Sara's Surprise Read Online Free PDF

went to the cobblestone yard and gazed up at her home. It was small, not a real castle, only twenty rooms, and all the upstairs ones had been closed off years before. There was only one turret and one pair of enormous chimneys. The tall, arched windows contained magnificent stained glass motifs that her grandfather had imported from his native England, but the security bars ruined the regal effect.
    Marcus Scarborough had fancied himself the king of a small fiefdom. His daughter had been its princess. Sara smiled ruefully. His granddaughter was its sorceress, held here by a spell.
    She crossed a heavy wooden bridge over a steep gully filled with painfully sharp privet hedge and stood in the castle's entranceway. Gazing across the front yard toward the massive gate in the distance, Sara wondered what Kyle was doing at his camp just outside, and when he would make his first attempt at scaling the walls.
    She paced in the grand, arching entrance with its enormous door of hand-carved teak and felt even more threatened than she had before. Sara opened the door, pressed a button, and watched the bridge rise until it formed a barricade in front of the entrance. She was ready for him, and she was confident that he would not get inside her home the way he'd gotten inside her heart.
* * *
    Exasperated and feeling none too gentle, Kyle decided that Sara reminded him of the tiny crabs that inhabited the marshes of his home state. When threatened, they ducked into their holes in the muddy sand, and nothing could tempt them out again. But a savvy spectator knew to wait, silent and calm. Marsh crabs were invariably too curious for their own good. Sara was a research scientistlike a crab, curiosity was a force she couldn't resist.
    So Kyle counted the days and waited for her to come out.
    Exactly one week after his siege began, on an overcast afternoon that smelled of cool rain and woodsmoke from his campfire, Kyle looked up from the spy thriller he was laughing overhe wished that the real world were as neat and simpleto listen as distant footsteps crunched on dried leaves. Sara appeared in the woods at the point where the stone wall made a sharp bend to the right.
    Kyle watched her stride toward his camp, her eyes locked on him, her hands jammed defensively into the pockets of white overalls that she wore with a pink sweatshirt. Pink and white were perfect colors for her;
    In them she stood out like a butterfly in the somber surroundings.
    He stood up slowly, angled a leg out to one side, hooked his thumbs into the belt loops of his jeans, and tried to appear relaxed. Pleasure and frustration made a knot in his stomach. Before the incident in Surador he'd had an easy way with women, women of all shapes, sizes, ages, and cultures. His far-flung work had given him ample opportunity for variety. He liked women, inside and out. Intellect and curves, the whole package. And, before the scars, they had liked him.
    He was tormented by his need for Saralovely, unique, and kind-hearted despite her stubborn refusal to let him inside her private Camelot. She was utterly determined to pretend that he didn't resemble the lead character in a horror flick. Freddy. Jason. Kyle. Maybe he had a movie career ahead of him.
    She looked at him stoically as she came to a stop on the opposite side of his campfire. Her face was more unusual than pretty, the face of a sloe-eyed forest elf, the queen of the elves, in factwith a regal jut to the chin and green eyes full of dignity. The image needed only to be framed by a pair of delicately pointed ears to make it mythical.
    Kyle couldn't help letting his gaze trace the contours of a voluptuous mouth that belonged in a men's magazine ad cooing something about fast cars, warm nights, and irresistible aftershave. Right now there wasn't a coo within a mile of that mouth.
    "This is ridiculous," she told him firmly.
    "That's right. Tinker Bell."
    "I have some shopping to do. I can put it off only for another couple of