The First Proposal — Chasity Bowlin

It was a blow to Persephone Percy Blake's vanity to discover that she'd somehow become a spinster aunt. It's certainly not what she set out to be. She had just been working away in her father's library, cataloging historical documents. Then one day she looked up to find that ten years had passed and she was as firmly on the shelf as his collection of rare books. Now, with the recent passing of her father, the country estate and the library are long gone. She's living as a poor relation on the less than freely given charity of her sister and acting as a de facto governess for her nieces and nephews. A more ungrateful, spoiled and thoroughly rotten bunch has never existed!And then it happens. Her nephew's kite, which she told him not to fly, becomes tangled in the limbs of a tree next door. It's either retrieve it at the cost of her own dignity or face her sister's wrath for not properly supervising her charges as, after all, it's the least she can do in exchange for room and board. Percy climbs the fence and finds herself in a wonderland of lush booms. Alone in this house since his sister's recent marriage, Algernon Dunne is bored. So bored that he's taken up gardening in order to pass his time. After all, there's only so much brandy a man can consume in a given day without feeling wretched for it. And he's found that despite the tame nature of his new hobby, there's something satisfying in cultivating the perfect bloom. It's teaching him patience and also the one thing he's always been missing in his life… humility. Nature might bow to him, after all, but only on her own terms. Gardening has brought him clarity and peace. That is until a ranting, cursing, fireball of a woman comes over his garden wall in a cascade of pink skirts and sends them both tumbling to the ground. One look at her lovely brown eyes and her kissable lips, and Algernon is well and truly sunk. Now he just has to convince her that love at first sight can apply to much more than just his garden… and sometimes The First Proposal is the only one a woman really needs.