Diane Pershing - The Wish

Had the morning been as magical as it had seemed? Had she and Des really confided in each other, let each other in on early hurts? Had there been a kind of communion between them, real intimacy, for the first time?

Had he really kissed her as though she were an attractive and desirable woman? Had he promised more, if she wanted it?

And had she really told him she wanted it?

Dear Reader,

Spring cleaning wearing you out? Perk up with a heart-thumping romance from Silhouette Romance. This month, your favorite authors return to the line, and a new one makes her debut!

Take a much-deserved break with bestselling author Judy Christenberry’s secret-baby story, Daddy on the Doorstep (#1654). Then plunge into Elizabeth August’s latest, The Rancher’s Hand-Picked Bride (#1656), about a celibate heroine forced to find her rugged neighbor a bride!

You won’t want to miss the first in Raye Morgan’s CATCHING THE CROWN miniseries about three royal siblings raised in America who must return to their kingdom and marry. In Jack and the Princess (#1655), Princess Karina falls for her bodyguard, but what will it take for this gruff commoner to win a place in the royal family? And in Diane Pershing’s The Wish (#1657), the next SOULMATES installment, a pair of magic eyeglasses gives Gerri Conklin the chance to do over the most disastrous week of her life…and find the man of her dreams!

And be sure to keep your eye on these two Romance authors. Roxann Delaney delivers her third fabulous Silhouette Romance novel, A Whole New Man (#1658), about a live-for-the-moment hero transformed into a family man, but will it last? And Cheryl Kushner makes her debut with He’s Still the One (#1659), a fresh, funny, heartwarming tale about a TV show host who returns to her hometown and the man she never stopped loving.

Happy reading!

Mary-Theresa Hussey

Senior Editor

www.millsandboon.co.uk

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To Morgan Rose, an excellent daughter, and George and

Ashley’s real mother. Thanks for letting me borrow them.

Silhouette Romance

Cassie’s Cowboy #1584

The Wish #1657

Silhouette Intimate Moments

While She Was Sleeping #863

The Tough Guy and the Toddler #928

Silhouette Yours Truly

First Date: Honeymoon

Third Date’s the Charm

cannot remember a time when she didn’t have her nose buried in a book. As a child, she would cheat the bedtime curfew by snuggling under the covers with her teddy bear, a flashlight and a forbidden (read “grown-up”) novel. Her mother warned her that she would ruin her eyes, but so far, they still work. Diane has had many careers—singer, actress, film critic, disc jockey, TV writer, to name a few. Currently she divides her time between writing romances and doing voice-overs. (You can hear her as “Poison Ivy” on the Batman cartoon.) She lives in Los Angeles, and promises she is only slightly affected. Her two children, Morgan Rose and Ben, have completed college. Diane looks forward to writing and acting until she expires, or people stop hiring her, whichever comes first. She loves to hear from readers, so please write to her at P.O. Box 67424, Los Angeles, CA 90067.

Dear Reader,

As planned, I concluded Cassie’s Cowboy (released in April 2002) with the standard boy-gets-girl-and-kisses-her-a-lot, followed by those magic words The End. Which meant the book was done, right? Not quite.

Without any input from my brain, my fingers continued to type away on an epilogue, and I realized that, although I had supplied the reader with the happy ending required in romance fiction, I wasn’t quite ready to let go of a key ingredient in that book—the outlandish magic eyeglasses that granted one wish to the wearer. It’s not every day you get a shot at making dreams come true, so why not keep the magic alive? And so Cassie handed off the glasses to a tall, skinny, brainy young woman who owned a bookstore.

Her name is Gerri, and The Wish is her story. She’s a bit of a klutz and socially awkward; she’s also funny and good-hearted, and I’d be honored to call her my friend.

Gerri has an unrequited crush on the town’s most popular playboy; needless to say, her wish involves making him notice and appreciate her.

However, as the old saying goes, “Be careful what you wish for….”

Enjoy!

Diane Pershing

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Epilogue

Sobbing, Gerri ran out of the casino ballroom and into the night as though running for her life, the skirts of her gown flying in the dry evening breeze. Down the flight of stone steps to the street level she fled, but on the second to last step, her heel caught in the hem of her dress, and she tripped.

Cursing herself under her breath for her lifelong clumsiness, and with tears still streaming down her cheeks, she managed to disentangle her heel, avoiding a pratfall—but turning her already sprained ankle—as she landed upright with both feet on the sidewalk. Taking a moment to wince in pain, she took off again at a run, but when she rounded the corner of the building, she ran smack into a very solid, all male chest.

“Oof!” she said.

“Gerri?” the owner of the chest replied, surprise in his voice as he gripped her upper arms to prevent her from taking a header.

“Des?”

Unbelievable. She’d just bumped into Des, of all people, her good friend, or sort of good friend. Incredibly strong and wonderfully solid Des, solid being the operative word here. She’d just barreled into him, all six-feet-in-heels of her, but, bless him, he’d stayed right where he was, upright and planted firmly, so yet one more mishap in an evening of mishaps had been avoided.

Thank God for small favors, Gerri thought. After the social nightmare she’d just experienced, all she needed was another ungraceful, unfeminine, classless, ignominious, klutzy act on her part, and she might just as well die on the spot.

The pressure on her upper arms increased. “Hey, Gerri, what’s wrong?”

She looked up at him, then glanced away quickly, too uncomfortable to face Des’s probing gaze. “Nothing.” She shook off his grip and headed out into the night. “Thanks for catching me. I have to go home now.”

She was maybe two steps away when he caught up to her and pulled her around to face him. Again, she tried to avoid looking at him head-on, because she didn’t want him to see her face, which, as she well knew, was a total disaster. Her inexpertly applied mascara was dripping down her cheeks, her eyes were red, as was her nose, she was sure—she was not one of those women who looked beautiful when they cried. She’d long ago bitten off any lipstick she’d been wearing. The week-old bruise on her upper cheek was probably glowing all kinds of colors, making her look like a woman in need of shelter from an abusive husband. Her attempt at a hairdo had come partly loose and was hanging in funny clumps around her face. Her gown was wrong, her shoes were killing her, and although Des had surely never thought of her as anything approaching glamorous, somehow this final humiliation of his seeing her at her very worst was more than she could bear.