Belonging to Them - By Brynn Paulin Page 0,21
order brides? Seriously?” she asked Patrick.
“Might be a way to get women out here,” he said.
Beside him, Sean snorted. “Right and how are you going to introduce the ménage and sharing ideas to the lucky girl?”
Patrick pulled the paper back in front of him and lifted it to peruse the page again. “This isn’t one of those pay for a bride from Romania kind of things. It’s like a dating service. American girls. They come here, check you out, decide if they want to stay—”
“Rayna has a better idea,” Jamie interrupted. “How did you put it, sweetness? Daly, the Mecca of Men?”
“How would that work?” David asked.
She shrugged. “We build a tourism plan. Make Daly desirable to outsiders—especially women who might be looking for a change from the rat races and dead-end dating of the big city. You’d need to implement changes here, but mostly you just need good advertising to the rest of the country. Personally, I’d suggest treating it a lot like a trip to a dude ranch or Club Med. Visitors come in and they stay at O’Keefe’s Bed and Breakfast, but in addition to that, they have an itinerary planned out for them—with free time built in of course.”
Patrick took her hand and kissed her knuckles, shooting a ribbon of arousal through her. “Lady, where have you been all my life? Can I be your first customer?”
The other men laughed.
“This is what she does,” Jamie supplied. “She’s a tourism researcher in North Carolina.”
“And developer by the sound of it,” David added.
“All part of the job,” Rayna murmured.
Patrick set aside his paper. “Do you think it could work?”
“Well, yeah,” she said. “The faster the pace gets in cities, the more people are drawn to Smalltown, USA. A certain sector of the population anyway, and that’s who you’d key into. Certainly, by the time a good tourism professional finished with Daly, there wouldn’t be any place more small town than here. The ultimate secluded destination. And by ‘good’, I mean someone who’d tweak, not give the place a huge facelift.”
“Sounds good to me,” Leena replied as she came to the table with their meals. “But where would you start?”
“Usually it has to be presented to a town council.”
“That’ll be a tough sell,” Jamie laughed. “All you’ll need to say is ‘I have an idea for getting women to come to Daly’ and they’d okay the proposal.”
“We’re not that easy,” David retorted, reaching around Rayna to smack Jamie.
“You said O’Keefe’s Bed and Breakfast,” Sean said.
“Just an example,” Rayna replied. “It’s a big place, but you guys live there and you’d need someone to run it.”
“We couldn’t live there?” Sean asked.
“Well sure you could. You have plenty of space. What are there? Ten bedrooms?”
“Yeah, five on the second floor and five on the third,” Jamie told her. “Plus we own much of the land surrounding the house and the garage. We can build.”
Excited by the prospect, they chatted about the idea for the rest of lunch. Rayna got a glimpse of how friendly—and nosy— people of Daly could be, too. Saturday seemed to be the day for visiting Leena’s, and cowboys galore stopped past the table, many of them listening in to the conversations for a spell and giving their opinions. Before he and Sean left to get supplies from the city, David nudged her and laughed that they wouldn’t need that meeting after all. The whole of Daly would know about the idea before nightfall and he didn’t doubt he’d start getting phone calls to see when the project would start.
“You are a big hit,” Jamie chuckled as they walked back to the house with Patrick.
“Me?” Rayna asked. “I was just talking. Besides, I have a shoe in. I have a vagina.”
“And there wasn’t a flaccid cock in the place,” Patrick added.
“Geez, Trick,” Jamie exclaimed in amusement, giving his brother a shove.
“Just sayin’, Jay. Just sayin’.”
Rayna shook her head. “You two…”
“But you want us,” Patrick teased.
“Mmm…of course. What woman wouldn’t want two green eyed, black haired, drool-worthy Irishmen whispering sweet nothings to her in their tantalizing brogues?”
“So we’re just sex objects?” Jamie laughed.
“Especially you, Jamie. I respect Patrick.”
Patrick hooted. “Yer a cheeky lass, ye are. I like it.” He swatted her on the rear with his magazine then gave her a peck on the temple. “Bring some of that cheek to bed tonight, and think about that plan of yours. I want a woman just as special as Jamie’s.”
Leaving her speechless, he sauntered off to his truck to head