Everything's Coming Up Rosie
Kasey Michaels


Synopsis:

What's a dedicated bachelor doing at a week-long society wedding celebration? Doug Llewellyn is being bored out of his skull . . . until a beautiful, unknown woman calls him "darling," then plants a big wet kiss on him. Suddenly boredom is no longer Doug's problem.

Rosie Kilgannon, she of the big wet kiss, is also a guest at the wedding, and although she's used Doug as a way to escape an amorous admirer, that kiss was really something else! Why not enjoy each other for the week, no strings attached?

Which might have worked, if not for the weeping bride, the suspiciously shifty groom, and neurotic wedding planner . . . and the fact that True Love often sneaks up on the unwary and belts them right in the chops!

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Everything's Coming Up Rosie
Kasey Michaels



CHAPTER ONE


THE SEPTEMBER SCENERY in northern New Jersey bordered on magnificent as Douglas Llewellyn navigated his sleek black sedan along the narrow, winding roadways that wended through a civilized forest surrounding the large, manicured grounds of well-hidden mansions.

At any other time Doug would have been slowing the car, peering through the trees, on the lookout for interesting old architecture. Because Douglas Llewellyn was an architect, the senior partner of Philadelphia based Architecture Design, Ltd. (restorations a specialty). His interests were steeped in history, and he'd once lost a hefty commission for refusing to remove a fireplace mantel in a suburban Pennsylvania farmhouse because there were three musket balls in the wood, remnants of an Indian raid in 1763.

Then again, as his friend and partner had pointed out at the time, a man could indulge his love of history to the point of walking away from a mid-five-figure profit, if he'd been born with a silver spoon in his mouth. Hell, Cameron Pierce had said, Doug had been born with a full set of demitasse spoons clamped between his toothless infant gums.

Doug had merely shrugged, then asked Cam to help him unload the massive oak mantel, because he may have turned down the job, but he'd rescued the mantel.

Besides being a highly successful and sought-after architect up and down Philadelphia's Main Line, Doug was handsome, intelligent, urbane, witty-and matrimonially uncatchable.

He prided himself on the fact that he enjoyed all the benefits of female company, while neatly sidestepping the pitfalls-meaning commitment, meaning marriage. He enjoyed life, he enjoyed women. There was, he believed, no harm in that.

Life had been pretty much one big party for Doug, and it was with shock that he woke up one morning with a young blond real-estate agent in his bed and a feeling of utter emptiness in his gut, to realize he'd somehow become forty years old.

How had this happened? Surely it had been only yesterday that he'd been in college, happily working his way through the cheerleading squad.

Where had the succeeding nearly twenty years gone, anyway? He didn't drink more than the occasional beer, so it couldn't be that the years had disappeared in an alcoholic fog. He worked hard, he played hard, and the years had passed in a blur of work and play. Was that a good answer?

Maybe it was learning that his partner, Cam, had at last found his Darcie, and the two were soon to be married-and looking disgustingly happy with each other.

Not that Doug wasn't happy. Hell, he was delirious he was so happy. Wasn't he? A successful business, work that he adored, beautiful women clinging to his elbow, and always with another beautiful woman eager to take her place.

What wasn't to be happy about?

Which didn't explain why he'd become a virtual hermit these past two months, turning down invitations to parties, boating excursions, even a weekend tryst in the Bahamas with one of his semiregulars, the incredibly beautiful Kay Williams, where they'd have the run of her parents' thatched-roof minimansion fifty yards from their private beach. Kay liked to sunbathe topless. And bottomless. And she liked to be oiled, hourly.

And he'd turned her down?

Obviously there was something wrong with him. Not enough iron in his diet, perhaps? Maybe the chase had become too easy, with the result always a foregone conclusion.

Or maybe he was...old.

No. No, that couldn't be it. Forty wasn't old.

Then again, forty wasn't thirty-nine, was it?

Cam, standing in the doorway of Doug's office last Tuesday morning-the better to make a quick getaway-had suggested that maybe it all boiled down to the idea that it was time for Peter Pan to grow up.