The Passionate G-Man

The Passionate G-Man
Dixie Browning

MAN of the Month THE LAWLESS HEIRSMR. MAY The G-Man: Secret agent Daniel Lawless… double-crossed by his own agency!The Woman: Brokenhearted beauty Jasmine Clancy… betrayed by her fiance and best friend!The passion: Suddenly trapped together in a remote hideaway, the two hotheads exploded with desire… for each other… .Agent Lawless had a bad guy to nab. More, he had his own untouchable heart to guard. Yet from the moment he met the lovely and mysterious Jasmine, keeping his mind on his mission got harder and harder. And keeping his hands off the forbidden Jasmine was even more of a mission impossible… .THE LAWLESS HEIRS: A surprise will unite the Lawless family - and leads them to love!

by Dixie Browning (#ucba55dde-2615-5f9e-8c37-09efc335b133)Letter to Reader (#u1c2596c6-cbfd-5ea6-86ab-9c54d22eefda)Title Page (#u32e80846-1ec3-5260-a4c3-62cfb590e933)DIXIE BROWNING (#ue10c04a8-9434-558f-9bff-be0f6a72d089)Chapter One (#u7d915643-2765-5729-b147-b468f2ea0038)Chapter Two (#u1a31d6fc-88d4-5ff1-b17f-afa149a302ba)Chapter Three (#ub86d1667-4d35-58f6-a0b6-6ba003dbc074)Chapter Four (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Five (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Six (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Seven (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Eight (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Nine (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Ten (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Eleven (#litres_trial_promo)Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)

by Dixie Browning

Silhouette Desire has something very special for you—The Passionate G-Man by Dixie Browning, book one of her new miniseries, THE LAWLESS HEIRS.

In The Passionate G-Man, irresistibly sexy secret agent Daniel Lyon Lawless has a simple mission—to expose the operative who double-crossed him. But he has a hard time keeping his mind on the job and off the beautiful woman by his side when he gets stranded with Jasmine Clancy!

Be sure to look for the second book of THE LAWLESS HEIRS miniseries, tycoon H. R. Lawless’s story, available in November from Silhouette’s new 12-book promotional series, WORLD’S MOST ELIGIBLE BACHELORS.

THE LAWLESS HEIRS: A surprise will unites the Lawless family—and leads them to love!

Dear Reader,

MEN! This month Silhouette Desire goes man-crazy with six of the sexiest, heart-stopping hunks ever to come alive on the pages of a romance novel

Meet May’s MAN OF THE MONTH, love-wary secret agent Daniel Lawless, in The Passionate G-Man, the first book in Dixie Browning’s fabulous new miniseries, THE LAWLESS HEIRS Metsy Hingle’s gallant hero protects an independent lady in danger in the last book of the RIGHT BRIDE, WRONG GROOM series, The Bodyguard and the Bridesmaid. Little bitty Joeville, Montana, has more tall, dark and rugged ranchers than any other town west of the Mississippi. And Josh Malone has more sex appeal than all of ’em put together in Last of the Joeville Lovers, the third book in Anne Earnes’s MONTANA MALONES series.

In The Notorious Groom, Caroline Cross pairs the baddest boy ever to roam the streets of Kisscount with the town virgin in a steamy marriage of convenience. The hero of Barbara McCauley’s Seduction of the Reluctant Bride is one purebred Texas cowboy fixin’ to do some wife-wranglin’—this new groom isn’t about to miss a sultry second of his very own wedding night. Yeehaw! Next, when a suddenly wealthy beauty meets the owner of the ranch next door, he’s wearing nothing but a Stetson and a smile in Carol Grace’s The Heiress Inherits a Cowboy.

Silhouette Desire brings you the kind of irresistible men who make your knees buckle, your stomach flutter, your heart melt...and your fingers turn the page. So enjoy our lineup of spectacular May men!

Regards,

Senior Editor

Silhouette Books

Please address questions and book requests to:

Silhouette Reader Service

U.S: 3010 Walden Ave., PO Box 1325, Buffalo, NY 14269

Canadian. PO. Box 609, Fort Ene, Ont. L2A 5X3

The Passionate G-Man

Dixie Browning

www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)

DIXIE BROWNING

celebrated her sixtieth book for Silhouette with the publication of Stryker’s Wife in 1996. She has also written a number of historical romances with her sister under the name Bronwyn Williams. A charter member of Romance Writers of America and a member of Novelists, Inc., Browning has won numerous awards for her work. She divides her time between Winston-Salem and the Outer Banks of North Carolina.

One

Lyon hobbled away from the truck stop with as much haste and dignity as he could muster, leaving the waitress staring after him, her tired blue eyes filled with sympathy. By all rights she should have clobbered him. Instead, she’d taken one look at his stricken face, another at his cane, and started in with the, “Oh, you poor man” routine.

Levering himself into the driver’s seat, he brushed a crumb of fried oyster off his sleeve and shifted until he found a position that was bearable. He’d been warned against driving at all, much less driving for hours at a stretch.

Needless to say, he’d ignored the warning.

Dammit, he’d tried to apologize to the woman. It wasn’t her fault he’d been in the process of extracting himself from the cramped booth just as she passed by with two big seafood platters.

Lyon was no good with apologies. Never had been.

He’d wanted to help her clean up the mess, but he knew better than to try, so he’d done the next best thing. He’d crammed a fistful of bills in her apron pocket and got the hell out of there, red face, grease-stained shoulders and all.

At least, with the help of a back brace, a knee brace and a cane, he could do that much. Walk away. There was damned little he was good at anymore, but he’d always been good at walking away.

Five weeks ago he had walked away from an explosion that had killed two other agents and three civilians. Crawled away, actually, after being blown clear. Miraculously, he’d suffered only minor burns, but he’d been thrown against the side of the surveillance van, injuring his back and one knee.

At least he’d survived.

Five days ago he had walked away from the hospital. He’d had a choice of lying there taped up like a mummy, waiting either to mend or to croak from sheer boredom—or for the bad guys to find him and put a permanent end to his career—or get the hell out.

He’d got out. Walked away. Because if the bad guys hadn’t got to him first, the boredom would’ve done him in.

Although there’d been a couple of nurses who’d done their best to relieve it. One, a sweet-faced, middle-aged woman, had joked about adopting him.

Another one had been more interested in seducing him.

He might even have considered it—the seduction—if only to prove to himself that he still had a few working body parts, but the last thing he needed was to get involved with a woman.

It had been Lyon’s experience that men and women viewed sex from widely different perspectives. Women—at least the few he’d been involved with for any length of time—used sex the same way he used the tools of his trade. As a means of achieving an end.

To all but one or two of the women he’d known, sex was bait. The female of the species was programmed by nature to latch onto the richest mate available. His old man had drummed that lesson into his head before he’d cleaned out the cash drawer where he worked and disappeared, leaving behind a bitter wife and an angry twelve-year-old son.

Lyon hadn’t learned much from his father, but he’d heard that little homily repeated too often ever to forget it.

Cautious by nature, he’d learned to be even more cautious, both in his work and in his relationships with women. Not all women were dishonest. Not all of them were looking for commitment, but enough of them were so that he didn’t care to take chances.

To a man, sex was relief. A basic requirement, like food and water and a couple of hours sleep out of every twenty-four or thirty-six hours, conditions permitting. For a man in his position, it didn’t pay to think beyond that.

Back on the highway, Lyon tuned to a country music station and set his mind on automatic. There were too many things it didn’t pay to think about. Not yet. Not until he was fully recovered, had a few answers and was ready to go back and deal with them.

He spotted the patrol car in plenty of time to ease his speed back to a safe and legal seventy. Not that he was afraid of getting pulled over. His ID, if he cared to use it, would get him past any branch of law enforcement. It was more a matter of common sense.

A matter of survival.

Common sense told him that a man in his condition had no business being on the highway at all. A well-honed sense of survival—which, admittedly had taken a beaten lately—told him that driving like a bat out of Daytona wasn’t particularly smart, either. Especially as he’d quit cold turkey taking painkillers and muscle relaxants three days ago. As a result, he was hurting. As a result of something else, although probably not the pills, he was jittery.

The smoky lost interest. Lyon breathed a sigh of relief. Near the Virginia-North Carolina border he pulled into the visitors’ center, parked and scanned the immediate surroundings out of habit. It was called situation awareness.