Rachel Lee – His Pregnant Courthouse Bride (страница 1)
Playing House Or Playing For Keeps?
Motorcycle-riding judge Wyatt Carter runs his life by the book...mostly. But when his old friend Amber Towers calls him in need, he doesn’t hesitate to help her, even though inviting the single and secretly pregnant lawyer to stay in his house has suddenly made him the scandal of Conard County!
Wyatt is the port in Amber’s stormy situation. Even though their friendship sizzles with an underlying attraction, she has to steer clear, because she is pregnant—and he is headed into an important election! But why, this time, does it seem like Wyatt and Amber are willing—no, eager!—to give the town something to talk about?
“Maybe you just need a break from it all. There’s been a lot to deal with.”
“Maybe.”
“No maybe about it,” Wyatt said. “You were awfully clinical when you called me and told me you were in a mess.”
She gazed into his face, reading his concern but more, his kindness. He’d always accepted her just as she was, and he was doing it right now.
He touched her cheek, and a pleasant shiver ran through her. Well, at least she could still feel that. It would have been so easy to just fall into his arms. Because she wanted to know what it would feel like to rest her head on his shoulder. To feel his lips on hers. To feel his skin against hers. To feel him filling the emptiness inside her.
She’d always wanted to know.
* * *
Conard County: The Next Generation
His Pregnant Courthouse Bride
Rachel Lee
RACHEL LEE was hooked on writing by the age of twelve and practiced her craft as she moved from place to place all over the United States. This New York Times bestselling author now resides in Florida and has the joy of writing full-time.
Contents
Circuit Judge Wyatt Carter had just finished a pleasant dinner at home, a too-rare occurrence, because he lived alone and was generally too busy to take the time to indulge in cooking. But this was a quiet Sunday evening after a comfortable day of catching up on his reading, and he’d made the effort to cook chicken Alfredo for himself and enjoyed it with a glass of pinot grigio. He felt somewhat self-indulgent, but considering how little time he had for indulgences, he didn’t feel guilty.
When the phone rang, he assumed it was his father. Earl Carter ran the family law practice, although lately it had shrunk because Earl was getting older and didn’t take as many cases. Earl seemed content enough to let the practice contract even though he’d once said it was his legacy to his son. Then Wyatt had become a circuit court judge, and the plans of a father-son practice had melted away.
But it was not his father, much to his surprise. It was a voice out of the past.
“Wyatt?”
He recognized Amber Towers’s voice. They’d kept in touch over the last decade, mostly by email and occasional phone calls. Amber had moved on from law school to a large firm in St. Louis, then recently to a much bigger firm in Chicago, headed for the heights. Wyatt, who had graduated two years ahead of her, had joined the military and spent three years in the judge advocate general’s office. Then he’d come back to out-of-the-way Conard County to fulfill his father’s dream of a shared practice.
He and Amber had once been very close friends, although nothing more than that, and since then they’d maintained a long-distance friendship, except for dinner or lunch at a bar association conference.
Now he heard her voice with astonishment, since she hadn’t called in ages, and concern popped into his mind. “Amber? What’s wrong?”
“You’re never going to believe it. I’m in a mess. Got an hour or so?”
“Of course.”
His mind dived down the byways of memory, recalling Amber as he had first seen her. She was young for a first-year law student, having gone to college two years early and finishing her bachelor’s degree in three years.
She had, in short, been barely nineteen. He’d been twenty-seven, because he’d taken a couple of years after college to try his hand at other things before going to law school. She’d been very pretty, so pretty that every guy who wasn’t already married—and some who were—chased her. He hadn’t chased. It wasn’t that he hadn’t found her attractive, but facing his tour with the military in exchange for them paying his law school expenses, he felt it was the wrong time to get involved, especially since the direction she wanted to take was far from his path. He’d also felt that given the difference in their ages, it might be close to cradle robbing. Amber had seemed so young to him then.
So they’d become friends over textbooks and in oral arguments. He’d mentored her, having already taken the classes she was in, and she’d challenged him with her sharp mind.
A lovely woman barely emerging from adolescence, with dark hair, a pleasant figure and a face that had been pretty but painfully young. Of one thing he had been sure, though: Amber would rise to the top. He wouldn’t have been surprised if she reached the Supreme Court.
But now she was in trouble?
He poured himself another glass of wine, carried it to his easy chair and prepared to listen.
It didn’t take an hour, either. Amber was indeed in a mess.
“I think this is a bad idea,” Earl Carter told his son, not for the first time in the last month.
“Amber needs a place to get her feet under her, Dad,” Wyatt answered. The two men were sharing a beer at the kitchen table as they had so many times over the years.
“People will talk, a strange woman moving in with you.”
“Dad, it’s the twenty-first century.”
Earl snorted. “Not in a lot of places in this county it isn’t, Wyatt. Dang, you’re a judge! Decorum and all that.”
Wyatt hid a smile behind his beer bottle. Clearly Earl was one of those who hadn’t quite come into the new century. But while he never would have admitted it to his father, he wasn’t so sure about having Amber here, either.
First off, she was a city gal, and Conard City was barely a blip on the map. Secondly, they’d been friends in law school over ten years ago. A bunch of keeping-in-touch emails and an occasional phone call didn’t mean he really knew the woman she had become. Nor could he know how all those years at huge law firms might have changed her.
“Maybe I should move back in,” Earl said. He’d moved out after Wyatt had come back from his years with the judge advocate general’s office, because—as he’d said at the time—he was tired of keeping up the huge old family house, and besides, what woman would want to marry a man who was living with his father?
“I don’t need a chaperone,” Wyatt said now.
“Maybe you need a headshrinker.” Earl leaned back, his comfortable belly stretching his white shirt. He’d come directly from his law office, where he still wore a suit every single day. A Western-cut suit with a bolo tie, to be sure, but still a suit. He often evinced disapproval of his son’s penchant for wearing jeans beneath his judicial robe. Of course, he voiced plenty of disapproval for Wyatt’s motorcycle, too. “Look, son, it hasn’t been that long since you broke it off with Ellie.”