Chapter 1
Lucas Friar was a jerk.

Riley Matthews leaned against the hood of her car glaring at the locked gates to the sprawling ranch and repeated the words like a mantra. Jerk. Jerk. Jerk.

He was a narcissistic egomaniac who thought the entire world had nothing better to do but impinge on his personal space. Of course he would have locked gates. He wasn't about to give mere mortals easy access to him.

Too darn bad. She had to talk to him today. If repeated phone calls, letters and emails weren't going to do the trick, she would just have to bust down these gates until the man agreed to talk to her.

She sighed. Well, okay, that probably wasn't the most brilliant idea she had ever come up with. As much as she adored her eggplant colored Mini, she was afraid it didn't have the necessary gumption to break through a couple of eight–foot–high iron gates.

Failure was not an option, though. She and the jerk in question had been heading for this shoot–out for three weeks. Whether he knew it or not — or whether he even cared — she had given Lucas Friar an ultimatum in her mind. His time for avoiding her had just run out.

She eyed the gates, all eight menacing feet of them. She hadn't grown up in New York with uncles, a brother and Maya without learning a thing or two about hurdling fences and climbing up fire escapes. She just wished Maya is here with her. Adventures like this is more Maya's forte than hers. Climbing the man's gate wouldn't exactly be easy, but he wasn't giving her a lot to work with here.

She sighed, grateful at least that she was wearing jeans. She had to jump three times before she could reach the crossbar on the fence. From there, it was easy enough to hoist herself up. She perched along the top bar for just a moment — only long enough to catch a terrifying glimpse of a horse and rider heading toward her at a neck–or–nothing pace.

Rats. It was too far to jump unless she wanted to risk a broken ankle, so she had to slither down like one of her kindergarten children on the monkey bars. She hit the ground and turned around just as a gorgeous horse raced up in a swirling cloud of dust.

Riley caught a quick glimpse of the horse's rider and her pulse rate kicked up a notch. Her mouth suddenly felt as dry as a dessert. It was the jerk himself. She couldn't mistake those chiseled features and that strong jaw for anyone else.

She had a quick mental picture of him dribbling to shake off the opposing team's point guard then aiming to shoot the ball from the three point line, scoring and once again winning the game for the Knicks. She loved that game. She loved all his game.

Lucas reined the horse in and tipped his hat back. Riley took an instinctive step back at the menace on his features. Had she ever really been young and so stupid to think she was hopelessly in love with him?

"You've got two choices here, lady," he growled. "You either climb back the way you came or we wait here until the sheriff shows up to arrest you for trespassing. Which one do you prefer?"

A chorus line of nerves started tap–dancing in her stomach, and she couldn't seem to think straight with those emerald eyes boring into her.

"Go ahead and call the sheriff, Mr. Friar. In fact," she added brightly, "I can do it for you if you'd like, since I've got him on speed dial on my cell phone. I have all the important people on speed dial. The sheriff is number 7, right after Uncle Eric. I should probably put him on number 6 since I call him more often than Uncle Eric. But the sheriff is not family so it wouldn't be fair. Still, he's almost like family. Maybe I should put Uncle Eric on number 5 and put Principal Evans on seven instead. But like I said, the sheriff is number 7 so it would be easy to get him here fast if that's what you want to do —" By the time she had the sense to realize she was rambling and could manage to clamp her teeth together to stem the gushing flow of stupidity, Lucas Friar's famously gorgeous eyes had started to cross.

This was all his own fault, she thought, crabby all over again. He didn't need to sit there on his horse and glower at her like she was a robber.
"I'm sorry," she said stiffly. "You don't care about any of that. When I'm nervous I ramble."

"I hadn't noticed," he muttered, with such condescension she wanted to smack him.

"Enlightening family history aside, you're still trespassing — an eight–foot–high locked iron gate is usually a big tip–off there."

She drew in a cleansing breath and let it out again. This wasn't going well. She needed to put aside her instinctive nervous reaction to her silly heartthrob and focus on the crisis at hand — the reason she was there.

"It's your own fault. If you weren't such a …a darn hermit maybe I wouldn't have to resort to such drastic measures."

He blinked. "A hermit?"

"Yes! How am I supposed to talk to you if you hardly leave this ranch?"
"I happen to like my privacy, Ms…"

She drew herself up to her full five–foot–six inches tall and glared at him with all the frustration that had been burning through her for three weeks. "Riley Matthews. Samantha's kindergarten teacher. Whether you want to be bothered or not, it is imperative I talk to you about your daughter."

Lucas looked down at the soft brunette peach in the dusty pink sweater who had just scaled his gate like some kind of Olympic gymnast. Samantha's kindergarten teacher. He winced, embarrassed he had mistaken her for an obsessed fan.

Though he had walked away from the NBA two years ago and moved back to Texas without a backward glance, away from the attention he had never wanted, sometimes it followed him. He wasn't obsessive about security. But what else was he supposed to think when he spied a woman climbing over his gate?

"Kind of a drastic measure to take for a parent–teacher conference, don't you think?" he asked as he slid down from his horse.

Her brown eyes narrowed at him and he had to admit, up close she was seriously pretty. Tall and feminine, with long brown curls held back in a headband and dimples that appeared even when she was glaring at him.

She looked like a cream puff. Like a delicious, sugary, melt–in–your–mouth confection. He had sworn off sweets a long time ago, but that didn't make the sudden intense craving any easier to ignore.

"I wouldn't have had to resort to such drastic measures as climbing your stupid gate if you could be bothered just once to answer one of my dozens of pleas to set up a meeting."

She didn't let him answer — not that he had the first idea what she was talking about.

"I realize you're a very busy, very important man," she snapped, her hands fisted on her hips.

How did the curl of those luscious lips make the words sound like an epithet? he wondered.

"I'm sure you must have scores of people to see and all that," she went on. "But you're a basketball player — or you used to be, anyway. Couldn't you at least pretend you care about your child?"

He jerked his attention from her lips as her words filtered through. "Excuse me?"

"You probably pay more attention to that horse of yours than you do to your own daughter!"

Lucas was usually pretty good at keeping his temper under wraps now a days. But he wasn't about to let some sanctimonious schoolteacher question how he raised his daughter. Samantha was the most important thing in his life. The only thing that mattered. Everything he did was for her and he didn't take kindly to anyone insinuating otherwise.

"You don't know anything about me or about my daughter if you can say that."

The cream puff didn't exactly deflate in the face of his anger, but she did back down a little.

"I'm sorry," she said stiffly. "But for three weeks I have been trying every method under the sun, except carrier pigeons, to get your attention, and you have ignored every single one of my attempts to contact you. If you were in my shoes, wouldn't you have the same impression, of an uninvolved parent who doesn't care a hill of beans about his daughter's education? I finally decided I would talk to you today, even if I had to climb your gate to do it."