Eileen Wilks – Proposition: Marriage (страница 1)
CONFIDENTIAL Letter to Reader Title Page About the Author Dedication Chapter One Chapter Two Chapter Three Chapter Four Chapter Five Chapter Six Chapter Seven Chapter Eight Chapter Nine Chapter Ten Chapter Eleven Chapter Twelve Chapter Thirteen Copyright
CONFIDENTIAL
Jane confuses the hell out of me. Maybe it will help to write out my objectives. I’m not used to putting anything on paper, but I can always destroy this later.
Objectives Attained:
1. Quit the Agency
2. Activate Samuel Charmaneaux identity
3. Find Jane Smith
Objectives Remaining:
1. Find an ordinary job
2. Make a place for myself in my new hometown
3. Marry Jane
The first two objectives depend on the last one. Jane doesn’t like risks, so I have to make her either need me or want me enough to take a chance. I don’t understand what she wants from me, or what happens to me when I kiss her, but I know she wants me—almost as much as I want her. I can use that to get her to agree to marry me.
New objective: Seduce Jane.
Dear Reader,
Welcome to Silhouette Desire—where you’re guaranteed powerful, passionate and provocative love stories that feature rugged heroes and spirited heroines who experience the full emotional intensity of falling in love!
Wonderful and ever-popular Annette Broadrick brings us September’s MAN OF THE MONTH with Lean, Mean & Lonesome. Watch as a tough loner returns home to face the woman he walked away from but never forgot.
Our exciting continuity series TEXAS CATTLEMAN’S CLUB continues with Cinderella’s Tycoon by Caroline Cross. Charismatic CEO Sterling Churchill marries a shy librarian pregnant with his sperm-bank baby—and finds love.
Proposition: Marriage is what rising star Eileen Wilks offers when the girl-next-door comes alive in the arms of an alpha hero. Beloved romance author Fayrene Preston makes her Desire debut with The Barons of Texas: Tess, featuring a beautiful heiress who falls in love with a sexy stranger. The popular theme BACHELORS & BABIES returns to Desire with Metsy Hingle’s Dad in Demand. And Barbara McCauley’s miniseries SECRETS! continues with the dramatic story of a mysterious millionaire in Killian’s Passion.
So make a commitment to sensual love—treat yourself to all six September love stories from Silhouette Desire!
Enjoy!
Joan Marlow Golan
Senior Editor, Silhouette Desire
Please address questions and book requests to:
Silhouette Reader Service
U.S.- 3010 Walden Ave., PO Box 1325, Buffalo, NY 14269
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Proposition: Marriage
Eileen Wilks
EILEEN WILKS
is a fifth-generation Texan. Her great-great-grandmother came to Texas in a covered wagon shortly after the end of the Civil War—excuse us, the War Between the States. But she’s not a full-blooded Texan. Right after another war, her Texan father fell for a Yankee woman. This obviously mismatched pair proceeded to travel to nine cities in three countries in the first twenty years of their marriage. For the next twenty years they stayed put, back home in Texas again—and still together.
Eileen figures her professional career matches her nomadic upbringing, since she’s tried everything from drafting to a brief stint as a ranch hand—raising two children and any number of cats and dogs along the way. Not until she started writing did she “stay put,” because that’s when she knew she’d come home. Readers can write to her at P.O. Box 4612, Midland, TX 79704-4612.
This book is dedicated to my bookseller friends—
to Sherry at Miz B’s for her support, her friendship
and for many, many hours of reading pleasure;
to Rick at Waldenbooks for always going the extra yard;
and to Donita Lawrence at Bell, Book and Candle for her
loving support of romance books, romance writers
and romance readers everywhere.
One
Repentance came too late. Jane was up to her neck in lake water and trouble.
The lake was a shallow one. The trouble waited about ten feet away, in the form of a pair of combat boots planted right at her eye level on the muddy bank. Jane crouched behind a bush that clung to life in spite of its recent inundation, and wished very hard for the impossible.
She wished she’d never heard of the small-Caribbean nation of San Tomás. She wished even more that she hadn’t bought the cruise tickets a fellow teacher had been forced to sell when his wife’s appendix ruptured just before spring break. Most of all, she wished she’d never given in to the rare spirit of adventure that had moved her to leave the port city where the cruise ship was docked, and go haring off to investigate the island’s interior.
Why, oh why, had she decided to toss aside the cautious habits of a lifetime and live a little?
The boots belonged to a soldier. The soldier had one friend nearby, whom she couldn’t see through her bush, and others spread out in the surrounding tropical forest. All were looking for her, and they had guns—big, mean-looking, Rambo-type guns.
The water was warm, the air was still and hot, but Jane shivered.
Until she’d heard the gunshots, she had been enjoying herself tremendously. She’d made several friends on the bus, including a native couple who had told her proudly about the dam the government had built nearby. Jane was sure she was more profoundly grateful for that dam than anyone else could be. Especially for the newness of it. That dam had created the shallow lake where she crouched. Its waters had swallowed part of the forest and killed off the ground-hugging plants, but it hadn’t finished drowning the trees and larger bushes. Jane’s bush still had plenty of leaves to hide behind.
Though she couldn’t see the soldiers’ faces now, she’d seen them in the village before she’d fled. They had all looked terribly young to her—no older than most of the boys she taught back home in Atherton. She’d noticed the dozen-or-so youthful soldiers with wicked-looking rifles slung over bony shoulders as soon as she’d climbed off the bus, but she hadn’t thought anything of it. Not really. Soldiers were a common sight in San Tomás.
Everything had happened so fast. When the bus driver had announced they had to stop for repairs; she hadn’t minded because she’d needed to find a ladies’ room. Seconds after she went into a local cantina, a boy she had met on the bus had come running in. He’d tried to warn her, but she hadn’t believed him—not until she’d been washing her hands in the tiny rest room, and had heard gunfire.
She’d crawled out the narrow window and had run for her life. The dirt path she’d stumbled across had led her straight to this lake, and her bush.
“Hernández is a fool,” one of the soldiers said in Spanish. “Do you see a woman? Of course not, because she isn’t here. Why would anyone head this way, right into the lake? Even a silly norteamericana would not be such a fool. But even if we find her, what good will it do us? Will any of that ransom he talks about find its way into our pockets?”
The other soldier chuckled and made a crude comment about what Hernández could do with his orders. The first young man laughed.
Whom had they been shooting at, back at the village? Jane tried not to think about that. It made her shiver, and she didn’t want to move, not even a breath. But it was hard, very hard, to be still.
There was a bug on her hand. It had climbed on when she’d gripped one limb of the bush—another move that she repented too late, because now she didn’t dare move her hand to release the bush. They might hear.
The bug was a huge, horrid monster of an insect as long as her little finger. It sat on her hand and stared at her, its carapace shining greenish-black in the sun, and it had too many legs. That was how bugs were. They had all those squirmy little legs. Jane purely hated being touched by squirmy little bug-legs.
Jane stared at the bug while she listened to the obscene joke the first soldier told, and to the second soldier’s laughter. Her other hand—the bugless one—gripped a tiny locket that hung on a chain around her neck. The two young men argued about where each of them would search for her.
Then they talked about what they would do if they found her.
When she heard one of them leaving, she waited for the tight band of terror around her chest to ease. It didn’t.
They’d just been talking tough to impress each other, she told herself. In spite of the guns, they were just kids—kids the same age as the ones she taught Spanish to, back at Atherton High, for heaven’s sake. They’d been talking about things they didn’t understand. Surely they couldn’t understand the reality of what they had said they would do to her.
Fear nearly choked her. The edge of the little disk she wore around her neck dug into the pads of her fingers, nearly cutting the skin. Papa, she thought, why did you always tell me I was like you? I’m not. I’m not cut out for adventures.
She wondered what had happened to the other foreigners who’d been on the bus. Please, God, she prayed, let them be all right. That German couple had been so nice, and so had the other passengers—like the quietly gorgeous man with the wire-rimmed glasses who had sat in the bench seat across from her. Jane couldn’t stand to think that the gunfire she’d heard had been directed at him. She’d talked with many of the others on the bus, but hadn’t gotten up the nerve to speak to him.