The Paternity Proposition

A career air force officer, MERLINE LOVELACE served at bases all over the world, including tours in Taiwan, Vietnam and at the Pentagon. When she hung up her uniform for the last time, she decided to combine her love of adventure with a flair for story-telling, basing many of her tales on her experiences in the service.

Since then, she’s produced more than eighty action-packed novels, many of which have made USA Today and Waldenbooks bestseller lists. Over eleven million copies of her works are in print in thirty countries. Be sure to check her website at www.merlinelovelace.com for contests, news and information on future releases.

Dear Reader,

With several sets of twins in our family, I’ve always been intrigued by their ability to communicate without words and the very unique personalities they develop despite their shared environments and experiences. So when a six-month-old drops unexpectedly into the lives of two rich, sophisticated and very handsome twins, I couldn’t resist putting the Dalton brothers through all kinds of turmoil trying to figure out which of them had fathered the baby, and who the heck the child’s mother is!

I hope you enjoy The Paternity Proposition as much as I did while writing it. And please check my website at www.merlinelovelace.com or join me on my Facebook page for more information about this and my other books.

All my best,

Merline Lovelace

www.millsandboon.co.uk

To my eighty-four nieces, nephews, grands

and great-grands—it’s been such fun watching you all grow. You’ve been the inspiration for many of my books!

“Uh-oh.”

The mechanic’s muttered exclamation brought Julie Bartlett’s head up. She was hot, sweaty, splattered with engine oil, and in no mood for another glitch. The PA-36 Pawnee they were working on was almost twice her age and had seen some hard years before being purchased third-or fourthhand by her new partners. No way she was going to take the plane up again until she and Agro-Air’s chief mechanic had wrestled new rings onto the cylinder heads.

Agro-Air’s chief and only mechanic. Tobacco-chawing Chuck Whitestone and Julie’s other partner, Dusty Jones, had been in the agricultural aviation business for a combined eighty-two years. They’d scraped by during the lean times, when plummeting prices and widespread foreclosures forced so many Oklahoma farmers off their land. With U.S. crop production now on an upsurge, they should have turned the corner and be showing a tidy profit.

Should being the operative word. Dusty Jones could fly circles around any pilot, young, old or anywhere in between. Julie could attest to that. He’d swooped in to dust her parents’ wheat fields, taken their eager nine-year-old up for her very first flight and had her working the stick their second time in the air. Because of Dusty, Julie qualified for a pilot’s license before she could legally drive a car. And paid her way through Oklahoma State University with a variety of flying jobs after her parents died. And got hired by a small regional airline right out of college.

Her plan at the time was to build up her cockpit hours and move into bigger passenger aircraft. Ballooning fuel prices had axed that noble goal. With commercial airlines shutting down routes and laying off personnel, she’d switched from hauling passengers to hauling freight. In the past four years, she’d flown in and out of so many remote locations in North, Central and South America that she couldn’t remember a tenth of the places where she’d overnighted. She would probably still be hopping from country to country if Dusty hadn’t tracked her down a couple of months ago and called to suggest she partner up with him and Chuck Whitestone.

He and Chuck were both on the down slope to seventy, he’d reminded her. They wanted to retire soon. If Julie stuck with Agro-Air for a few years, she could buy them out lock, stock and barrel. All they needed was a small infusion of cash to stay afloat until they rode the upsurge in crop production to a nice, fat retirement.

As it turned out, Dusty’s definition of “small infusion” differed from Julie’s by several decimal points. Still, she couldn’t let him and Chuck go under. So she’d quit her job and sunk her entire savings into Agro-Air. But even someone with all her hours in the cockpit didn’t just jump into aerial agriculture feet first. Zipping under power lines and skimming tree tops required a completely different set of flying skills. Also damned near the equivalent of a double PhD in biology and chemistry. Luckily, Julie had taken many of the necessary science courses at OSU. Still, Dusty had insisted she do all the grunt work these past two months—driving trucks, mixing pesticides, maintaining the plane. She’d learned every aspect of the business from the ground up, literally and figuratively.

During her hot, grimy apprenticeship, Julie had also discovered that one of her new partners hit the casinos almost as often as he climbed into the cockpit. The cash she’d invested in Agro-Air should have gone for new equipment. Instead, Dusty had diverted it to pay his most pressing debts.