Mistletoe Mistress. HELEN BROOKS

bed.

      Other women, more worldly, experienced women, might be able to handle a man like Hawk and enjoy the challenge, but he frightened her half to death. She shut her eyes tightly in the warm darkness, her toes curling into the linen covers.

      Not that he had behaved as anything but the perfect gentleman on their ride home, seeing her to her door with a polite handshake and almost distant smile that would have sat well on a maiden aunt. In fact from the moment he had explained about the job one could almost have called his attitude cool, certainly formal... She refused to recognise even a shred of pique at his lack of interest. It suited her—the fact that he was concerned only with her ability to do the job he had in mind. It did. She knew only too well how the man-woman relationship, with all its complications, could prove a time bomb that ruined the lives of everyone within a mile radius.

      As though it were yesterday her mother’s face was there, pretty, irritated, as she had handed her over to the social worker at the home. ‘It will only be for a little while, Joanne.’ Her mother had clearly wished she were anywhere but in the neat, orderly office with officialdom present. ‘Just until Mummy gets a nice house to live in.’

      The ‘nice house’ had taken three years to achieve, three years in which she was moved from foster home to foster home, until, at the age of seven, her mother had married. Not again—she had never been married to Joanne’s father who had deserted his pregnant girlfriend once the good news was imparted—but for the first time. That marriage had lasted nine months, and by the time she was eight she was back in a foster home again, with the knowledge that her mother could barely wait to see the back of her.

      When she was nine her mother had married Bob, and it had been at his insistence that she was once again placed in her mother’s care.