Читать онлайн книгу «Major Daddy» автора Cara Colter
Major Daddy
Cara Colter
When Major Cole Standen retired from the Canadian Armed Forces, he figured he'd quit the rescuing business for good.Then five irresistible tykes turned up on his doorstep in the middle of the night, desperate for his help But he hadn't counted on sharing child-care duties with their auntie, Brooke Callan–a wide-eyed beauty who seemed as if she could use a little rescuing herself.Knee-deep in diapers and baby bottles, Cole soon realized there was far more to Brooke than just her vulnerable eyes and kissable lips. Perhaps it was being around a ready-made family, but this soldier was suddenly picturing himself with a brood of his own…and beautiful Brooke as his not-so-temporary second-in-command!
“The baby needs a bath,” she announced.
“Have at it,” he said. “Bathing babies is not my department.”
“And why not?” she said, folding her arms and tapping her foot.
A fighting stance if he’d ever seen one. He held up his hands. “These hands strip rifles and change flat tires and chop wood and put worms on hooks. Men things.”
She was looking at his hands with a strange hunger burning in her eyes, a hunger that made him realize his hands wanted to explore all kinds of softer territory.
“It’s a two-person job,” she said firmly. “Wet babies are slippery.”
He knew, suddenly, that just as he had helped her face the challenge of her fears, she was now asking him to explore new territory, move out of his comfort zone.
“I’ve already found out all about slippery babies.”
“Well, then this should be a piece of cake for you, Major.”
Dear Reader,
Baby birds are chirping, bees are buzzing and the tulips are beginning to bud. Spring is here, so why not revive the winter-weary romantic in you by reading four brand-new love stories from Silhouette Romance this month.
What’s an old soldier to do when a bunch of needy rug rats and a hapless beauty crash his retreat? Fall in love, of course! Follow the antics of this funny little troop in Major Daddy (#1710) by Cara Colter.
In Dylan’s Last Dare (#1711), the latest title in Patricia Thayer’s dynamite THE TEXAS BROTHERHOOD miniseries, a cranky cowboy locks horns with his feisty physical therapist and then learns she has a little secret she soon won’t be able to hide!
Jordan Bishop wants to dwell in a castle and live happily ever after, but somehow things aren’t going as she’s planned, in An Heiress on His Doorstep (#1712) by Teresa Southwick. This is the final title in Southwick’s delightful IF WISHES WERE… miniseries in which three friends have their dreams come true in unexpected ways.
When a bookworm meets her prince and discovers she’s a real-life princess, will she be able to make her own happy ending? Find out in The Secret Princess (#1713) by Elizabeth Harbison.
Celebrate the new season, feel the love and join in the fun by experiencing each of these lively new love stories from Silhouette Romance!
Mavis C. Allen
Associate Senior Editor
Major Daddy
Cara Colter
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
For those courageous women who love the men—
sons, brothers, husbands, fathers—
who go to war
Books by Cara Colter
Silhouette Romance
Dare To Dream #491
Baby in Blue #1161
Husband in Red #1243
The Cowboy, the Baby and the Bride-to-Be #1319
Truly Daddy #1363
A Bride Worth Waiting For #1388
Weddings Do Come True #1406
A Babe in the Woods #1424
A Royal Marriage #1440
First Time, Forever #1464
* (#litres_trial_promo)Husband by Inheritance #1532
* (#litres_trial_promo)The Heiress Takes a Husband #1538
* (#litres_trial_promo)Wed by a Will #1544
What Child Is This? #1585
Her Royal Husband #1600
9 Out of 10 Women Can’t Be Wrong #1615
Guess Who’s Coming for Christmas? #1632
What a Woman Should Know #1685
Major Daddy #1710
Silhouette Books
The Coltons
A Hasty Wedding
CARA COLTER
shares ten acres in the wild Kootenay region of British Columbia with the man of her dreams, three children, two horses, a cat with no tail and a golden retriever who answers best to “bad dog.” She loves reading, writing and the woods in winter (no bears). She says life’s delights include an automatic garage door opener and the skylight over the bed that allows her to see the stars at night.
She also says, “I have not lived a neat and tidy life, and used to envy those who did. Now I see my struggles as having given me a deep appreciation of life, and of love, that I hope I succeed in passing on through the stories that I tell.”
MAJOR COLE STANDEN’S SURVIVAL STRATEGY
(for handling emergencies when stranded with five children, one wounded senior citizen and a beautiful woman)
CODE YELLOW
Diaper change, liquid variety.
Emergency rating: minor.
CODE BROWN
Diaper change, horrible variety.
Clothespins and/or face mask may be required.
Emergency rating: moderate.
CODE RED
Brooke Callan. Beautiful, bossy and armed with Mace. Be alert for the heart to do strange things when she’s in the vicinity.
Emergency rating: major.
Contents
Prologue (#u1dd94599-03e7-55b8-943e-b8fcbf99bc9b)
Chapter One (#u5af69a5c-d6d1-5615-969b-dfd6a7daba17)
Chapter Two (#u487c24a0-45ca-5c49-8f88-747d96f09331)
Chapter Three (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Four (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Five (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Six (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Seven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eight (#litres_trial_promo)
Epilogue (#litres_trial_promo)
Prologue
Cole Standen woke with a start. For a moment, in the inky, impenetrable darkness, he thought he was in that inhospitable land of icy-cold nights, blowing sand, ragged, rocky places and hidden dangers. The blood surged and his muscles tensed, battle alert, ready. He held his breath, listening.
It was the scent that brought him back to reality. The aroma of cedar and pine, made richer by the dampness in the storm-tossed night, rushed in the open bedroom window and comforted him. It was the smell of his boyhood.
And then he became aware of the sounds outside the shelter of the sturdy cabin. The wind was savage, howling through the treetops. Rain hammered the metal roof. Waves crashed and rolled on the rock-lined shore of the lake.
He sighed and felt his muscles relax. He remembered he was home.
His eyes adjusted minutely to the murky darkness and the rough log walls of his bedroom came into focus. The mattress beneath him was firm and comfortable, a plaid bedroom-window curtain flapped and jigged with the wind.
He had gone to sleep with the wind high—raising the waves to ferocious whitecaps on the lake, swaying the treetops, shrieking through the soffit under the eaves—so he knew the wind had not woken him.
Cole had a soldier’s gift for sifting out those noises that were supposed to be there—no matter how chaotic—and sleeping through them with relative ease. But something out of the ordinary, no matter how small, could bring him instantly awake. The sound he thought he had heard was so fragile, so tiny, it was easy to believe he had imagined it.
He waited under the comfortable weight of a down comforter for his sense of safety to return, for his mind to sound the all clear.
He reminded himself that he was virtually alone here at this isolated bay on Kootenay Lake, an enormous body of water located in the shadows of British Columbia’s Purcell Mountains. Unlike most men, he craved solitude and found solace in it.
It was November. The summer people had boarded up the windows of the rare cabins that dotted the inlet and had gone home long ago.
Only the new house—rumored to be a movie star’s—showed signs of occupation. He had noticed fresh tire tracks on the impossibly steep driveway. At night, light spilled from windows of the house high on the point and wove ribbons of gold into the black, restless water beyond the bay.
The new house was a monstrosity of tasteless white stucco that had changed the landscape of Heartbreak Bay forever, and that Cole heartily resented every time he caught a glimpse of it. Still, it was a long distance up the bay, far enough away that his sense of isolation remained safely intact.
Despite how his reasoning mind tried to tell him he was as safe here as he could ever be anywhere, Cole’s deeper mind—that place of pure instinct that had kept him alive so many times—did not sound the all clear. Cole frowned, and then he heard it, suddenly, again.
His frown deepened, and he reached for the light beside his bed. The lamp clicked but did not come on. No power, not an unusual situation in this remote bay that was subjected to cruel weather from November until February. He reached for the flashlight on his night table and played the beam across the ceiling. The light did not persuade him that he had not heard a sound, frail and pitiful, like the mewing of a kitten.
Restless now, Cole threw back the covers, yanked on a pair of jeans, and went and stood at the window. The air was biting against his naked chest.
Tap. Tap. Tap. The hair on the back of his neck rose. The noise was puny, almost lost in the furor of the storm, and yet there it was again. Tap. Tap. Tap.
He followed the sound out of his bedroom, following the beam of his flashlight over rough hardwood floors, past the ragtag collection of cabin furniture in the living room.
Tap. Tap. Tap.
The sound was on the other side of the front door. He told himself a tree branch must be scraping it. He reminded himself he was home, in Canada, safe, and yet it was a warrior who flung open the door, ready and fierce.
At first he saw only the night, felt the sting of rain against his face and the cold fingers of wind in his hair. But then that small sound, the kitten mewing, made him look down, and his flashlight beam illuminated a most startling sight.
His jaw dropped.
A small girl stood there, her white nightdress whipping around her, a doll wrapped in a bright blanket clutched tight to her chest.
Perhaps eleven, the child was painfully thin, and her long dark hair tangled, curly, around her head. Her eyes were huge and blue and frightened, and her teeth were chattering. A fine line of blue was appearing around her lips despite the sweater pulled over the nightdress.
The doll she was holding suddenly let out a fierce yell, as frightening as any battle cry Cole had ever heard. He took an alarmed step back and scrutinized the bundle the girl held.
It squirmed, and he realized it was not a doll. It was a baby! His blood went cold, and his mind tried to sort through the hodgepodge of illogical information that was being thrust on it.
The soldier, the commander, stepped in coolly and took charge. It told him job one was to get these kids out of the cold. No matter how startling their appearance on his doorstep, there would be time, later, to sort through the intrigues.
“Get in,” he ordered and was stunned when the child hesitated before the authority in his voice, a voice that men raced to obey.
He saw suddenly her arms were trembling from the effort of holding the baby, and firmly, a soldier doing the thing he least wanted to do, but recognizing his lack of choices, he plucked the baby from her arms.
It stared at him with huge blue eyes just like the girl’s and screwed up its face until the eyes disappeared into a nest of wrinkles. But then, mercifully, instead of crying the baby nestled into him, sighed, plopped a plump thumb into its mouth.
“Come in,” he said, again, trying to take the military snap out of his voice, trying for a note of kindness that might reassure the trembling waif before him.
She regarded him with huge eyes that stripped him to his soul, and then gave a small satisfied nod. But still, she did not step over the threshold to warmth and safety.
She turned on the step and motioned with her arm. A motion any soldier would recognize.
Come forward. The shrubs that formed a border around the small square of yard that surrounded the house, parted.
Cole almost dropped the baby. A toddler, not more than three, obviously female from the foolishness of the lace-trimmed nightdress that tangled around pudgy legs, emerged from the shrubs and tottered across the leaf-and branch-strewn yard.
As if he was not reeling from enough shock, the shrubs parted again, and two small boys, maybe seven and eight, dark-haired, dirt-smeared and pajama-clad, also emerged into the clearing of his cabin.
Cole Standen had faced the types of terror that make a man tremble and reach inside himself to find his deepest reserves of courage.
He had jumped from airplanes, been shot at, dealt with the dread of an enemy concealed by night but so close you could almost feel his breath upon your cheek.
But as those cold, wet, mud-spattered children tumbled by him into his sanctuary, and the warm puddle of humanity that was the baby squirmed against his bare chest, Cole searched his memory bank to see if he had ever faced a terror quite like the one that hammered in his breast now.
He discovered he had not.
Chapter One
“My granny’s dead,” the girl, obviously the oldest of the five, announced. And then, her bravery all used up, her face crumpled as if the air was being let out of a balloon. She began to cry, quietly at first, big silent tears rolling down her face. The silence was but the still before the storm. She built quickly to a crescendo. She uttered a heartbreaking wail.
The four other waifs watched her anxiously, and her breakdown was a lesson in leadership. All four of them instantly followed her example. Even the baby. They screwed up their faces in expressions of identical distress and began to caterwaul. Awkwardly gripping the baby, which seemed unaccountably slippery, Cole escorted the four other howling children into his living room and planted them on the couch.
The older girl held out her arms, and he carefully placed the screaming baby back in her care. All the children huddled together in a messy pile of tangled limbs and wept until their skinny shoulders heaved and their sobs were interspersed with hiccups.
Cole did not know very much about children, but he hoped hiccup-crying did not induce vomiting.
Quickly, he checked the phone—which naturally was out—stoked the fire and lit his two coal-oil lamps.
He turned back and studied the children in the flickering yellow light. He realized he was in trouble. The crying continued unabated—in fact it seemed to be rising in tempo and intensity. He had no doubt the children were going to make themselves sick if they continued. There was also the possibility that grandma—wherever she was—might not be dead and might urgently require his assistance.
He held up a hand. “Hey,” he said, in his best commander voice, “that’s enough.”
There was momentary silence while they all gazed wide-eyed at his raised hand, and then one of them whimpered and the rest of them dissolved all over again.
He clapped his hands. He stamped his foot. He roared.
And nothing worked, until something divine whispered in his ear what was required to stop the noise and squeeze the story out of the little mites.
Surrender.
The soldier in him resisted. Surrender? It was not in his vocabulary. But he resisted only momentarily. The noise and emotion in the room were going to send him on a one-way trip into the lake if it didn’t stop.
So, summoning all his courage, he took the baby back, discovered why she seemed unaccountably slippery and did his best to ignore it. He wedged himself a spot on the couch between the children. Blessed and stunned silence followed while the little troop evaluated this latest development. And then, before Cole could really prepare himself properly, the two boys and the toddler in the ridiculous dress were all vying for a place on his lap—and found it. The older girl snuggled in so tight under his arm it felt as if she was crushing his heart.
The combined weight of the children and the baby was startlingly small. It was their warmth that surprised him, the seeming bonelessness of them as they melted into him, like kittens who had found a mother.
For an old soldier, a terrifying thing happened.
Soaked in tears and whatever horrible warm liquid that was seeping out of the baby’s diaper, he felt a terrible weakness, a softening around his heart.
“Okay,” he said, putting his voice into the blessed silence with extreme caution, “tell me what happened to Grandma.” Out of the sudden chorus of overlapping voices, he began to pick out a story.
“The lights went out.”
“She fell down the steps.”
“Blood everywhere.”
“Lots of blood. Maybe bwains, too.”
In bits and pieces, like putting together a verbal jigsaw puzzle, Cole figured out who the children were, where they were from and what needed to be done.
They were the movie star’s children. When the power had gone out, their grandma, who looked after them when their mother was away, had fallen down the steps in the darkness. The children had presumed, erroneously, Cole hoped, that she was dead.
“I knew I had to get help,” the oldest girl told him solemnly, “but they—” she stabbed an accusing finger at the two boys “—said they had to come, too. And we couldn’t leave Kolina—”
“That me,” the toddler in the dress told him, then relaxed into his chest, her cheek warm and soft and wet, and inserted her thumb in her mouth.
“—or the baby, so we all came. And here we are, Mr. Herman.”
Mr. Herman? They obviously had him confused with a different neighbor, possibly one who was friendly.
He considered telling them he was not Mr. Herman, but they had a shell-shocked look about them that told him to save his breath.
He saw immediately the order of things that needed to be done. He had to get to the grandma and fast. Possibly, she was not dead, but hovering on the brink, where seconds could count.
“Your name?” he demanded of the oldest one.
“Saffron,” she told him, and the rest of them piped up with the most bewildering and ridiculous assortment of names he’d ever heard. The older of the boys was Darrance, and the other one was Calypso. Calypso!
The smallest girl batted thick eyelashes and reiterated that her name was Kolina. And the baby, he was informed, was Lexandra.
The impossible names swam in his head, and were then pushed aside by more important tasks that needed to be dealt with.
“Okay,” he said, pointing at the oldest girl, “You are not Saffron anymore. You are Number One. And you are Number Two…”
He went on quickly, numbering them largest to smallest, and he could see that rather than being indignant about the name changes, it was exactly what they needed. Someone of authority to relinquish the responsibility to. Having established himself as boss, he confidently gave his first order.
“Now, Number One, I have to go see to your grand-mother, and I am placing you in charge here. That makes you second in command.”
Adding another number had been a mistake, because the child’s brow furrowed. He hurried on. “Number One, you are to make sure each of these children sits quietly on this couch while I go to your house and check on your grandmother. Nobody moves a muscle, right?”
He was already calculating. What were the chances his road was open? Slim. If he had to hike cross-country, he could probably be at the big house on the point in ten minutes, going flat out.
It pierced his awareness that Number One was not the least impressed with military protocol or her new title of second in command. In fact, she was frowning, her expression vaguely mutinous.
“No,” she said with flat finality.
“No?” Cole said, dumbfounded. Apparently the child had no idea that he outranked her and was not to be challenged. In fact, her cute little face screwed up, and she let loose a new wail that threatened to peel the paint off his ceiling. Fresh tears squirted out of her eyes at an alarming rate.
He felt himself tensing as four other faces screwed up in unison, but they held off making noise as their sister spoke.
“Mr. Herman, we’re not staying here by ourselves,” she told him. “This house is spooky. I’m scared. I don’t want to be in charge anymore. I want to go with you.”
He only briefly wrestled with his astonishment that this snippet of a child was refusing an order. Obviously the other kids were going to follow her cue, and he did not have the time—nor the patience—to cajole them into seeing things his way.
As much as it went against his nature, he surrendered again. Twice in the space of a few minutes. He could only hope it wasn’t an omen.
He hurriedly packed a knapsack with emergency supplies, and then he turned his attention back to the children.
For a man who could move a regiment in minutes, getting those five children back through the door, arranged in his SUV and safely belted into position was a humbling experience.
Precious moments lost, he finally fired up the engine. Just as he had feared, at the first switchback in his own driveway a huge ponderosa pine was lying lengthwise across it, the branches spanning it ditch to ditch. He’d reversed, plotting furiously the whole way.
The children spilled out of the vehicle and back into the house. He took the baby and lined the rest of them up, shortest to tallest, and inspected them. They were all dressed inadequately for even a short trek along the roughly wooded shores of the lake.
Biting back his impatience, Cole pulled sweaters and jackets off the hooks in his coat closet. “Put them on.”
Giggling slightly, the children did as they were ordered. Cole stuffed Kolina inside a large sweater. It fit her like a sleeping bag. He intended to carry her, anyway.
He used pieces of binder twine to adjust the clothing on the older children so they wouldn’t be tripping as they walked. Lastly, he looked for head coverings. Well versed in the dangers of hypothermia, he knew the greatest heat loss was from the head area. In a moment of pure inspiration, he raided his sock drawer and fitted each child with a makeshift woolen cap—one of his large socks pulled down tight over their ears.
He inspected them again. They looked like a ragtag group of very adorable elves, but he had no time to appreciate his handiwork. Once more, the children were herded out the door.
He put the smaller of the boys on his shoulders, and then had Number One hand him Number Four, the toddler, Kolina, and Number Five, the baby.
He set as hard a pace as he was able, changing Number Three, on his shoulders, with Number Two, the bigger of the boys, every five or six minutes so that none of them would tire. The girl, Saffron, showed remarkable endurance. The beam of the flashlight picked out the well-worn trails that wove around the lake and to the point of land where the movie star’s house was. To his intense relief the ax stayed in his pack. There were no obstacles so large that they could not get around them, though the path was littered with tree branches, cones and needles. Debris continued to rain around them as the wind shrieked through the trees.
It would have been a two minute drive to the house from his cabin. Overland, they made it in just over thirty minutes, which Cole thought was probably something of a miracle.
The children did not whine, or cry or complain. Soldiers could be trained to be brave. That the bravery of the children came to them so naturally put his heart at risk in ways it had never been risked before.
He heard the weak voice calling into the night before he saw her.
“Children? Where are you? Saffron? Darrance? Calypso? Kolina? Lexandra? Dear God, where are you?”
They cried back and began to run, and moments later were reunited with their grandmother. Their unbridled exuberance at finding her returned to life was nearly as exhausting as their sorrow had been.
Cole managed to herd the whole gang, including Granny, whom he secretly labeled Number Six, into the dark interior of the house.
The head injury had bled profusely. Granny’s gray hair was matted with blood and it streaked her kindly wrinkled face and neck.
“This is Mr. Herman,” Saffron told her. “We went to get him because we thought you were dead.”
“My poor babies,” Granny said, and then extended a frail hand. “Thank you so much for coming to my rescue, Mr. Herman.”
He didn’t really care if she called him Mr. Herman or Santa Claus. He wanted to assess her injury as soon as possible. The house, apparently electrically heated, was cold, and he herded his charges into what he knew must be called the great room. Located off the main hallway, it was a huge room with picture windows that faced the lake. In the dim light, he could see the floor was marble-tiled with thick Persian rugs tossed on it. Big mahogany-colored leather couches were grouped facing the window. Thankfully, on the north wall, was an enormous floor-to-ceiling stone fireplace.
He equipped the children with flashlights to help them find their way around the dark house, and then gave them each a job they could handle. The baby was set on the floor beside him while the rest of them went in search of clean cloth for bandages, ice and sturdy straight sticks suitable for splinting, should they be needed.
While they were gone, Cole opened his first-aid kit and began to swab away the worst of the blood. He grilled the old girl to see if she was confused, but, aside from being woozy, she seemed articulate and aware. She knew her age, the date, and even the impossible names of all those children.
She was not weak or numb on either side of her body, no blood or fluids were coming from her ears or her nose. She had not vomited or had convulsions that she was aware of.
Still, Cole knew the very fact she had lost consciousness made the injury serious. The roads were impassable and the phones were out.
But for him, handling emergencies on his own, without counting on backup, came as naturally as breathing.
The children brought him sheets, and, even the rough soldier that he was, he recognized them as very expensive. Percale. Unhesitatingly, he tore them into bandages and encouraged the children to do the same.
Children two, three and four were soon hauling wood. He settled Granny on the couch, built a fire, and, with Saffron at his side, began to haul mattresses down from upstairs.
“This is the boys’ room,” Saffron told him. The room was done in a jungle theme, complete with fake palm trees with stuffed gorillas swinging from them.
Saffron’s own room paid homage to a vapid-looking girl who was too skinny and had too big a mouth. Brittany or Tiffany or something. The room was divided by an invisible line, and the other half—Kolina’s, Saffron informed him—was aggressively Dalmatian. There were black-and-white spots everywhere. They marched relentlessly up the walls and across the ceiling, they dotted the rugs, the bed comforter, the pillows, the dresser and drawers.
Cole tried to decide which half of the room was more nauseating, but reached no conclusion. After salvaging both mattresses from the room, he closed the door firmly, hoping never to have to enter again.
The baby’s room was a dream of ruffled white lace. It was everywhere—skirting the crib, forming a drape over it, hanging in big wads from the windows.
And those kids had thought his house was spooky!
Shaking his head, he began to haul mattresses down the curved marble staircase. It was easy to see why it had caused such a terrible injury. The marble was slippery and exceedingly hard. He shook his head at the impracticality of it.
In the great room, he laid out the mattresses and got his now-willing little soldiers to haul bedding. One last emergency before he tucked them in.
The baby needed fresh pants and badly.
“There’s only a few diapers,” Granny told him weakly. “The housekeeper will bring new ones with the grocery order tomorrow.”
Cole didn’t want to be the one to break it to her that the housekeeper probably wasn’t coming tomorrow. He made a mental note to check around and see what was available that would pass as a diaper.
The diaper was absolutely rank. He had to tie the triangular bandage from his first-aid kit around his nose to even begin to deal with it.
The children shouted with laughter at his impromptu face mask and his clumsy efforts to handle the diaper. “This is a Code Brown,” he informed them, trying not to gag. “The other is a Code Yellow.”
“Poop, Code Brown,” his second in command translated for him. “Pee-pee, Code Yellow.”
The children squealed with laughter though he failed to see the humor. The replacement diaper was finally in place, more or less, the baby had a bottle and the rest of them were assigned beds. He tucked them in.
They took his refusal of their requests for stories, snacks and teddy bears with fairly good grace, but insisted on good-night hugs and did not even notice his awkwardness in performing this rare duty. Then they laid down their heads and slept almost instantly.
Granny was soon sleeping, too, and he set his watch alarm to check her pupils every two hours. Exhausted, Cole stoked the fire, pulled the sleeping bag he had brought from his knapsack and fell asleep on one of the large leather couches.
He awoke to find the toddler sitting on his chest, her face three inches from his, her eyes locked on his, willing him awake.
“Me Kolina,” she announced as soon as he pried one eye open.
“Number Four,” he corrected her. “Go back to sleep.”
“Baby tinks,” she informed him. “Code Bwon.”
His own nose had already let him know that. And that was how his day began, with a baby stinking and the unsettling discovery that at this rate they had a two-hour supply of diapers. And the pace didn’t let up one little bit, until Number Seven appeared, two full days into the siege.
There was still no power and no phone. The main road was not open. Cole would not, in good conscience, leave an aging, injured grandmother alone to cope with these challenges, never mind the five rambunctious children.
And now Number Seven had arrived. And it didn’t appear that she was a housekeeper with a nice, fresh supply of diapers, either.
“What kind of nut has five kids?” The voice was gravel-edged and deep, and the man who regarded Brooke Callan from the doorway of her employer’s house made her heart drop like an elevator rushing down a shaft.
The man was glorious and having spent the last five years in and around the film industry in Los Angeles as actress Shauna Carrier’s personal assistant, Brooke was now something of an expert on glorious men.
And their black hearts.
To her discerning eye, this one looked more black-hearted than most of them. He stood at least six feet tall, handsome as a pirate captain. He had the faintly disheveled look of a man so certain of his charms he could be careless about his appearance.
His denim shirt was unbuttoned and untucked, and the white undershirt underneath molded perfect pecs, a wide powerful chest, a flat, washboard stomach. His jeans, worn through on both knees, were so soft with age and wear that they clung to the large muscles of sculpted thighs.
The man had dark whiskers roughing his perfectly planed cheeks and his clefted chin. His hair, black and curling wildly, had not been groomed, a fact that just underscored his faintly brutal untamed charm.
In startling contrast to the darkness of his hair and whiskers, and to the olive tone of his skin, were eyes as blue and startling as sapphires. There was a certain light of strong command in them that Brooke did not see in actors, though, not even when they were trying their hardest to look menacing.
The man before her gave off an air no actor could ever imitate. His eyes held the shadows of things not spoken about in polite circles, and something in the chiseled and forbidding lines of his face warned her this was a man who had been on intimate terms with danger.
The look in those sapphire-blue eyes was impenetrable, guarded and assessing at the same time. The lines around the firm curve of sinfully sensuous lips was stern and unyielding. He did not look like a man who would laugh easily or often.
The man exuded power and control.
Only one thing stopped the picture of menace, of almost overpowering male strength, from being complete.
Shauna’s baby, Lexandra, was stuffed under one of his arms like a football, her large padded rump and ruffled diaper cover pointed at Brooke. Chubby pink legs churned the air happily.
Nestled in the crook of the other strong, masculine arm was two-and-half-year-old Kolina, her head resting trustingly against that broad chest, her thumb in her mouth. The child’s face was dirty, but other than that she was a picture of contentment. She popped out her thumb briefly and gave Brooke a radiant grin reminiscent of her famous mother’s.
“Hawo, Addie Bwookie.”
“Hello, sweetheart.” Brooke tried to keep her voice calm. Who was this menacing man? What was he doing looking so at home in Shauna’s house and so comfortable with Shauna’s children when Shauna herself was in California making a film?
Brooke knew if she had ever met him before she would never have forgotten him. He was not an acquaintance of Shauna’s. The other possibilities made her quail in her shoes. Was he a criminal? A kidnapper? An obsessive fan who had somehow found out about this secret hideaway?
How often had she tried to tell Shauna she needed more staff? Full-time guards, not just the housekeeper and nanny who came during the day to help her poor mother. But Shauna had this thing about her children being raised “normally,” not surrounded by live-in helpers and armed guards.
Realizing now was a poor time for I-told-you-so, Brooke drew a deep breath, tried to swallow her fears and gather authority. It felt like a futile effort given the unflinching gaze that rested on her with such unsettling intensity. She knew she looked a wreck, her clothing rumpled, her shoe broken, her hair a hopeless damp tangle after her nightmarish journey here.
Still, she had to conduct herself with dignity and courage. The safety of Shauna’s children might depend upon it.
“What are you doing in Shauna Carrier’s house?” she demanded.
“Who’s Shauna Carrier?” he asked with only the mildest of interest.
Brooke eyed him narrowly, trying to sniff out subterfuge. Surely every man in the Western world, and perhaps beyond, knew who Shauna was.
At least every man Brooke had the misfortune to date. They knew and had no scruples about using the personal assistant to try to get closer to Shauna.
The fact the actress had been happily married for the last twelve years seemed to make no difference to the myriad men who wanted to make her acquaintance.
But Brooke decided the man before her looked capable of many things—not all of them kind—but subterfuge? Nothing in the stubborn strength of his features suggested he would see any need for it.
“Shauna Carrier,” Brooke explained. “She owns the house you are ensconced in. She’s the mother to those children you are holding.”
“Well, that answers my question about who would be nutty enough to have five children. She’s a movie star, or something, right?”
“She’s not a movie star. She’s an actress.” Of course, it was the wrong time entirely for a debate on semantics.
“Whatever.”
His lack of being impressed was completely unfeigned, but it seemed to Brooke this unexpected visitor to the estate was not being particularly forthcoming.
“Who are you?” she demanded, sliding the zipper open on her purse as a first step toward getting at the Mace she kept secreted in her handbag.
For this whole long trek, she had been cursing Shauna for her overly active imagination when it came to her kids.
The phone, Shauna had reported to Brooke yesterday, almost in tears, was not working at Heartbreak Bay. Shauna was a devoted parent, and she spoke to her children every day when she had to be away.
The actress had fallen in love with the wild Kootenay region of Canada several years ago. She had purchased lakeside property and built a home there, declaring the remote location the perfect place to raise her family, away from life in L.A. and the prying of the press.
To Brooke, it seemed if Shauna was determined to have a retreat in the Canadian wilderness she had to factor in minor inconveniences like bears and mosquitoes and unreliable phone and power service. Even cell phones—essentials of modern communication—were inoperable in the area because the house stood in the shadow of mountains that soared to dizzying heights.
Yesterday, Brooke’s calls on Shauna’s behalf had determined the phones were out because of a severe windstorm.
Shauna had only been slightly mollified by the news that her difficulties in contacting her children were being caused by technical problems. She had that feeling.
Brooke heartily hated that feeling, which Shauna had also had about each of the men who had dated Brooke since Brooke had joined her employ. And, in each case, it had been entirely, heartbreakingly correct.
And so, Brooke had been dispatched to check on things in Canada. The trip was nightmarish, as always. The final indignity had been a huge tree across the highway just miles from Shauna’s lakeside estate.
“Ma’am, we’re going to be a while cleaning up this mess,” a road-crew member had informed her helpfully. “You might want to think about getting a room in Creston and trying later in the week. Or if you’re en route to Nelson, you can go the other way.”
But she was not en route to Nelson, and she wasn’t about to be thwarted at this stage of the journey. She hadn’t succeeded as a personal assistant to someone as famous and temperamental as Shauna because she lacked determination.
So, here she was, her shoe broken, most of her nylons left behind on the branches of a fallen tree she had skirted, her gray silk suit smudged, rumpled and stained beyond repair, her hair falling in her eyes and sweat trickling down her neck from the final climb to Shauna’s cliff-top mansion.
Facing a gorgeous and mysterious man who felt like an adversary. Of course, lately, she felt pretty adversarial toward all members of the male species, fickle swine that they were. And the better-looking they were, the more adversarial she felt. No excuses needed.
Brooke’s exhausted mind tried to figure out if she disliked the man before her on principle, or if she sensed real danger. It did seem like a horrible possibility that Shauna’s misgivings might be founded, once again. The facts: a notoriously handsome stranger with ice-blue eyes and the look of a warrior king was in Shauna’s house and held two of her unsuspecting children captive in his powerful arms.
Brooke tried not to let the terrifying thoughts that were flitting through her mind show on her face. What if the fierce-featured man in front of her was holding Granny Molly and the children hostage? Even if he truly didn’t know who Shauna was, the house announced to any who glimpsed it that the owner had a great deal of money, if not a whole lot of taste.
“Who are you?” she demanded again, her voice stronger as she slid her hand unobtrusively into her bag and searched around for her can of Mace.
“Who are you?” he returned, unforthcoming. His eyes narrowed and flickered to where her hand was imbedded in her purse and then back to her face. “We’re expecting the housekeeper, which you obviously aren’t.”
We’re expecting the housekeeper. As if he lived there!
“Addie Bwookie,” Kolina informed him by way of introduction.
“I’m Brooke Callan,” she said. “Shauna Carrier’s personal assistant.” She debated offering her hand, but she would have had to pull it out of her purse to do so, and she had almost found the Mace. Also, both of his hands seemed to be full.
And then, while debating what tone to take, she realized she was just too tired to be civil or cautious.
“I want to know what you are doing in Shauna’s house. Where is Grandma Molly?”
She realized she should have summoned the energy for a more civil tone, because she did not like the look on his face, the tightening of his jaw or the squint in his eyes one little bit. She found the can of Mace and wrapped her fingers firmly around it.
In a blur of motion, he set Kolina on the ground and caught the wrist of the hand Brooke had inserted in her purse. His grip was not painful, but it was relentless.
“Let me go,” she said and felt the first surge of true panic. This man was obviously much stronger than her. If he was holding the children and Granny, did she think he was going to come out and admit it?
Of course not! He would take her hostage, as well!
“You let go of whatever you have a hold of in there first,” he said quietly, and the calm of his tone abated her panic slightly. Her fingers seemed to loosen their hold on the Mace of their own accord, and he let go of her wrist immediately.
“Now put your hand where I can see it.”
The authority with which he spoke gave Brooke the very awful feeling he had done things like this before.
Though he had not for a moment looked tense, she saw that he relaxed subtly when she withdrew her hand from her purse and let it drop to her side.
Even after he had let go, she felt the imprint of his hand on her wrist and felt the leashed power of his grip and his personality. Kolina, on the other hand, was oblivious to his threat. From her new station on the floor, she had coiled her arms around his legs and was peeking out from behind his knee.
“Of all the nerve!” Brooke sputtered.
“What have you got in there, a gun?” He spat out a word that was not at all appropriate in front of Kolina, then took a deep breath as though he was gathering patience. He seemed a little confused about who was the suspicious party here!
“It is none of your business what I have in my purse!” She resisted a temptation to rub her wrist.
“This is not exactly L.A.,” he told her. “And guns and kids don’t mix. I can’t even believe you’d think of pulling one while I was holding two babies.”
“Not a baby,” Kolina informed him with a piqued pull on the leg of his jeans.
In spite of her indignation, Brooke registered the slim comfort that he actually seemed concerned about the children’s welfare.
“How do you know where I’m from?” she demanded.
“You already told me you work for the movie star. We don’t have a big film industry here in Creston, B.C. Besides, if the road crew is in the same place they were in yesterday, you’ve walked less than two miles and you look like you have survived a two-year trek across an unmapped wilderness. We make Canadian girls a little tougher than that.”
His gaze moved to her torn panty hose, which fluttered in the wind, and she felt a strange but not completely unfamiliar twist in her tummy.
Her worst enemy, attraction to the opposite sex.
No wonder she was so determined to believe he was a villain!
So she could be glad that she looked terrible. More than glad. She should be deliriously happy. But, oh no, Brooke-who-dances-with-temptation was shattered by the appraisal of the cool stranger before her.
Insanely, even if he was a notorious criminal, she had a purely feminine desire to be found irresistibly attractive by him.
Survival, she told herself. A little attraction might sway the power a bit in her direction if need be.
Besides, she liked basking briefly in male attention until they either found out who she worked for or Shauna appeared in person. Though reasonably attractive, Brooke could not compete with the stunning otherworldly beauty of her employer and had long since given up trying.
But this stranger seemed indifferent to Brooke’s female allure even without Shauna’s presence outshining the sun.
He continued his assessment of her in a flat tone. “Your hair color is fake and your tan is real.”
“Canadian girls don’t dye their hair?” she asked sourly.
“They don’t have that golden-girl look about them,” he said. “You do.”
He did not say it as if it were a compliment, and, unfortunately, when Brooke thought of golden girls she thought of Bette White and Bea Arthur.
“That’s an awful lot to know about a person in a glance,” she said, irritated at having been found superficial and inadequate without a fair trial. By a potential criminal.
And he wasn’t finished with her yet!
He ignored the challenge in her statement and went on, his voice low and level. “Don’t ever touch a gun unless you are prepared to use it. And you know what? I can tell from looking at you, you don’t have what it takes to use it.”
She stared at him in confusion. She should be delighting in the fact that an outlaw who had just taken over a house and kidnapped children would hardly be giving lessons on gun safety. On the other hand, he obviously had an unsettling personal knowledge of weapons and how to use them.
She felt a little finger of fury. How could he tell, in the length of a thirty-second meeting, whether or not she had what it takes? She itched to give him a little taste of the Mace.
“I do so have what it takes!” she said and realized it was a pathetic thing to say in the presence of a man who so obviously possessed the real thing in astounding abundance.
She wondered if she really could use Mace on him. She’d seen how quick his reflexes were. He could probably wrestle her weapon away from her before she’d figured out how to discharge the spray. And then, he’d be in the position to use it on her. She could feel the blood drain from her face at the thought.
“Exactly,” he said and, looking directly into his piercing gaze, she had the disconcerting sensation that he had just read her mind.
For just a second, the briefest spark of humor flickered to life in the depths of those eyes. If anything, it only made him look more dangerous. And more attractive. And more sexy. She felt that traitorous little twitch of her heart.
She could almost see Shauna rolling her eyes and saying with sweet southern sarcasm, “Brooke, you sure know how to pick ’em.”
“It isn’t a gun, anyway,” Brooke defended herself. “It’s Mace. And Lexandra wouldn’t have been hurt had I used it. I would have been very careful with my aim. Besides, there’s quite a bit of padding between me and her skin.”
“And for what reason exactly were you feeling a need to defend yourself?”
“I don’t know who you are! Or what you are doing in my employer’s home. With her children tucked under your arms. You haven’t exactly been forthcoming.”
“Ah. And straight from the embrace of Hollywood, you figured a plot was being hatched.” His voice, edged with sarcasm, was even sexier than when it was not. “Let me guess, your boss is filming suspense and terror, and all of you become so immersed that you see it everywhere. An easy leap to assume I have taken the children and their dear granny hostage.”
She disliked being so transparent, and, as a matter of fact, Shauna was filming a suspense thriller.
“Have you?” she said.
He snorted derisively. “Is it that easy to come up with a plot?”
“You are still not answering the question! You are being evasive, a quality I cannot stand in men.”
The smile died. He looked at her intently before saying, with disconcerting softness, “I think I hear the bitterness of experience.”
“No, you don’t!” she lied, a defensive lie if she had ever told one.
He sighed, then dismissed that topic with a shake of his head. “It’s the other way around,” he said. “I haven’t taken them hostage, they have taken me. I’m glad I don’t do this for a living. It’s exhausting being a hero. And then to get sprayed with Mace for my trouble.”
A hero? No, no, no! “I would have used it only if you did something to deserve it.”
“I don’t believe that. Once you got your finger on that sprayer, you would have been a dangerous woman. Trigger-happy.”
She did not dignify that with a reply.
“Mace is illegal in Canada,” he informed her dryly. “If they’d found it on you at the border you could have been refused entry. And that would have been a very bad thing for me, since I’m assuming you are the reinforcements, Addie Bwookie.”
“Brooke Callan,” she corrected him haughtily.
But she registered the word reinforcements and her relief grew. Whoever the mystery man was, he wouldn’t be glad to see her if he was up to no good, though glad was probably phrasing his reaction to her arrival a little too strongly.
Her relief died abruptly. What if he was that handsome, that sure of himself, that physically perfect, and he wasn’t the bad guy?
He looked down suddenly at the baby that was straddled over his arm and a terrible expression crossed his face. He unraveled Kolina’s fingers from around his knee, scooped her up, tucked her under the other arm, whirled and disappeared into the darkness of the house, giving Brooke little choice but to follow him.
Out of pure defiance, she stuck her hand back in the purse and fondled her Mace can deliberately.
Please be a bad guy. Please, please, please.
“Don’t even think it,” he warned her without looking back, and so she took her hand out again, not knowing what it was in his voice that made it unthinkable not to obey, but resenting it heartily all the same.
Chapter Two
Cole Standen’s arm was drenched in baby pee, and the gorgeous, but irksome, Miss Brooke Callan was still toying with the idea of spraying him with Mace.
“Don’t even think it,” he told her and could feel her disgruntled shock that he knew exactly where her hand had gone the moment his back was turned. He’d spent his entire career assessing situations that involved matters of life and death, and he’d gotten damn good at reading people. She was still bristling with suspicion, and it had probably been a poor idea to turn his back on her, even though she looked as if she would weigh all of a hundred pounds soaking wet.
The fact that she had that poorly disguised look of a woman who was suspicious and prickly around all men only made her more dangerous.
But it was in reading his own reaction to the unexpected arrival of yet another complication in Heartbreak Bay that unsettled him. The truth was, Cole had felt a little shock of his own. Because the can of Mace in her purse was not where the danger from Brooke Callan lay. Nor was it in the prickly attitude he recognized as a disguise for fear.
Nope. It was from her eyes, huge and violet as pansies. There was vulnerability in those eyes. They were the eyes of a woman who had been hurt and was scared to death to be hurt ever again.
Thankfully, he knew the hard truth about himself: Cole Standen, least likely to be trusted with vulnerability. He wasn’t going to hurt her. He wasn’t going to allow himself to get close enough to hurt her. Nope, he was going to work overtime at keeping those defenses of hers—the ones that would have made a porcupine proud—in place.
No matter how attractive he found the rest of the package. And he did find it attractive, oddly even more so because of the broken shoe, the panty hose bunched around her shapely legs like the tattered remains of a storm-tattered sail, the wildly tangled brown hair, the rumpled clothes clinging to a delicate figure that was soft and round in all the right places.
Despite the smudged makeup and the defensive expression, her face was lovely, with high cheekbones, snub nose and wide, sensuous lips.
But quite frankly, everything about her was adding up to maiden in distress, and Cole Standen would have thought that after the last twenty hours, maidens in distress would have little appeal for him.
Make that two small maidens, one old granny, two lovable ruffian boys and a baby who was sweet and affable until the exact second Cole tried to set her down somewhere. Even if the adorable Number Five was sleeping, the moment he tried to divest himself of her, she shook herself from deep slumber and roared back to life. Number Five was setting up permanent housekeeping in the crook of his arm.
He’d retired from the rescuing business. He’d done his duty in some of the saddest, hardest, most shattered places in the world.
At thirty-eight, a major in the Canadian Armed Forces, he was burned out. He’d given his work and his career everything he had, up to and including his soul. He had no wife or children as other men his age did, and he was glad he didn’t.
He did not think his job had made him a likable man. His emotions, by necessity, had turned to stone a long time ago. He had lived largely in the disciplined but rough arenas of all male societies. His areas of expertise included being able to strip and clean a weapon with astonishing rapidity, leaping out of aircraft without causing injury to himself or others and taking command of people in situations that tended to either bring out the best in them or the very, very worst.
None of these skills, so useful and lifesaving in his limited world, had any value at all when it came to the dreaded R word. As in relationships. With the opposite sex. Of the intimate variety.
Women, unfortunately, did not seem to get that. They threw temptation in his path by insisting on seeing him as a romantic figure instead of what he was.
Flawed. Cole knew he had come of age without a single skill that would make him a suitable partner to a member of the fairer sex, and especially not to one who looked as vulnerable as Brooke Callan.
He considered himself a natural-born leader who specialized in survival—and that meant the parts of him that were analytical and hard and cold and emotionally unavailable were overdeveloped. Way overdeveloped.
No, Major Cole Standen was exactly where he needed to be.
Alone.
After so many years of living a regimented, disciplined life, it was wonderful to wake up in the morning with nothing to do and nowhere to go, no crushing world disaster to feel in some way responsible for.
At thirty-eight, he had twenty years of service with the military and his pension was decent for a man of simple needs.
He had his boat, a cabin cruiser with a huge engine, moored at his pier, and for the past ten months, summer and winter, he’d fished the waters of Kootenay Lake. The body of water was as temperamental and hazardous as a mistress, and he enjoyed her changing face and challenges enough that he needed no other.
He’d been asked to write a book about some of his experiences, and, in the back of his mind, he thought eventually he might, but it never seemed to be a convenient time. And he didn’t feel like pulling scabs from scars just beginning to heal over.
His life, until a little less than twenty hours ago, had been about as perfect as he could make it. No wars beckoned, and no one’s life depended on him. So, he fished. He had a satellite-television dish. Occasionally he hiked the familiar boyhood trails of the mountain ranges behind his home. He kept a good stock of cold beverages, convenience foods, and T-bone steaks. He ate microwave popcorn for breakfast if he damn well pleased. He grew his hair so that it actually touched his collar at the back.
He was what every man longed for and every man envied. Cole Standen was free.
And then that little girl clutching a baby had come to his door in the middle of the night. Even though he was an expert on handling disasters, his well-ordered world felt as if it had been tipped on its axis from the moment he had opened his door.
And now it tilted more wildly still. Brooke Callan appeared to be a new twist in the horrible unraveling of the retired major’s perfect and controlled life.
Exposure to the genuine sweetness of Granny and those kids, with their incessant demands for hugs—never mind all their other constant demands for food, games, stories, clothing, snacks, noses wiped, bottoms wiped, diaper changes—seemed to be wearing him down, tenderizing the toughness of his heart, because why did he feel the threat of this woman so strongly?
And it had nothing to do with her Mace. Though he hoped he didn’t have to wrestle it away from her. Her curves, under her somewhat sodden outfit, were delectable, and if it came to a hand-to-hand struggle, he might win control of the Mace but lose control of something much more vital.
It occurred to him that maybe he’d been doing the man-alone-on-the-mountain routine for a little too long.
He deliberately changed his focus, away from her, her curves and her vulnerability.
“Number One,” he called, turning away from the door. “Number One! We have a Code Yellow.”
He was rewarded instantly with the sound of many feet stampeding across the floor above his head, and, moments later, Saffron, dressed in a winter jacket against the cold in the house, appeared on the top of the curved stairway, a heap of towels clutched to her chest.
“Auntie Brooke,” she shrieked and dropped the towels, flying down the stairs and flinging herself at Brooke.
“She’s not really my aunt,” she informed Cole, just as if he cared. “It’s an honorary title.”
“And one I enjoy immensely,” Brooke said, and then asked in a suspicious undertone. “Are you okay, Saffron? Is everything okay here?”
“Of course I’m okay. Everything is fine, Auntie.”
She was a beautiful woman to begin with, but when her face softened with relief and then lit from within as she returned that wholehearted hug, Cole had to turn abruptly away. This was precisely why he needed to keep Brooke Callan sour, defensive and irritated.
Unfortunately, he turned back just in time to see her expression of delight deepen as the boys tumbled down the stairs. They were unaccountably attached to the socks he had given them to wear on their heads and still had them on. And when Brooke smiled at that, her lips looked distinctly and temptingly kissable.
Discipline, Cole reminded himself.
“I’m fine now. But it was soooo awful,” Saffron breathed, and Cole noticed, not for the first time, that the child had a precocious flair for drama. She probably took after her mother. “Granny fell down the stairs, and there was blood absolutely everywhere, and she didn’t move. Not even a blink. Not even when I shook her. It was like shaking a rag doll.”
Boy Number Two chipped in. “I slipped in the blood, and I thought her brains were on the stairs.”
Cole couldn’t help but notice that Ms. Callan turned a little pale, though he told himself it wasn’t for her benefit that he cut off the tale-telling.
“Number Two,” Cole interrupted sternly, before the whole episode could be reenacted, “we have a Code Yellow here.”
“Code Yellow. Thank God,” the boy said to Brooke. “I hate Code Brown.”
“You and me both,” Cole agreed under his breath.
“Darrance, you don’t say thank God, like that, you say thank goodness.”
That was much better. Brooke had a prissy and disapproving look on her face. Her lips had thinned into a downward line that a sane man would not think was the least bit kissable.
But a man who had spent too much time alone on the edge of a mountain-shadowed lake could still see the puffy sensuality of that bottom lip if he looked hard enough.
“Mr. Herman says thank God all the time. And also thank Ch—”
“Code Yellow,” he reminded his troops sternly.
To his satisfaction, Saffron broke away from Brooke, raced up the stairs and gathered the towels that had fallen.
“The children are cursing. And why on earth are you calling them numbers?” Brooke asked, folding her arms over her chest and tapping her foot sternly.
This was much better. Much, much better. A less vulnerable-looking woman would have been very hard to imagine.
But out loud, he replied, calmly, ignoring the challenge in her voice because he knew that would irritate her more, “Where I come from, that wouldn’t be considered cursing, Miss Brooke. Not even close.”
“And where would that be? That you come from?” she asked snootily.
Hoping she would chalk it up to evasiveness, a quality she had already told him she disliked in men—and it seemed imperative that she dislike him—he chose to ignore her. “Just between you and me, I have never heard such strange and unpronounceable names in my life.” He gave Kolina, Number Four, who was still wearing what looked to be a silk party dress, an absent pat on her messy hair. “This one has a name like colon. Who would do that to a kid?”
“You’ll hurt her feelings,” Brooke snapped at him in an undertone.
The accusation caught him off guard, and he scanned Kolina’s face for any sign of hurt. The child gave him her toothiest grin, her psyche apparently undamaged by his dislike of her name.
“She was named after the heroine in her mother’s movie, Sinking of the Suzanne. Kolina is a beautiful name,” she assured the little girl, who didn’t have a clue what they were talking about.
Obviously, he was supposed to be impressed. He wasn’t. “Suzanne would have been a good name. Solid. Sensible.”
“That was the ship!”
“Better than a colon.”
“Kolina is a Swedish variation of Katharine,” she informed him regally.
“Yeah, so what’s wrong with the English version?” he asked.
He found he enjoyed baiting Brooke. Keeping her dislike for him high was going to be more fun than he had originally imagined. The new danger was that he rather liked how she looked when she was annoyed. Her cheeks were rosy as apples, her eyes flashed fire, and, with the barest little shove on his part, she could probably be coaxed to stamp her foot.
“Katharine,” he said, “there’s a nice sensible name that nobody would ever mistake for an interior body part. It could be shortened to Katie. I’ve always liked Katie.”
She stamped her foot.
He felt a smile trying to tickle his lips, but he ruthlessly bit it back.
“Obviously you are lacking in creativity,” Brooke said. The humorless line of her own lips should have made him think of his grade seven teacher, Miss Hunt. But it didn’t. In fact, her lips didn’t look one ounce less kissable. Not one.
“Lacking in creativity,” he agreed without an ounce of regret.
Saffron returned, and he noticed she was apparently unoffended that she had been labeled with a number. Probably hated her name, poor kid. He was willing to bet she got teased at school.
“Code Yellow is a diaper change,” Saffron informed Brooke importantly and then added in a confidential whisper. “Pee-pee. Code Brown is poo-poo. Only we don’t have any diapers left because a tree fell down over the road to town. We’re using towels.”
Brooke stared at the pure-white towels. “These towels are from the House of Bryan,” she gasped.
He folded his arms across his chest, gazed narrowly at her, daring her to go on. Of course she did.
“They’re worth a fortune. Look, they’re embossed. It’s a special order. It takes months to get them. Years if you aren’t Shauna Carrier.”
She pointed out the silky, heavy embroidery, white on white so it hardly showed up, anyway, as if this was a detail he was supposed to care about.
“Surely you could have found something else for diaper material,” she sputtered.
“At great inconvenience to myself, I decided not to let Granny bleed to death or to let five small children fend for themselves. My humblest apologies if my methods, and my diaper service, don’t meet with your approval, Miss Callan.”
“Ms.,” she corrected him absently, looking somewhat grieved that he had had the bad manners to point out to her that he had come to the rescue of her employer’s family. She tried for a conciliatory tone, which failed miserably. “I’m sorry. I didn’t want to give the impression I wasn’t grateful for all you’ve done, but—”
“Good,” he said, cutting her off quickly, since in his experience the word but almost always canceled out every word that had come before it. “I’m going to take a wild guess that you are going to love what we did with the sheets.”
“The sheets? You’re not using House of Bryan sheets for diapers? They’re Egyptian cotton. Seven-hundred-thread count.”
He couldn’t believe this. She looked intelligent enough. Could she seriously be working herself into a lather over sheets? She was, and who was he to stop her? In fact, he egged her on just a little bit, for the pure fun of it.
“Nope, of course we’re not using the sheets for diapers.” He waited until the relief flitted through her eyes before he continued. “Not absorbent enough. We used the sheets for bandages. Ripped them into nice lengths.”
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Cara Colter
When Major Cole Standen retired from the Canadian Armed Forces, he figured he'd quit the rescuing business for good.Then five irresistible tykes turned up on his doorstep in the middle of the night, desperate for his help But he hadn't counted on sharing child-care duties with their auntie, Brooke Callan–a wide-eyed beauty who seemed as if she could use a little rescuing herself.Knee-deep in diapers and baby bottles, Cole soon realized there was far more to Brooke than just her vulnerable eyes and kissable lips. Perhaps it was being around a ready-made family, but this soldier was suddenly picturing himself with a brood of his own…and beautiful Brooke as his not-so-temporary second-in-command!
“The baby needs a bath,” she announced.
“Have at it,” he said. “Bathing babies is not my department.”
“And why not?” she said, folding her arms and tapping her foot.
A fighting stance if he’d ever seen one. He held up his hands. “These hands strip rifles and change flat tires and chop wood and put worms on hooks. Men things.”
She was looking at his hands with a strange hunger burning in her eyes, a hunger that made him realize his hands wanted to explore all kinds of softer territory.
“It’s a two-person job,” she said firmly. “Wet babies are slippery.”
He knew, suddenly, that just as he had helped her face the challenge of her fears, she was now asking him to explore new territory, move out of his comfort zone.
“I’ve already found out all about slippery babies.”
“Well, then this should be a piece of cake for you, Major.”
Dear Reader,
Baby birds are chirping, bees are buzzing and the tulips are beginning to bud. Spring is here, so why not revive the winter-weary romantic in you by reading four brand-new love stories from Silhouette Romance this month.
What’s an old soldier to do when a bunch of needy rug rats and a hapless beauty crash his retreat? Fall in love, of course! Follow the antics of this funny little troop in Major Daddy (#1710) by Cara Colter.
In Dylan’s Last Dare (#1711), the latest title in Patricia Thayer’s dynamite THE TEXAS BROTHERHOOD miniseries, a cranky cowboy locks horns with his feisty physical therapist and then learns she has a little secret she soon won’t be able to hide!
Jordan Bishop wants to dwell in a castle and live happily ever after, but somehow things aren’t going as she’s planned, in An Heiress on His Doorstep (#1712) by Teresa Southwick. This is the final title in Southwick’s delightful IF WISHES WERE… miniseries in which three friends have their dreams come true in unexpected ways.
When a bookworm meets her prince and discovers she’s a real-life princess, will she be able to make her own happy ending? Find out in The Secret Princess (#1713) by Elizabeth Harbison.
Celebrate the new season, feel the love and join in the fun by experiencing each of these lively new love stories from Silhouette Romance!
Mavis C. Allen
Associate Senior Editor
Major Daddy
Cara Colter
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
For those courageous women who love the men—
sons, brothers, husbands, fathers—
who go to war
Books by Cara Colter
Silhouette Romance
Dare To Dream #491
Baby in Blue #1161
Husband in Red #1243
The Cowboy, the Baby and the Bride-to-Be #1319
Truly Daddy #1363
A Bride Worth Waiting For #1388
Weddings Do Come True #1406
A Babe in the Woods #1424
A Royal Marriage #1440
First Time, Forever #1464
* (#litres_trial_promo)Husband by Inheritance #1532
* (#litres_trial_promo)The Heiress Takes a Husband #1538
* (#litres_trial_promo)Wed by a Will #1544
What Child Is This? #1585
Her Royal Husband #1600
9 Out of 10 Women Can’t Be Wrong #1615
Guess Who’s Coming for Christmas? #1632
What a Woman Should Know #1685
Major Daddy #1710
Silhouette Books
The Coltons
A Hasty Wedding
CARA COLTER
shares ten acres in the wild Kootenay region of British Columbia with the man of her dreams, three children, two horses, a cat with no tail and a golden retriever who answers best to “bad dog.” She loves reading, writing and the woods in winter (no bears). She says life’s delights include an automatic garage door opener and the skylight over the bed that allows her to see the stars at night.
She also says, “I have not lived a neat and tidy life, and used to envy those who did. Now I see my struggles as having given me a deep appreciation of life, and of love, that I hope I succeed in passing on through the stories that I tell.”
MAJOR COLE STANDEN’S SURVIVAL STRATEGY
(for handling emergencies when stranded with five children, one wounded senior citizen and a beautiful woman)
CODE YELLOW
Diaper change, liquid variety.
Emergency rating: minor.
CODE BROWN
Diaper change, horrible variety.
Clothespins and/or face mask may be required.
Emergency rating: moderate.
CODE RED
Brooke Callan. Beautiful, bossy and armed with Mace. Be alert for the heart to do strange things when she’s in the vicinity.
Emergency rating: major.
Contents
Prologue (#u1dd94599-03e7-55b8-943e-b8fcbf99bc9b)
Chapter One (#u5af69a5c-d6d1-5615-969b-dfd6a7daba17)
Chapter Two (#u487c24a0-45ca-5c49-8f88-747d96f09331)
Chapter Three (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Four (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Five (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Six (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Seven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eight (#litres_trial_promo)
Epilogue (#litres_trial_promo)
Prologue
Cole Standen woke with a start. For a moment, in the inky, impenetrable darkness, he thought he was in that inhospitable land of icy-cold nights, blowing sand, ragged, rocky places and hidden dangers. The blood surged and his muscles tensed, battle alert, ready. He held his breath, listening.
It was the scent that brought him back to reality. The aroma of cedar and pine, made richer by the dampness in the storm-tossed night, rushed in the open bedroom window and comforted him. It was the smell of his boyhood.
And then he became aware of the sounds outside the shelter of the sturdy cabin. The wind was savage, howling through the treetops. Rain hammered the metal roof. Waves crashed and rolled on the rock-lined shore of the lake.
He sighed and felt his muscles relax. He remembered he was home.
His eyes adjusted minutely to the murky darkness and the rough log walls of his bedroom came into focus. The mattress beneath him was firm and comfortable, a plaid bedroom-window curtain flapped and jigged with the wind.
He had gone to sleep with the wind high—raising the waves to ferocious whitecaps on the lake, swaying the treetops, shrieking through the soffit under the eaves—so he knew the wind had not woken him.
Cole had a soldier’s gift for sifting out those noises that were supposed to be there—no matter how chaotic—and sleeping through them with relative ease. But something out of the ordinary, no matter how small, could bring him instantly awake. The sound he thought he had heard was so fragile, so tiny, it was easy to believe he had imagined it.
He waited under the comfortable weight of a down comforter for his sense of safety to return, for his mind to sound the all clear.
He reminded himself that he was virtually alone here at this isolated bay on Kootenay Lake, an enormous body of water located in the shadows of British Columbia’s Purcell Mountains. Unlike most men, he craved solitude and found solace in it.
It was November. The summer people had boarded up the windows of the rare cabins that dotted the inlet and had gone home long ago.
Only the new house—rumored to be a movie star’s—showed signs of occupation. He had noticed fresh tire tracks on the impossibly steep driveway. At night, light spilled from windows of the house high on the point and wove ribbons of gold into the black, restless water beyond the bay.
The new house was a monstrosity of tasteless white stucco that had changed the landscape of Heartbreak Bay forever, and that Cole heartily resented every time he caught a glimpse of it. Still, it was a long distance up the bay, far enough away that his sense of isolation remained safely intact.
Despite how his reasoning mind tried to tell him he was as safe here as he could ever be anywhere, Cole’s deeper mind—that place of pure instinct that had kept him alive so many times—did not sound the all clear. Cole frowned, and then he heard it, suddenly, again.
His frown deepened, and he reached for the light beside his bed. The lamp clicked but did not come on. No power, not an unusual situation in this remote bay that was subjected to cruel weather from November until February. He reached for the flashlight on his night table and played the beam across the ceiling. The light did not persuade him that he had not heard a sound, frail and pitiful, like the mewing of a kitten.
Restless now, Cole threw back the covers, yanked on a pair of jeans, and went and stood at the window. The air was biting against his naked chest.
Tap. Tap. Tap. The hair on the back of his neck rose. The noise was puny, almost lost in the furor of the storm, and yet there it was again. Tap. Tap. Tap.
He followed the sound out of his bedroom, following the beam of his flashlight over rough hardwood floors, past the ragtag collection of cabin furniture in the living room.
Tap. Tap. Tap.
The sound was on the other side of the front door. He told himself a tree branch must be scraping it. He reminded himself he was home, in Canada, safe, and yet it was a warrior who flung open the door, ready and fierce.
At first he saw only the night, felt the sting of rain against his face and the cold fingers of wind in his hair. But then that small sound, the kitten mewing, made him look down, and his flashlight beam illuminated a most startling sight.
His jaw dropped.
A small girl stood there, her white nightdress whipping around her, a doll wrapped in a bright blanket clutched tight to her chest.
Perhaps eleven, the child was painfully thin, and her long dark hair tangled, curly, around her head. Her eyes were huge and blue and frightened, and her teeth were chattering. A fine line of blue was appearing around her lips despite the sweater pulled over the nightdress.
The doll she was holding suddenly let out a fierce yell, as frightening as any battle cry Cole had ever heard. He took an alarmed step back and scrutinized the bundle the girl held.
It squirmed, and he realized it was not a doll. It was a baby! His blood went cold, and his mind tried to sort through the hodgepodge of illogical information that was being thrust on it.
The soldier, the commander, stepped in coolly and took charge. It told him job one was to get these kids out of the cold. No matter how startling their appearance on his doorstep, there would be time, later, to sort through the intrigues.
“Get in,” he ordered and was stunned when the child hesitated before the authority in his voice, a voice that men raced to obey.
He saw suddenly her arms were trembling from the effort of holding the baby, and firmly, a soldier doing the thing he least wanted to do, but recognizing his lack of choices, he plucked the baby from her arms.
It stared at him with huge blue eyes just like the girl’s and screwed up its face until the eyes disappeared into a nest of wrinkles. But then, mercifully, instead of crying the baby nestled into him, sighed, plopped a plump thumb into its mouth.
“Come in,” he said, again, trying to take the military snap out of his voice, trying for a note of kindness that might reassure the trembling waif before him.
She regarded him with huge eyes that stripped him to his soul, and then gave a small satisfied nod. But still, she did not step over the threshold to warmth and safety.
She turned on the step and motioned with her arm. A motion any soldier would recognize.
Come forward. The shrubs that formed a border around the small square of yard that surrounded the house, parted.
Cole almost dropped the baby. A toddler, not more than three, obviously female from the foolishness of the lace-trimmed nightdress that tangled around pudgy legs, emerged from the shrubs and tottered across the leaf-and branch-strewn yard.
As if he was not reeling from enough shock, the shrubs parted again, and two small boys, maybe seven and eight, dark-haired, dirt-smeared and pajama-clad, also emerged into the clearing of his cabin.
Cole Standen had faced the types of terror that make a man tremble and reach inside himself to find his deepest reserves of courage.
He had jumped from airplanes, been shot at, dealt with the dread of an enemy concealed by night but so close you could almost feel his breath upon your cheek.
But as those cold, wet, mud-spattered children tumbled by him into his sanctuary, and the warm puddle of humanity that was the baby squirmed against his bare chest, Cole searched his memory bank to see if he had ever faced a terror quite like the one that hammered in his breast now.
He discovered he had not.
Chapter One
“My granny’s dead,” the girl, obviously the oldest of the five, announced. And then, her bravery all used up, her face crumpled as if the air was being let out of a balloon. She began to cry, quietly at first, big silent tears rolling down her face. The silence was but the still before the storm. She built quickly to a crescendo. She uttered a heartbreaking wail.
The four other waifs watched her anxiously, and her breakdown was a lesson in leadership. All four of them instantly followed her example. Even the baby. They screwed up their faces in expressions of identical distress and began to caterwaul. Awkwardly gripping the baby, which seemed unaccountably slippery, Cole escorted the four other howling children into his living room and planted them on the couch.
The older girl held out her arms, and he carefully placed the screaming baby back in her care. All the children huddled together in a messy pile of tangled limbs and wept until their skinny shoulders heaved and their sobs were interspersed with hiccups.
Cole did not know very much about children, but he hoped hiccup-crying did not induce vomiting.
Quickly, he checked the phone—which naturally was out—stoked the fire and lit his two coal-oil lamps.
He turned back and studied the children in the flickering yellow light. He realized he was in trouble. The crying continued unabated—in fact it seemed to be rising in tempo and intensity. He had no doubt the children were going to make themselves sick if they continued. There was also the possibility that grandma—wherever she was—might not be dead and might urgently require his assistance.
He held up a hand. “Hey,” he said, in his best commander voice, “that’s enough.”
There was momentary silence while they all gazed wide-eyed at his raised hand, and then one of them whimpered and the rest of them dissolved all over again.
He clapped his hands. He stamped his foot. He roared.
And nothing worked, until something divine whispered in his ear what was required to stop the noise and squeeze the story out of the little mites.
Surrender.
The soldier in him resisted. Surrender? It was not in his vocabulary. But he resisted only momentarily. The noise and emotion in the room were going to send him on a one-way trip into the lake if it didn’t stop.
So, summoning all his courage, he took the baby back, discovered why she seemed unaccountably slippery and did his best to ignore it. He wedged himself a spot on the couch between the children. Blessed and stunned silence followed while the little troop evaluated this latest development. And then, before Cole could really prepare himself properly, the two boys and the toddler in the ridiculous dress were all vying for a place on his lap—and found it. The older girl snuggled in so tight under his arm it felt as if she was crushing his heart.
The combined weight of the children and the baby was startlingly small. It was their warmth that surprised him, the seeming bonelessness of them as they melted into him, like kittens who had found a mother.
For an old soldier, a terrifying thing happened.
Soaked in tears and whatever horrible warm liquid that was seeping out of the baby’s diaper, he felt a terrible weakness, a softening around his heart.
“Okay,” he said, putting his voice into the blessed silence with extreme caution, “tell me what happened to Grandma.” Out of the sudden chorus of overlapping voices, he began to pick out a story.
“The lights went out.”
“She fell down the steps.”
“Blood everywhere.”
“Lots of blood. Maybe bwains, too.”
In bits and pieces, like putting together a verbal jigsaw puzzle, Cole figured out who the children were, where they were from and what needed to be done.
They were the movie star’s children. When the power had gone out, their grandma, who looked after them when their mother was away, had fallen down the steps in the darkness. The children had presumed, erroneously, Cole hoped, that she was dead.
“I knew I had to get help,” the oldest girl told him solemnly, “but they—” she stabbed an accusing finger at the two boys “—said they had to come, too. And we couldn’t leave Kolina—”
“That me,” the toddler in the dress told him, then relaxed into his chest, her cheek warm and soft and wet, and inserted her thumb in her mouth.
“—or the baby, so we all came. And here we are, Mr. Herman.”
Mr. Herman? They obviously had him confused with a different neighbor, possibly one who was friendly.
He considered telling them he was not Mr. Herman, but they had a shell-shocked look about them that told him to save his breath.
He saw immediately the order of things that needed to be done. He had to get to the grandma and fast. Possibly, she was not dead, but hovering on the brink, where seconds could count.
“Your name?” he demanded of the oldest one.
“Saffron,” she told him, and the rest of them piped up with the most bewildering and ridiculous assortment of names he’d ever heard. The older of the boys was Darrance, and the other one was Calypso. Calypso!
The smallest girl batted thick eyelashes and reiterated that her name was Kolina. And the baby, he was informed, was Lexandra.
The impossible names swam in his head, and were then pushed aside by more important tasks that needed to be dealt with.
“Okay,” he said, pointing at the oldest girl, “You are not Saffron anymore. You are Number One. And you are Number Two…”
He went on quickly, numbering them largest to smallest, and he could see that rather than being indignant about the name changes, it was exactly what they needed. Someone of authority to relinquish the responsibility to. Having established himself as boss, he confidently gave his first order.
“Now, Number One, I have to go see to your grand-mother, and I am placing you in charge here. That makes you second in command.”
Adding another number had been a mistake, because the child’s brow furrowed. He hurried on. “Number One, you are to make sure each of these children sits quietly on this couch while I go to your house and check on your grandmother. Nobody moves a muscle, right?”
He was already calculating. What were the chances his road was open? Slim. If he had to hike cross-country, he could probably be at the big house on the point in ten minutes, going flat out.
It pierced his awareness that Number One was not the least impressed with military protocol or her new title of second in command. In fact, she was frowning, her expression vaguely mutinous.
“No,” she said with flat finality.
“No?” Cole said, dumbfounded. Apparently the child had no idea that he outranked her and was not to be challenged. In fact, her cute little face screwed up, and she let loose a new wail that threatened to peel the paint off his ceiling. Fresh tears squirted out of her eyes at an alarming rate.
He felt himself tensing as four other faces screwed up in unison, but they held off making noise as their sister spoke.
“Mr. Herman, we’re not staying here by ourselves,” she told him. “This house is spooky. I’m scared. I don’t want to be in charge anymore. I want to go with you.”
He only briefly wrestled with his astonishment that this snippet of a child was refusing an order. Obviously the other kids were going to follow her cue, and he did not have the time—nor the patience—to cajole them into seeing things his way.
As much as it went against his nature, he surrendered again. Twice in the space of a few minutes. He could only hope it wasn’t an omen.
He hurriedly packed a knapsack with emergency supplies, and then he turned his attention back to the children.
For a man who could move a regiment in minutes, getting those five children back through the door, arranged in his SUV and safely belted into position was a humbling experience.
Precious moments lost, he finally fired up the engine. Just as he had feared, at the first switchback in his own driveway a huge ponderosa pine was lying lengthwise across it, the branches spanning it ditch to ditch. He’d reversed, plotting furiously the whole way.
The children spilled out of the vehicle and back into the house. He took the baby and lined the rest of them up, shortest to tallest, and inspected them. They were all dressed inadequately for even a short trek along the roughly wooded shores of the lake.
Biting back his impatience, Cole pulled sweaters and jackets off the hooks in his coat closet. “Put them on.”
Giggling slightly, the children did as they were ordered. Cole stuffed Kolina inside a large sweater. It fit her like a sleeping bag. He intended to carry her, anyway.
He used pieces of binder twine to adjust the clothing on the older children so they wouldn’t be tripping as they walked. Lastly, he looked for head coverings. Well versed in the dangers of hypothermia, he knew the greatest heat loss was from the head area. In a moment of pure inspiration, he raided his sock drawer and fitted each child with a makeshift woolen cap—one of his large socks pulled down tight over their ears.
He inspected them again. They looked like a ragtag group of very adorable elves, but he had no time to appreciate his handiwork. Once more, the children were herded out the door.
He put the smaller of the boys on his shoulders, and then had Number One hand him Number Four, the toddler, Kolina, and Number Five, the baby.
He set as hard a pace as he was able, changing Number Three, on his shoulders, with Number Two, the bigger of the boys, every five or six minutes so that none of them would tire. The girl, Saffron, showed remarkable endurance. The beam of the flashlight picked out the well-worn trails that wove around the lake and to the point of land where the movie star’s house was. To his intense relief the ax stayed in his pack. There were no obstacles so large that they could not get around them, though the path was littered with tree branches, cones and needles. Debris continued to rain around them as the wind shrieked through the trees.
It would have been a two minute drive to the house from his cabin. Overland, they made it in just over thirty minutes, which Cole thought was probably something of a miracle.
The children did not whine, or cry or complain. Soldiers could be trained to be brave. That the bravery of the children came to them so naturally put his heart at risk in ways it had never been risked before.
He heard the weak voice calling into the night before he saw her.
“Children? Where are you? Saffron? Darrance? Calypso? Kolina? Lexandra? Dear God, where are you?”
They cried back and began to run, and moments later were reunited with their grandmother. Their unbridled exuberance at finding her returned to life was nearly as exhausting as their sorrow had been.
Cole managed to herd the whole gang, including Granny, whom he secretly labeled Number Six, into the dark interior of the house.
The head injury had bled profusely. Granny’s gray hair was matted with blood and it streaked her kindly wrinkled face and neck.
“This is Mr. Herman,” Saffron told her. “We went to get him because we thought you were dead.”
“My poor babies,” Granny said, and then extended a frail hand. “Thank you so much for coming to my rescue, Mr. Herman.”
He didn’t really care if she called him Mr. Herman or Santa Claus. He wanted to assess her injury as soon as possible. The house, apparently electrically heated, was cold, and he herded his charges into what he knew must be called the great room. Located off the main hallway, it was a huge room with picture windows that faced the lake. In the dim light, he could see the floor was marble-tiled with thick Persian rugs tossed on it. Big mahogany-colored leather couches were grouped facing the window. Thankfully, on the north wall, was an enormous floor-to-ceiling stone fireplace.
He equipped the children with flashlights to help them find their way around the dark house, and then gave them each a job they could handle. The baby was set on the floor beside him while the rest of them went in search of clean cloth for bandages, ice and sturdy straight sticks suitable for splinting, should they be needed.
While they were gone, Cole opened his first-aid kit and began to swab away the worst of the blood. He grilled the old girl to see if she was confused, but, aside from being woozy, she seemed articulate and aware. She knew her age, the date, and even the impossible names of all those children.
She was not weak or numb on either side of her body, no blood or fluids were coming from her ears or her nose. She had not vomited or had convulsions that she was aware of.
Still, Cole knew the very fact she had lost consciousness made the injury serious. The roads were impassable and the phones were out.
But for him, handling emergencies on his own, without counting on backup, came as naturally as breathing.
The children brought him sheets, and, even the rough soldier that he was, he recognized them as very expensive. Percale. Unhesitatingly, he tore them into bandages and encouraged the children to do the same.
Children two, three and four were soon hauling wood. He settled Granny on the couch, built a fire, and, with Saffron at his side, began to haul mattresses down from upstairs.
“This is the boys’ room,” Saffron told him. The room was done in a jungle theme, complete with fake palm trees with stuffed gorillas swinging from them.
Saffron’s own room paid homage to a vapid-looking girl who was too skinny and had too big a mouth. Brittany or Tiffany or something. The room was divided by an invisible line, and the other half—Kolina’s, Saffron informed him—was aggressively Dalmatian. There were black-and-white spots everywhere. They marched relentlessly up the walls and across the ceiling, they dotted the rugs, the bed comforter, the pillows, the dresser and drawers.
Cole tried to decide which half of the room was more nauseating, but reached no conclusion. After salvaging both mattresses from the room, he closed the door firmly, hoping never to have to enter again.
The baby’s room was a dream of ruffled white lace. It was everywhere—skirting the crib, forming a drape over it, hanging in big wads from the windows.
And those kids had thought his house was spooky!
Shaking his head, he began to haul mattresses down the curved marble staircase. It was easy to see why it had caused such a terrible injury. The marble was slippery and exceedingly hard. He shook his head at the impracticality of it.
In the great room, he laid out the mattresses and got his now-willing little soldiers to haul bedding. One last emergency before he tucked them in.
The baby needed fresh pants and badly.
“There’s only a few diapers,” Granny told him weakly. “The housekeeper will bring new ones with the grocery order tomorrow.”
Cole didn’t want to be the one to break it to her that the housekeeper probably wasn’t coming tomorrow. He made a mental note to check around and see what was available that would pass as a diaper.
The diaper was absolutely rank. He had to tie the triangular bandage from his first-aid kit around his nose to even begin to deal with it.
The children shouted with laughter at his impromptu face mask and his clumsy efforts to handle the diaper. “This is a Code Brown,” he informed them, trying not to gag. “The other is a Code Yellow.”
“Poop, Code Brown,” his second in command translated for him. “Pee-pee, Code Yellow.”
The children squealed with laughter though he failed to see the humor. The replacement diaper was finally in place, more or less, the baby had a bottle and the rest of them were assigned beds. He tucked them in.
They took his refusal of their requests for stories, snacks and teddy bears with fairly good grace, but insisted on good-night hugs and did not even notice his awkwardness in performing this rare duty. Then they laid down their heads and slept almost instantly.
Granny was soon sleeping, too, and he set his watch alarm to check her pupils every two hours. Exhausted, Cole stoked the fire, pulled the sleeping bag he had brought from his knapsack and fell asleep on one of the large leather couches.
He awoke to find the toddler sitting on his chest, her face three inches from his, her eyes locked on his, willing him awake.
“Me Kolina,” she announced as soon as he pried one eye open.
“Number Four,” he corrected her. “Go back to sleep.”
“Baby tinks,” she informed him. “Code Bwon.”
His own nose had already let him know that. And that was how his day began, with a baby stinking and the unsettling discovery that at this rate they had a two-hour supply of diapers. And the pace didn’t let up one little bit, until Number Seven appeared, two full days into the siege.
There was still no power and no phone. The main road was not open. Cole would not, in good conscience, leave an aging, injured grandmother alone to cope with these challenges, never mind the five rambunctious children.
And now Number Seven had arrived. And it didn’t appear that she was a housekeeper with a nice, fresh supply of diapers, either.
“What kind of nut has five kids?” The voice was gravel-edged and deep, and the man who regarded Brooke Callan from the doorway of her employer’s house made her heart drop like an elevator rushing down a shaft.
The man was glorious and having spent the last five years in and around the film industry in Los Angeles as actress Shauna Carrier’s personal assistant, Brooke was now something of an expert on glorious men.
And their black hearts.
To her discerning eye, this one looked more black-hearted than most of them. He stood at least six feet tall, handsome as a pirate captain. He had the faintly disheveled look of a man so certain of his charms he could be careless about his appearance.
His denim shirt was unbuttoned and untucked, and the white undershirt underneath molded perfect pecs, a wide powerful chest, a flat, washboard stomach. His jeans, worn through on both knees, were so soft with age and wear that they clung to the large muscles of sculpted thighs.
The man had dark whiskers roughing his perfectly planed cheeks and his clefted chin. His hair, black and curling wildly, had not been groomed, a fact that just underscored his faintly brutal untamed charm.
In startling contrast to the darkness of his hair and whiskers, and to the olive tone of his skin, were eyes as blue and startling as sapphires. There was a certain light of strong command in them that Brooke did not see in actors, though, not even when they were trying their hardest to look menacing.
The man before her gave off an air no actor could ever imitate. His eyes held the shadows of things not spoken about in polite circles, and something in the chiseled and forbidding lines of his face warned her this was a man who had been on intimate terms with danger.
The look in those sapphire-blue eyes was impenetrable, guarded and assessing at the same time. The lines around the firm curve of sinfully sensuous lips was stern and unyielding. He did not look like a man who would laugh easily or often.
The man exuded power and control.
Only one thing stopped the picture of menace, of almost overpowering male strength, from being complete.
Shauna’s baby, Lexandra, was stuffed under one of his arms like a football, her large padded rump and ruffled diaper cover pointed at Brooke. Chubby pink legs churned the air happily.
Nestled in the crook of the other strong, masculine arm was two-and-half-year-old Kolina, her head resting trustingly against that broad chest, her thumb in her mouth. The child’s face was dirty, but other than that she was a picture of contentment. She popped out her thumb briefly and gave Brooke a radiant grin reminiscent of her famous mother’s.
“Hawo, Addie Bwookie.”
“Hello, sweetheart.” Brooke tried to keep her voice calm. Who was this menacing man? What was he doing looking so at home in Shauna’s house and so comfortable with Shauna’s children when Shauna herself was in California making a film?
Brooke knew if she had ever met him before she would never have forgotten him. He was not an acquaintance of Shauna’s. The other possibilities made her quail in her shoes. Was he a criminal? A kidnapper? An obsessive fan who had somehow found out about this secret hideaway?
How often had she tried to tell Shauna she needed more staff? Full-time guards, not just the housekeeper and nanny who came during the day to help her poor mother. But Shauna had this thing about her children being raised “normally,” not surrounded by live-in helpers and armed guards.
Realizing now was a poor time for I-told-you-so, Brooke drew a deep breath, tried to swallow her fears and gather authority. It felt like a futile effort given the unflinching gaze that rested on her with such unsettling intensity. She knew she looked a wreck, her clothing rumpled, her shoe broken, her hair a hopeless damp tangle after her nightmarish journey here.
Still, she had to conduct herself with dignity and courage. The safety of Shauna’s children might depend upon it.
“What are you doing in Shauna Carrier’s house?” she demanded.
“Who’s Shauna Carrier?” he asked with only the mildest of interest.
Brooke eyed him narrowly, trying to sniff out subterfuge. Surely every man in the Western world, and perhaps beyond, knew who Shauna was.
At least every man Brooke had the misfortune to date. They knew and had no scruples about using the personal assistant to try to get closer to Shauna.
The fact the actress had been happily married for the last twelve years seemed to make no difference to the myriad men who wanted to make her acquaintance.
But Brooke decided the man before her looked capable of many things—not all of them kind—but subterfuge? Nothing in the stubborn strength of his features suggested he would see any need for it.
“Shauna Carrier,” Brooke explained. “She owns the house you are ensconced in. She’s the mother to those children you are holding.”
“Well, that answers my question about who would be nutty enough to have five children. She’s a movie star, or something, right?”
“She’s not a movie star. She’s an actress.” Of course, it was the wrong time entirely for a debate on semantics.
“Whatever.”
His lack of being impressed was completely unfeigned, but it seemed to Brooke this unexpected visitor to the estate was not being particularly forthcoming.
“Who are you?” she demanded, sliding the zipper open on her purse as a first step toward getting at the Mace she kept secreted in her handbag.
For this whole long trek, she had been cursing Shauna for her overly active imagination when it came to her kids.
The phone, Shauna had reported to Brooke yesterday, almost in tears, was not working at Heartbreak Bay. Shauna was a devoted parent, and she spoke to her children every day when she had to be away.
The actress had fallen in love with the wild Kootenay region of Canada several years ago. She had purchased lakeside property and built a home there, declaring the remote location the perfect place to raise her family, away from life in L.A. and the prying of the press.
To Brooke, it seemed if Shauna was determined to have a retreat in the Canadian wilderness she had to factor in minor inconveniences like bears and mosquitoes and unreliable phone and power service. Even cell phones—essentials of modern communication—were inoperable in the area because the house stood in the shadow of mountains that soared to dizzying heights.
Yesterday, Brooke’s calls on Shauna’s behalf had determined the phones were out because of a severe windstorm.
Shauna had only been slightly mollified by the news that her difficulties in contacting her children were being caused by technical problems. She had that feeling.
Brooke heartily hated that feeling, which Shauna had also had about each of the men who had dated Brooke since Brooke had joined her employ. And, in each case, it had been entirely, heartbreakingly correct.
And so, Brooke had been dispatched to check on things in Canada. The trip was nightmarish, as always. The final indignity had been a huge tree across the highway just miles from Shauna’s lakeside estate.
“Ma’am, we’re going to be a while cleaning up this mess,” a road-crew member had informed her helpfully. “You might want to think about getting a room in Creston and trying later in the week. Or if you’re en route to Nelson, you can go the other way.”
But she was not en route to Nelson, and she wasn’t about to be thwarted at this stage of the journey. She hadn’t succeeded as a personal assistant to someone as famous and temperamental as Shauna because she lacked determination.
So, here she was, her shoe broken, most of her nylons left behind on the branches of a fallen tree she had skirted, her gray silk suit smudged, rumpled and stained beyond repair, her hair falling in her eyes and sweat trickling down her neck from the final climb to Shauna’s cliff-top mansion.
Facing a gorgeous and mysterious man who felt like an adversary. Of course, lately, she felt pretty adversarial toward all members of the male species, fickle swine that they were. And the better-looking they were, the more adversarial she felt. No excuses needed.
Brooke’s exhausted mind tried to figure out if she disliked the man before her on principle, or if she sensed real danger. It did seem like a horrible possibility that Shauna’s misgivings might be founded, once again. The facts: a notoriously handsome stranger with ice-blue eyes and the look of a warrior king was in Shauna’s house and held two of her unsuspecting children captive in his powerful arms.
Brooke tried not to let the terrifying thoughts that were flitting through her mind show on her face. What if the fierce-featured man in front of her was holding Granny Molly and the children hostage? Even if he truly didn’t know who Shauna was, the house announced to any who glimpsed it that the owner had a great deal of money, if not a whole lot of taste.
“Who are you?” she demanded again, her voice stronger as she slid her hand unobtrusively into her bag and searched around for her can of Mace.
“Who are you?” he returned, unforthcoming. His eyes narrowed and flickered to where her hand was imbedded in her purse and then back to her face. “We’re expecting the housekeeper, which you obviously aren’t.”
We’re expecting the housekeeper. As if he lived there!
“Addie Bwookie,” Kolina informed him by way of introduction.
“I’m Brooke Callan,” she said. “Shauna Carrier’s personal assistant.” She debated offering her hand, but she would have had to pull it out of her purse to do so, and she had almost found the Mace. Also, both of his hands seemed to be full.
And then, while debating what tone to take, she realized she was just too tired to be civil or cautious.
“I want to know what you are doing in Shauna’s house. Where is Grandma Molly?”
She realized she should have summoned the energy for a more civil tone, because she did not like the look on his face, the tightening of his jaw or the squint in his eyes one little bit. She found the can of Mace and wrapped her fingers firmly around it.
In a blur of motion, he set Kolina on the ground and caught the wrist of the hand Brooke had inserted in her purse. His grip was not painful, but it was relentless.
“Let me go,” she said and felt the first surge of true panic. This man was obviously much stronger than her. If he was holding the children and Granny, did she think he was going to come out and admit it?
Of course not! He would take her hostage, as well!
“You let go of whatever you have a hold of in there first,” he said quietly, and the calm of his tone abated her panic slightly. Her fingers seemed to loosen their hold on the Mace of their own accord, and he let go of her wrist immediately.
“Now put your hand where I can see it.”
The authority with which he spoke gave Brooke the very awful feeling he had done things like this before.
Though he had not for a moment looked tense, she saw that he relaxed subtly when she withdrew her hand from her purse and let it drop to her side.
Even after he had let go, she felt the imprint of his hand on her wrist and felt the leashed power of his grip and his personality. Kolina, on the other hand, was oblivious to his threat. From her new station on the floor, she had coiled her arms around his legs and was peeking out from behind his knee.
“Of all the nerve!” Brooke sputtered.
“What have you got in there, a gun?” He spat out a word that was not at all appropriate in front of Kolina, then took a deep breath as though he was gathering patience. He seemed a little confused about who was the suspicious party here!
“It is none of your business what I have in my purse!” She resisted a temptation to rub her wrist.
“This is not exactly L.A.,” he told her. “And guns and kids don’t mix. I can’t even believe you’d think of pulling one while I was holding two babies.”
“Not a baby,” Kolina informed him with a piqued pull on the leg of his jeans.
In spite of her indignation, Brooke registered the slim comfort that he actually seemed concerned about the children’s welfare.
“How do you know where I’m from?” she demanded.
“You already told me you work for the movie star. We don’t have a big film industry here in Creston, B.C. Besides, if the road crew is in the same place they were in yesterday, you’ve walked less than two miles and you look like you have survived a two-year trek across an unmapped wilderness. We make Canadian girls a little tougher than that.”
His gaze moved to her torn panty hose, which fluttered in the wind, and she felt a strange but not completely unfamiliar twist in her tummy.
Her worst enemy, attraction to the opposite sex.
No wonder she was so determined to believe he was a villain!
So she could be glad that she looked terrible. More than glad. She should be deliriously happy. But, oh no, Brooke-who-dances-with-temptation was shattered by the appraisal of the cool stranger before her.
Insanely, even if he was a notorious criminal, she had a purely feminine desire to be found irresistibly attractive by him.
Survival, she told herself. A little attraction might sway the power a bit in her direction if need be.
Besides, she liked basking briefly in male attention until they either found out who she worked for or Shauna appeared in person. Though reasonably attractive, Brooke could not compete with the stunning otherworldly beauty of her employer and had long since given up trying.
But this stranger seemed indifferent to Brooke’s female allure even without Shauna’s presence outshining the sun.
He continued his assessment of her in a flat tone. “Your hair color is fake and your tan is real.”
“Canadian girls don’t dye their hair?” she asked sourly.
“They don’t have that golden-girl look about them,” he said. “You do.”
He did not say it as if it were a compliment, and, unfortunately, when Brooke thought of golden girls she thought of Bette White and Bea Arthur.
“That’s an awful lot to know about a person in a glance,” she said, irritated at having been found superficial and inadequate without a fair trial. By a potential criminal.
And he wasn’t finished with her yet!
He ignored the challenge in her statement and went on, his voice low and level. “Don’t ever touch a gun unless you are prepared to use it. And you know what? I can tell from looking at you, you don’t have what it takes to use it.”
She stared at him in confusion. She should be delighting in the fact that an outlaw who had just taken over a house and kidnapped children would hardly be giving lessons on gun safety. On the other hand, he obviously had an unsettling personal knowledge of weapons and how to use them.
She felt a little finger of fury. How could he tell, in the length of a thirty-second meeting, whether or not she had what it takes? She itched to give him a little taste of the Mace.
“I do so have what it takes!” she said and realized it was a pathetic thing to say in the presence of a man who so obviously possessed the real thing in astounding abundance.
She wondered if she really could use Mace on him. She’d seen how quick his reflexes were. He could probably wrestle her weapon away from her before she’d figured out how to discharge the spray. And then, he’d be in the position to use it on her. She could feel the blood drain from her face at the thought.
“Exactly,” he said and, looking directly into his piercing gaze, she had the disconcerting sensation that he had just read her mind.
For just a second, the briefest spark of humor flickered to life in the depths of those eyes. If anything, it only made him look more dangerous. And more attractive. And more sexy. She felt that traitorous little twitch of her heart.
She could almost see Shauna rolling her eyes and saying with sweet southern sarcasm, “Brooke, you sure know how to pick ’em.”
“It isn’t a gun, anyway,” Brooke defended herself. “It’s Mace. And Lexandra wouldn’t have been hurt had I used it. I would have been very careful with my aim. Besides, there’s quite a bit of padding between me and her skin.”
“And for what reason exactly were you feeling a need to defend yourself?”
“I don’t know who you are! Or what you are doing in my employer’s home. With her children tucked under your arms. You haven’t exactly been forthcoming.”
“Ah. And straight from the embrace of Hollywood, you figured a plot was being hatched.” His voice, edged with sarcasm, was even sexier than when it was not. “Let me guess, your boss is filming suspense and terror, and all of you become so immersed that you see it everywhere. An easy leap to assume I have taken the children and their dear granny hostage.”
She disliked being so transparent, and, as a matter of fact, Shauna was filming a suspense thriller.
“Have you?” she said.
He snorted derisively. “Is it that easy to come up with a plot?”
“You are still not answering the question! You are being evasive, a quality I cannot stand in men.”
The smile died. He looked at her intently before saying, with disconcerting softness, “I think I hear the bitterness of experience.”
“No, you don’t!” she lied, a defensive lie if she had ever told one.
He sighed, then dismissed that topic with a shake of his head. “It’s the other way around,” he said. “I haven’t taken them hostage, they have taken me. I’m glad I don’t do this for a living. It’s exhausting being a hero. And then to get sprayed with Mace for my trouble.”
A hero? No, no, no! “I would have used it only if you did something to deserve it.”
“I don’t believe that. Once you got your finger on that sprayer, you would have been a dangerous woman. Trigger-happy.”
She did not dignify that with a reply.
“Mace is illegal in Canada,” he informed her dryly. “If they’d found it on you at the border you could have been refused entry. And that would have been a very bad thing for me, since I’m assuming you are the reinforcements, Addie Bwookie.”
“Brooke Callan,” she corrected him haughtily.
But she registered the word reinforcements and her relief grew. Whoever the mystery man was, he wouldn’t be glad to see her if he was up to no good, though glad was probably phrasing his reaction to her arrival a little too strongly.
Her relief died abruptly. What if he was that handsome, that sure of himself, that physically perfect, and he wasn’t the bad guy?
He looked down suddenly at the baby that was straddled over his arm and a terrible expression crossed his face. He unraveled Kolina’s fingers from around his knee, scooped her up, tucked her under the other arm, whirled and disappeared into the darkness of the house, giving Brooke little choice but to follow him.
Out of pure defiance, she stuck her hand back in the purse and fondled her Mace can deliberately.
Please be a bad guy. Please, please, please.
“Don’t even think it,” he warned her without looking back, and so she took her hand out again, not knowing what it was in his voice that made it unthinkable not to obey, but resenting it heartily all the same.
Chapter Two
Cole Standen’s arm was drenched in baby pee, and the gorgeous, but irksome, Miss Brooke Callan was still toying with the idea of spraying him with Mace.
“Don’t even think it,” he told her and could feel her disgruntled shock that he knew exactly where her hand had gone the moment his back was turned. He’d spent his entire career assessing situations that involved matters of life and death, and he’d gotten damn good at reading people. She was still bristling with suspicion, and it had probably been a poor idea to turn his back on her, even though she looked as if she would weigh all of a hundred pounds soaking wet.
The fact that she had that poorly disguised look of a woman who was suspicious and prickly around all men only made her more dangerous.
But it was in reading his own reaction to the unexpected arrival of yet another complication in Heartbreak Bay that unsettled him. The truth was, Cole had felt a little shock of his own. Because the can of Mace in her purse was not where the danger from Brooke Callan lay. Nor was it in the prickly attitude he recognized as a disguise for fear.
Nope. It was from her eyes, huge and violet as pansies. There was vulnerability in those eyes. They were the eyes of a woman who had been hurt and was scared to death to be hurt ever again.
Thankfully, he knew the hard truth about himself: Cole Standen, least likely to be trusted with vulnerability. He wasn’t going to hurt her. He wasn’t going to allow himself to get close enough to hurt her. Nope, he was going to work overtime at keeping those defenses of hers—the ones that would have made a porcupine proud—in place.
No matter how attractive he found the rest of the package. And he did find it attractive, oddly even more so because of the broken shoe, the panty hose bunched around her shapely legs like the tattered remains of a storm-tattered sail, the wildly tangled brown hair, the rumpled clothes clinging to a delicate figure that was soft and round in all the right places.
Despite the smudged makeup and the defensive expression, her face was lovely, with high cheekbones, snub nose and wide, sensuous lips.
But quite frankly, everything about her was adding up to maiden in distress, and Cole Standen would have thought that after the last twenty hours, maidens in distress would have little appeal for him.
Make that two small maidens, one old granny, two lovable ruffian boys and a baby who was sweet and affable until the exact second Cole tried to set her down somewhere. Even if the adorable Number Five was sleeping, the moment he tried to divest himself of her, she shook herself from deep slumber and roared back to life. Number Five was setting up permanent housekeeping in the crook of his arm.
He’d retired from the rescuing business. He’d done his duty in some of the saddest, hardest, most shattered places in the world.
At thirty-eight, a major in the Canadian Armed Forces, he was burned out. He’d given his work and his career everything he had, up to and including his soul. He had no wife or children as other men his age did, and he was glad he didn’t.
He did not think his job had made him a likable man. His emotions, by necessity, had turned to stone a long time ago. He had lived largely in the disciplined but rough arenas of all male societies. His areas of expertise included being able to strip and clean a weapon with astonishing rapidity, leaping out of aircraft without causing injury to himself or others and taking command of people in situations that tended to either bring out the best in them or the very, very worst.
None of these skills, so useful and lifesaving in his limited world, had any value at all when it came to the dreaded R word. As in relationships. With the opposite sex. Of the intimate variety.
Women, unfortunately, did not seem to get that. They threw temptation in his path by insisting on seeing him as a romantic figure instead of what he was.
Flawed. Cole knew he had come of age without a single skill that would make him a suitable partner to a member of the fairer sex, and especially not to one who looked as vulnerable as Brooke Callan.
He considered himself a natural-born leader who specialized in survival—and that meant the parts of him that were analytical and hard and cold and emotionally unavailable were overdeveloped. Way overdeveloped.
No, Major Cole Standen was exactly where he needed to be.
Alone.
After so many years of living a regimented, disciplined life, it was wonderful to wake up in the morning with nothing to do and nowhere to go, no crushing world disaster to feel in some way responsible for.
At thirty-eight, he had twenty years of service with the military and his pension was decent for a man of simple needs.
He had his boat, a cabin cruiser with a huge engine, moored at his pier, and for the past ten months, summer and winter, he’d fished the waters of Kootenay Lake. The body of water was as temperamental and hazardous as a mistress, and he enjoyed her changing face and challenges enough that he needed no other.
He’d been asked to write a book about some of his experiences, and, in the back of his mind, he thought eventually he might, but it never seemed to be a convenient time. And he didn’t feel like pulling scabs from scars just beginning to heal over.
His life, until a little less than twenty hours ago, had been about as perfect as he could make it. No wars beckoned, and no one’s life depended on him. So, he fished. He had a satellite-television dish. Occasionally he hiked the familiar boyhood trails of the mountain ranges behind his home. He kept a good stock of cold beverages, convenience foods, and T-bone steaks. He ate microwave popcorn for breakfast if he damn well pleased. He grew his hair so that it actually touched his collar at the back.
He was what every man longed for and every man envied. Cole Standen was free.
And then that little girl clutching a baby had come to his door in the middle of the night. Even though he was an expert on handling disasters, his well-ordered world felt as if it had been tipped on its axis from the moment he had opened his door.
And now it tilted more wildly still. Brooke Callan appeared to be a new twist in the horrible unraveling of the retired major’s perfect and controlled life.
Exposure to the genuine sweetness of Granny and those kids, with their incessant demands for hugs—never mind all their other constant demands for food, games, stories, clothing, snacks, noses wiped, bottoms wiped, diaper changes—seemed to be wearing him down, tenderizing the toughness of his heart, because why did he feel the threat of this woman so strongly?
And it had nothing to do with her Mace. Though he hoped he didn’t have to wrestle it away from her. Her curves, under her somewhat sodden outfit, were delectable, and if it came to a hand-to-hand struggle, he might win control of the Mace but lose control of something much more vital.
It occurred to him that maybe he’d been doing the man-alone-on-the-mountain routine for a little too long.
He deliberately changed his focus, away from her, her curves and her vulnerability.
“Number One,” he called, turning away from the door. “Number One! We have a Code Yellow.”
He was rewarded instantly with the sound of many feet stampeding across the floor above his head, and, moments later, Saffron, dressed in a winter jacket against the cold in the house, appeared on the top of the curved stairway, a heap of towels clutched to her chest.
“Auntie Brooke,” she shrieked and dropped the towels, flying down the stairs and flinging herself at Brooke.
“She’s not really my aunt,” she informed Cole, just as if he cared. “It’s an honorary title.”
“And one I enjoy immensely,” Brooke said, and then asked in a suspicious undertone. “Are you okay, Saffron? Is everything okay here?”
“Of course I’m okay. Everything is fine, Auntie.”
She was a beautiful woman to begin with, but when her face softened with relief and then lit from within as she returned that wholehearted hug, Cole had to turn abruptly away. This was precisely why he needed to keep Brooke Callan sour, defensive and irritated.
Unfortunately, he turned back just in time to see her expression of delight deepen as the boys tumbled down the stairs. They were unaccountably attached to the socks he had given them to wear on their heads and still had them on. And when Brooke smiled at that, her lips looked distinctly and temptingly kissable.
Discipline, Cole reminded himself.
“I’m fine now. But it was soooo awful,” Saffron breathed, and Cole noticed, not for the first time, that the child had a precocious flair for drama. She probably took after her mother. “Granny fell down the stairs, and there was blood absolutely everywhere, and she didn’t move. Not even a blink. Not even when I shook her. It was like shaking a rag doll.”
Boy Number Two chipped in. “I slipped in the blood, and I thought her brains were on the stairs.”
Cole couldn’t help but notice that Ms. Callan turned a little pale, though he told himself it wasn’t for her benefit that he cut off the tale-telling.
“Number Two,” Cole interrupted sternly, before the whole episode could be reenacted, “we have a Code Yellow here.”
“Code Yellow. Thank God,” the boy said to Brooke. “I hate Code Brown.”
“You and me both,” Cole agreed under his breath.
“Darrance, you don’t say thank God, like that, you say thank goodness.”
That was much better. Brooke had a prissy and disapproving look on her face. Her lips had thinned into a downward line that a sane man would not think was the least bit kissable.
But a man who had spent too much time alone on the edge of a mountain-shadowed lake could still see the puffy sensuality of that bottom lip if he looked hard enough.
“Mr. Herman says thank God all the time. And also thank Ch—”
“Code Yellow,” he reminded his troops sternly.
To his satisfaction, Saffron broke away from Brooke, raced up the stairs and gathered the towels that had fallen.
“The children are cursing. And why on earth are you calling them numbers?” Brooke asked, folding her arms over her chest and tapping her foot sternly.
This was much better. Much, much better. A less vulnerable-looking woman would have been very hard to imagine.
But out loud, he replied, calmly, ignoring the challenge in her voice because he knew that would irritate her more, “Where I come from, that wouldn’t be considered cursing, Miss Brooke. Not even close.”
“And where would that be? That you come from?” she asked snootily.
Hoping she would chalk it up to evasiveness, a quality she had already told him she disliked in men—and it seemed imperative that she dislike him—he chose to ignore her. “Just between you and me, I have never heard such strange and unpronounceable names in my life.” He gave Kolina, Number Four, who was still wearing what looked to be a silk party dress, an absent pat on her messy hair. “This one has a name like colon. Who would do that to a kid?”
“You’ll hurt her feelings,” Brooke snapped at him in an undertone.
The accusation caught him off guard, and he scanned Kolina’s face for any sign of hurt. The child gave him her toothiest grin, her psyche apparently undamaged by his dislike of her name.
“She was named after the heroine in her mother’s movie, Sinking of the Suzanne. Kolina is a beautiful name,” she assured the little girl, who didn’t have a clue what they were talking about.
Obviously, he was supposed to be impressed. He wasn’t. “Suzanne would have been a good name. Solid. Sensible.”
“That was the ship!”
“Better than a colon.”
“Kolina is a Swedish variation of Katharine,” she informed him regally.
“Yeah, so what’s wrong with the English version?” he asked.
He found he enjoyed baiting Brooke. Keeping her dislike for him high was going to be more fun than he had originally imagined. The new danger was that he rather liked how she looked when she was annoyed. Her cheeks were rosy as apples, her eyes flashed fire, and, with the barest little shove on his part, she could probably be coaxed to stamp her foot.
“Katharine,” he said, “there’s a nice sensible name that nobody would ever mistake for an interior body part. It could be shortened to Katie. I’ve always liked Katie.”
She stamped her foot.
He felt a smile trying to tickle his lips, but he ruthlessly bit it back.
“Obviously you are lacking in creativity,” Brooke said. The humorless line of her own lips should have made him think of his grade seven teacher, Miss Hunt. But it didn’t. In fact, her lips didn’t look one ounce less kissable. Not one.
“Lacking in creativity,” he agreed without an ounce of regret.
Saffron returned, and he noticed she was apparently unoffended that she had been labeled with a number. Probably hated her name, poor kid. He was willing to bet she got teased at school.
“Code Yellow is a diaper change,” Saffron informed Brooke importantly and then added in a confidential whisper. “Pee-pee. Code Brown is poo-poo. Only we don’t have any diapers left because a tree fell down over the road to town. We’re using towels.”
Brooke stared at the pure-white towels. “These towels are from the House of Bryan,” she gasped.
He folded his arms across his chest, gazed narrowly at her, daring her to go on. Of course she did.
“They’re worth a fortune. Look, they’re embossed. It’s a special order. It takes months to get them. Years if you aren’t Shauna Carrier.”
She pointed out the silky, heavy embroidery, white on white so it hardly showed up, anyway, as if this was a detail he was supposed to care about.
“Surely you could have found something else for diaper material,” she sputtered.
“At great inconvenience to myself, I decided not to let Granny bleed to death or to let five small children fend for themselves. My humblest apologies if my methods, and my diaper service, don’t meet with your approval, Miss Callan.”
“Ms.,” she corrected him absently, looking somewhat grieved that he had had the bad manners to point out to her that he had come to the rescue of her employer’s family. She tried for a conciliatory tone, which failed miserably. “I’m sorry. I didn’t want to give the impression I wasn’t grateful for all you’ve done, but—”
“Good,” he said, cutting her off quickly, since in his experience the word but almost always canceled out every word that had come before it. “I’m going to take a wild guess that you are going to love what we did with the sheets.”
“The sheets? You’re not using House of Bryan sheets for diapers? They’re Egyptian cotton. Seven-hundred-thread count.”
He couldn’t believe this. She looked intelligent enough. Could she seriously be working herself into a lather over sheets? She was, and who was he to stop her? In fact, he egged her on just a little bit, for the pure fun of it.
“Nope, of course we’re not using the sheets for diapers.” He waited until the relief flitted through her eyes before he continued. “Not absorbent enough. We used the sheets for bandages. Ripped them into nice lengths.”
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