Holiday Homecoming. Mary Wilson Anne

      “How could I have destroyed your life?” Cain wanted to know

      Holly would have stood, but he was right there, and any move she made would have propelled her straight into him. She didn’t want to touch him, not now. “Please, this is ridiculous” was all she told him, sure she sounded as panicked as she felt. “I just need to go. Forget that I said anything. It doesn’t matter, not at all. Not anymore.”

      “You bet it does,” he said, the harshness in his words almost making her flinch. “You know, all my life people have accused me of things that they thought I did. From the start. Back at the orphanage. Right on through the rest of my life.” His eyes narrowed as he looked at her. “I hate the idea of you doing that, too. I really hate it.”

      She did flinch at that. She heard her own voice, but it sounded distant and odd.

      “Then we’re even, aren’t we?”

      Dear Reader,

      Cain Stone has always been a gambler and a risk taker. But when he goes home to Silver Creek and meets single mother Holly Winston, he realizes from the start that the gamble he takes getting close to her and her tiny daughter has higher odds than anything he’s ever known.

      Holly isn’t into taking chances. She’s tried it and paid for it. At this stage in her life, opening her heart to anyone is a risk she won’t take—until Cain Stone walks into her neatly arranged world.

      I’ve always been intrigued by the concept of opposites attracting, and when the stakes are high, this is even more compelling. In Holiday Homecoming, the third installment in my RETURN TO SILVER CREEK four-book series, opposites not only attract, they find themselves in a world neither has entered before. It’s all about love and all about trust, the very elements that neither has experienced.

      I hope you enjoy the journey of Holly and Cain as they find each other and each takes the biggest gamble of their life.

      Holiday Homecoming

      Mary Anne Wilson

      

www.millsandboon.co.uk

      For Joe Geisler

      For being part of our family, For being a terrific father.

      Love, Mary Anne

      Books by Mary Anne Wilson

      HARLEQUIN AMERICAN ROMANCE

      1003—PREDICTING RAIN? *

      1005—WINNING SARA’S HEART *

      1009—WHEN MEGAN SMILES… *

      1062—DISCOVERING DUNCAN †

      1078—JUDGING JOSHUA †

      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

       Epilogue

      Prologue

      Las Vegas, Nevada

      One month earlier

      “I’m not going back to Silver Creek,” Cain Stone said. “I don’t have the time—or the inclination to make the time. Besides, it’s not my home.”

      The man he was talking to, Jack Prescott, shook his head, then motioned with both hands at Caine’s sterile penthouse. It was done in black and white—black marble floors, white stone fireplace, white leather furniture. The only splash of color came from the sofa pillows, which were various shades of red. “And this is?”

      The Dream Catcher Hotel and Casino on the Strip in Las Vegas was a place to be. The place Cain worked. The part of the world that he owned. His place. But his home? No. He’d never had one. “It’s my place,” he said honestly.

      Jack, an angular man, with almost shoulder-length dark hair peppered with gray, who was dressed as usual in faded jeans, an open-necked navy shirt and his well-worn leather boots, leaned back in the semicircular couch to face the bank of windows that looked down on the city sprawling twenty stories below. “Cain, come on. You haven’t been back in years, and it’s the holidays.”

      “Bah, humbug,” Cain said with a slight smile, wishing that the feeble joke would ease the growing tension in him. A tension that had started when Jack had first asked him to return to Silver Creek. “You know that for people like us there are no holidays. They’re the heavy times in the year. I look forward to Christmas the way Ebenezer did. You get through it and make as much money as you can.”

      Jack didn’t respond with any semblance of a smile. Instead, he muttered, “God, you’re cynical.”

      “Realistic,” Cain amended with a shrug. “But is it so important to you that I go to Silver Creek now?”

      “Like I said, it’s the holidays, and that means friends. Josh is there, and Gordie, who’s at his clinic twenty-four hours a day. We can get drunk, ski down Main Street or take on Killer Run again. Whatever you want.”

      Jack, Josh and Gordie were as close to a family as Cain had had as a child. The orphanage hadn’t been anything out of Dickens, but it hadn’t been family. His three friends were. The four of them had done everything together, including getting into trouble and wiping out on Killer Run. “Tempting,” Cain said, a pure lie at that moment. “But no deal.”

      “I won’t stop asking,” Jack said.

      Cain stood and crossed to the built-in bar by the bank of windows. He ignored the alcohol and glasses and picked up a pack of unopened cards, one of several. He caught a glimpse of himself in the mirrors behind the bar