Solution: Marriage

Solution: Marriage
Barbara Benedict

LUKE PARKER WAS BACK IN TOWN…The news ripped through Main Street like a midsummer tornado. But Callie Magruder didn't need the local gossip mill to tell her so. She'd felt he was coming. After all, she'd always had a sixth sense when it came to Luke–or maybe it was no sense. Luke was the town's Golden Boy, son of her family's nemesis…and her forbidden first love. And now he was returning with a proposition: marriage! Only, Callie had a ten-year-old secret, one that shared his father's devastating smile….

“You once said that if I ever needed a favor, I simply had to ask,”

Luke told Callie.

“Well, you have some nerve, Luke Parker. Calling me in on a long-ago favor!”

“My father is set on me taking over the family business.”

Callie didn’t need to hear the steel in his tone to know his take on that. Years ago, something bad must have happened between father and son, something that left Luke vehemently determined to do nothing to increase his father’s fortune.

“Just how do you expect me to help you?” She wanted to sound aloof and uncaring, but she was curious.

“Way I see it,” Luke said carefully, “I need to make myself so undesirable, he’d never let me run the business. And that, darlin’, is where you come in.”

“Forget it, Luke. I’ve got better things to do than playing your girlfriend again so you can annoy your father.”

“I’m not asking you to play my girlfriend,” he said. “No, Callie, I’m asking you to be my wife.”

Dear Reader,

When Patricia Kay was a child, she could be found hiding somewhere…reading. “Ever since I was old enough to realize someone wrote books and they didn’t just magically appear, I dreamed of writing,” she says. And this month Special Edition is proud to publish Patricia’s twenty-second novel, The Millionaire and the Mom, the next of the STOCKWELLS OF TEXAS series. She admits it isn’t always easy keeping her ideas and her writing fresh. What helps, she says, is “nonwriting” activities, such as singing in her church choir, swimming, taking long walks, going to the movies and traveling. “Staying well-rounded keeps me excited about writing,” she says.

We have plenty of other fresh stories to offer this month. After finding herself in the midst of an armed robbery with a gun to her back in Christie Ridgway’s From This Day Forward, Annie Smith vows to chase her dreams…. In the next of A RANCHING FAMILY series by Victoria Pade, Kate McDermot returns from Vegas unexpectedly married and with a Cowboy’s Baby in her belly! And Sally Tyler Hayes’s Magic in a Jelly Jar is what young Luke Morgan hopes for by saving his teeth in a jelly jar…because he thinks that his dentist is the tooth fairy and can grant him one wish: a mother! Also, don’t miss the surprising twists in Her Mysterious Houseguest by Jane Toombs, and an exciting forbidden love story with Barbara Benedict’s Solution: Marriage.

At Special Edition, fresh, innovative books are our passion. We hope you enjoy them all.

Best,

Karen Taylor Richman

Senior Editor

Solution: Marriage

Barbara Benedict

www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)

For my dad,

who showed me and everyone around him

what love truly means.

We’ll all miss you.

BARBARA BENEDICT

Weaving a story has always been part of Barbara Benedict’s life, from the days when her grandfather would gather the kids around his banjo, to the nights of bedtime tales with her own children. To Barbara, starting a story should be like saying, “Come, enter a special new world with me.”

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

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter One

Lucky Parker was back in town.

The news ripped through Mamie’s Main Street Styling Salon like a midsummer tornado—Tuesdays always drawing the biggest crowd for the cut-and-curl special—but Callianne Magruder didn’t need the buzz of small-town gossips to alert her to that man’s appearance. Long before the ladies of Latour, Louisiana, began their clucking, she’d felt he was coming.

Thing was, she’d always had this sixth sense when it came to Lucky Parker. Or maybe she might better call it no sense, since it invariably led her to trouble.