Can
Kyra and Dax let go so easily—or has love become a preexisting condition?
SUDDENLY ENGAGED
Lake Haven #3
Julia London
Releasing July 25, 2017
Montlake
Single
mother Kyra Kokinos spends her days waiting tables, her nights working on her
real estate license, and every spare moment with her precocious six-year-old
daughter, Ruby—especially when Ruby won’t stop pestering their grumpy next-door
neighbor. At first glance, Dax Bishop seems like the kind of gruff, solitary
guy who’d be unlikely to offer a cup of sugar, let alone a marriage proposal.
But that’s exactly what happens when Ruby needs life-saving surgery.
Dax showed
up in East Beach a year ago, fresh from a painful divorce and looking for a
place where he could make furniture and avoid people. Suddenly his life is
invaded by an inquisitive munchkin in sparkly cowboy boots—and her frazzled,
too-tempting mother. So he presents a practical plan: his insurance will help
Ruby, and then they can divorce—zero strings attached.
But soon
Kyra and Dax find their engagement of convenience is simple in name only. As
their attraction deepens, a figure from the past reappears, offering a way out.
Can Kyra and Dax let go so easily—or has love become a preexisting condition?
Chapter One
Seven years later
July
Leave it to a female to think the rules did not apply to her.
The little heathen from next door was crawling under the split-rail fence that separated the cottages again. Dax, who already had been feeling pretty damn grumpy going on a year now, wondered why she didn’t just go over the fence. She was big enough. It was almost as if she wanted the mud on her dress and her knees, to drag the ends of her dark red ponytails through the muck.
She crawled under, stood up, and knocked the caked mud off her knees. She stomped her pink, sparkly cowboy boots—never had he seen a more impractical shoe—to make them light up, as she liked to do, hopping around her porch several times a day.
Then she started for cottage Number Two, arms swinging, stride long.
Dax watched her from inside his kitchen, annoyed. It had started a week ago, when she’d climbed on the bottom railing of the fence, leaned over it, and shouted, “I like your dog!”
He’d ignored her.
Two days ago he’d asked her, fairly politely, not to give any more cheese to his dog, Otto. That little stunt of hers had resulted in a very long and malodorous night between man and beast.
Yesterday he’d commanded her to stay on her side of the fence.
But here the little monster came, apparently neither impressed with him nor intimidated by his warnings.
Well, Dax had had enough with that family, or whatever the situation was next door. And the enormous pickup truck that showed up at seven a.m. and idled in the drive just outside his bedroom window. Those people were exactly what was wrong with America—people doing whatever they wanted without regard for anyone else, letting their kids run wild, coming and going at all hours of the day.
He walked to the back screen door and opened it. He’d installed a dog door, but Otto refused to use it. No, Otto was a precious buttercup of a dog that liked to have his doors opened for him, and he assumed that anytime his master neared the door, Dax was opening it for him.
Julia
London is
the New York Times, USA Today, and Publishers
Weekly bestselling author of more than forty romance novels. Her
historical titles include the popular Desperate Debutantes series, the Cabot
Sisters series, and the Highland Grooms series. Her contemporary works include
the Lake Haven series, the Pine River series, and the Cedar Springs series. She
has won the RT Book Club Award for Best Historical Romance and has been a
six-time finalist for the prestigious RITA Award for excellence in romantic
fiction. She lives in Austin, Texas.
