Just One Look Read online

  “Go back to sleep,”

  Letter to Reader

  Title Page

  Books by Mary McBride

  MARY McBRIDE

  Dedication

  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

  Chapter 15

  Epilogue

  Copyright

  “Go back to sleep,”

  Joe said, conscious of the sudden thickness in his voice.

  Sara bit her lower lip and shook her head. “Too scared. What a wimp, huh?”

  “I’m here.”

  “You weren’t here. You were there.” She pointed in the direction of the den. “God. I don’t think I’ll ever sleep again.”

  He didn’t like where this was heading. Not one bit. Because he knew when she turned those big green eyes up at him and asked him to stay with her, here in her room, he’d say the dumbest, most dangerous thing he’d ever said. Yes.

  Dear Reader,

  What is there to say about a month with a new Nora Roberts title except “Hurry up and get to the store!” Enchanted is a mysterious, romantic and utterly irresistible follow-up to THE DONOVAN LEGACY trilogy, which appeared several years ago and is currently being reissued. It’s the kind of story only Nora can tell—and boy, will you be glad she did!

  The rest of our month is pretty special, too, so pick up a few more books to keep you warm. Try The Admiral’s Bride, by Suzanne Brockmann, the latest TALL, DARK & DANGEROUS title. These navy SEAL heroes are fast staking claim to readers’ hearts all over the world. Read about the last of THE SISTERS WASKOWITZ in Kathleen Creighton’s Eve’s Wedding Knight. You’ll love it—and you’ll join me in hoping we revisit these fascinating women—and their irresistible heroes—someday. Rio Grande Wedding is the latest from multiaward-wtnning Ruth Wind, a part of her MEN OF THE LAND miniseries, featuring the kind of Southwestern men no self-respecting heroine can resist. Take a look at Vickie Taylor’s Virgin Without a Memory, a book you’ll remember for a long time. And finally, welcome Harlequin Historical author Mary McBnde to the contemporary romance lineup. Just One Look will demand more than just one look from you, and it will have you counting the days until she sets another story in the present day

  And, of course, mark your calendar and come back next month, when Silhouette Intimate Moments will once again bring you six of the most excitingly romantic novels you’ll ever find.

  Enjoy!

  Leslie J. Wainger

  Executive Senior Editor

  * * *

  Please address questions and book requests to.

  Silhouette Reader Service

  U.S.: 3010 Walden Ave , P.O Box 1325, Buffalo, NY 14269

  Canadian PO Box 609, Fort Ene, Ont. L2A 5X3

  * * *

  JUST ONE LOOK

  MARY McBRIDE

  Books by Mary McBride

  Silhouette Intimate Moments

  Just One Look #966

  Harlequin Historicals

  Riverbend #164

  Fly Away Home #189

  The Fourth of Forever #221

  The Sugarman #237

  The Gunslinger #256

  Forever and a Day #294

  Darling Jack #323

  Quicksilver’s Catch #375

  Storming Paradise #424

  The Marriage Knot #465

  Harlequin Books

  Outlaw Brides

  “The Ballad of Josie Dove”

  MARY McBRIDE

  When it comes to writing romance, Mary McBride is a natural. What else would anyone expect from someone whose parents met on a blind date on Valentine’s Day, and who met her own husband—whose middle name just happens to be Valentine—on February 14, as well?

  Although Just One Look is Mary’s first contemporary romance, she is no stranger to publishing. She has written ten historical romances for Harlequin Historicals, most recently The Marriage Knot, a June 1999 release.

  She lives in St. Lows, Missouri, with her husband and two sons. Mary loves to hear from readers. You can write to her c/o P.O. Box 411202, St. Louis, MO 63141.

  For Barbara M. Falk

  Thanks for the coffee, comfort and care.

  Chapter 1

  Sara Campbell never saw it coming.

  She was stuck in traffic three blocks from home, and once she got there she wasn’t going to leave again. Never. Ever. From now on, she was going to say no to therapy that didn’t help panic attacks, tranquilizers that never calmed her down, and all the dopey coping strategies that didn’t work.

  She was going home and she was going to stay there. Period.

  “You’re making a huge mistake,” Dr. Bourne had said just twenty minutes ago in his overheated, overdecorated office when Sara had told him this would be her final session. “Please reconsider, Sara.”

  “No, I won’t. Can’t you see the logic of it, Dr. Bourne? My problem is panic attacks, right? But I only have the attacks when I leave home. So, if I don’t leave home anymore, I’m cured.”

  Sara had added a tiny little ta-da to her declaration of independence, which hadn’t amused Dr. Bourne one bit. In fact, it had made the psychiatrist sit forward in his flame-stitched wing chair and positively glower over his tortoiseshell reading glasses.

  “This is serious,” he said.

  “I know. I’m very serious.”

  “You’re a young woman, Sara. You’re what...?” He glanced down at her file. “Thirty-one years old. Not only young, but attractive, too. You can’t just close the door on the world.”

  “Oh, no?” She grabbed her purse and stood. “Watch me.”

  Now she was just three blocks from home. In a minute or two, once the stalled traffic started up again, the big tires of her Land Cruiser, her fortress on wheels, would be sounding that familiar, homecoming crunch on the gravel drive. She was going to press the remote almost sensuously to open the garage door, then drive in slowly, turn off the ignition, pull out the key and close the door behind her. For good.

  The doctor was wrong. She wasn’t going to be a prisoner in her own house. She was going to be free.

  A raindrop splashed on the windshield, then another and another. Sara switched the wipers on and nudged up the heat against the November cold. It was perfect weather for a recluse, she thought. She’d build a fire in the den tonight, maybe put on her long and slinky black velour lounger, then fix herself a gooey grilled cheese sandwich and open a bottle of Merlot.

  She’d go to sleep peacefully tonight knowing there was nowhere she had to go tomorrow. Or the next day. Or the next. No more making up dumb excuses. No more last-minute cancellations when she couldn’t come up with a dumb excuse. No more worrying, stewing, fretting, sweating. Just no. No. No. No.

  The world would have to come to her from now on. And the beauty of it was that it could, compliments of IBM, AT&T, UPS and 1-800-Everything.

  The car behind her honked, making Sara realize she’d been sitting there for quite a while. She turned the wipers up a notch against the rain and peered at the two cars in front of her. Apparently the first one in line had stalled. Its driver, a huge man in a buffalo plaid jacket, was just getting out to glare at the motionless vehicle. After his glare accomplished nothing, he kicked the front tire and then walked around to open the hood.

  The car behind her honked again, this time a bit more aggressively. Her windows were beginning to fog up, but when Sara glanced in the rearview mirror she was able to see a rude middle finger stabbing in her direction. “O
h, great,” she muttered, sorely tempted just then to return the gesture as a kind of final salute to the world and all the honkers and bird flippers in it.

  She was too close to the car in front of her to maneuver around it. And even if she could, at almost rush hour, the oncoming traffic was already horrific, whizzing past on her left with barely a break in it. She was three blocks from home—home!—sanctuary!—and she was trapped.

  Then, to make matters worse, the rain changed to sleet, and instead of splashing gently on her windshield, it started hitting hard and accumulating on the wipers so that every pass across the glass only made it more difficult to see. Behind her, the idiot attached to the finger honked again. And again. Beep.

  Then it started. Sara’s heart picked up speed. Her grip on the steering wheel got slippery. Her vision blurred at the edges. Her breath came in short little gasps as the dark shroud of panic descended on her, threatening to smother her.

  “Oh, please, no. Not now. Not here.” She closed her eyes and clenched her teeth against the onslaught of the adrenaline rushing through her, her body’s dire signal of danger, what the shrinks called “fight or flight.” But she didn’t know how to fight it. Trapped like this, she couldn’t flee. It wasn’t fair. Not now. She was almost home. Almost safe. Almost free.

  Beep.

  She forced her eyes open and squinted through the slush on the windshield to see the man in the buffalo plaid jacket—a blur of red and black—drop the hood on his car and get in. A second later a plume of greasy smoke rose from his exhaust and the stalled car appeared to shiver slightly, then shimmy to life. The light turned green, and he chugged across the intersection.

  “Oh, thank God.” Sara tightened her clammy grasp on the wheel and pressed her foot on the Land Cruiser’s accelerator. The engine roared, but the Cruiser didn’t move.

  “What the...?”

  Her heart pumped even harder. What? Had her engine frozen? Was she out of gas? Was the Cruiser flooded or dead? What was wrong?

  She’d always meant to learn where the button for the hazard lights was located and how to lift the hood and change a tire and pump her own gas, but she hadn’t learned and she hadn’t put a blanket in the back or a shovel or granola bars or any of that winter emergency stuff. And this was definitely an emergency, since she hadn’t bothered to wear her heavy winter coat or her gloves or a hat. God! She didn’t even have panty hose on, let alone thick warm socks. Her fortress on wheels had suddenly become a chamber of horrors, and she was—

  “Oh.”

  She looked down and realized that she had put the car in parking gear when it seemed as if she’d be stuck there for a while. Quickly, she shifted into forward gear, stepped on the gas again, then—after going a mere ten or fifteen feet—slammed on the brakes when the amber caution light changed to a hideous red.

  Beep!

  She was only three blocks away, but she was never going to get home. There would be no ceremonial closing of the garage door. She wouldn’t be lighting a fire in the fireplace, or changing into her soft velour lounger, or reading in a comfy corner of her couch while she sipped a rich, full-bodied Merlot. She was going to be here forever—stopped at a permanent red light at this gray, slippery intersection with her palms dripping sweat and her head throbbing and her heart about to explode and some jerk behind her giving her the finger while he wasn’t laying on the horn.

  She was going to die!

  The light changed to green.

  Maybe she’d live after all. She could breathe, and drew in a long, deep breath just to prove it. Her head stopped throbbing and her heart felt more like a heart, not a bomb about to go off. Three blocks. Three minutes more. Four at the most. Then she’d be home for good. She’d be safe forever.

  She stepped on the gas. The back tires spun a second on the sleet-covered street, then grabbed.

  She was halfway across the intersection, but Sara never saw the pickup truck until it slammed into her left front fender.

  Joe Decker pumped the brakes, but the big unmarked Crown Victoria started to fishtail on the slick street in spite of his efforts and then nearly jumped the curb before he wrestled it to a halt.

  Beside him, his partner’s face went an even paler shade of white than it had been during their pursuit of the pickup. Sergeant Maggie O’Connor had braced for a crash, and when it hadn’t happened, she blistered him with one of her Irish curses.

  “Dammit, Decker! You suicidal son of a bitch. This guy isn’t worth dying for. Do you hear me?”

  He heard her but he didn’t reply because he was already out of the car and racing through the snarl of stopped traffic toward the intersection where the pickup had smashed into the black Land Cruiser. The street was like a skating rink under his feet, and for somebody who could still do a pretty good imitation of a four-minute mile, Joe felt as if he was going in slippery slow motion. Sleet pelted his unshaven cheeks, and his breath seemed to freeze in front of him as soon as it escaped.

  The closer he got to the intersection, the less space there was between vehicles. He vaulted over the hood of a Buick, then felt his feet going out from beneath him as he landed. He cursed all the way down to the cold, wet pavement, then cursed as he got back on his feet. The Buick’s driver rolled down his window and added a few choice words of his own, but Joe wasn’t listening because just up ahead he saw the hooded man exit the disabled pickup and lunge for the door of the Land Cruiser.

  He reached under his jacket for his gun. “Stop. Police.”

  The perp had already jerked open the Cruiser’s door and was trying to pull the female driver from her seat. Joe heard her shriek as he threaded the narrow spaces between cars, and all of a sudden he saw her reach up and rip the ski mask from her assailant’s face.

  “Turn around, you bastard,” Joe screamed. “I want to see your face just once before I blow it away.” He brought up his left hand to brace his right as he aimed his gun. Don’t move, lady, he prayed.

  But she did, dammit, and Joe had no choice but to lower his weapon and continue toward them. Where the hell was Maggie, anyway? He glanced quickly over his shoulder and saw that his partner was still in the car, calling for backup. He cursed roughly. By the time anybody got through this traffic, their man would be home, thumbing through the phone book for his next victim.

  Joe had almost reached the snarled intersection when the unmasked man pulled back his gloved fist and let the scrappy little woman have it right in the side of her head. They both went down out of Joe’s line of sight for a minute, and the next thing he saw was the perp—masked again—on the opposite side of the Land Cruiser and starting to run, slipping and sliding, east on Hartford toward Patriot’s Park.

  “That’s it, asshole,” Joe muttered. “I’ve got you now. I know every nook and cranny and culvert over there.”

  He was at the intersection, about to race around the Land Cruiser, when he saw the little redhead lying on the pavement. He stopped, absolutely still, while his heart bunched up in his chest and his breath chuffed out of his lungs.

  Edie? No, it couldn’t be. His wife had been dead for three years. For an instant, though, it was as if she was dying all over again, lying broken and bleeding on a winter street, sleet coming down and accumulating on her closed eyelids faster than he could wipe it away, and his tears freezing on her face and sirens—too late!—wailing in the cold distance.

  Everything around him disappeared... except the woman lying at his feet. Joe shrugged out of his jacket and knelt to blanket her as best he could, all the while thinking, Little idiot, didn’t anybody tell you to bundle up on a day like this? Where’s your plaid scarf with the fringe? Where’s your silly hat with the floppy tassel? Why didn’t you wear your gloves?

  Her hand was freezing as he clasped it in his own while he felt for a pulse. Yes! It was thready, but it was there. I won’t let you die. Not again.

  “Decker? She okay?”

  “Call an ambulance, Maggie.”

  “It’s already on the wa
y. Did you get a look at our guy?”

  Joe shook his head. “No.” He used his thumb to gently wipe the sleet from the woman’s pale eyelids. “But she did.”

  Chapter 2

  It was a sad fact of Lieutenant Joe Decker’s life that the emergency room of Saint Catherine’s was just about his second home. His name was even on the anteup-for-coffee list in the staff lounge. He folded a dollar bill and shoved it through the slot in the top of the jar before he poured the last inch of black sludge from the pot.

  “Where do you buy this stuff? Wanda’s Bait and Party Shop?” he grumbled after his first sip.

  “How’d you guess?” Lucy Mack was taking a break from her stint on triage, and she laughed out loud, a sound not heard all that often in this particular corner of Saint Cat’s, especially on an icy November night when business was brisk with fender benders and broken bones. She was a pretty blonde with soft blue eyes, an intriguing dimple in her chin and world-class ankles beneath her white stockings. Joe had thought more than once about asking her out sometime, but the thought had never quite progressed from his brain to his lips.

  “How’s the shoulder, Decker?” She grinned. “Met up with any more steel doors lately?”

  Just three weeks earlier he’d separated his shoulder during a drug bust when the Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms idiots forgot the battering ram and he’d underestimated the door in question. He’d gotten the sucker open, though, even if it had nearly torn him in half. “Good thing I didn’t use my head, huh?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe you should have.” Lucy laughed again, then her pretty face darkened in a frown. “That woman you brought in,” she said. “Did I hear somebody say that she actually saw the South Side Ripper?”