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Автор Paige Laurie
Praise for Laurie Paige:
“Laurie Paige doesn’t miss…”
—New York Times bestselling author Catherine Coulter
“Laurie Paige adds humor and wit to a touching love story filled with heartfelt emotion and a thrilling cast of supporting characters. ”
—Romantic Times BOOKclub on Christmas Kisses for a Dollar
“It is always a joy to savor the consistent excellence of this outstanding author. ”
—Romantic Times BOOKclub
LAURIE PAIGE
reports that she is working on her seventieth romance book. She is still married to her high school sweetheart. It’s cold and snowy in the mountains of northern California where she lives, but when she checks the weather news on TV, she notes the temperatures in New Orleans and other cities that got hit by Hurricane Katrina. While many people have found refuge in other states, she knows that, in the landscape of the heart, there’s no place like home.
Christmas Kisses for a Dollar
Laurie Paige
This book is for Tara, who said, “Yes, you can” after I explained all the reasons I couldn’t. With thanks and warm fuzzies.
Contents
1
Christmas Kisses—$1. 00
Jonathan Sinclair smiled at the provocative banner wafting in the December breeze. The sign, attached to two trees, floated over a booth wreathed in holly and cedar boughs. The occasion appeared to be an old-fashioned bazaar in the school yard.
He stopped at a red light and used the opportunity to assess the group waiting to buy a kiss. The line was long. He couldn’t see the woman from this angle, but the guys were young—some of them teenagers, he guessed, in line on a dare from their friends, most likely—while the rest were probably in their twenties, maybe thirties.
All single, he assumed. They didn’t have the look of men who were shackled to shrews, which, from his observations of life, were what women became once they got a man to the altar.
Or even before, as his own experience proved.
A shudder ran clear down to his toes as he remembered his close call in this very town. He’d been eighteen when the girl next door, who’d been twenty, had tried to trap him into marriage with the oldest trick in the book. Few people had believed he’d been innocent as he’d claimed.
It had been a learning experience. He went on the alert when women came on to him in too friendly a manner, and he suspected ulterior motives behind their smiles.
The light changed. He waited with resigned patience for the crowd to amble past the lined crosswalk. When the street was clear, he turned the corner.
Everyone in the county was in town for the festivities, it seemed. He grimaced at his poor timing and looked for a parking space near the feed-and-seed store. The fertilizer he’d ordered last week was in. All he wanted was to pick it up and get back to the ranch.
The ranch. Three hundred acres of pines and pasture, two hundred head of cattle and a commercial plant nursery.
