Resolved To (Re)Marry Read online

  The HOLIDAY HONEYMOON fun continues this month, when Gulliver’s Travels employee LUCY FALCO rekindles the flame with CHRISTOPHER BANKS.

  Praise

  Letter to Reader

  Title Page

  Books by Carole Buck

  About the Author

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Copyright

  The HOLIDAY HONEYMOON fun continues this month, when Gulliver’s Travels employee LUCY FALCO rekindles the flame with CHRISTOPHER BANKS.

  So if you loved the earlier HOLIDAY HONEYMOON books—or even if you missed them—you’re sure to enjoy this sensuous, fun-filled romance by award-winning author Carole Buck.

  Praise for Carole Buck’s earlier Desire miniseries WEDDING BELLES...

  “...In Annie Says I Do...readers will appreciate how Ms. Buck skillfully turns a lifelong friendship into a passionate love affair.”

  “...Peachy’s Proposal [is] a scrumptious confection of a delight... Ms. Buck...creates a keeper for your bookshelf.”

  “[In]...Zoe and the Best Man...Ms. Buck gifts us with a clever, witty love story with oodles of warm sensuality and touching emotion.”

  —Melinda Helfer, Romantic Times

  Dear Reader,

  Welcome to a wonderful new year at Silhouette Desire! Let’s start with a delightfully humorous MAN OF THE MONTH by Lass Small—The Coffeepot Inn. Here, a sinfully sexy hero is tempted by a virtuous woman. He’s determined to protect her from becoming the prey of the local men—and he’s determined to win her for himself!

  The HOLIDAY HONEYMOONS miniseries continues this month with Resolved To (Re)Marry by Carole Buck. Don’t miss this latest installment of this delightful continuity series!

  And the always wonderful Jennifer Greene continues her STANFORD SISTERS series with Bachelor Mom. As many of you know, Jennifer is an award winner, and this book shows why she is so popular with readers and critics alike!

  Completing the month are a new love story from the sizzling pen of Beverly Barton, The Tender Trap: a delightful Western from Pamela Macaluso, The Loneliest Cowboy; and something a little bit different from Ashley Summers, On Wings of Love.

  Enjoy!

  Senior Editor

  Please address questions and book requests to:

  Silhouette Reader Service

  U.S.: 3010 Walden Ave., P.O. Box 1325. Buffalo. NY 14269 Canadian: P.O. Box 609, Fort Erie, Ont L2A 5X3

  CAROLE BUCK

  RESOLVED TO (RE)MARRY

  Books by Carole Buck

  Silhouette Desire

  Time Enough for Love #565

  Paradise Remembered #614

  While Lace Promises #644

  Red-Hot Sann #677

  Knight and Day #699

  Blue Sky Guy #750

  Sparks #808

  Dark Intentions #899

  *Annie Says I Do #934

  *Peachy’s Proposal #976

  *Zoe and the Best Man #989

  †Resolved to (Re)Marry #1049

  Silhouette Romance

  Make-believe Marriage #752

  Silhouette Intimate Moments

  †A Bride lor Saint Nick #752

  Silhouette Books

  Silhouette Summer Sizzlers 1993

  “Hot Copy”

  *Wedding Belles

  †Holiday Honeymoons

  CAROLE BUCK

  is a television news writer and movie reviewer who lives in Atlanta. She is single and her hobbies include cake decorating, ballet and traveling. She collects frogs, but does not kiss them. Carole says she’s in love with life; she hopes the books she writes reflect this.

  Prologue

  It was the final night of December, and the former Lucia Annette Falco and her new husband, Christopher Dodson Banks, were too intoxicated to fully understand what they were doing.

  Their euphoric deficit of comprehension had nothing to do with alcohol. The only liquor either of them had imbibed on this New Year’s Eve was a few pro forma sips of champagne at their wedding reception. If they’d been tested, they would have registered stone-cold sober.

  So why were Chris’s normally steady limbs as wobbly as a wino’s as he stood in the center of the hotel suite where he intended to consummate the marriage vows he’d uttered with such solemnity earlier that evening?

  And why was Lucy feeling as giggly and giddy as a prom queen at a frat-house keg party as she anticipated doing exactly the same thing?

  To put it simply—or not so simply, as things turned out—the newly wed Mr. and Mrs. Banks were drunk with love.

  And dreams.

  His dreams about her.

  Her dreams about him.

  Their dreams ... about themselves and their future together.

  The fact that only a few of these dreams had been clearly articulated by either party—and that several of the more crucial unspoken ones seemed to be downright contradictory—was something neither the bride nor the groom had taken time to consider.

  Such was the nature of their mutual intoxication.

  Lucy melted against Chris with a purr of delight as he gathered her tenderly into his arms. She clung to him, nuzzling at his chest. Breathing in deeply, she savored the subtle spice of his cologne and the potent hint of natural male musk that lay beneath it.

  She adored the way her new husband smelled.

  And tasted.

  And felt.

  She was nuts about the way be looked, too.

  Funny. She’d grown up assuming that when she finally surrendered to the urge to merge, her mate would be some hunky Mediterranean-type male. And why not? The vast majority of the guys she’d gone out with had been cast from the same dark-eyed, dark-haired, olive-complected mold. They’d sported tight jeans and black leather jackets. They’d also—with the notable exception of Chachi Palucci, who’d tried to impress her with plagiarized poetry—been prone to flexing their well-developed pecs in an effort to incite her admiration.

  Whereas Chris ...

  Well, the man to whom she’d given herself in every sense of the phrase had hazel eyes. His thick, straight hair was a sun-gilded caramel brown. Although his skin had been burnished by years of tennis, skiing and sailing, it was pale in the places the sun had never touched.

  The bulk of his well-tailored wardrobe came from Brooks Brothers, Paul Stuart and Ralph Lauren. He wore leather on his feet and around his narrow waist, and that was it. He was tall—six feet to her own five-five-and built along lean, angular lines. While he was not the kind of man who indulged in false modesty, neither was he inclined to strut his stuff.

  In short, Christopher Dodson Banks was not her type. No way. No how.

  Or so Lucia Annette Falco would have sworn, until the sultry Saturday night when her gaze connected with his for the first time.

  He had been checking out her chest when she registered his existence in the world. No big deal, really. She’d blossomed from soda-straw skinniness to a C cup the summer before she entered seventh grade, and she’d been getting ogled ever since.

  Although she didn’t particularly relish the attention her bosom attracted, Lucy had come to terms with it. She’d also discovered that the apparently genetically ingrained male tendency to assume that a woman’s IQ was inversely proportional to her bra size could be turned to her advantage. She didn’t play dumb. She had too much self-respect to resort to that kind of ploy. But there were situations in which she consciously refrain
ed from flaunting her brains up front.

  The few genuinely offensive members of the opposite sex she encountered-specifically, the jerks who grabbed without asking permission and who couldn’t seem to grasp the concept that no meant no, not maybe or take me—she left to the not-so-tender mercies of her widowed father, three unmarried brothers, four uncles and ten male cousins. It wasn’t that she didn’t believe herself capable of fending off lechers. Quite the contrary. But as the only female Falco of her generation, she believed it behooved her to offer the men in her family the opportunity to defend her honor—and vent what she considered potentially dangerous buildups of excess testosterone—every now and then.

  It was for her own peace of mind, really. As long as her macho macho relatives were preoccupied with protecting her, they weren’t going to have the time or energy to embroil themselves in any really serious trouble.

  The tawny-haired stranger had lifted his gray-green eyes to her coffee-bean-brown ones a second or two after she glanced in his direction and became aware of his unabashed appraisal of her T-shirted breasts. She’d intended to blow him off like lint, for a variety of reasons, not the least of which was that she was sweating like a pig—thanks to her brothers’ spectacularly inept efforts at air-conditioning repair—and didn’t feel like being gawked at by some preppie-style prince who obviously didn’t belong in Falco’s Pizzeria. But as their gazes collided and locked, she’d felt a surge of attraction so powerful that she gasped aloud and grabbed for the side of the cash register she’d been tending for nigh on eight hours.

  She’d tried to turn away, but found herself unable to do so. Her pulse had kicked like a chorus line. Her stomach had fluttered wildly. Nothing she’d experienced with any of the long line of neighborhood guys she’d dated during the five years since she’d celebrated her sweet sixteenth had prepared her for such a primal response.

  Her ogler had flushed, obviously embarrassed. Obviously affected, too.

  And then, astonishingly, he’d smiled at her.

  It hadn’t been one of those hey-baby-I’m-so-sexy grins she was accustomed to fielding from the local lotharios. Rather, it had been a quirking of flexible male lips, punctuated by a glint of even white teeth.

  There’d been a trace of surprise in the expression. As though the smile represented a surrender to impulse by someone not usually given to succumbing to hormonally generated whim.

  Lucy had reciprocated. Briefly. Breathlessly. If Chris had blinked, he probably would have missed it.

  Despite the fact that she’d been accused—not completely without justification, she was willing to concede—of being a tease by several of the neighborhood Romeos, she hadn’t been trying to be coy. Her control over her facial muscles had simply been too iffy for her to attempt a full-scale smile.

  Lucia Annette Falco had not been hunting for a husband the day twenty-four-year-old Christopher Dodson Banks walked into her family’s restaurant. She’d hoped to make a happy marriage eventually, of course. But not until she’d proven herself. By herself. To herself. For herself. And not until she’d firmly established her emotional and economic independence from her family.

  She’d never imagined herself tying the knot while she was still two semesters away from earning her bachelor’s degree in business administration. And even if she had, she certainly never would have envisioned a scenario in which the cause of her decision to reroute—some might suggest derail—her professional ambitions would be an Ivy League-educated lawyer who was the scion of one of Chicago’s most prominent families!

  Lucy’s breath hitched in her throat as she suddenly recalled the disapproving expression she’d glimpsed on her new mother-in-law’s perfectly made-up face as she and Chris departed for their honeymoon. She quickly shoved the memory aside. She’d find a way to deal with Elizabeth Banks, she assured herself. But not on this, the first night of her married life.

  “I can’t believe we actually did it,” she whispered, scarcely realizing that she’d spoken aloud. The enormity of the commitment she’d made washed over her like a wave. For a moment, she felt as though she might drown.

  “Well, we did, sweetheart.” Chris hugged Lucy close, pressing his lips against the crown of her head. He inhaled sharply. The scent of a fresh floral perfume—and of warm feminine flesh—hazed his nostrils. Desire swirled through him like a zephyr. “You and me. Together. In front of a huge horde of witnesses.”

  “I told you I had a lot of relatives.” There was an apology implicit in her soft voice. And an edge of defensiveness, too. The potentially troubling implications of both were lost in the rush of sensation unleashed by the stroking search of her hands.

  “True,” Chris acknowledged thickly, plucking the pins from her hair and scattering them on the floor. Lucy’s family—boisterously affectionate, abundantly extended, the antithesis of his own limited network of blood kin—was something he envied her. Still, there had been more than a couple of instances during this evening’s nuptial festivities when he found himself growing irritated by the number of guests who seemed to believe themselves entitled to lay claim to his bride’s undivided attention. “But having to face all of them in the same place at the same time was a little overwhelming.”

  “Overwhelming,” Lucy repeated in an odd tone, then shivered ardently as he finessed the nerve-rich skin of her nape. “I know... what you mean.”

  Perhaps she did. Perhaps she didn’t. Chris decided that it wasn’t particularly important at this particular time. What mattered right now was that, after too many hours of being forced to share her, he finally had the woman he’d promised to love and honor as long as they both should live all to himself.

  Was it selfish to want her so exclusively? he asked himself, unzipping Lucy’s dress and sliding it off her smooth-skinned shoulders. She accommodated his efforts with a provocative little shimmy, then began undoing the buttons on the front of his shirt. Was it wrong to resent her seemingly endless interest in other people’s problems?

  Maybe, he conceded, sucking in his breath as he felt the delicate rake of fingernails against his hair-whorled chest. But it also struck him as being profoundly human.

  They kissed again. Chris feathered his mouth back and forth, deepening the intimacy of the caress by carefully calibrated increments. Lucy’s lips grew pliant, then parted. He eased his tongue between them, absorbing his bride’s languid sigh of pleasure with a throaty invocation of her name.

  She was so...different... from the kind of woman he—to say nothing of his parents, friends and professional colleagues—had expected he’d one day woo and wed. Not just in appearance. But in upbringing and outlook, as well.

  This had unsettled Chris at the start of their relationship, and he’d tried to go slowly because of it. He hadn’t doubted Lucy. He’d doubted himself.

  He was self-aware enough to recognize that he wasn‘t—and probably never would be—entirely comfortable with the unearned privileges and unavoidable responsibilities that went with being the sole heir to the Banks family fortune. He’d needed to be certain that his desire to get involved with Lucia Annette Falco wasn’t the manifestation of some long-deferred impulse toward rebelling against his birthright.

  It had taken a fair amount of soul-searching, but he’d finally satisfied himself that his feelings were not the product of a postadolescent identity crisis. Which had been terrific, up to a point. Unfortunately, all the clumsy scrabbling around in his psyche hadn’t help him figure out why he was drawn so intensely to a young woman with whom, by most objective standards, he seemed to have very little in common.

  He’d replayed over and over again that first, heady moment when his eyes had connected with Lucy’s, attempting to make sense of his instantaneous hunger for her. While Chris was no stranger to physical passion, he’d never before encountered a female who could make his mouth go dry and his palms start to sweat simply by looking at him. He’d eventually abandoned his quest for a rational explanation of what had happened, deciding that he’d
probably have better luck trapping a lightning bolt between his hands during a thunderstorm.

  The woman with whom he’d tumbled so precipitately in love was neither classically beautiful nor all-American cute. Her brows were too strongly marked, her jawline was too stubbornly angled and her gaze was too direct to qualify her for inclusion the latter category. As for the former—well, her nose missed being aristocratic by several significant millimeters, while her lush-lipped mouth was a degree or so off plumb and bracketed by dimples.

  The thing was, Chris hadn’t registered a single one of these flaws—if flaws they were—the first time he saw his future wife. Nor had he stopped to question why, after years of squiring lithesome blue-eyed blond debutantes, he’d suddenly found himself bewitched by a voluptuous brunette cashier at a pizzeria.

  It had been her smile that initially snagged his attention. He’d seen her flash it at a slick-looking character in sunglasses and felt a strange stab to the heart. A surge of possessiveness had swept through him. He’d wanted that frank, feisty and oh-so-feminine expression directed at him—not some other guy.

  After her smile, he’d focused on her skin. He’d longed to touch it. To taste it. To discover whether it carried the flavor, as well as the look, of sweet cream and sun-ripened apricots.

  Her hair had compelled his senses, too. He’d yearned to free it from its haphazard ponytail and run his fingers through the long espresso-colored strands. To bury his face in the glossy tumble and breathe in its dusky fragrance.