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“Dance with me, Maria.”
She turned toward Jake, her body already betraying her with a jump in her heartbeat. A distracting sense of warmth made her feel slightly light-headed, in danger.
Then she was in Jake’s arms. “I was looking for you,” he said, his voice an irresistible mix of dark mood and confession. His breath brushed Maria’s ear and her throat. Hot. Tempting. Sinking against him would be so easy. So damn good.
Maria feared she couldn’t hide her vulnerability. “Do you have any idea what you’ve done to my life?”
Something had to be wrong between two people who could hate each other and yet yearn to make love. She found the strength to push him away. “You have what you want.” And she’d been a fool.
Jake turned toward the door, but paused. “I didn’t get what I want. And neither did you.”
Dear Reader,
I have the best job. I get to write romance for Harlequin Enterprises. At about the age of twelve, I read my first Harlequin book, set in a coastal town in Canada. I’ll never forget a scene where the heroine ran down a wooden staircase to the beach and ended up in the hero’s arms. Before my grandma gave me that book I’d read only the classics or history or mystery. As I read that first romance, I kept waiting for a body to fall. But how cool—this book was all about love growing between a man and a woman.
I’ve never stopped reading everything else, but I love romance. From that first book, I moved on to Harlequin Presents. When Anne Mather had a new release, I hurried it to the cash register. In college, after analyzing lit all semester, I’d rush to the bookstore for a break filled with romance.
Finally I sold my own first novel. Then, one surreal day, one of mine appeared on the Mills & Boon site on the same page as a Betty Neels release! I took a screen shot that follows me to each new laptop.
I’ve tried to bring all the passion I love reading about to Judge Jake Sloane and Dr. Maria Keaton’s story. While Maria reels with relief that Jake hasn’t betrayed her, he’s torn by guilt because he should have. Being Jake’s conflict of interest isn’t enough for Maria, but how can she learn to trust him? Visit me at annaadamswriter.blogspot.com to share your thoughts on the story.
Happy 60th anniversary, Harlequin! Happy reading to all of us who seek out our favorite books each month.
All the best,
Anna Adams
A Conflict of Interest
Anna Adams
MILLS & BOON
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Anna Adams wrote her first romance on the beach in wet sand with a stick. These days she uses modern tools to write the kind of stories she loves best—romance that involves everyone in the family, and often the whole community. Love between two people, like the proverbial stone in a lake—the ripples of their feelings spread and contract, bringing conflict and “help” from the people who care most about them.
Anna is in the middle of one of those stories, with her own hero. From Iceland to Hawaii and points in between they’ve shared their lives with children and family and friends who’ve become family. Right now they’re living in a small Southern town, whose square has become the model for the one where much of the action happens in Honesty, Virginia. In fact, Anna wrote much of A Conflict of Interest in a coffee shop looking out at the courthouse that features in the story. All this living and loving gives Anna plenty of fodder to dream up stories of real love set in real life. Come along and live them with her!
To Missy, because the roads are empty without you.
And to June, Alan, Adam and Brandon,
good friends who’ve become family.
CONTENTS
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
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
EPILOGUE
CHAPTER ONE
BITS OF ICE PLINKED against the courtroom windows, to the odd accompaniment of whispering fans that dispersed the heat of too many bodies packed into one small space. The defense attorney, a walking cliché of paunch and righteous anger, set a composition book in front of Dr. Maria Keaton on the witness stand.
“Do you recognize this diary?” Buck Collier pointed with his thick finger.
Maria stared at the marbleized cover, rubbed almost gray. Her patient, Griff Butler, had scrawled shapes into the cardboard, bearing down so hard he’d drilled red and blue ink beneath the surface. He’d written words and then crossed them out with heavy marker. He’d drawn muscle-bound men firing guns that sprayed bullets across the mottled cover.
And he’d tried to make her read the pages, swollen with his secrets.
He’d had a crush. Sometimes patients got them, but as they healed, they also found out they didn’t truly love their therapists.
But one look at the man behind the judge’s bench, just above her, made her reconsider. The man whose gaze she’d avoided because his black eyes made her painfully aware that inappropriate, nearly mind-drugging attraction could also afflict her. Judge Jake Sloane didn’t even have to move to capture her attention.
Soon after she’d moved to Honesty, he’d said hello at a party and taken her hand just as someone else called to him from across the buffet table. She’d let go, but the low timbre of his voice had touched her. She’d dragged her hand out of midair to hold it close to her stomach. With a nod, Jake had strode away, his lean body cutting a swath through the crowd.
Attraction that felt more like instant addiction made her wary. After that, she’d hung back, watching Jake at town meetings and the food bank where they both volunteered. She’d waited for her ridiculous crush to wane.
Since the moment she’d answered the bailiff’s summons to the courtroom, she’d been uncomfortably aware of Jake, leaning back in his chair, his sharp features focused, totally belying his body’s false image of indifference.
“Dr. Keaton?” Buck’s imperious tone cut through Maria’s thoughts. “The journal. What’s in it?”
“I don’t