to change the whole world. Only my world.”

“I don’t want to hurt you,” he whispered. “You’re vulnerable right now, and confused. You don’t know what you really want.”

Her hands came up to caress his face. “For the first time in my life, I know exactly what I want.”

Dear Reader,

Valentine’s Day is here, a time for sweet indulgences. RITA Award-winning author Merline Lovelace is happy to oblige as she revisits her popular CODE NAME: DANGER miniseries. In Hot as Ice, a frozen Cold War-era pilot is thawed out by beautiful scientist Diana Remington, who soon finds herself taking her work home with her.

ROMANCING THE CROWN continues with The Princess and the Mercenary, by RITA Award winner Marilyn Pappano. Mercenary Tyler Ramsey reluctantly agrees to guard Princess Anna Sebastiani as she searches for her missing brother, but who will protect Princess Anna’s heart from Tyler? In Linda Randall Wisdom’s Small-Town Secrets, a young widow—and detective—tries to solve a string of murders with the help of a handsome reporter. The long-awaited LONE STAR COUNTRY CLUB series gets its start with Marie Ferrarella’s Once a Father. A bomb has ripped apart the Club, and only a young boy rescued from the wreckage knows the identity of the bombers. The child’s savior, firefighter Adam Collins, and his doctor, Tracy Walker, have taken the child into protective custody—where they will fight danger from outside and attraction from within. RaeAnne Thayne begins her OUTLAW HARTES series with The Valentine Two-Step. Watch as two matchmaking little girls turn their schemes on their unsuspecting single parents. And in Nancy Morse’s Panther on the Prowl, a temporarily blinded woman seeks shelter—and finds much more—in the arms of a mysterious stranger.

Enjoy them all, and come back next month, because the excitement never ends in Silhouette Intimate Moments.

Yours,

Leslie. J. Wainger

Executive Senior Editor

www.millsandboon.co.uk

Nancy lives in New York and Florida with her husband, Talley, who works in the film industry, and their Alaskan Malamute, Max, aka Big Fur. An early love of reading and happy endings led to the publication of her first historical romance in 1980. She has an avid interest in Native American art and culture and takes pride in her collection of nineteenth-century artifacts. In addition to writing, she keep busy with reading, gardening, aerobic workouts and a full-time job in health and education.

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Rennie Hollander was desperate.

The practiced hands at the controls trembled and her usually steady grip was scared and unsure as she piloted the single-engine Cessna southward, hugging the Florida coastline.

All around, lightning snaked the black sky. The sudden, violent thunderstorm that ripped through the night shortly after takeoff should have forced her to turn around and head back to Palm Beach International, but the radio frequencies were flooded with diverted pilots trying to talk to tower controllers. And besides, it would have been a mistake to go back.

Fixing her coordinates, she flew on into the thick night. The steady hum of the engine was the only reassuring thing as the plane bumped its way through the turbulence.

South Florida was called the lightning capital of the world. It was a reputation well deserved, Rennie thought grimly. Two years ago the senator’s caddy was struck and killed by lightning on the tenth hole, and last summer a workman repairing the roof of the guest house was knocked into the air by a bolt of lightning.

Rennie knew from the weather report she received before take off that she was taking a chance flying in such weather, but she was an experienced pilot, and desperate to get away.

Far below, the Everglades stretched into the darkness. Rennie shuddered, recalling the only time she had ever been to the Everglades. It was the summer after her father died, when her mother’s friend, Senator Trevor Hollander, took her on an airboat ride. Of course, he wasn’t a senator back then, merely an overambitious businessman eager to impress an eight-year-old and her wealthy, widowed mother.

She found the place treacherous and frightening, with alligators sitting like partially submerged logs in the still water. Yet to her child’s eye it was also strangely beautiful. Though Rennie had been too young to understand the dichotomy, the Everglades haunted her until she grew older and came to realize the place mirrored her own life, for it, too, was filled with beautiful things and long, endless stretches of loneliness.

In the years following her mother’s marriage to the senator, the conflict within her deepened. Hers was the kind of life that most people only dreamed about, with private flying lessons, the best schools, summers in Southampton, winters in Palm Beach. But like the vast wetland somewhere down there in the darkness beyond the plane’s window, Rennie felt empty and alone. Something was missing. She referred to it as her missing link.

The family wealth notwithstanding, Rennie preferred to earn her own living as a professor of anthropology with the University of Miami. Her work gave her life some focus. She didn’t earn much, but at least she earned it herself. Besides, there was always the trust fund to fall back on. Not that she needed it. She already had everything she could want—except, of course the things that really mattered, like the love she lost when her father died and the attention she rarely received from a mother who had been too busy hosting lavish parties and fund-raising events for her husband.

Growing up, money had always been the only constant thing in her life. The more she had of it, the less she needed of everything else. But as she grew older, what was once difficult for a little girl to understand became frighteningly clear to the woman she had become. Where was the desire? The need? The sheer necessity for life? That old missing link churned deep inside, filling her with the need to need something…someone.

She had thought her fiancé, Craig Wolfson, was that someone. She’d met the handsome land developer at a fund-raising party for the senator. A whirlwind courtship led to a proposal of marriage. Craig would make a good husband, she had reasoned much the way her mother had reasoned that the senator would make a good husband after Rennie’s father died. Rennie hadn’t cared that she wasn’t head-over-heels in love with Craig. He was good-looking, smart, successful and utterly devoted to her. Almost too good to be true. Besides, the senator approved the match, and the senator always got what he wanted. Thank God she found out about Craig in time and broke off the engagement.

Rennie’s fingers gripped the stick tighter, knuckles whitening under the pressure as she contemplated the consequences of her actions. She didn’t want to be there when the Senator returned from Washington and learned what she had done.

Glancing up she noticed that the landing-gear-indicator light had burned out. Routine, she told herself. No reason to panic. And she didn’t, until several moments later, when the engine didn’t sound right.

Apprehension darted through her like a hard-driven nail. Like it or not, she had to turn around and return to the airport.

It was in the midst of a banked left turn to head back when the engine went to takeoff power. That’s when the world exploded.

There was a horrible noise, followed in less than a heartbeat by a jolt that pitched Rennie forward in her seat. A ferocious heat welled up behind her. She didn’t have to turn around to know that the plane was on fire and that she was going to crash.

There was a bone-shattering thud when the plane hit the ground. Cushioned by the soft, damp earth, it remained in one piece. Rennie was shaken violently from side to side as the tail section spun around and around, churning over the muck and saw grass.

When the plane finally came to a stop, Rennie found herself miraculously alive and pinned beneath the wreckage. Jet fuel from the engine poured on her. Her fingers clawed at the seat belt. In her frenzy she got it unbuckled. Disentangling herself from the wreckage, she fell out of the plane into the swamp.

Worse than the awful sound of the crash was the crushing silence that greeted her. There was no noise, no movement, no life, it seemed in the cold, raw darkness that swallowed her up. She stumbled away from the plane, mindless of injuries and fearful of the sinister creatures that lurked in the swamp. Alligators came to mind. Snakes. And panthers. God only knew what was out there. It was so dark she couldn’t see a thing. Then a startling realization came over her. The darkness all around her was not caused by the veil of night or because her eyes were shut. Her eyes were, in fact, wide open. She blinked several times just to make sure. Yes, open. Her hands went up to her eyes, and she cried out at the horribly painful touch of her fingertips. With a strangled sob she realized that she could not see.

Panic unlike anything Rennie had ever known seized her, constricting the breath in her throat and threatening to choke her with fear. It was then that she began to scream.

In her terror, Rennie did not hear the sound of the frog hunter’s airboat. In her blindness, she did not see the light on his helmet leading him through the dark swamp to the woman who had collapsed unconscious on the soft, wet ground.

Images darted out of the darkness. Distorted images of Craig, his eyes filled with the same arrogance she had heard in his voice that night she stood in the doorway listening to him speak to someone on the telephone.

She had gone to his apartment to tell him the news that she’d been awarded a grant to study the myths and legends of the Seminoles. Letting herself in with the key he’d given her, she overheard him telling someone on the telephone of his plan to build a high-rise condominium on a prime parcel of coastal real estate he was receiving as a wedding gift. All he had to do was make a sizable donation to the senator’s reelection campaign…and marry a woman he didn’t love.

Rennie was devastated. She knew the senator had promised Craig the land, but she never dreamed that it was the only reason he was marrying her. It had all been a charade—their first meeting, the courtship, everything had been carefully orchestrated by Craig to get the land.

She thought that marrying Craig was a way to test her independence and find some shelter from the influence of her family, but his betrayal only proved that she hadn’t been making the right choices for herself. Why hadn’t she seen it before? Maybe she just hadn’t wanted to see. Maybe she’d been unconsciously trying to replace the father she lost at an early age. Whatever the reason, the eye-opening experience drove home the realization of just how important it was for her to stand on her own two feet and not to depend on someone else for happiness, especially someone as controlling as Craig.