Wanted: One Son

Table of Contents

Cover Page

Excerpt

Dear Reader

Title Page

About the Author

Dear Doogie

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Copyright

“I don’t think I’ve met your date, Nick,”

Stephanie said with a smile.

“Nikki, meet Stephanie. Stephanie, this is my favorite niece, Nikki.”

The four-year-old dimpled. “I think you’re pretty,” she said to Stephanie. “Uncle Nick doesn’t have a girlfriend. I’ve got a boyfriend,” she confided. “His name is Zach. Do you have one?”

Stephanie felt a blush warm her ears. Was everyone curious about her social life? “Not at present.”

“Do you have a little girl?” she continued.

“No, I have a son. But he’s a little old for you.”

As they chatted, Stephanie looked around the crowded diner. Heat seeped into her cheeks. In a small town, memories were long. The townsfolk would recall that she and Nick had once been inseparable. She’d thought they would be a family….

But now she knew that could never be.

Or could it?

Dear Reader,

This month, Silhouette Romance has six irresistible, emotional and heartwarming love stories for you, starting with our FABULOUS FATHERS title, Wanted: One Son by Laurie Paige. Deputy sheriff Nick Dorelli had watched the woman he loved marry another and have that man’s child. But now, mother and child need Nick. Next is The Bride Price by bestselling author Suzanne Carey. Kyra Martin has fuzzy memories of having just married her Navajo ex-fiancé in a traditional wedding ceremony. And when she discovers she’s expecting his child, she knows her dream was not only real…but had mysteriously come true! We also have two not-to-be missed new miniseries starting this month, beginning with Miss Prim’s Untamable Cowboy, book 1 of THE BRUBAKER BRIDES by Carolyn Zane. A prim image consultant tries to tame a very masculine working-class wrangler into the true Texas millionaire tycoon he really is. Good luck, Miss Prim!

In Only Bachelors Need Apply by Charlotte Maclay, a manshy woman’s handsome new neighbor has some secrets that will make her the happiest woman in the world, and in The Tycoon and the Townie by Elizabeth Lane, a struggling waitress from the wrong side of the tracks is romanced by a handsome, wealthy bachelor. Finally, our other new miniseries, ROYAL WEDDINGS by Lisa Kaye Laurel. The lovely caretaker of a royal castle finds herself a prince’s bride-to-be during a ball…with high hopes for happily ever after in The Prince’s Bride.

I hope you enjoy all six of Silhouette Romance’s terrific novels this month…and every month.

Regards,

Melissa Senate,

Senior Editor

Please address questions and book requests to:

Silhouette Reader Service

U.S.: 3010 Walden Ave., P.O. Box 1325, Buffalo, NY 14269

Canadian: P.O. Box 609, Fort Erie, Ont. L2A 5X3

Wanted: One Son

Laurie Paige

www.millsandboon.co.uk

LAURIE PAIGE

was recently presented with the Affaire de Coeur Readers’ Choice Silver Pen Award for Favorite Contemporary Author. In addition, she was a 1994 Romance Writers of America (RITA) finalist for Best Traditional Romance for her book, Sally’s Beau. She reports romance is blooming in her part of Northern California. With the birth of her second grandson, she finds herself madly in love with three wonderful males—"all hero material.” So far, her husband hasn’t complained about the other men in her life.

Dear Doogie,

Sometimes, when a fellow is hurting, he does a stupid thing. I know. I’ve been there. Once in anger and hurt, I reacted before thinking, then pride and stubbornness kept me from admitting I just might have been wrong. That cost me the future—and the family—I thought I’d have.

Well, a man makes his choices.

The only problem then is you have to live with them. Make sure yours are the ones you truly want.

Your dad was lucky in having a son like you. I thought so the first time I met you, and I still do. You have the makings of a fine man. I know I’d be proud to call you “son.”

Your mom’s a little uptight about things right now, but be honest with her, and you two will work it out For one thing—she loves you. Don’t ever forget that. I did once, and it cost me. That’s neither here nor there. Just remember, you can talk to me anytime. I’ll be here.

Love,

Nick

Chapter One

Nicholas Dorelli shifted restlessly from his left foot to his right, but his attention didn’t wander. He watched his quarry with the expertise honed by ten years on the job. As a senior deputy sheriff and special investigator in Colorado, he was there on business. Stephanie Bolt was that business.

He tongued a toothpick from the right side of his mouth to the left. With a quick jab of his fingers, he shoved the annoying wing of hair that arced over his forehead to the side, where it stayed momentarily before returning to its natural position. He settled his hat with a firm tug over the stubborn cowlick and wished he was anyplace but here.

“Here” was the public park. Stephanie was sitting on a bench gazing at the mountains that surrounded the small town high in the Rockies.

Her short brown hair glowed with honey highlights in the June sun. She caught the strands blowing across her face and hooked them behind her ear. Her wedding band reflected the warm noon light, winking at him across the well-tended lawn of the park as if laughing at a private joke.

The joke was on him. Once she’d been his girl. Until he’d found her in the arms of another man.

For three months that fateful winter while he’d been away at college, he’d refused to believe the friends who reported Steph was seeing another man, not even when his own brother had confirmed it. He’d come home on spring break, determined to find out the truth. He had.

Steph, the woman he’d trusted. Steph, who’d clung to him for comfort at her father’s funeral only three months before. Steph, who’d been his first love, had sat on her front porch and let another man hold and caress her….

After all these years, that bitter betrayal still lingered like a burr under his hide.

So did the hunger. It made him angry, this need that wouldn’t go away. With it came a sense of things unfinished, the tattered ends of emotions left over from those days when he’d thought the world was his for the taking.

He shook his head slightly, as if he could cast off the past and the feelings associated with it. It had been a mistake to return home when he finished at the police academy. Having graduated at the top of his class, he’d been offered a job with the FBI in Virginia, a long way from here and from memories….

He watched as she plucked a blade of grass, and he wondered what she’d felt for her husband. She’d certainly played the faithful and dutiful widow in the two years since Clay’s death. Too bad she hadn’t been as faithful as a lover…. He cursed silently.

When she stood, the breeze pressed her silk shirt against her breasts. Her skirt folded between her thighs. He clenched his teeth. The toothpick snapped in half.

With a grimace he dropped the two pieces into the pine needles and shoved himself off the wrought iron fence. Stephanie was heading his way.

He knew the moment she spotted him.

She stopped and watched him. Her eyes, blue as the noontime sky, seemed to become even deeper in tone. She opened the gate, stepped out, then closed it behind her, her movements precise as she made sure the latch clicked into place.

“Nick,” she said.

Not exactly a fond greeting for the man who had once been the love of her life, or so she’d claimed. They’d gone steady during their last year of high school and first year of college.

He cursed silently and nodded his head. “Stephanie.”

He noticed the faint perpetual frown she’d worn for two years. He observed the tiny, perfectly round mole one inch from the corner of her mouth on the left, a place just made for kissing…before a man moved on to the lush fullness of her lips.

She was a woman to make a man dream. Full breasts. Slender waist. Rounded hips. Shapely legs. At five-nine, she was a good height for him. In heels, she’d fit his six-one frame perfectly. Once, they’d danced the night away, locked together so tightly he couldn’t tell where he ended and she began.

She’d seldom worn heels during her marriage. That would have put her taller than Clay.

A knot formed in his throat, startling him with the unexpected emotion. Clay had been his mentor on the force, taking him on as his partner when Nick was a rookie, as green as a spring leaf on a cottonwood. It had been difficult, but he’d learned to admire the seasoned officer who was eight years his senior and husband to the woman he had thought to wed.

“What brings you here?” she asked, her eyes wary.

He’d put that wariness there. Last Christinas, after a cup of hot buttered rum, he’d kissed her at the mayor’s annual party.

The mayor’s wife had hung mistletoe over every door. He’d resisted temptation for an hour. When he’d run into Stephanie in the kitchen doorway, the mistletoe had been in place, they’d been alone for a minute and he’d given in to the passion that had erupted abruptly, catching him off guard.

So sue him.

“Doogie,” he answered her question.

Surprise flew over her face, then she became wary again. “Doogie?” She sounded suspicious, as if she thought he might be lying for his own nefarious purposes.

“Yeah.” He hesitated to disclose his news.

“If he were hurt, I assume you’d tell me right off.”

“Of course.”

“So he must be in trouble.” She hooked the hair behind her ear with an impatient gesture. Her fingers trembled slightly. “What’d he do this time?”

“This time?”

“Last week he got in a fight with Clyde Marlow.”

“Clyde’s his best friend,” Nick said, filing the information away. It tied in with his reason for being there.

“Not anymore.”

Nick shoved his hands into his back pockets and considered. “Sounds like the boy needs help.”

Her shoulders stiffened. Hostility boiled between them, distorting the air like summer heat on asphalt. It was a defensive reaction on her part, he reminded himself. On his part, neither anger nor any other emotion had a place in his dealings with her. She was simply the parent with a kid in trouble.

“Doogie…Douglas is fine. He’s just…” Her voice trailed off, and she looked uncertain.

“Going through a phase?” He ended it for her.

“Yes. All boys get up to mischief. What has he done now? Another fight?” She almost looked hopeful.

“Shoplifting.” The word came out harder than he meant it to do, but there was no way to pretty it up.

Her shoulders sagged. She closed her eyes for a second while she dragged in a shaky breath. Her skin, usually a smooth, healthy pink, mottled.

Nick took a step forward, his hands going out, his arms opening instinctively before he caught himself. He tucked his hands into his back pockets again, where they’d be safe, and backed up a step.

She opened her eyes, and he saw the heat in the usually cool depths. He steeled himself. People always took their anger out on cops. The Bad News Boys, as the sheriff labeled them in his jocular moments.

“Where? What?” she asked.

“Video, over at Joe Moss’s.”

“A video,” she echoed. “Why? Why would he do something like that?”

He shrugged. “Kids.”

“Is he in…at the jail?”

“No. I, umm…Joe decided not to prosecute.”

“You talked him out of it I…thank you. Where’s Douglas? Did you take him back to the store?”

“Yeah.” He knew the boy stayed in town on Saturdays, hanging around the clothing and accessories boutique that Stephanie successfully owned and managed with the mayor’s wife. The kid ran errands for some of the merchants or went to a movie. It could be a lonely life for a twelve-year-old.

Stephanie was pretty strict about who her son was with and where he went. Since Clay’s death she was even more so. That’s what Nick had heard. He didn’t see her much. He didn’t want to. Steph was a part of his past that he’d never come to grips with. The fact that she still had the power to bother him made him angry, but that’s the way it was.

Okay, he could handle it.

“Did you drive up?” She looked around for his cruiser, a four-wheel-drive utility truck.

“Yeah. Down here under the trees.”

She’d walked the half mile from the Glass Slipper Boutique to the isolated park on a rise at the edge of town, a thing she often did during her brief periods of freedom. He shortened his steps to her pace and guided her down the sidewalk and around the corner.

The cruiser was parked in the shade of some ancient cottonwoods. A creek ran along the road and under a thirty-foot bridge nearby. The spot was pretty, romantic even. There was a nice grassy area for a picnic. Bittercress bobbed and nodded in shades of pink, white and yellow.

Not that she took the time to notice.

Without waiting for him, she wrenched open the truck door and attempted to climb inside. Her skirt was too narrow. She hiked it midway to her thigh, but still couldn’t manage. He hooked his hands on each side of her waist and lifted her.

He held himself in check as her perfume wafted around them, brought out by the warmth of the sun and the exertion of the fast walk. He was aware of the hitch in her breathing and swallowed a groan that crowded his throat.

She fell back against him, and he realized he’d taken her by surprise. Strength flowed into him in a tidal wave of adrenaline and hunger. She wasn’t a featherweight, but neither did she feel heavy. In fact, she felt wonderful in his arms, but then, she’d always felt perfect to him during those long-ago days.

“You can put me down now.”

Her voice came from far away, barely audible over the roar of the blood pulsing through his ears.

“Nick! Nicholas! Put me down.”

The sharp panic that underlined the command jerked him back from the edge of control. He released her and slammed the door.

Stalking behind the truck, he paused and swiped a hand over his forehead where sweat had gathered in a fine-beaded sheen. He caught sight of himself in the tinted rear window.

Picture of a haunted man.

He yanked his sunglasses from his shirt pocket and jammed them on his nose. There, he thought, that at least hid the treachery of raging lust from her view. The anger surged anew. He didn’t want to be susceptible to Stephanie. He forced himself to calmly walk to the driver’s door and climb in.

When the engine was purring, he flicked the fan to high. Cool air swirled around them, drowning out the need to talk as he eased into gear and headed for the heart of the. town nestled in the foothills of the Rockies, an hour out from Denver.

Stephanie hopped out of the truck before Nick had a chance to come around and lift her down. His eyes, dark as bitter chocolate when he removed his sunglasses, bored into hers.

“Thanks for the ride. And for taking care of Doogie.”

“It was nothing.”

She nodded, closed the door and dashed across the parking lot to the boutique before he could say more. One thing she didn’t need was advice from a thirty-four-year-old bachelor on how to raise her son. She was only three months younger than Nick Dorelli. She and Doogie were doing fine, just fine.

Anxiety belied her shaky confidence as she walked into the cool, pleasant interior of the shop. “Doogie?” she said.

“In your office,” Pat, the assistant manager, told her.

Stephanie hurried toward the back. No surge of satisfaction filled her as it usually did when she walked through her little kingdom, as Clay had once called it.

Passing the curtained dressing rooms, she entered the back hallway and went into the office, which was piled high with catalogs and samples. Her son sat in a wing chair, one leg thrown over the arm in a careless position. She noticed his sneakers were wearing thin. He’d soon have a hole under the ball of his big toe. She sighed. Twelve-year-olds went through everything—clothes, shoes and food—so fast.

“I just spoke to Officer Dorelli,” she said, slipping into her chair behind the desk. She hooked a strand of hair behind her ear and looked at her son. Really looked at him.

He was more than cute. He already showed the lanky form of her family and the stunning good looks of his father. His hair was dark, almost black, and he had brilliant blue eyes, a true blue, unlike hers that had a dusky gray tint.

Doogie swallowed, but he said nothing.

“Well?” she demanded, suppressing an urge to bawl like a baby rather than act the reasonable parent

.

She didn’t want to deal with this on top of worrying about money, mortgage payments and keeping the store profits up in face of each downward turn in the economy. She didn’t need the constant reminder of her youth and its romantic, idealistic dreams, as personified by Nick Dorelli, invading her peace of mind. Life could be cruel….

“What have you got to say for yourself?” she asked her son.

“Nothing.”

“Nothing? You’re caught shoplifting and you have nothing to say?” The silence stretched between them. “Why?”

He shrugged. “I wasn’t gonna keep it It was…well, like I just wanted to watch it, then I’d have brought it back.”

“You could have rented it. You got your allowance this morning. Why didn’t you do that?”

He squinched his face up as if thinking about it was really hard. She noticed the smoothness of his skin, how tan he was already this year, except for a scar running from the edge of his chin down under the line of jawbone. He’d fallen and split his chin open on a skateboard last year.

When he’d walked in the door of the shop, blood running down the front of his T-shirt like a river, her heart had stopped. She’d taken him to the emergency clinic where they’d put eight stitches in to close the cut. Had anyone ever remarked on the difficulties of raising a child alone?

The sardonic humor helped keep the despair at bay. She had a million things to do to get the store ready for the Summer Madness sale coming up next week. Time was a pit bull, always snapping at her heels.

“Doogie?”

“There was a line. It was too much hassle.” He shrugged, defiant as only an adolescent can be.

“Hassle,” she repeated. She tried to be calm, to speak without accusation in her voice. They had to get to the bottom of this. “Shoplifting isn’t a minor infraction or a fight with a friend. It’s stealing.”

“I wasn’t stealing. I’d have brought it back tomorrow.”

“Taking something without permission is wrong, no matter what your intentions might be.” Nausea gripped her as she tried to speak reasonably and appeal to his finer qualities. “Think how you would feel if Clyde took your baseball mitt without asking you first. You’d think someone had stolen it.”

“Clyde’s a dork.”

She remembered the two boys were no longer friends. “But think how you’d feel,” she persisted. She had to get through to him somehow. “You’d be hurt. And angry. That’s how I feel.”

He kept his gaze fixed on the floor at his feet, looking very much like his father when she’d tried to talk to him about the problems in their marriage. Men. They never wanted to hear the bad stuff, only the good.

“Think about how you would have felt if it had been your father who had answered the call and found his son was accused of shoplifting. Think about how he would have felt.”

Two circles of shame formed in the boy’s cheeks. Good. Maybe her words were getting through to him. His father had been one of the best deputies in the county. He’d died a hero, leaping in front of a bullet which would have hit a woman holding a child. His bullet-proof vest deflected the first shot, but not the second that went in his neck. He’d bled to death before the paramedics arrived.

Doogie didn’t stir from his sullen position. She felt an upsurge of fear and helplessness. “Well?” she demanded. “What have you got to say for yourself?”

He stared at the floor.

“You will return to Mrs. Withers tomorrow,” she decided.

He blinked at that. “I don’t need a baby-sitter.”

“A person who can’t be trusted out on his own does.” She caught sight of her face in the decorative mirror on a highboy beside the door. She saw desperation in her eyes and willed it away with an effort. “This was a trial period, remember? You said you wouldn’t be bored here at the office.”

“I’m not bored.” His mouth pulled down at the corners while his bottom lip puckered stubbornly.

She took a breath and spoke firmly. “What happened this morning tells me I was wrong to listen to your arguments.”

“It was just a dumb video. It didn’t mean anything. I’ll never do it again.” His voice, deeper of late, segued into a treble. He gestured with his hand, a quick, angry flick as if to throw out her statement.

His hands were large, more those of a man than a child. He was growing up. Twelve years old and he was only three inches shorter than she was. In another couple of years, he’d be as tall…and much stronger.

If she couldn’t use words and reasoning to control him now, what would she do then?

“You’ll go back to Mrs. Withers for the rest of the month. And you’re grounded for that time.”

His mouth opened in protest.

She continued. “You’ll also apologize to the store owner—”

“I already did. Nick…Deputy Dorelli…made me before he brought me over here.”

Stephanie frowned at this news. She wished Nick hadn’t been the one to answer the call on her son. It was embarrassing. However, she could handle it and anything else that came up. Being married to a policeman, she’d had to.

Her husband had loved his job. He’d loved the uniform and the camaraderie with his deputy buddies. He’d worked a lot of overtime so they could save up enough money for repairs, then he’d used every spare minute to fix up the small ranch she’d inherited. Those early years had been the best part of their marriage. She tried not to think of the later years.

“Can I go now?”

“No. You’ll stay here until the store closes at six. You should have brought something to read.” She hesitated. “Trust is a funny thing. It’s given automatically to those we love, but when it’s breached, you have to earn it. Your father would have been very disappointed—”

“I don’t care,” he muttered. He stood, shoving the chair back with his legs. “I don’t care what he would have thought. He wasn’t…he wasn’t…I don’t care.”