Peachy's Proposal

Cover Page

Excerpt

Dear Reader

Title Page

About the Author

Dedication

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

Copyright

“You Want Me To What?” Luc Finally Managed To Ask.

“It’s no big deal,” Peachy responded.

“My taking your virginity is no big deal?”

“I don’t think ‘taking’ is the right word. It’s not as though I’m trying to keep it.”

“True,” he acknowledged with a humorless laugh. “You’re offering to give it away. To me.”

“That’s right.”

“And this is a no-strings-attached, one-time-only deal?”

“Yes.”

“No.”

Peachy stiffened. “You mean you don’t want to do it?”

Luc fervently wished she’d phrased her statement in a different way. Preferably one that omitted the word want. He wasn’t oblivious to Peachy’s appeal. But there was no way—no way in hell—he was going to do what he’d just been requested to do.

Dear Reader,

Go no further! I want you to read all about what’s in store for you this month at Silhouette Desire. First, there’s the moment you’ve all been waiting for, the triumphant return of Joan Hohl’s BIG BAD WOLFE series! MAN OF THE MONTH Cameron Wolfe “stars” in the absolutely wonderful Wolfe Wedding. This book, Joan’s twenty-fifth Silhouette title, is a keeper. So if you plan on giving it to someone to read I suggest you get one for yourself and one for a friend—it’s that good!

In addition, it’s always exciting for me to present a unique new miniseries, and SONS AND LOVERS is just such a series. Lucas, Ridge and Reese are all brothers with a secret past…and a romantic future. The series begins with Lucas: The Loner by Cindy Gerard, and continues in February with Reese: The Untamed by Susan Connell and in March with Ridge: The Avenger by Leanne Banks. Don’t miss them!

If you like humor, don’t miss Peachy’s Proposal, the next book in Carole Buck’s charming, fun-filled WEDDING BELLES series, or My House or Yours? the latest from Lass Small.

If ranches are a place you’d like to visit, you must check out Barbara McMahon’s Cowboy’s Bride. And this month is completed with a dramatic, sensuous love story from Metsy Hingle. The story is called Surrender, and I think you’ll surrender to the talents of this wonderful new writer.

Sincerely,

Lucia Macro

Senior Editor

Please address questions and book requests to:

Silhouette Reader Service

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

Canadian: P.O. Box 609, Fort Ene, OnL L2A 5X3

Peachy’s Proposal

Carole Buck

www.millsandboon.co.uk

CAROLE BUCK

is a television news writer and movie reviewer who lives in Atlanta. She is single and her hobbies include cake decorating, ballet and traveling. She collects frogs, but does not kiss them. Carole says she’s in love with life; she hopes the books she writes reflect this.

To Melissa Jeglinski:

An editor with the “write” stuff. Thanks for your personal encouragement and professional excellence.

Prologue

Shortly after 9:00 p.m. on the third Saturday in April, Pamela Gayle Keene—called “Peachy” by just about everybody—caught the bridal bouquet tossed by the newly wed Mrs. Matthew Douglas Powell. According to nuptial lore, this meant that she was destined to be the next female among those present to get married.

Yet less than twenty-four hours after bagging the lace-frilled bundle of blossoms for which so many had so eagerly vied, Peachy found herself clutching the floral omen of her supposedly happily-ever-after fate and contemplating the very real possibility that she was going to die a single woman.

And not just any old sort of single woman, either. Oh, no. Pamela Gayle Keene was a single woman who’d never made love with a man.

She’d come close to doing so once. Very, very close. Unfortunately, while her prospective partner had been extremely willing in spirit, he’d been woefully weak in terms of fleshly follow-through.

Although Peachy was aware that being a virgin at twenty-three years of age would qualify her as something of an oddity in many social circles, she normally did not give much thought to her lack of sexual experience. A public address announcement that the plane she was flying on had suffered an equipment failure and would be attempting a “belly” landing at the New Orleans International Airport changed this state of affairs. All at once the implications of her intact status began to loom extremely large on her emotional radar. Larger than life, one might be tempted to say.

Her first reaction to the news of the emergency—which had been delivered by the plane’s pilot in a calm, country-boy drawl—was fear. Her heartbeat accelerated from a slow, steady rhythm to a panicked pounding in a few short seconds. Her stomach knotted. Her mouth went dry. Her palms turned clammy.

“Oh, God,” she whispered on a shuddering exhalation of breath. “Oh…Dear God.”

She lifted her left hand to the base of her throat, instinctively seeking the familiar contours of the bell-shaped silver locket she’d worn for nearly ten years. The locket was a cherished memento of the first wedding she’d ever attended and the emblem of an experience she’d shared with two very special women. Touching it eased her terror, just a bit.

Although possessed of a certain degree of personal daring, Peachy had always been a nervous flyer. It wasn’t that she subscribed to the dictum that if the Lord had intended people to soar into the sky He would have blessed them with wings. She didn’t. She simply harbored a gut-level conviction that flying was a decidedly unnatural activity which should be avoided whenever possible. She was also strongly inclined to question the veracity of many aviation safety claims—particularly the ones involving statistics that purportedly showed people were more likely to be killed by bathtub falls than by plane crashes.

A woman across the aisle from her began sobbing as the pilot completed his spiel. A man seated behind her started praying in a language she didn’t understand. Up front, the flight attendants launched briskly into a detailed demonstration of the applicable emergency procedures.

“After the aircraft lands…” they said, prefacing each instruction.

After.

Not if.

And not the slightest hint that instead of touching down safely and sliding to a well-positioned stop, the plane might very well end up smashing into the runway and exploding into several thousand fiery pieces.

Peachy appreciated the cabin crew’s relentlessly positive attitude. She hoped it would prove an effective counterbalance to the little voice in the back of her skull that kept shrieking, I always knew flying was dangerous! She suspected it was the same sort of little voice that had prompted a fabled hypochondriac to have the phrase “See, I told you I was sick” engraved on his headstone.

About the time the flight attendants finished explaining how to exit the plane via its inflatable escape chutes, Peachy’s fear gave way to a curious kind of calm. It was not a que sera, sera sense of resignation about what was going to happen. Passive acceptance was not—would never be—her style. Rather, this was an empowering feeling of serenity that flowed directly from her participation in the previous evening’s wedding.

That wedding had been an incandescently happy event, a celebration of the matrimonial commitment between a man and woman whose lifelong friendship had unexpectedly blossomed into passion. All the people Peachy held nearest and dearest had been there, sharing in the blissful smiles and sentimental tears. If her time was up, if the plane did crash and burn, it was profoundly comforting to her to think that her loved ones would be able to remember her in the context of such a life-affirming occasion.

As for the memories she had to cling to in what might be her final minutes…

There was the glow she’d seen in Annie’s and Matt’s eyes when they’d turned from the altar after exchanging their “I do’s” and faced the world as husband and wife.

There was the enduring warmth she’d felt emanating from her parents, who would soon mark their thirty-eighth anniversary, when they’d danced together at the reception.

And above all, there was the breathless joy she’d heard in her older sister’s voice when Eden had confided that she and her husband, Rick, were going to have a baby in October, some six months hence.

“Oh, Eden,” she’d whispered, perilously close to tears. She knew how desperately her sister and her brother-in-law yearned for a child. She also knew how many fertility experts had declared that their chances of conceiving one were next to nil. “Oh…Eden.”

“You like the idea of being an auntie?” had been the mother-tobe’s bantering response.

“Like it?” she’d echoed, eyeing her sister’s still-flat tummy with fierce affection then enveloping her in a hug. “I absolutely love it! It’s even better than getting to be one of the Wedding Belles when you and Rick—”

“We aren’t going to make it,” the weeping woman on the other side of the aisle suddenly moaned. “We’re all going to die.”

Peachy’s curious kind of calm slammed against cold, cruel reality and cracked. Regret surged through her in a torrent of couldhaves, would-haves and should-haves, of might-have-beens and ought-to-have-dones. Dreams deferred became dreams irrevocably denied. A twenty-three-year life that had seemed rich and rewarding just moments earlier devolved into an unfulfilled existence consisting of little more than missed chances and squandered opportunities.

If only—

Too late.

And then the realization struck. It popped into Peachy’s consciousness unbidden, like the evil fairy godmother who’d shown up at Sleeping Beauty’s christening to lay a curse on the baby princess rather than to gift her with a special grace.

I’m going to die without ever having done it, she thought, the fingers of her right hand spasming around the ribbon-wrapped stem of the former Hannah Elaine Martin’s bridal bouquet.

Funny, how the human psyche reacts in times of great stress. Pamela Gayle Keene had a million marvelous reasons for wanting to live, not the least of which was the desire to discover whether she was to be “Auntie Peachy” to a niece or nephew. Yet she stubbornly fixated on the notion that she had to survive so she could finally have sex. An obsession was born in the space of a single heartbeat.

I don’t need to have a lot of sex, she assured herself and any straitlaced spirits that might be listening. Just one time with one man will be enough.

Peachy felt her cheeks heat. It was a familiar sensation. Endowed with flame-colored hair and fair, freckle-dusted skin, she’d been blushing since babyhood.

Then again, maybe it won’t be, her innate honesty forced her to concede after a few moments. But given the alternative—

The pilot came on the P.A. system again. He provided a terse update on the plane’s location then ordered the members of the cabin crew to take their seats and strap in. While the bedrock steadiness of his voice was encouraging, his use of the word “final” when describing their approach to the New Orleans airport seemed a trifle ill-advised.

Inhaling a deep, deliberate breath, Peachy bent forward to assume what had been described as the emergency “posture.” She tried not to think about how much doing so seemed an act of compliance with the clichéd admonition about putting one’s head between one’s knees and kissing one’s derriere adieu.

Her long, red-gold hair swung forward, curtaining her face.

Her world was reduced to a fragmented series of sensory details.

The sharp-edged jab of the seat belt’s metallic buckle against her midriff.

The sweet fragrance of wedding flowers mixed with the rancid odor of mortal dread.

The frantic thundering of her pulse.

Please, Peachy prayed, the faces of her family and friends flashing through her mind. Oh, please.

She brought her hands up, clasping the back of her head as the flight attendants had instructed everyone to do. Drawing another deep breath, she squeezed her eyes shut and waited.

And waited.

Then waited some more.

A split second before the plane bumped down on the runway, Pamela Gayle Keene made a solemn vow about her sexual future.

Sometime later—in the middle of a “How does it feel to have cheated death?” interview conducted by a vaguely familiar male TV reporter with an off-kilter nose and a cemented-in-place hairstyle, to be precise—it occurred to her that the fulfillment of this solemn vow was going to require the cooperation of a second party.

That started Peachy thinking…

One

Lucien “Luc” Devereaux, scion of a tradition-rich but financially strapped Louisiana family and veteran of an elite U.S. Army special operations team turned bestselling novelist, had been propositioned by a lot of different women in a lot of different ways for a lot of different reasons since his sexual initiation at age sixteen. Nonetheless, the proposal he received from Pamela Gayle Keene five days after she and all the other people aboard her flight from Atlanta survived an emergency landing at New Orleans International Airport left him temporarily bereft of speech.

“You want me to what?” he finally managed to ask, staring at the improbably nicknamed redhead who’d been his tenant and downstairs neighbor in a mansion-cum-apartment building on Prytania Street for about two years.

“It’s no big deal,” Peachy responded, sustaining his gaze with remarkable steadiness even as she started to flush.

“My taking your virginity is no big deal?” he echoed tightly, wondering whether her dismissive comment had been inspired by her feelings about the sexual act itself, her expectations about his performance of it or a mixture of both. He also wondered why it should matter to him. Because there was no way—no way in hell—he was going to do what he’d just been requested to do.

Luc watched as Peachy veiled her green-gold eyes with her lush, mascara-darkened lashes. After a few moments, she lifted her left hand and began fiddling with a silver locket at the base of her throat. Her rhythmic fingering of the pendant had an odd effect on his already erratic pulse.

He’d never seen it coming, he thought, trying to rein in emotions that ran the gamut from strangely flattered to furiously stunned and then some. He, the man who’d been accused more than once of having distrust of the opposite sex imprinted on his DNA, had been blindsided by a blush-prone innocent, a decade his junior!

The weird thing was, Peachy had done it by behaving in the same straightforward way she’d behaved since the first day he’d met her. There’d been no deceit involved, no sneakily seductive tricks. Armored against guile, he’d been ambushed by honesty.

It was a perverse state of affairs, to say the least. And Luc Devereaux was a long way from understanding how it had come about.

He and Peachy had had a brief encounter in the foyer of their Garden District apartment building that morning. He’d been heading in after a five-mile run, mulling over the fate of a minor character in his latest book. She’d been heading out to her job as a junior designer with one of the city’s finest custom jewelers.

They’d chatted for a minute or two. Right before they’d gone their separate ways, she’d asked him to drop by her apartment after she got home from work.

“I need a favor,” she’d said simply, gazing up at him with clear, candid eyes.

“I’ll try to oblige, cher,” he’d answered, his grin as easy as his unthinking use of the colloquial endearment.

He’d knocked on her door about twelve hours later. She’d invited him in.

They’d talked a bit. She, perched on the edge of a lavishly fringed but slightly moth-eaten hassock. He, sprawled comfortably in a funkily shaped armchair he’d helped her lug home from a flea market the previous spring. Their conversation had been a genial one, spiced with good-natured laughter.

Eventually, he’d gotten around to asking what he could do for her.

She responded promptly and without mincing words.

It had taken him several minutes to accept that she’d actually said what he’d thought she’d said.

“I don’t think taking is the right word,” Peachy suddenly declared, lowering her hand from the locket. She shifted her position on the hassock, crossing her long, slender legs beneath the crinkled, paisley-patterned cotton of the calf-length skirt she was wearing. The toenails of her bare feet were painted a vibrant coral pink. “It’s not—I mean, it’s so—so—”

“Politically incorrect?” Luc offered sardonically.

She lifted her lashes and gave him a look he couldn’t interpret. Something—annoyance? impatience? embarrassment?—flashed in the depths of her eyes.

“It’s not as though I’m trying to keep it,” she retorted.

“True,” he acknowledged with a humorless laugh. “You’re offering to give it away.”

There was a pause. After a few moments Peachy smoothed her curly tumble of red-gold hair back from her face, squared her slim shoulders and calmly replied, “That’s right.”

“To me.”

There was another pause, a little longer than the preceding one. Then, again, a quiet affirmative.

“So that the next time you confront the possibility of dying you don’t have to worry about going to your grave wondering what all the fuss was about.”

Peachy’s eyes flashed a second time. Her delicately made features took on a decidedly determined cast. “More or less.”

“And this is a no-strings-attached, one-time-only deal.”

“Yes.”

Luc inhaled a short, sharp breath, struggling with a sudden surge of temper. He couldn’t define the source of his anger, nor determine whether it was directed more at himself or her.

When he thought he could trust his voice he said, “No.”

Peachy stiffened. Her chin went up a notch. “No?”

“No,” he repeated, underscoring the negative with a shake of his head.

“You mean—” she swallowed “—you don’t want to do it.”

Luc felt the muscles of his belly clench and fervently wished she’d phrased her statement in a different way. Preferably one that omitted the word want.

He wasn’t oblivious to Peachy’s appeal. Although she was a far cry from his usual type—he was inclined toward experienced blondes and exotic brunettes, not arty, ethereal redheads—he’d felt a powerful tug of attraction the day she’d shown up on his doorstep, seeking to rent the unit one floor down.

He’d refrained from acting on this attraction for a variety of reasons. Peachy’s comparative youth had been part of the equation. His firm conviction that getting entangled with any female tenant—much less one who’d become the darling of their mutual collection of rather eccentric neighbors within a week of moving in—would be asking for trouble had been a factor, as well.

But the key basis for his decision to clamp down and hold back had been his gut-level feeling that there was a lot more to Ms. Pamela Gayle Keene than immediately met the eye. For all her seemingly free-spirited manner, she’d exuded an aura of potential complications.

Luc grimaced, raking a hand through his hair. “Look, cher,” he began, letting his gaze slide away. “My saying no to you—it’s nothing personal.”

The ludicrousness of his words registered with him even as he was uttering them. Nothing personal? Peachy had asked him to be her first lover and he’d rejected her! What in heaven’s name could be more personal than that?

He glanced back at his would-be bed partner, expecting an angry reaction. He was startled to find Peachy was no longer looking at him. Instead, she was staring down at her well-pedicured toes. Her mouth was set in a stubborn line, her forehead was furrowed. He had the distinct and rather disturbing impression that she’d dismissed him from her mind and was now contemplating her next option for defloration.

Every instinct for self-preservation Luc Devereaux had—and he had developed a great many of them during his thirty-three years on earth—told him to get up and get out. But he couldn’t.

He just…couldn’t.

“Peachy?” he asked after a few seconds, acutely conscious of the thudding of his heart. Even the most automatic of natural functions, breathing, suddenly seemed to require a conscious effort.

She started slightly, then lifted her eyes to meet his.

“I understand, Luc,” she said quietly, without bothering to specify exactly what it was that she comprehended. “And…well, I appreciate your being honest with me.” She paused for a moment, her lips quirking into a crooked little smile. Then she rose from the hassock in a graceful movement and concluded with a shrug, “I’ll just have to find someone else.”

From another woman, Luc would have interpreted this last comment as a threat. As an attempt at emotional blackmail. But coming from Peachy…

He got to his feet slowly, keeping his gaze fixed on his tenant’s expressive face. She means it, he thought, a chill skittering down his spine and settling in the pit of his stomach. She really means it.

“You genuinely intend to go through with this, don’t you,” he said.

Peachy lifted her brows, plainly surprised. Perhaps even a little affronted. “I told you I did.”

Yes, she had. But until a couple of seconds ago, he’d been unwilling to believe that she’d been sincere.

“Why?” he asked bluntly.

“I told you that, too.”

“Tell me again.”

Peachy’s green-gold eyes flicked back and forth several times as though she was trying to figure out what sort of game he was playing at. Finally, she expelled a breath in a long sigh.

“You’ve been in life-or-death situations, haven’t you?” she questioned. “When you were in the military?”

“A few,” Luc acknowledged after a fractional hesitation, sensing where she was heading and not entirely comfortable with the direction. Although he was intensely proud of the services he’d performed for his country, not all his military memories were pleasant ones. The covert style of war he’d been trained to make had been a dirty, as well as dangerous, business.

“Didn’t you find yourself regretting things you hadn’t done?”

“While I was in the middle of an operation where I might be killed, you mean?”

Peachy nodded.

Luc felt his lips twist. “If I regretted anything, it was committed sins. Not ones I hadn’t had a chance to get around to.”

“Still—”

“Still,” he interrupted, “I take your meaning. Facing down death tends to reorder a person’s priorities.”