Love at First Sight #22

A young secretary working at the Pentagon meets the charming but notorious Lieutenant Rex Marlowe, a Navy playboy known for leaving a trail of heartbroken women in his wake. When Rex sets his sights on her, Christine decides to turn the tables and play him at his own game—but staying emotionally detached proves harder than she anticipated. In "Dangerous Pretense," a woman discovers that beating a master manipulator at romance might cost her more than she bargained for.

Christine Page makes an impulsive call to Lieutenant Rex Marlowe, ditching another date for a chance at dinner with the charming Navy officer—but she soon discovers he has a reputation for breaking hearts. As Christine and Rex begin dating, she struggles between her genuine feelings for him and the game she's decided to play: staying cool and detached to keep him interested, even as she falls deeper in love. When Rex proposes after two weeks of dates, Christine faces a crisis of conscience—she wants to confess that her carefree heartbreaker act was all an elaborate act, but fears losing him if the truth comes out.

A hat-check girl named Vonda falls hard for Davis Buckland, a wealthy oil man she glimpses at the nightclub where she works—so when he's about to leave her life for good, she impulsively quits her job and confesses her feelings over coffee at a corner diner. What begins as a reckless "bargain" between two people nursing their wounds—he bitter over a woman who used him, she desperate to escape the city—transforms into something neither of them quite expected when they marry and head to his home in Texas.

A girl fresh to the city shakes off her small-town restraint by throwing open her apartment door—and her life—to anyone who wants to drop in for a party. When a disapproving neighbor with an unexpected pull on her heart shows up to silence the noise, Joyce realizes her bid for freedom and popularity may have sent her careening in exactly the wrong direction.