‘Of course it is,’ he said. ‘I’d been thinking about it for ages. I once spent a week in hospital not long after my parents died. I had my tonsils out. I was so lonely and afraid, I have never forgotten it. I swore one day I would try and do something to help kids who were sick.’
She smiled up at him. ‘So you became a principle sponsor for a major children’s charity even though you pretend you’re not capable of love.’
‘You have taught me how to love, Mia,’ he said, ‘and not only that, you taught me how to recognise it. If you hadn’t come along and tossed that coffee in my lap I might have very well ended up alone and lonely for the rest of my life. No one has ever affected me the way you do. I looked into those big grey eyes of yours and I was totally lost. It was a frightening experience for someone like me who has clung to what is predictable and controllable all his life. When you told me you loved me I was so overcome, I felt so guilty for what I had done. I couldn’t imagine you ever forgiving me.’
‘Of course I forgive you—I love you. I think I fell in love with you the first day too. But I had my own reasons for marrying you which had nothing to do with how I felt about you.’
‘You did?’
She gave him a sheepish look. ‘I would never have agreed to take things so far but Ellie was in trouble in South America. She needed money in a hurry and your marriage proposal was the ideal way to solve a problem I just couldn’t solve on my own. It was only as we were officially married that I started to realise that I had got myself in a little deeper than I’d initially intended.’
‘So will you agree to stay married to me for real? No acting this time?’
She gave him an impish smile, two tiny dimples appearing in her cheeks. ‘I wasn’t acting in the first place.’
‘You know something, sweetheart?’ he said as he brought his mouth down to hers. ‘Nor was I.’
The Virgin’s Proposal
By Shirley Jump
TORONTO • NEW YORK • LONDON
AMSTERDAM • PARIS • SYDNEY • HAMBURG
STOCKHOLM • ATHENS • TOKYO • MILAN • MADRID
PRAGUE • WARSAW • BUDAPEST • AUCKLAND
Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Epilogue
Chapter One
Standing on a street corner in a banana suit was not the most humiliating thing to happen in Katie’s life, but it came in at a close second.
Dressed from head to toe in yellow felt, she barely remembered what the word dignity meant. She’d checked hers the minute Sarah had talked her into masquerading as a piece of fruit, all to increase sales.
“Hey Chiquita! Can you peel for me?” A carload of teenagers screamed past her. She might as well have been the Soak-the-Bloke clown for all the respect she’d received. Apparently, a five-foot-three, twenty-four-year-old woman in a banana suit was the funniest thing in the tiny town of Mercy, Indiana, today. What kind of suicidal tendencies had made her mention the idea of doing something unique to boost sales to Sarah, soon-to-be-ex-best friend and business partner?
The store. It was all she thought about. Sales had been low when they’d opened a year ago and kept dropping. The rent was due in two weeks, and unfortunately, their bank account didn’t have a big enough balance to cover it. Katie and Sarah had yet to find a way to crack the hold their competition, Flowers and More, a shop in the nearby city of Lawford, had on Mercy. Plenty of weddings, bar mitzvahs, showers and funerals happened around here, but hardly anyone was buying from A Pair of Posies.
If there was some way to get people to notice the store, maybe Katie wouldn’t feel like such a failure—both personally and business-wise. She was desperate to make a go of the store—desperate enough to wear the fruit suit.
She sighed. The four-tone Ford with the teens came swerving back around the corner. “You’d be King Kong’s dream!”
She ignored them, her cheeks hot. Sales or no sales, the costume was humiliating. Thank God the foam head covered most of her face. The last thing she wanted was anyone finding out it was her under the peel.
She straightened the sign advertising their sale on fruit baskets, then noticed a motorcycle, gleaming in chrome and black, roar down the street toward her and slip into one of the front spaces. She bit her lip and steeled herself for another onslaught of pubescent humor. The rider pulled off his helmet and swung a denim-clad leg over the bike.
Oh. My. God. The man was no teenager and no joke. Motorcycle Man had extra-dark Hershey-brown hair that raked across his brows and set off eyes the color of a twilight sky. He was tall, taller than she and her banana head put together, and lean in a way that said he hadn’t spent hours on a couch playing potato. Stonewashed jeans molded his hips; a white T-shirt hugged his chest. Topped with a battered chestnut-brown leather jacket, he looked as if he’d stepped out of a James Dean movie.
And yet, he looked familiar. But try as she might, she couldn’t quite place a name with his face.
He glanced at her as he passed, smiling at her costume. A shiver tingled down her spine. With his slow, easy grin and confident step, he looked like the kind of man who knew exactly what the word pleasure meant and how to give it as well as he got it. That was a skimpy area on Katie’s personal résumé.
“Great marketing idea,” he said before disappearing into the shop.
Katie straightened her tilting foam head and wished men with movie-star looks would only stop in on days when she didn’t look ready for trick-or-treating.
Just once, I wonder what it would be like to be with a man like that.
For the first time in her life, she was tempted, very, very tempted, to swallow her shyness and take a chance. To break out of the shell that had gotten her nowhere in life. Talk to him. Flirt a little. Walk on the wild side.
Well, at least cross the sidewalk. Actually walking on the wild side might be more than she could handle. And, according to the breakup letter from her ex-fiancé, Steve Spencer, it was something she would never do. When she’d proved to be too boring for his tastes, Steve had left her at the altar and run off with Katie’s bridesmaid—a woman who gave him exactly what he wanted, when he wanted it. Because of that, Katie had become the most pitied person in town. All her life she’d been the good girl: dependable, obedient. It used to be a plus. But all it had done was make her a grown-up doormat.
Not to mention, still a virgin at twenty-four. She used to be proud she’d stuck to her guns, held out for her wedding night. Now she felt like the world’s biggest idiot.
Make that the world’s biggest banana, she amended.
For a few seconds, she stopped thinking about the shop and the horrible day she’d had so far. Her mind turned to Motorcycle Man and how a glimpse of him had her thinking about tossing her morals right out the window. They hadn’t gotten her very far anyway—just alone and dressed like one of the four food groups.
My hormones have launched a mental coup, she thought. There was no other explanation for the fact she was still reeling from his smile. Imagine what a kiss from him would be like, her conspiratorial mind whispered.
Who was he? He certainly didn’t live here in town, though maybe he used to and that’s why he looked familiar. A man like him, a man who would leave broken hearts in his path as surely as the Presbyterian church clock would chime the hour ten minutes late, couldn’t buy a soda at the Bowl-a-Rama without spurring excited twitters among the female half of Mercy’s population of 4,036.
Kate wiped away the sweat beading along her brow. The late-April sun beat down, roasting her like the turkeys in a bag her mother cooked every Thanksgiving. She was tempted to toss the banana suit and rejoin the human race. She could grab an icy sod
a out of the fridge and plant herself under the air conditioner until icicles hung from her nose.
Katie ducked her head, moving back into the cool shade of the awning. And collided with something tall and solid. She teetered, then began to topple over, heavy banana head first. Strong arms righted her before she hit the concrete. “Thanks.” She pivoted in suit-restricted geisha-girl steps to see the identity of her rescuer.
Could her day get any more humiliating? Motorcycle Man was standing behind her, a bundle of roses cushioned in one arm and that same easy grin lighting up his face. “Are you okay?”
“Yeah,” she managed. “Thanks for catching me before I became a banana split.”
He smiled. “It’s not every day I get a chance to rescue a banana in distress.”
Curiosity, helped along by the anonymity of a fruit costume, overrode Katie’s natural tendency to be reserved. Walk on the wild side, Katie. Just a step or two. Besides, he’s a customer—no harm in being friendly.
“It must be the most apeeling part of your day.” The dry humor slipped from her tongue as if she talked this way every day. Geez, put a costume on me and I become Jay Leno. “Or maybe it’s better than slipping on one….”
He laughed and put up a hand. “Truce. I guess you’ve heard your share of jokes this morning.”
“Yours just added to the total. I’m at lucky thirteen now.”
“Sorry.”
She flashed him a smile which she knew he couldn’t see. “Now that you’ve teased and nearly toppled me, the least you can do is tell me who you are.”
He extended his hand. “Matt Webster.”
The name immediately clicked. Handsome and rich renegade son of the Webster family. A few years older than her, so not someone Katie had really known. She did remember the huge wedding-of-the-century his family had held for him ten years or so ago, but then he’d left town and no one had heard much about him since.
She pulled off her glove and shook. His hand was slightly rough and callused, but large, capable and strong. And bare of a wedding ring, she noted. “Katie Dole.”
She saw him try to hold back the laughter, but it burst out all the same. “You’re joking, right?”
“I wish.”
“No relation to the fruit company, I presume?”
She shook her head, the foam head bobbing. “I’m not that lucky.”
“Are you related to Jack Dole?”
She nodded. “He’s my oldest brother. Then there’s Luke, Mark and Nate. There are a lot of bananas in the Dole family tree.”
He laughed. “Well, Miss Dole, it was a delicious pleasure to meet you.”
His hand slipped out of hers and with it went a warmth that had nothing to do with the hot day. She scrambled for a witty reply…nothing. Dressed as a piece of fruit, she felt a tad out of her element as a woman. Short of tucking herself into a massive bowl of ice cream and drizzling chocolate sauce down her torso, she didn’t think her banana costume made her look very appealing to a man like him.
So she stood there like the village idiot as he waved and got back on the motorcycle, tucking the flowers into the compartment behind him before roaring away.
That man was definitely dangerous, always had been, if his reputation was any indication. The kind of guy who was out of her league, sexually, physically…every way. A man who lived on the brink. Katie had never lived anywhere close to the edge. She was too afraid of hurtling over it and into a canyon of heartache.
As if he had some kind of death wish, Matt pushed his Harley to the limit. The town where he’d spent what some would call his formative years rushed by in a blur of impressions: the Langdon Street sign that still bent to the right, eleven years after his convertible had given it a new shape; Amos Wintergreen’s farm, where Matt and his friends had tipped cows until Amos’s Labrador drove them off his land; the county jail, where he’d spent many a night paying for what his father called “bad choices.”
The wind whipped at his jacket, pushing him to turn around and go back to Pennsylvania. He had a business there, a life. He didn’t need to be in Mercy, he told himself.
With a determined twist, Matt revved the engine of the 1974 Sportster and the sleek machine beneath him lunged forward.
The image of the woman in the banana suit popped into his head. The memory erased the growing tension in his neck. He chuckled. She must be mighty brave to put on such a public display in a small town, especially this small town.
His imagination was drifting toward what she’d look like beneath the peel when the bike shuddered and the engine began to cough and stall. Matt squeezed the handlebar brakes and brought the motorcycle to a grinding, definitely-bad-for-the-engine halt.
“Damn!” he swore at the defiant mass of steaming metal. The head gasket had blown and was spewing oil everywhere. Slick, dark liquid sprayed over his boots, across his T-shirt, trickled down the sleeves of his leather jacket. He set the bike on its kickstand, grabbed a rag from the toolbox strapped to the back and rubbed off the worst of it.
He was still two miles away from what used to be home. How ironic. Instead of the triumphant return he’d envisioned, he’d have to limp back to his parents’ house, hauling a several-hundred-pound pile of metal to boot. He swore twice more, cursing the fates resoundingly. But they didn’t listen. They’d given up on him long ago.
He began pushing it along the side of the road. The sun beat down, cooking him inside his leather jacket. He glanced at the cooler strapped to the back. A waste of time. The container had been empty of anything carbonated for the last ten miles. What he wouldn’t do for an ice-cold beer, or two or ten, right about now.
It had been eleven years since he’d dropped to the bottom and picked himself up, but some days—especially this day—the siren call of alcohol was loud and insistent.
For the thousandth time, Matt wondered why he’d thought it would be a good idea to come back.
At the end of the day, Katie headed into the air-conditioned shop, grateful she and Sarah had scraped together enough money to repair the aging cooling system. She peeled off the suit, stripping down to her shorts and tank.
“We had three orders for fruit baskets, so our idea boosted business. Not enough, though.” Sarah seated herself on a stool, popping open a can of soda and handing it to Katie, who promptly guzzled down half. “Was it as much fun as it looked?”
“Oh, so much more fun. I can’t believe you talked me into doing that.” Katie slipped off the yellow felt coverings on her sneakers. “You should try it sometime.”
“I’d be glad to. But the suit won’t fit for a couple months!” She patted her stomach, the mountainous bulge announcing her pregnancy, now in its ninth month.
It had been three years since Jack, Katie’s oldest brother, had married Sarah. Ever since, Katie had been awaiting the day a tiny voice called her Auntie Katie. Her brother Luke’s daughter was eleven and living in California, too far away to spoil. It wasn’t a family of her own, but it was the next best thing. Buying bibs and stuffed animals also kept her from thinking too hard about her own life—not that there’d been much of one to think about. She’d been stuck in glue for the past year, not moving forward with anything other than the store. Work was the only thing that filled the emptiness that crept around her when she flipped the sign to Closed.
It also helped her avoid the one thing she feared. Failure. Katie had yet to be a success at anything. She’d had good grades in high school, but not good enough to get a college scholarship. She’d joined the debate team and publicly frozen at her first competition. She’d dated the captain of the football team, but had been dumped at the altar. And now, the store—her dream—was close to financial ruin. Another imminent failure, if she didn’t take some action.
Katie propped open the door and dragged in the sign. “I’m glad to hear we had a few sales. We needed them.”
“I know. The road construction isn’t helping. The rent—” Sarah stopped when the door jangled.
Katie immediately recognized the woman who entered the store. Olivia Maguire, owner of the only interior design business in the Mercy area. Tall, thin and dressed in silvery-blue, she sailed into the room, straight for the counter. “Is that your design in the window?” she asked Sarah, pointing to an exotic silk display.
“Yes, it is.” Sarah said.
“Good. I’ll take two of those. As fast as you can get them to me.” She paced the store, her movements quick, exact. “And one of these,” she pointed to an elaborate vase filled with antique silk roses. “And three of those.” She gestured to a design Sarah had put out yesterday, a retro planter with bright flowers. “How soon can I have them?”
“We’d be happy to create those for you.” Katie proffered her hand when Sarah remained mute, mouth agape. “I’m Katie Dole, one of the owners. This is Sarah—”
“Yes, I know. I believe we’ve met once before, at a charity function or something.” She waved her hand vaguely. “Besides, it’s a small town. Everyone knows everyone and their business.” Olivia gave Katie’s hand a short, firm shake. “I’m Olivia Maguire. I own Renew Interior Designs. Right now, I have three clients who need arrangements. I drove by, saw that interesting one in the window and decided to stop.” She spun on her heel, taking in the shop. “I like what I see. I normally use the Lawford shop, but I’d like to give yours a try, if you have time in your schedule.”
“Certainly.” Katie shot a glance at Sarah. “We could probably have those arrangements to you in three days.” Sarah turned, grabbed the order pad and started writing.
“Make it two and you have a deal.” Olivia laid some money on the counter for a down payment.
Sarah nodded, her gaze on the cash. “Okay.”
“Wonderful.” Olivia handed Katie a foil-embossed business card. “Call me when they’re ready.” Then she left.
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