by Susan Meier
“You may kiss the bride.”
Drew turned to Tia and their eyes met. His were dark and serious, clouded with something Tia now understood very well. Confusion. They had taken the biggest step a man and woman could take together. They had done it for some very good reasons. But if their fifteen-minute service had almost sucked her into believing this was real, how would she possibly survive eight months?
Drew bent his head and touched his lips to hers, but before he could pull away, Tia slid her right arm around his neck and nudged him to stay where he was. They wouldn’t give the impression of two people so enamored they had to get married in two weeks with a peck on the cheek.
They had to really kiss.
Dear Reader,
After looking at winter’s bleak landscape and feeling her icy cold breezes, I found nothing to be more rewarding than savoring the warm ocean breezes from a poolside lounge chair as I read a soon-to-be favorite book or two! Of course, as I choose my books for this long-anticipated outing, this month’s Silhouette Romance offerings will be on the top of my pile.
Cara Colter begins the month with Chasing Dreams (#1818), part of her A FATHER’S WISH trilogy. In this poignant title, a beautiful academic moves outside her comfort zone and feels alive for the first time in the arms of a brawny man who would seem her polar opposite. When an unexpected night of passion results in a pregnancy, the hero and heroine learn that duty can bring its own sweet rewards, in Wishing and Hoping (#1819), the debut book in beloved series author Susan Meier’s THE CUPID CAMPAIGN miniseries. Elizabeth Harbison sets out to discover whether bustling New York City will prove the setting for a modern-day fairy tale when an ordinary woman comes face-to-face with one of the world’s most eligible royals, in If the Slipper Fits (#1820). Finally, Lissa Manley rounds out the month with The Parent Trap (#1821), in which two matchmaking girls set out to invent a family.
Be sure to return next month when Cara Colter concludes her heartwarming trilogy.
Happy reading!
Ann Leslie Tuttle
Associate Senior Editor
Wishing and Hoping
SUSAN MEIER
The Cupid Campaign
Books by Susan Meier
Silhouette Romance
Stand-In Mom #1022
Temporarily Hers #1109
Wife in Training #1184
Merry Christmas, Daddy #1192
*In Care of the Sheriff #1283
*Guess What? We’re Married! #1338
Husband from 9 to 5 #1354
*The Rancher and the Heiress #1374
†The Baby Bequest #1420
†Bringing Up Babies #1427
†Oh, Babies! #1433
His Expectant Neighbor #1468
Hunter’s Vow #1487
Cinderella and the CEO #1498
Marrying Money #1519
The Boss’s Urgent Proposal #1566
Married Right Away #1579
Married in the Morning #1601
**Baby on Board #1639
**The Tycoon’s Double Trouble #1650
**The Nanny Solution #1662
Love, Your Secret Admirer #1684
Twice a Princess #1758
††Baby Before Business #1774
††Prince Baby #1783
††Snowbound Baby #1791
‡Wishing and Hoping #1819
SUSAN MEIER
is one of eleven children, and though she’s yet to write a book about a big family, many of her books explore the dynamics of “unusual” family situations, such as large work “families,” bosses who behave like overprotective fathers, or “sister” bonds created between friends. Because she has more than twenty nieces and nephews, children also are always popping up in her stories. Many of the funny scenes in her books are based on experiences raising her own children or interacting with her nieces and nephews. She was born and raised in western Pennsylvania and continues to live in Pennsylvania.
For my parents, whose continuing romance through their marriage showed me that love really can be everlasting.
Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter One
“I’m pregnant.”
Tia Capriotti stood on the porch of Drew Wallace’s white French Colonial farmhouse, staring at the father of her child. His shiny black hair, usually hidden by his Stetson, was sexily disheveled and his dark eyes glittered sexily, but that was Drew. He was handsome. He was sexy. And she now knew he was out of her league.
The sounds of two stable hands leaving for the day alerted Tia to the fact that they might be overheard. She knew Drew realized that too when he grabbed her forearm and pulled her into his foyer, quickly closing the stained-glass door behind her.
“Say that again.”
She raised her eyes to meet his gaze. “I’m pregnant.”
“Oh, God!” was all Drew said as he sat down heavily on the fourth step of the stairway. His butt hit the soft carpet runner as his boots thumped on the hardwood floor.
Tia said nothing, giving him time to get his bearings, remembering, as he probably was, the night they had run into each other at a party in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, so far away from Calhoun Corners, Virginia, that he’d never expected to come across somebody from his hometown. He’d always known her as Isabella. So when their host introduced her as Tia—a nickname she’d picked up in college—without her last name, he hadn’t associated her with his formerly chubby, long-haired next-door neighbor, whom he hadn’t seen since she’d left for college six years before.
But she had assumed he’d recognized her because he didn’t ask her last name and flirted with her as if she were the love of his life—something she’d dreamt of through high school when she’d had a killer crush on him. She was thrilled when he’d accepted her invitation to come back to her house.
They hadn’t caught the misunderstanding until after they’d made love, but when he had discovered she was Isabella Capriotti, not just plain Tia-somebody-or-another-who-worked-at-an-ad-firm-in downtown-Pittsburgh, Drew had been furious. He’d felt she should have realized he hadn’t recognized her, if only because she should have known he wouldn’t have a one-night stand with the daughter of the man who had helped him build his horse-breeding business. And if that wasn’t enough, he didn’t sleep with women twelve years younger than he was.
After his outburst, Tia had stared at him mutely, thinking his understanding of romance was nonexistent. He had no qualms about jumping into bed with a total stranger, but he was upset about making love to her—mostly because he knew her.
Still, she had her pride. When they had made love, he’d believed she was somebody else. She couldn’t even remotely pretend the man of her high-school fantasies loved her. And the way he had scolded her had made her blood boil. She was an adult. She had a job and a house. A bank had considered her responsible enough to give her a mortgage. She hadn’t deserved to be treated like a little girl.
And that’s exactly what she had told him before she’d asked him to leave. When he’d walked out her door that night she had been convinced that she would never see him again.
She knew he wouldn’t be happy she was pregnant, but she was here to assure him he needn’t be concerned. She might be twelve years younger than he was, but she was a twenty-four-year-old woman who made enough money to support a child. She was ready to become a mom. He could have as much or as little involvement with this baby as he wanted.
“Don’t worry. I have
everything under control.”
“What about me? Don’t I get any say in this?”
“I absolutely want you to be involved in our baby’s life, but there’s no pressure. You have the option to be as involved as you want to be.”
He gaped at her. “That’s your idea of having everything under control? To give me the ‘option’ of being involved in our baby’s life?”
“No!” Tia said, baffled by how he had twisted everything. “I have a job and my own house…”
“I’m not talking about finances. I’m talking about the personal end of things. A child should have its father’s name.”
He sounded exactly as her dad sounded any time he heard of a woman having a baby on her own, and Tia realized that this was probably why women didn’t date men too much older than they were.
“As far as I’m concerned the first thing we need to do is get married.”
Tia’s heart thumped at the possibility of being the wife of the man she’d fantasized about since she was fourteen. But she knew he didn’t want to marry her. And she didn’t think she wanted to marry him, either. Not after the way he’d reacted the night they’d made love. No thanks.
“I didn’t come here to extort marriage from you. The baby can just take your name. It doesn’t matter if we’re married when he’s born—”
“Maybe not to you, but it does to me and I’ll bet it does to your dad.” He paused and groaned. “Damn it! We have a bigger reason to get married than giving the baby my name.”
Not quite sure she trusted him, Tia peered at him. “And that reason is?”
“Your dad’s reelection campaign is in trouble.”
“Really?” she asked dubiously. Her dad had been mayor of Calhoun Corners since she was six. No one ever voted against him.
“For the first time in close to twenty years, your dad has an opponent. Auggie Malloy. His entire platform is based on the fact that your dad had a heart attack last year. Everybody knows he takes pills when he’s stressed and Auggie’s saying that makes him too sick to be mayor. And Mark Fegan agrees,” Drew said, referring to the editor of the Calhoun Corners Chronicle. “He’s been running editorials supporting Auggie.”
This time it was Tia who groaned. “Are you kidding me? By doing that he’s actually causing the stress that causes my dad’s chest pain.”
“And makes your dad look too weak to be mayor. But even so, the election isn’t our problem. Our problem is that your dad has enough stress already and God only knows how he’s going to react when we tell him I got you pregnant in a one-night stand and we’re not getting married because we don’t really know each other—but we had sex.”
Tia fell to the step just below the one on which Drew sat. She hadn’t intended to tell her dad the “circumstances” under which she got pregnant, but she understood what Drew was saying. With the stress her dad already had, there was a chance that any news that made him angry could be the stress that pushed him over the edge, and she didn’t even want to put into words what would happen then.
“What if we don’t tell him until after the election?”
“There are six months until the election. Do you think you’re not going to be showing any time in the next six months? Or that the stress of the election will lessen as we get closer to the day that everybody goes to the polls? If anything, the stress is going to increase. It’s better to tell him you’re pregnant now before the election stress is at its worst, when he really could have a heart attack.”
As Tia tried to think it through, Drew scooted off his stair to pace the foyer, his boots making a thumping sound on the hardwood with every step. But he suddenly turned and stood towering over her. Because it was a hot June day, he wore only jeans and a T-shirt that his chest and broad shoulders stretched to capacity. His penetrating brown eyes seemed to be able to see the whole way to her soul. He was so attractive it almost hurt to look at him. She swallowed.
“This doesn’t have to be complicated. If we tell your dad we’ve been secretly dating and you’re pregnant so we’re getting married, nobody will blink an eye. And it’s not like we have to be ‘really’ married. You work in Pittsburgh. I live in Virginia. We don’t even have to see each other except for a few weekends to make the situation look believable. We can divorce after the baby’s born and once again I’ll bet nobody will even blink an eye, if only because with you working in Pittsburgh and me living in Virginia everybody will say our marriage was doomed from the start.”
What he said made a lot of sense. They could pretend to be married without having to live together because of her job. Plus, not seeing much of each other was a built-in explanation for why the marriage would fail. Oddly enough, it was the perfect way to hide the bad part of their situation while revealing the good parts. Her parents didn’t have any grandchildren. A wedding and a baby right now might be a calming influence. At the very least, a baby and a wedding could make her parents happy.
“Okay. We’ll get married.”
“Okay.”
The foyer became incredibly quiet. They spent the next few seconds staring at each other and it sunk in for Tia that she was marrying the guy she’d dreamed about from the day she’d met him when she was fourteen. Unfortunately, the wedding wasn’t happening anywhere near the way she’d envisioned it. And, even more unfortunately, Drew Wallace wasn’t the Prince Charming she had imagined in her teenage fantasies. In fact, he was pretty much the opposite of the sweet, sincere gentleman she had pictured him to be.
Drew suddenly turned and grabbed his Stetson from a peg by the door. “Let’s go tell your parents.”
Her gaze jerked back to his. “Now?”
“If we don’t do this now, we’re both going to lose courage. Or we’ll try to talk ourselves out of it. Trust me. When it comes to ugly situations like this, I know exactly how to get out of them.”
A quiver of misgiving shuddered through Tia. She wasn’t so naive as to think that a man as handsome and sexy as Drew got to be thirty-six without being involved with other women. Maybe even lots of women. But she’d never thought of him as needing to “get out of things.” Worse, she’d never thought far enough ahead to consider that he might actually be involved with somebody right now.
She rose from the step. “I’m not about to be confronted by an angry woman for stealing her man, am I?”
With his hand already on the doorknob, Drew let out a gust of air and faced her. “You’re not stealing anybody’s man.”
“Because you don’t have somebody?”
“Because we’re not staying married.”
“So this marriage won’t even be a bump in the road for you?”
Drew looked at her as if she were crazy and she said, “Never mind.” She stepped out onto the porch ahead of him and ran down the steps to the sidewalk, knowing that for the next several months, maybe even year, she was stuck with the grumpiest man on the face of the earth. “This is going to be fun.”
“It doesn’t have to be fun. It doesn’t have to be much of anything since we only have to spend enough time together that your parents don’t suspect the marriage is fake.”
“As I said, sounds like a barrel of fun.”
After crunching across the gravel to the big black truck he had parked in front of his garage, Drew opened the door to the cab and gestured for Tia to climb inside. “And as I said, it doesn’t need to be fun. Only official.”
Tia walked past him. She was pregnant with his baby and had conspired to enter into a fake marriage with him, yet he was barking orders as if he still saw her as a child.
“I’ll take my own car, thanks,” she said, her voice prim and proper. “There’s no reason for me to drive back here just to pick it up.”
He slammed the truck door. “Good point.”
“Whatever,” she said, and marched to her little red sports car.
She got inside, closed her door with enough force to rattle the windows and had her vehicle roaring down the lane toward the main highway before Dre
w turned to walk to the driver’s-side door.
Anger ricocheted through Drew. He kicked both front tires of his truck on his way around each fender and slammed his door, too.
His only consolation was that he knew Tia wasn’t really driving too fast. Her sports car had a big engine that would roar anytime anyone hit the gas even slightly. But occupying his brain with anger about her driving was much better than thinking about telling his mentor and friend that his daughter was about to have a baby. His baby….
Drew paused and, dropping his head, let his forehead bump against the steering wheel. His baby.
Dear God. He was going to be a father.
Even as the thought filled him with an emotion that made his heart feel as if it was surrounded by warm oatmeal, it also struck pure terror in that same heart. Not because he thought he couldn’t handle being a dad, but because he knew he could not handle being married. One incredibly ugly divorce had taught him that lesson. His ex-wife had bled him dry. But that wasn’t the worst. The worst was discovering, after he’d literally sold his share of his first business to his partner to pay her settlement, that she just happened to be having an affair with that same partner.
Drew squeezed his eyes shut, angry with himself for thinking of things so far in the past, but he couldn’t stop the memories. Sandy hadn’t been his first love. He’d had girlfriends, been in love, and even lived with someone for a few months before he’d met Sandy, so he wasn’t naive. But Sandy had been special. She was funny, interesting, smart and one of the most wonderful women he had ever met. He remembered some nights just watching her sleep, totally grateful that she was his.
Her request for a divorce had come out of the blue and had blindsided him. When he had opened the envelope from the process server he was sure he and his partner were being sued by one of their contractors. That would have been stunning enough. But to see in print Sandy’s name and his name and the word divorce on the same page, when he hadn’t even known there was trouble in paradise, had paralyzed him.
