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“I’ll be right back,” he lied. “You stay where you are and wait for me,” he hastily added so she wouldn’t get the notion she could follow him the way she used to and drive him daft with her complaints until he gave in to whatever it was she wanted. He smiled when he realized she was more stubborn and strong-willed than he was.

Pausing at the entrance, he called out, “You know I love you, girl, don’t you?”

“Yes, I know. I love you too, Uncle Morgan.”

He started up the stairs then, but stopped when he heard the door open behind him. He didn’t have to turn around to know who was there.

“You’ll treat her well.” It wasn’t a question but a statement of fact.

“Yes, sir, I will.”

“You don’t deserve her.”

“I know I don’t, but I’m keeping her anyway.”

“You know, son, you remind me of someone, but I can’t think who it is.” He shook his head in bewilderment and then suggested, “You’d best get on inside before she floods my hall with her tears. If anyone could do it, she could.”

At the sound of her uncle’s laughter, she glanced up and saw Brodick standing in the entrance, watching her. She stood up then and took a step toward him.

“You came back.”

“I never left.”

As though drawn by a magnet, they moved toward one another.

“You were angry with me. I saw it in your eyes.”

“Yes, I was angry. I didn’t know if I could keep you safe, and that scared the hell out of me.”

He was close enough to take her into his arms, but he didn’t dare touch her yet because he knew that once he started kissing her, he wouldn’t stop, and he needed to mend the hurt he had caused her. Telling her what was in his heart seemed so easy to him now, and he couldn’t understand why he’d been such a fool. Love didn’t weaken a man; it strengthened him, made him feel invincible when he had a woman like Gillian at his side.

“I thought you went home.”

“How could I go home without you? I’ve searched my entire life for you. I could never leave you. Home is wherever you are.” His hand shook as he gently caressed the side of her face. “Don’t you understand? I love you, and I want to wake up with you beside me every morning for the rest of my life. If that means I have to live in England to be with you, then that’s what I’ll do.”

Tears of joy brimmed in her eyes. She was overwhelmed by the depth of his feelings for her and the tender, romantic way he’d told her how he felt.

She knew it was difficult for him. He hid his feelings behind his gruff exterior. She realized then she knew him better than he knew himself. It didn’t matter that he’d broken out in a cold sweat or that he looked quite ill now; he’d given her what she needed. Aye, he’d said the words, and he couldn’t take them back.

“Say it again,” she whispered.

Gritting his teeth, he did as she asked. “I’ll live in England.”

She blinked. “What?”

“Ah, love, don’t make me say it again. If it makes you happy, we’ll live here.”

She knew he meant it and was staggered by the sacrifice this dear, gentle man was willing to make for her. Lord, she needed to kiss him, but she decided to put him out of his misery first.

“Will it make you happy to live in England?”

Her poor, distraught husband was rapidly turning gray. “If I’m with you, I’ll be happy.”

She began to laugh. “Then I’m about to make you delirious. I don’t want to live in England. I want to live with the Buchanans. Take me home.”

An Exciting Interview With Julie Garwood

Heartbreaker is a contemporary romantic suspense novel. This is something new for you. What made you decide to make the transition from historical fiction to contemporary suspense?

The deciding factor is always the story. The idea for this book came to me a couple of years ago. I was attending a church service in London, and—I hesitate to admit—my mind began to wander, as it sometimes is prone to do. I was glancing around at the incredible architecture surrounding me, and I noticed the ornate confessional against the wall. That’s when a story began to take shape. I’ve been letting it percolate ever since that day. It’s a thriller and a mystery and a love story all at the same time, and while I love the historicals, this is a story that could be told only in a contemporary setting.

Do you think that the type of characters you create, in a fundamental way, are the same in both the historical and the contemporary?

It’s my belief that human nature hasn’t changed all that much over the centuries. The people of the Middle Ages had the same basic concerns that we do now. They wanted to find love; they cared and worried about their families, etc. —It’s just the world outside that’s changed.

Tell us a little about the characters from Heartbreaker. Where did you get your inspiration?

My characters are created from the initial scene that inspires the book. Once I’ve visualized that particular scene, the people who will play a part in the story begin to come to life. In Heartbreaker, the two main characters are Laurant and Nick. Laurant is a strong woman, but she is also quite vulnerable and looking for some stability in her life. Having grown up in Europe virtually alone, she is searching for the one place she feels she truly belongs. She believes she’s found it in Holy Oaks, Iowa. Nick, on the other hand, comes from a large, nurturing family, and his roots are deep and strong, but as a result of his work with the FBI, he’s developed calluses on his heart and has learned to guard his feelings. When danger brings them together, the lives they’ve chosen are turned upside down.

The plot of Heartbreaker is very gritty and edgy. How did you research the book?

I’ve been reading as many books on profiling and the criminal mind as I can find. I’ve also interviewed FBI agents, psychologists, and priests, and they’ve been very helpful and patient as I pester them with endless questions.

Do you find the Internet to be useful in your research?

I still go to books for in-depth research, but the Internet gives me immediate answers when I’m looking for a quick response to a detail question.

Speaking of the Internet, do you have your own Web page?

Yes. For some time I’ve had an ongoing Web site at www.SimonandSchuster.com/garwood but I’m in the process of developing another one and I’m really excited about it. The new site—www.juliegarwood.com—is going to have lots for the viewers to see and do, and I’m hoping they’ll want to visit it often.

Your Irish Catholic upbringing seems to have played an important role in your life. Is there a little piece of you or those you love in all your characters?

I think it’s inevitable that writers put a little of themselves in every book they write. I’ve often been accused of passing on my warped sense of humor to my characters. And, since I grew up in a large Irish Catholic family, I think it’s only natural that their influence shows up in my work.

Now that you’ve written your first contemporary novel, do you think you’ll ever go back to writing historicals?

I love history, and I love writing stories set against exciting historical backdrops. So I don’t think I’ll ever stop writing them. But I also have a number of contemporary stories I’m dying to tell. I just hope I can find the time to do them all.

Speaking of more books, what is the next project you are working on?

I have two ideas I’m working on. One is a follow-up to Saving Grace, a medieval I wrote several years ago. And the other is a contemporary that involves the brother of Nick, the hero in Heartbreaker. As I was creating the characters for the book, something funny happened. Nick’s large New England family of six brothers and sisters began to fascinate me. Even though they don’t play a large part in Heartbreaker, I know them inside and out. Some of them have already had incredible lives, and some of them have some real adventures ahead of them. I’d love to write one of their stories. I’ll keep working on both ideas until one of

them pushes its way to the front.

POCKET BOOKS

PROUDLY PRESENTS

Heartbreaker

JULIE GARWOOD

Coming soon in hardcover

from Pocket Books

The following is a preview of

Heartbreaker . . . .

It was hotter than hell inside the confessional. A thick black curtain, dusty with age and neglect, covered the narrow opening from the ceiling of the box to the scarred hardwood floor, blocking out both the daylight and the air.

It was very much like being inside a coffin someone had absentmindedly left propped up against the wall, and Father Thomas Madden thanked God he wasn’t claustrophobic. He was rapidly becoming miserable, though. The air was heavy and ripe with mildew, making his breathing as labored as when he was back at Penn State running that last yard to the goalposts, with the football tucked neatly under his arm. He hadn’t minded the pain in his lungs then and he certainly didn’t mind it now. It was all simply part of the job.

The old priests would tell him to offer his discomfort up to God for the poor souls in purgatory. Tom didn’t see any harm in doing that, even though he wondered how his own misery was going to relieve anyone else’s.

He shifted his position on the hard oak chair, squirming like a choirboy at Sunday practice. He could feel the sweat dripping down the sides of his face and neck into his cassock. The long black robe was soaked through with perspiration, and he sincerely doubted he smelled at all like the hint of Irish Spring soap he’d used in the shower this morning.

The temperature outside hovered between ninety-four and ninety-five degrees in the shade of the rectory porch, where the thermostat was nailed to the whitewashed stone wall. The humidity made the heat so oppressive that those unfortunate souls forced to leave their air-conditioned homes and venture outside did so with a slow shuffle and a quick temper.

It was a lousy day for the compressor to bite the dust. There were windows in the church, of course, but the ones that could have been opened had been sealed shut long ago in a futile attempt to keep the vandals out. The two others were high up in the gold domed ceiling. They were stained-glass depictions of the archangels Gabriel and Michael holding gleaming swords in their fists. Gabriel was looking up toward Heaven, a beatific expression on his face, while Michael scowled at the snakes he held pinned down with his bare feet. The colored windows were considered priceless prayer-inspiring works of art by the congregation, but they were useless in combating the heat. They had been added for decoration, not ventilation.

Tom was a big, strapping man with a seventeen-and-a-half-inch neck left over from his glory days, but he was cursed with baby-sensitive skin. The heat was giving him a prickly rash. He hiked the cassock up to his thighs, revealing the red-and-white happy-face boxer shorts his sister, Laurant, had given him, kicked off his paint-splattered Wal-Mart rubber thongs, and popped a piece of Dubble Bubble into his mouth.

An act of kindness had landed him in the sweatbox. While waiting for the test results that would determine if he needed another round of chemotherapy at Kansas University Medical Center, he was a guest of Monsignor MacKindry, pastor of Our Lady of Mercy Church. The parish was located in the forgotten sector of Kansas City, several hundred miles south of Holy Oaks, Iowa, where Tom was stationed. The neighborhood had been officially designated as the gang zone by the mayor’s task force. The monsignor always took Saturday-afternoon confession, but because of the blistering heat, his advanced age, the broken air conditioner, and a conflict in his schedule—the pastor was busy preparing for his reunion with two friends from seminary days at Assumption Abbey—Tom had volunteered for the duty. He had assumed he’d sit face-to-face with his penitent in a room with a couple of windows open for fresh air. MacKindry, however, bowed to the preferences of his faithful parishioners, who stubbornly clung to the old-fashioned way of hearing confessions, a fact Tom learned only after he’d offered his services and Lewis, the parish handyman, had directed him to the oven he would sit in for the next ninety minutes.

In appreciation, the monsignor had lent him a thoroughly inadequate, battery-operated fan that one of his flock had put in the collection basket. The thing was no bigger than a man’s hand. Tom adjusted the angle of the fan so that the air would blow directly on his face, leaned back against the wall, and began to read the Holy Oaks Gazette he’d brought along to Kansas City.

He turned to the society page on the back first because he got such a kick out of it. He glanced over the usual club news and the smattering of announcements—two births, three engagements, and a wedding—and then he found his favorite column called “About Town.” The headline was always the same: the bingo game. The number of people who attended the community center’s bingo night was reported, along with the names of the winners of the twenty-five-dollar jackpots. Interviews with the lucky recipients followed, telling what each of them planned to do with his or her windfall. And there was always a comment by Rabbi Jim Spears, who organized the weekly event, about what a good time everyone had had. Tom was suspicious that the society editor, Lorna Hamburg, had a secret crush on Rabbi Spears, a widower, and that was why the bingo game was so prominently featured in the paper. The rabbi said the same thing every week, and Tom invariably ribbed him about that when they played golf together on Wednesday afternoons. Since Jim usually beat the socks off him, he didn’t mind the teasing, but he did accuse Tom of trying to divert attention from his appalling game.

The rest of the column was dedicated to letting everyone in town know who was entertaining company and what they were feeding them. If the news that week was hard to come by, Lorna filled in the space with popular recipes.

There weren’t any secrets in Holy Oaks. The front page was full of news about the proposed town square development and the upcoming centennial celebration at Assumpion Abbey. And there was a nice mention about his sister helping out at the abbey. The reporter called her a tireless and cheerful volunteer and described at some length all the projects she had taken on. Not only was she going to eliminate all the clutter in the attic, but she was also going to transfer all the information from the old dusty files to their newly donated computer. When she had a few minutes to spare, she would be translating the French journals of Father Andre Vankirk, a priest who had died recently. Tom chuckled to himself as he finished reading the glowing testimonial to his sister. Laurant hadn’t actually volunteered for any of the jobs. She just happened to be walking past the abbot the moment he came up with the ideas and, gracious to a fault, couldn’t refuse.

By the time Tom finished reading the rest of the paper, his soaked collar was sticking to his neck. He put the paper on the seat next to him, mopped his brow again, and contemplated closing shop fifteen minutes early.

He gave up the idea almost as soon as it entered his mind. He knew that if he left the confessional early, he’d catch hell from the monsignor, and after the hard day of manual labor he’d put in, he simply wasn’t up to a lecture. On the first Wednesday of every third month—Ash Wednesday, he silently called it—Tom moved in with Monsignor MacKindry, an old, broken-nosed, crackle-skinned Irishman who never missed an opportunity to get as much physical labor as he could possibly squeeze out of his houseguest in seven days. MacKindry was crusty and gruff, but he had a heart of gold and a compassionate nature that wasn’t compromised by sentimentality. He firmly believed that idle hands were the devil’s workshop, especially when the rectory was in dire need of a fresh coat of paint. Hard work, he pontificated, would cure anything, even cancer.

Some days Tom had a hard time remembering why he liked the monsignor so much or felt a kinship toward him. Maybe it was because they both had a bit of Irish in them. Or maybe it was because the old man’s philosophy—that only a fool cried over spilt milk—had sustained him through more hardships than Job. Tom’s battle was child’s play compared to MacKindry’s life.

He would do whatever he could to help lighten MacKindry’s burdens. The monsignor was looking

forward to visiting with his old friends again. One of them was Abbot James Rockhill, Tom’s superior at Assumption Abbey, and the other, Vincent Moreno, was a priest Tom had never met. However, neither Rockhill nor Moreno would be staying at Mercy House with MacKindry and Tom, for they much preferred the luxuries provided by the staff at Holy Trinity parish, luxuries like hot water that lasted longer than five minutes and central air-conditioning. Trinity was located in the heart of a bedroom community on the other side of the state line separating Missouri from Kansas. MacKindry jokingly referred to it as “Our Lady of the Lexus,” and from the number of designer cars parked in the church’s lot on Sunday mornings, the label was right on the mark. Most of the parishioners at Mercy didn’t own cars; they walked to church.

Tom’s stomach began to rumble. He was hot and sticky and thirsty. He needed another shower, and he wanted a cold Bud Light. There hadn’t been a single taker all the while he’d been sitting there roasting like a turkey. He didn’t think anyone else was even inside the church now, except maybe Lewis, who liked to hide in the cloakroom behind the vestibule and sneak sips of rot whiskey from the bottle in his toolbox. Tom checked his watch, saw he only had a couple of minutes left, and decided he’d had enough. He switched off the light above the confessional and was reaching for the curtain when he heard the swoosh of air the leather kneeler expelled when weight was placed upon it. The sound was followed by a discreet cough from the confessor’s cell next to him.

Tom immediately straightened in his chair and took the gum out of his mouth and put it back in the wrapper. Then he bowed his head in prayer and slid the wooden panel up.

“In the name of the Father and of the Son . . .” he began in a low voice as he made the sign of the cross.

Several seconds passed in silence. The penitent was either gathering his thoughts or his courage before he confessed his transgressions. Tom adjusted the stole around his neck and patiently continued to wait.



Tags: Julie Garwood Highlands' Lairds Romance