An Unexpected Love (7 page)

“Fine,” he said tightly, his eyes glued to the drink cart making its way down the aisle towards us. Wow. Even loving him the way I did, there was no denying that when Dan was in a mood, he could still be kind of…
imposing
. Not in a scary kind of way, of course, but in a way that made me wonder what was going on in his head. I so rarely got to see what he was really thinking.

As the drink cart got closer, Dan seemed to get more jumpy, and pretty soon,
I
needed a drink. The flight attendant stopped and asked our row what we’d like. Thinning-haired guy ordered a club soda, I ordered a rum and Coke, and Dan didn’t order anything. The flight attendant immediately leaned over Dan and placed a can of Coke, a tiny bottle of rum and a cup of ice on my tray.

“Hey, why don’t you get something, you know I feel cheap when I drink alone—” I opened the baby rum bottle and was about to pour in a generous shot when my eye caught something floating in the cubes of ice. Something shiny. Holy shit.

I leaned forward and began digging around in the ice with my fingers, and pulled out a beautiful, pear-shaped solitaire, set in platinum. It was freezing in my hand. When I looked over at Dan, he was sliding down on one knee in the aisle beside me. He was pretty squished, and if I didn’t already feel tears gathering in the corners of my eyes, I would have burst out laughing at his face, which was frozen in a mask of terror. The flight attendant was standing behind him, looking like the cat that ate the canary. When had he set all this up?

He took my left hand in his. “Lexi, I’ve loved you for so long, and these last nine months have been the best of my life. I can’t remember what my life was like before you, and I can’t bear the thought of what it would be like without you…” Okay, so by then I was crying, and people were staring, and even thinning-haired guy was leaning over, listening with interest. “Will you marry me?”

I let forth some kind of horrible sound, which might have been a sob, or a cough, or a laugh, I’m not sure which. “So
this
is why you took the aisle seat,” I squeaked triumphantly.

Dan closed his eyes for a moment, as if praying for patience.

“Lex, can we focus here?”

“Oh God, sorry,
of course
I’ll marry you.” I lunged forward and threw my arms around his neck, and we kissed and kissed, until the drink cart started to jam Dan in the ribs. Finally he rose stiffly, and a bunch of passengers congratulated us, and I slipped the ring on my finger and absolutely could not take my eyes off it. When it was finally time to sit back down, Dan took the middle seat without my having to ask. I scooted as close to him as I could and rested my head on his shoulder.

“I love you,” I whispered in his neck.

“You love me because I gave you the aisle seat.”

“I love you because you are the best thing that’s ever happened to me. You know that, right?” I moved back and looked into his dark brown eyes, so dear to me now, and traced my finger along the edge of his jaw. “Right?”

“Yes, I know that,” he said roughly, and I hugged him, and he hugged me back, and I finally stopped talking.

Because everything was perfect.

About the Author

Claire Matthews caught the writing bug soon after her youngest daughter started school, leaving her to either write or seduce the FedEx guy. Since the FedEx guy was a woman, an author was born. After her first five stories were accepted for publication, Claire began to realize that this was more than just a hobby, and set up shop in the attic, with an old TV table, an ancient laptop and a well-worn thesaurus.

Focusing on short contemporary romance, Claire finds time to write between teaching political science at a nearby community college and caring for her two demanding daughters, her slightly neglected husband and her antisocial dog.

Find more about Claire at
clairematthews11.blogspot.com
.

She has a deft hand with banana flambé…and a touch that sets his body on fire.

Unnatural Calamities

© 2011 Summer Devon

Janey knows all too well she looks a wreck. What hard-working chef wouldn’t, operating on three hours of sleep? Stuck in a dull Connecticut town, taking care of her beloved niece, Rachel, Janey spends her days looking for a job and her nights working high-end catering gigs.

Just her luck, she runs into Mr. Perfect two days past her designated laundry day. And she’s just found out her niece is passing her off as “Mom” to avoid the embarrassment of admitting her real mother, Janey’s identical twin, is serving time.

Despite Janey’s questionable fashion sense and the juicy gossip about her checkered past, venture capitalist Christopher Dunham finds himself drawn to her spark. And warmed by her obvious affection for Rachel, so like what he feels for his own daughter.

When sexy, way-out-of-her-league Toph offers her a business loan, Janey can’t believe her long string of bad luck with bad boys has come to an end. At least, until a blast from her sister’s shady past turns up the heat on their attraction. And sets off a chain of events that could snuff out the flame just as their love starts to come to a boil…

Warning: A comedy of errors, mistaken identity, poor girl meets rich guy, kidnapping at gunpoint, and hot handcuffed sex in a hotel bathtub—and that’s all before lunch.

Enjoy the following excerpt for
Unnatural Calamities:

But God almighty, let Janey count the ways she hated West Farmbrook as a place to live. She counted as she dismembered the green pepper.

Thump
. One.
Thump
. The thin, chic mothers who stood in closed little circles at the one and only PTA meeting she’d gone to, and gave her the weirdest looks.

Two.
Thump, thump, thump.
The tennis club.

Three.
Thump, thump.
She grabbed another pepper and continued her list. The lack of any kind of life outside the PTA, the soccer team, the lacrosse team and the swim team.

Four.
Thump, thump.
The commute to reach any kind of life other than the PTA, soccer, etc. A half-hour drive, no buses, of course, to any of Janey’s friends and her various jobs and even a decent movie in the center of the city. No sidewalks.
Thump, thump.

She tossed the peppers into the pan and began to clean up. Libra-girl time—rants had to be followed by a counter-balancing “the place could be worse” viewpoint.

The great schools.
Right, did that already.
And at least Margaret Hamilton, a talkative stay-at-home parent of another nerdy girl, was friendly. She provided some companionship and gossip and even better, had an older daughter, a college student, who loved to babysit on the nights Janey worked.

A car door slammed. Then another car door. Oh damn—no,
darn
and blast the child, she was not alone.

Janey rubbed her hands on the stainless steel sink. Someone had told her that got rid of the stench of garlic. She didn’t exactly feel like a toad the few times she met up with the fabulous Cynthia, but she didn’t feel she came across as the right kind of grown-up. The slight narrowing of the well-groomed Cynthia’s blue eyes made Janey wish she had better posture or wore designer clothing or didn’t cut her own hair. Rachel had said that Cynthia’s mother had been a model or something. And Cynthia’s father sounded even worse.

“He has buckets of money and is a mover and shaker of massive proportions,” Rachel had solemnly told her.

“Sounds like a sumo wrestler.” Janey had snickered, which had somehow offended Rachel.

Janey had deftly changed the subject of the two near-perfect Dunham households by asking, “So what do you guess a dance called The Mover and Shaker should look like?”

The two of them had ended up boogeying, moving and shaking, around the tiny kitchen. Give Rachel a chance to sing or dance and she tended to forget everything else.

The door flew open. Rachel and Cynthia thumped into the small apartment shrieking with laughter, as usual. They skittered down the hall to Rachel’s room.

“Hey, you puny, lily-livered, young rapscallion, how many times do I have to tell you to close the door?” Janey called after Rachel. She went to shove the door shut.

“Excuse me?”

The man she’d almost slammed the door on smiled. Perhaps the most gorgeous eyes she’d ever beheld stared down into hers. Deep-set brown eyes. Heavy lidded, with the hint of laugh lines at their corners to add character.

“Is that puny, lily-livered thing a line from a play?” he asked.

Her examination shifted to the smiling mouth again. The rest of his face had character too. His body was nothing to sneeze at either. Too bad he appeared to be fairly prosperous, unlike the men she’d had the instant hots for. He wore a gray suit and burgundy tie instead of the usual greasy jeans her hormones sang out for.

“Um. Well. It’s a thing. An insult thing. A Shakespeare insult page on the net. The ah, Internet. We. Um. So.” She held out her hand and smiled brightly. “You must be Mr…ah.”
Fabulous? Mover and shaker?
She felt fairly moved, and not just because he’d scared the bejeezus out of her. Despite the tie, he was not bad. No, indeed.

She could almost hear Penny’s whisper. “It’s a TD&H, hon. Go ferrit.” Tall, dark and handsome. Except in Penny and Janey’s past men, the “h” stood for hellish, horny, heavy-metal, Harley or ham-handed. Penny still liked bad boys. Janey had given them up years ago, about the same time she stopped smoking and a few years after she stopped drinking too much.

The TD&H shook her hand. “Toph Dunham. Cynthia’s father.”

An Unexpected Love

Claire Matthews

Happily ever after is part of the equation...but something’s not adding up.

Investment analyst Lexi Watts has a social life, but thanks to her demanding job, no love life. After a twelve-hour day going toe-to-toe with her demanding boss, Dan Yeager, she barely has the energy to make her usual stop by her favorite pub for a pint and dinner. Except this night is different. Tonight, the firm’s golden boy, Jack Brogan—a.k.a. the man of her dreams—is in the pub. Drunk, lonely and available.

After she takes him home and tucks him into bed, she finds herself joining him there more and more often. A dream come true, yet she can’t quite put her finger on what’s missing.

The pieces fall into place one night when she’s a victim of a mugging. And it’s not Jack who comes to her rescue, but Dan. Giving Lexi a surprising glimpse of the real man behind his volatile, irascible office persona.
 

And suddenly Lexi’s once nonexistent love life has become complicated beyond belief…

Warning:
 
Contains a heroine who is suddenly the center of attention of two desirable men. And who realizes it’s not the best of both worlds…

eBooks are
not
transferable.

They cannot be sold, shared or given away as it is an infringement on the copyright of this work.

This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the writer’s imagination or have been used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, actual events, locale or organizations is entirely coincidental.

Samhain Publishing, Ltd.

11821 Mason Montgomery Road Suite 4B

Cincinnati OH 45249

An Unexpected Love

Copyright © 2012 by Claire Matthews

ISBN: 978-1-60928-872-3

Edited by Jennifer Miller

Cover by Scott Carpenter

All Rights Are Reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

First
Samhain Publishing, Ltd.
electronic publication: March 2012

www.samhainpublishing.com