The Bachelor's Brighton Valley Bride

Maybe it wasn’t just the scent alone. Maybe it was the way it blended with the pheromones he gave off. She didn’t know for sure.

But as intoxicating and alluring as she’d found it to be, that only made her want to steer clear of the man the best that she could.

Because she’d come to distrust her choices when it came to men and sexual attraction. And something told her that Peyton Johnson, like his scent, would linger with a woman long after he left town—a life-changing, heartbreaking memory a woman wasn’t likely to forget.

Chapter Four (#ulink_5a7fbcc6-f32f-5544-8e78-a2aff2aa92f8)

The following morning, after dropping Lisa off at school, Megan pulled into her regular parking space in the alley behind the shop.

She needed to deliver this morning’s fresh batch of peach-crumble muffins to Caroline at the diner before starting work. So she took the linen-covered basket out of her backseat and grabbed the oversize breakfast burrito she’d wrapped in foil. Then she locked the car.

As she made her way toward the back entrance of the diner, she risked an upward glance at the apartment over Zorba’s. The shutters were closed. Peyton was most likely still asleep, which meant he’d probably been up late last night snooping through all their files.

She’d stayed up most of the night, too, but her time had been spent in the kitchen, baking and preparing more jams and preserves for the farmers’ market held in town square on the third Sunday of each month. She’d hoped her work would be a diversion for her worries, but she hadn’t been able to keep her thoughts from straying to the sexy and suspicious stranger who’d kept her second-guessing everything he did or said.

Did he have another agenda besides helping them get the new accounting system up and running?

Could he be trusted to do only that particular job and not run back to corporate with reports of how bad things actually were at the Brighton Valley store?

She lifted the basket containing the fruits of her labor, rested it on one hip and strode into the diner through the open back door.

Caroline, who’d been a friend of Megan’s late grandmother, sat at the butcher-block counter, making notes and ordering supplies. Annie, the cook, was busy frying eggs and flipping pancakes, while Sally hollered out breakfast orders through the open window between the front of the restaurant and the kitchen.

After Megan had divorced Todd and moved home to live with her mom, Caroline had suggested that Megan sell some of the extra peaches and plums that grew in the family orchard at the farmers’ market. Since she’d been left in dire financial straits thanks to Todd’s wild and reckless spending habits, she’d jumped on the idea of earning some extra money.

To liven up the boring displays of fruit, she’d set out a few jars of the jellies and preserves she’d canned, along with a few muffins.

As a child and the only girl in the family, she’d spent the summers on Gram’s farm, where she’d learned to cook and bake, memorizing all her grandmother’s recipes, especially the preserves, which had won Gram many a blue ribbon at the county fair each year. Still, she’d been surprised when her preserves had sold out well before the peaches and plums had.