The Playboy Doctor Claims His Bride. Janice Lynn

her only one-night stand stood in her workplace.

      Panic clutched at her throat, rendering her speechless.

      This wasn’t really happening. History would not repeat itself. Not that she’d had a one-night stand with Randall. No, she’d given the bastard an entire year of her life. A whole wasted year where she’d dreamed of them being the perfect couple, having the perfect life together. Boy, had she been wrong.

      About them being a perfect couple at any rate. With or without a man in her life, she was going to have the perfect life. She’d set goals and worked long hours to make sure they came true.

      “When did you meet?” Delight sparkled in Dr. Douglas’s blue eyes.

      “A few months ago.” Eric’s gaze bored into Kasey. Was he waiting for her to acknowledge the night they’d spent together? Did he really think she’d do that? Lord, she just wanted to forget that night had ever happened. Had spent two months trying to forget.

      Unfortunately, forgetting the best sex she’d ever had wasn’t proving an easy task.

      Images of that best sex flashed into her head like candid shots portraying the man standing before her in living color.

      Hot, lurid, take-her-to-another-world best sex images.

      Fire engulfed her face. She lifted her hand to fan the burn, realized what she was doing, and stopped.

      “You met Eric and didn’t tell me?” Jonathan’s dark blond brow arched.

      This wasn’t happening.

      Kasey roped her uncooperative vocal cords into submission. “Why would I mention we’d met? He was just someone I met—” mere hours after laying my estranged mother in the ground “—and I didn’t know the two of you knew each other.” Because he and I really didn’t do a lot of in-depth talking.

      Eric’s smile slipped. “Why indeed?”

      She tried not to look at him, but an inner force compelled her. His chocolate eyes appeared thoughtful, as if he was trying to read her, to gauge how to take her response.

      What would her sexy lover have said, done, had she still been in his bed when he’d awakened?

      Hello, she’d been a one-night stand. No doubt he was grateful she hadn’t made a scene, that she had slipped out in abject humiliation prior to him waking that morning.

      She was humiliated. She’d been the one thing she’d always sworn never to be. Easy. Like her mother.

      She’d had one night of passion.

      With a stranger.

      A stranger she’d met in a bar and later accompanied to his hotel. A stranger who now stood in her clinic making a sham of her memories by looking so much better than she’d recalled.

      Much to her abhorrence, she recalled way too much all too often.

      God, he was gorgeous.

      The strong, handsome planes of his face had surely been sculpted by a goddess intent on tempting mortal women with a glimpse of heaven. The sun had kissed his dark wavy hair with gold and his skin with a bronze hue.

      At six-two or -three, he towered over her five-eight. Beneath his tailored suit, his shoulders stretched broadly, tapering into a trim waist and powerful, narrow hips. As he’d been the night they met, he was so well dressed that if testosterone didn’t ooze from every pore of his fine body she’d think he must be gay. But in vivid and exquisite detail, she knew testosterone oozed.

      An image of his naked body over hers, melted into hers, popped into her mind, short-circuiting her nerve endings.

      Kasey swallowed. Just as she’d done many times over the past two months, she forced memories of him from her mind.

      Only how was she supposed to force him from her mind when he stood a few feet away, eyeing her as if he’d like to push her into the exam room she’d just stepped out of and pick up where they’d left off? Naked and tangled together with frantic desire. When her body was all too willing.

      No. She didn’t want him at her workplace.

      Didn’t want him anywhere near her.

      She had a great life.

      One that didn’t need a complication of his magnitude. No pun intended.

      “This is interesting.” As the silence continued, a grin lifted the corner of Dr. Douglas’s mouth. “I call out my esteemed coworker to introduce her to my old university roomie, and they’ve already met.”

      “Dr. Douglas is who you were supposed to meet that night?” Kasey asked, winced and slapped her hand over her mouth in the most giveaway oops motion a person could make.

      Eric nodded, then turned to his old university roomie. “I met Kasey on the night you got hung up here at the clinic. We shared a few drinks, a few dances.”

      A zillion amazing orgasms.

      Heat slammed into Kasey’s body.

      “Right,” she agreed on a breathless note, averting her gaze to stare at a body mass index chart stuck on the wall. “A few drinks and dances. No big deal.”

      Eric had been a big deal.

      A very big deal.

      She winced. What was wrong with her? She was at work. She wasn’t supposed to be having a hot flush of sexual awareness.

      That wasn’t who she was. She was calm, cool, collected Dr. Kasey Carmichael.

      Dr. Douglas’s bushy brows rose so high they brushed the stylishly tousled hair atop his head. “You were in a bar? Had drinks? As in alcohol rather than a wheat-germ shake?” A new light shone in his eyes as he looked at Kasey. Possibly for the first time ever he was seeing her as a woman rather than the uptight doctor he worked with. “And you danced? Did I miss something?” He drew his brows into a V. “Like hell freezing over?”

      Squelching the urge to growl at him, Kasey took a deep, exasperated breath. She pushed her glasses up the bridge of her nose to give her hands something to do.

      Otherwise she might curl her fingers into a fist and punch his straight nose. “I happen to like wheat-germ shakes and, of course, I dance.”

      Not well, but she could pull off the slow numbers she and Eric had swayed to without any problems. Usually too self-conscious to let herself relax, she’d moved in rhythm to Eric’s lead. On the dance floor and in the bedroom. He’d been perfect. And something she’d desperately tried to stop thinking about because Kasey was not like her mother.

      “In case you hadn’t realized—” she kept her voice smooth, calm, professional, like she wasn’t dying inside “—I am over the legal drinking age.”

      Dr. Douglas burst into laughter. “You’ve totally shattered my image of you, Kase. I didn’t think you drank. Or hung out in bars. Or talked to men who weren’t paying you for their fifteen-minute appointment slot of your time.” He placed his hands over his heart. “Shattered, I tell you.”

      Her nerves grated at how he shortened her name. She glared.

      Eric cleared his throat, calling their attention back to him.

      Kasey turned to the man who’d held her so tenderly on the night she’d felt so alone. He looked perturbed.

      Was he upset that he’d run into his weepy bedmate who’d practically ripped off his clothes? That his friend knew he’d had drinks with the office wallflower who preferred wheat-germ shakes to cosmos?

      Lord, she wanted out of here.

      A cool blast of realization froze the blood chugging through Kasey’s veins.

      Why was Dr. Douglas introducing her to his old university mate here at the medical clinic?

      University