Found: His Perfect Wife Read online

  “You’re trying too hard to remember, Luc,”

  Alison said, her tone sympathetic to his frustration. “Sometimes, memories come when you least expect them.”

  Luc turned around to face her. Something was nudging a thought in his mind. But it was shimmering just out of reach.

  “Yeah, maybe you’re right,” he said finally.

  He saw her smile and immediately felt something stir inside him in response. The smile was sensual, but innocent at the same time. More questions came to mind, but this time they had to do with her.

  Maybe she was the missing link—not just to his memory, but to his heart….

  MARIE FERRARELLA

  FOUND: HIS PERFECT WIFE

  To Sissie, For her friendship, Jessie’s mom

  Books by Marie Ferrarella

  Silhouette Special Edition

  It Happened One Night #597

  A Girl’s Best Friend #652

  Blessing in Disguise #675

  Someone To Talk To #703

  World’s Greatest Dad #767

  Family Matters #832

  She Got Her Man #843

  Baby in the Middle #892

  Husband: Some Assembly Required #931

  Brooding Angel #963

  ‡Baby’s First Christmas #997

  Christmas Bride #1069

  Wanted: Husband, Will Train #1132

  Wife in the Mail #1217

  Stand-In Mom #1294

  Found: His Perfect Wife #1310

  Silhouette Romance

  The Gift #588

  Five-Alarm Affair #613

  Heart to Heart #632

  Mother for Hire #686

  Borrowed Baby #730

  Her Special Angel #744

  The Undoing of Justin Starbuck #766

  Man Trouble #815

  The Taming of the Teen #839

  Father Goose #869

  Babies on His Mind #920

  The Right Man #932

  In Her Own Backyard #947

  Her Man Friday #959

  Aunt Connie’s Wedding #984

  †Caution: Baby Ahead #1007

  †Mother on the Wing #1026

  †Baby Times Two #1037

  Father in the Making #1078

  The Women in Joe Sullivan’s Life #1096

  ‡Do You Take This Child? #1145

  The Man Who Would Be Daddy #1175

  Your Baby or Mine? #1216

  **The Baby Came C.O.D. #1264

  Suddenly…Marriage! #1312

  ‡‡One Plus One Makes Marriage #1328

  ‡‡Never Too Late for Love #1351

  The Baby Beneath the Mistletoe #1408

  Silhouette Desire

  ‡Husband: Optional #988

  Silhouette Intimate Moments

  *Holding Out for a Hero #496

  *Heroes Great and Small #501

  *Christmas Every Day #538

  Callaghan’s Way #601

  *Caitlin’s Guardian Angel #661

  ‡Happy New Year—Baby! #686

  The Amnesiac Bride #787

  Serena McKee’s Back in Town #808

  A Husband Waiting to Happen #842

  Angus’s Lost Lady #853

  This Heart for Hire #919

  ††A Hero for All Seasons #932

  ††A Forever Kind of Hero #943

  ††Hero in the Nick of Time #956

  Silhouette Yours Truly

  ‡The 7lb., 2oz. Valentine

  Let’s Get Mommy Married

  Traci on the Spot

  Mommy and the Policeman Next Door

  **Desperately Seeking Twin…

  The Offer She Couldn’t Refuse

  ΔFiona and the Sexy Stranger

  ΔCowboys Are for Loving

  ΔWill and the Headstrong Female

  ΔThe Law and Ginny Marlow

  ΔA Match for Morgan

  Silhouette Books

  ‡In The Family Way

  ‡The Baby of the Month Club: Baby Talk

  Silhouette Christmas Stories 1992

  “The Night Santa Claus Returned”

  Fortune’s Children

  Forgotten Honeymoon

  The Fortunes of Texas

  Expecting…In Texas

  World’s Most Eligible Bachelors

  ‡Detective Dad

  Books by Marie Ferrarella writing as Marie Nicole

  Silhouette Desire

  Tried and True #112

  Buyer Beware #142

  Through Laughter and Tears #161

  Grand Theft: Heart #182

  A Woman of Integrity #197

  Country Blue #224

  Last Year’s Hunk #274

  Foxy Lady #315

  Chocolate Dreams #346

  No Laughing Matter #382

  Silhouette Romance

  Man Undercover #373

  Please Stand By #394

  Mine by Write #411

  Getting Physical #440

  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

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Epilogue

  Prologue

  Terrific, just terrific.

  For the first time in a very long time, he felt like having a drink. But that wouldn’t help anything. It was because he’d taken a drink—several drinks—that he was in this predicament to begin with.

  “Bad news?”

  Luc LeBlanc looked over his shoulder to see his cousin Ike standing behind him. The Salty, the saloon they both owned and Ike ran, was nearly empty this time of day.

  Ike had been watching his cousin for a while now. He indicated the letter lying on the table in front of him.

  Luc drew the letter closer to him. “What makes you ask that?”

  “The vein in your neck looked like it was going to pop out just then.” Without waiting to be invited, Ike turned the letter toward him and scanned the contents. They were closer than brothers and there were no secrets between them. For that matter, there were precious few in a town the size of Hades. It was average only by Alaskan standards. Coming to the portion that had Luc silently swearing, Ike raised his eyes to look at his cousin. “Wow, what makes Jacob think you’re—?”

  “Married?” Luc shrugged, looking off. “Might have been something I said when I ran into him in Anchorage.”

  “Well, if you want to save face, looks like you might have to go on a wife hunt.” Ike grinned. “I’d lend you mine but I’m just getting the hang of being a husband myself and I might lose my place if I let you borrow Marta for appearance’s sake.” He grew serious. “What are you going to do?”

  Luc stared down at the letter. “I don’t know.”

  “This,” Ike said as he got up to get the bar ready for the mine workers who came in to the Salty Saloon at noon, “is going to be interesting.”

  Interesting wouldn’t have been the word he would have used, Luc thought. Frustration surged through him. He resisted the urge to crumple the letter. Crumpling it wouldn’t make the problem go away. It was coming via an airplane in a little more than three weeks. Both of them were coming.

  Served him right. He’d lied; now he was going to have to pay for it. Which meant owning up to the truth.

  Something he wasn’t looking forward to.

  He’d lived with and by the truth all his life, not fan
atically, but just because it was his way. To his recollection, the lie he’d allowed to slip out in a moment of pure, unadulterated weakness had been the only one he’d ever told.

  People lied every day, even here in Hades. Especially here in Hades, he thought, where boredom almost demanded it. It was a form of creative art in this tiny town hovering a hundred miles away from Anchorage. None of the townsfolk had probably ever had to face up to the fact that they had lied to someone who had once, when life was simpler, been their best friend.

  But he had lied to Jacob and now he was going to have to admit it.

  What he needed, Luc decided, wasn’t a drink. It was to get away. Both were only temporary fixes, but a trip would do him far more good than alcohol. Maybe now was the time for that visit to Seattle he’d been promising himself.

  He rolled it over in his head. Seattle. Sure, why not?

  It might just be the thing to help him pull his thoughts together and figure out how to handle this without completely humiliating himself.

  Chapter One

  The indignant scream sliced through his thoughts like a newly honed scalpel.

  By the time the angry barrage of words had followed in the scream’s wake, Jean-Luc LeBlanc had already whirled around on his heel and was running to the rescue. The reaction was purely instinctive, without so much as a shred of thought on his part to slow him down. Certainly it didn’t occur to him that a threat here on the streets of Seattle was something quite different from a threat in Hades, Alaska. There, more than likely, danger came from four-legged creatures or merciless weather. In the lower forty-nine, danger walked on two legs and could be just as merciless as any act of nature. Sometimes even more.

  Luc didn’t stop to reason out anything, or weigh pros and cons. None of that mattered. Someone needed help and Luc was close by. That was enough for him.

  It took only a moment to orient himself. Behind him in the alley, the taxi driver—who’d picked him up at the airport and had just, less than half a minute earlier, dropped him off near the hotel where he would be staying—was fighting someone off. The attacker was in the front seat of the cab, grappling with her. Something flashed, catching the light.

  The man had a knife.

  Luc threw aside his suitcase, running faster. “Let her go!”

  The voice, deep and dangerous, seemed almost incongruous with his open, blond good looks. But he had the build and the muscles to back up the warning in his voice. Reaching the cab, Luc grabbed the would-be mugger by the back of the neck and roughly hauled him out. He threw the mugger aside as if the man was nothing more than an undesirable, miserable rag.

  Caught by surprise, the man’s knife flew out of his hand. He went crashing into the broad side of a Dumpster housed against the rear of a tall building opposite the back of the hotel. Luc could almost feel the man’s brains rattling as his head made contact with the metal side.

  His eyes still on the mugger, Luc stooped to pick up the fallen knife, meaning to toss it out of play.

  Shrieking a curse that was almost intelligible, the mugger scrambled to his feet and lunged himself at Luc. Rather than throw it, Luc could only kick the knife aside. With the wind knocked out of him, Luc still managed to gain his feet quickly. He raised his fists to defend himself the way he’d learned when he was barely into his teens.

  Luc heard the cabdriver yell and realized a heartbeat later that it was a warning. The warning melded with the sudden, excruciating pain crashing down on his skull.

  And then everything went black.

  Damn it, she shouldn’t have parked here.

  She should have known better. But the street out in front of the Embassy Hotel was being torn up in both directions. The ongoing reconstruction of MacArthur Boulevard had forced her to pull the cab around to an alley that was best left to inhabitants of the night and to burly deliverymen driving large trucks. The alley certainly wasn’t any place for a recently graduated nursing student who drove her brother’s taxi in an attempt to earn a little money.

  One eye on the fight, her heart pounding double time, Alison Quintano looked frantically around for a patrol car, but there was none in sight. It figured.

  Swearing, she grabbed the lid of a trash can and hurled it at the second mugger who had appeared out of nowhere. The arm that had her older brothers swearing should have belonged to a first draft baseball rookie remained true and she clipped the second mugger on the back of the head, throwing him off balance. But not before the man had knocked out her recent fare.

  Fury was in the man’s eyes as he swung around. Reflexes had him clutching at the back of his head. When he looked at his hand, there was blood. “Son of a bitch, I’m going to make you pay for that.”

  He started after her, only to have his partner yell at him. “Ain’t got time for that.” He rifled through the prone man’s pockets. “We’ve gotta get out of here!”

  The second mugger looked torn. Common sense prevailed and he followed the first man, stopping only to grab the fallen suitcase. Running down the alley, they disappeared.

  Alison fought back the desire to chase after them. That would be stupid. There wasn’t anything she could do. Besides, there were two of them, and while not big, they could still easily overpower her. Look what they had done to her fare.

  Abandoning the thought of pursuit, she hurried over to her Good Samaritan.

  The man was flat on his stomach.

  She got a sick feeling in hers.

  Dropping to her knees, she placed her fingertips to the side of his neck. A pulse. She released the breath that had gotten clogged in her lungs at the sight of his unconscious body.

  He was alive, but out cold. The second mugger had come up on him from behind, hitting him over the head with what looked like a kid’s bat. How much damage was there? Very gently she rolled the man onto his back. Gingerly she pried apart his eyelids one at a time. His pupils didn’t appear to be dilated, but that could still change.

  Except for one cut over his left eye and what looked like the beginning of a nasty bruise on his cheek, it looked as if her Good Samaritan hadn’t been too seriously hurt.

  She hoped.

  Placing her hand lightly on his shoulder, she gently tried to rouse him without success.

  “Are you all right?” She leaned in closer so that he could hear her. “Mister, can you hear me? Are you all right?”

  He lay still and unresponsive.

  This wasn’t good.

  Worried, Alison looked around, but there was absolutely no one walking by the alley’s opening. Murphy’s Law. It seemed almost impossible, given that she was practically in the heart of Seattle.

  For a second, she debated trying to wake him again. Maybe she should just go for help. To do the latter, she’d have to leave him and she was reluctant. He was unconscious and couldn’t defend himself, and while crime didn’t exactly run rampant in the streets, they had just been mugged. She didn’t want to take any more chances. The man was unconscious and that made him her responsibility.

  Alison settled on trying to raise her brother on the two-way radio in the cab. She glanced at her watch. Almost two, but it was still considered lunchtime by a few. If she had any sort of luck left, Kevin should still be in his office.

  This was going to make her brother blow his top, she thought. He hadn’t been keen on her taking the part-time position to begin with, never mind that it was with the cab company he owned. She was the baby of the family and everyone was always being protective of her.

  Except once, but that had been no one’s fault.

  Right now, she was far more concerned with her Good Samaritan than her brother’s reaction. She’d deal with that later. As she began to rise, she saw the man’s eyes flutter slightly.

  He was coming around.

  The next second, he opened his eyes. She hadn’t realized, when she’d glanced back at him in her rearview mirror earlier, just how blue his eyes were.

  Alison sucked in air, and then exhaled it again, in alm
ost a sigh of relief.

  “You’re awake.” Relief was short-lived as her training reared its head again. Just because his eyes were open didn’t mean he was all right—not by a long shot. Sympathy flooded her. At the very least, the man had to have one mother of a headache. “How do you feel? That was some wallop he gave you.”

  It took him a second to realize she was talking to him. He’d been too mesmerized by what he saw to absorb any of the words. He’d opened his eyes to find himself looking up at an angel. An angel with an abundance of dark, chestnut-colored wavy hair and eyes the color of the sky that was above her head.

  She was talking about someone hitting him. “Who?”

  He looked a little disoriented. Under the circumstances she couldn’t blame him. “The mugger.”

  “Mugger?” He struggled to sit up, feeling as if there was an anvil on his forehead.

  Maybe he hadn’t put two and two together yet, she thought. Taking his hand, she slowly helped him into a sitting position, watching his face carefully. “Yeah, there was another one.”

  He was trying to make sense of what she was saying to him and having very little luck. “Another one.”

  The unease slowly began to return. “Why are you repeating everything I say?”

  Luc passed a hand over his forehead. “Just trying to get a clear picture in my mind.”

  Or any picture, he thought. God, but his head ached. The pain was crowding out any thoughts he was trying to grasp, squeezing them away.

  Looking at his eyes, Alison sat back on her heels. “Anybody would be muddled after going through what you just did.” The blank look on his face had her adding, “Coming to my rescue like that was nothing short of sheer bravery.” Something straight out of King Arthur, her favorite section of literature. She smiled at him. “Don’t see much of that these days.” Guilt began to nibble at her again. He did look rather out of it. “Sorry you seemed to have gotten the worst of it. I beamed the second guy with a garbage can lid, but it didn’t seem to hurt him very much. Man probably had a head made out of stone, which would be in keeping with his Neanderthal behavior.” And then she smiled at her rescuer. “Not like you.”