Her Baby and Her Beau

He nodded as if he understood, and she appreciated that he didn’t try to force instant forgiveness, that he was accepting even blame he wasn’t due.

There was a quiet strength in that, and she couldn’t help admiring it.

Some of that same strength she’d seen in him fourteen years ago that had set him apart. That had drawn her to him and made her like him.

And she had liked him.

So much …

She looked at him then and for some reason remembered the first time he’d kissed her.

She hadn’t kissed many boys before him because she’d never been in any one place long enough to have a real boyfriend. But Beau had seemed to have more experience—when it came to kissing, at least.

They’d been at the movies. His arm had been around her shoulders. And he’d just swiveled from the waist toward her and kissed her …

The best kiss she’d had up until then.

And one she’d never forgotten. Not even when she’d wished she could …

The Camdens of Colorado:

They’ve made a fortune in business.

Can they make it in the game of love?

Her Baby and Her Beau

Victoria Pade

www.millsandboon.co.uk

VICTORIA PADE is a USA TODAY bestselling author. A native of Colorado, she’s lived there her entire life. She studied art before discovering her real passion was for writing, and even after more than eighty books, she still loves it. When she isn’t writing she’s baking and worrying about how to work off the calories. She has better luck with the baking than with the calories. Readers can contact her on her Facebook page.

Contents

Cover

Excerpt

Title Page

About the Author

Prologue

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Extract

Copyright

Prologue

Standing at the front door to his grandmother’s Denver home on that sizzling August afternoon, Beau Camden heard a car pull up the drive behind him.

He spun around so fast he might as well have still been in the caves of Afghanistan with a rifle in his hands.

Then he recognized his older brother Cade at the wheel of a blue sedan and relaxed.

Beau watched as Cade parked behind his own black SUV, thinking that maybe Cade would have better luck getting someone to answer the door.

“Beau! Hey!” Cade called as he got out of his car and headed for the landing. “I didn’t expect to see you.”

“GiGi asked me to come over. But I rang the bell and knocked, and no one seems to be here.”

Cade raised his chin knowingly. “Oh, that’s right, GiGi said you’d been doing that—knocking and ringing the bell instead of just coming in. Acting like you don’t belong here—that’s what she calls it. She doesn’t like it. This is home, pal. Our home—we grew up here, remember? I know you’ve been gone a long time, but nothing’s changed. We don’t stand on ceremony.”

But standing on ceremony had been ingrained in him in the Marines.

And he had been gone a long time. Thirteen years. The first four of them in college at Annapolis with summers and holidays spent on the Camden ranch in Northbridge, Montana, to toughen up. The last nine years a marine.

Once a marine, always a marine...

“Hard to get back to things,” he muttered.

An understatement.

Beau was having a lot of trouble fitting in again. The few occasions over the years when he’d been home on leave had been vacations from reality. Every waking hour had been filled with activities and seeing family and friends who all wanted to spoil him and show him a good time before he left again.

Being back for good was something else.

When Cade joined him at the oversize front door with its arched top and the stained glass in the upper half he reached in front of Beau, punched in the code that unlocked the door and unceremoniously turned the handle.

“Finally! It’s about time, Beaumont Anthony Camden!” came a victorious call from inside before the door was open all the way. “I thought I was going to have to stand here till dark before you got the idea!”

Georgianna Camden, matriarch of the Camden family and the woman who had raised all ten of her grandchildren—the grandmother they called GiGi—stood several feet inside the entry, facing the door as if she’d been there all along.

Spotting Cade, she deflated slightly, her shoulders drooping into her dumpling-like shape, her head shaking enough for her salt-and-pepper curls to shimmy and her frustration showing on the lined face that still bore evidence of beauty.

“Oh, Cade...” she said. “I didn’t know you were coming—you opened the door, didn’t you?”

“Well, it’s open, so it doesn’t really matter, does it?” Cade asked.

Beau knew his older brother was covering for him.

So did GiGi, if her disapproving frown meant anything.

Cade ignored it and said, “I left my sunglasses when we were here Sunday. Just came to pick them up on my way home.”

“Ah. We wondered who those belonged to. They’re in the kitchen on the counter.”

“But you were waiting for Beau?” Cade asked with a glance from GiGi to Beau. “Standing here in the middle of the entry? With a bowl of marshmallows? What’s that, his reward if he came in without ringing the bell or knocking?”

“I was waiting for him to come in, yes,” GiGi confirmed. “I’m trying to get that stick out of his—”

“GiGi!” Cade teasingly cut her off.

“He keeps acting like a stranger around here. It has to stop!” To Beau she added forcefully, “It has to stop!”

“Sorry, ma’am,” Beau apologized automatically.

And for that, his grandmother threw a marshmallow at his chest.

Beau’s reflexes were lightning quick and he caught it as his grandmother’s frustration erupted.

“Every time you call me ma’am that’s what you’re getting!” she warned. “I changed your diapers and wiped your nose and kissed your boo-boos. I am not ma’am!”

Cade laughed again and said, “I told you she wants the old Beau back. We all do. The uniform is off. You’re just one of us again. That’s how we want you to feel.”

Beau kept himself from saying the automatic yes, sir that was on the tip of his tongue and merely mimicked his brother’s earlier tilt of the chin to acknowledge Cade’s comment.

But he was thinking, easier said than done...

Unsure what else to do with the marshmallow, Beau ate it.

“Is this why you invited him over today?” Cade asked GiGi then. “To keep him hostage here and thump him with marshmallows until he’s retrained? Un-boot camp? Marshmallow deprogramming?”

“No. I need to talk to him,” GiGi said more seriously. “I just decided that from now on I’ll leave him cooling his heels on the doorstep until he figures out to come in like everyone else does. And every time he calls me ma’am he is going to get thumped with one of these,” she threatened, jostling the ammunition in her bowl.

Beau thought how like his strong-willed grandmother it was not to accept something she didn’t care for. And he made a mental note to try harder not to be so formal with her. With everyone. But his training went deep and he wasn’t sure what it was going to take to change that.

His brother’s expression sobered suddenly, as if something had occurred to him. “Oh, GiGi, you aren’t thinking about sending him out on one of our missions, are you? Give him a break—it’s too soon for that. He’s only been home two months. You can’t—”

“There’s something he needs to know and he needs to know it now,” GiGi insisted, sounding determined to conquer an unpleasant task.

“I’m fine,” Beau said to Cade, appreciating his brother looking out for him even as it secretly amused him. They weren’t kids anymore and he was a long—long—way from needing his big brother’s protection. Cade was as tall as Beau and in shape, but Beau knew he could have Cade on the ground and out cold before Cade knew what hit him. Certainly there was nothing their seventy-five-year-old grandmother could come up with that he couldn’t take in stride.

“I can handle whatever she needs to tell me. Whatever she needs me to do,” he assured his brother.

“Don’t bet on it,” Cade countered.

“I’ll be glad for more to do,” Beau added, meaning it. He wasn’t working for Camden Incorporated yet and had too much idle time on his hands. He was lifting weights and working out for hours these days just to expend his pent-up energy. And even after all that he still couldn’t sleep at night.

“We need some privacy to talk,” GiGi said to Cade.

“And I’m supposed to make myself scarce, is that it, ma’am?” Cade said facetiously.

GiGi threw a marshmallow at him.

Cade’s reflexes were good, too, because he also caught the confection, popping it into his mouth before he said, “Come on, GiGi, cut him a little slack—”

“Your sunglasses are in the kitchen,” the woman repeated. “Beau and I are going into the den.”

For a moment Cade locked eyes with GiGi, but when she raised one eyebrow at him Beau knew his brother had lost the standoff.

Cade apparently had the same realization. “Looks like there’s nothing I can do for you, little brother. You know how she is when she sets her mind to something—”

“More determined than Afghan rebels,” Beau confirmed. “But I did all right with those. I think I’ll be okay.”

“I hope so,” Cade said, as if he wasn’t too sure. Then to their grandmother he added, “Really, GiGi, give it to someone else—”

“Kitchen,” she commanded Cade. Then to Beau she said a definitive, “And you, this way.”

“Good luck,” Cade said.

“Thanks,” Beau responded as they both followed orders, going where they’d been told to go, with GiGi herding Beau into the paneled den.

She closed the door behind them before she let out a deep sigh and moved to the desk.

“Sit,” she said, indicating the tufted leather sofa against the wall of the large, stately room.

Beau followed that order, as well.

GiGi unlocked a drawer in the enormous antique mahogany desk in the center of the room and removed what looked like an old leather-bound book. She brought the book and her bowl of marshmallows to sit at the other end of the sofa, angling toward Beau.

“There’s something you need to know,” she said then. “Something I read in H.J.’s journals just before you were discharged. I wanted to wait to tell you until you really were settled in. But as of today it can’t be put off.”

Beau knew what his grandmother was talking about when she mentioned H.J.’s journals. Beau’s oldest brother, Seth—who ran the Camden ranch in Northbridge and oversaw all the other Camden Incorporated agricultural interests—had come across journals kept by H. J. Camden, Beau’s great-grandfather and the founder of the family’s fortunes.

H.J.—as well as his son, Hank, and grandsons Mitchum and Howard—had long been accused of ruthless and unscrupulous practices. H.J. had gone to his grave denying all accusations, but apparently his journals told a different story.

Beau had been in Afghanistan when the journals were found, but he’d been told about the information they held. Many things were done that shouldn’t have been.

Underhanded deals, backstabbing, string pulling, sabotaging, payoffs, lying and cheating that had cost other people property or livelihoods, that had wrongly altered and sometimes destroyed lives and futures, and even had ripple effects on later generations.

Since finding the journals and realizing the truth, the current Camdens were endeavoring to make amends where amends could be made. It was being done quietly to avoid scandal or lawsuits against Camden Incorporated.

But if Beau was facing the prospect of one of these missions, he was more eager for it than his brother suspected. A mission with a direct target, a plan of action he could devise and put into effect—it was all actually familiar territory to him. And it felt good to have a purpose again.

“Whatever you need, ma’a—” He caught himself when he saw his grandmother reach into the bowl in her lap. “Whatever you need, GiGi,” he corrected himself with a wry laugh.

But his grandmother’s expression remained solemn as she removed her hand from the bowl and went on.

“I’m sorry, Beau. It’s been bad enough reading what I’ve read in H.J.’s journals and learning that some of the worst that’s been said of him, of my own husband, of my sons—your dad and your uncle—is true. But this...”

Another sigh. Another shake of her head. Her brow furrowed and she clearly didn’t want to reveal whatever it was that she’d discovered.

“It didn’t occur to me as I was going along,” she said in a quieter voice, “that H.J. had wronged one of his own family...”

Beau watched his grandmother purse her lips and she seemed to age right before his eyes.

But then she bucked up like a good soldier and opened the book she’d taken from the drawer, turning to a page marked with a paper clip.

“I’m going to let you read this for yourself. And all I can do is apologize to you on behalf of H.J. and say that—mistaken or not—he honestly thought he was doing what was best for you...”

She shook her head again. “It’s still inexcusable, but that’s what was behind it. And I would never—ever—have let it happen if I’d have known,” she added remorsefully. “When you’ve finished reading I have to tell you why this is information that couldn’t wait even a day longer.”

Chapter One

Kyla Gibson moved gingerly to one of the truck-stop motel room’s two beds and eased herself onto it to sit with her sore back against the headboard. She couldn’t settle into place without flinching at multiple aches, pains, bruises and cuts. Then she pulled a pillow to her lap to prop the sprained wrist that was also throbbing from the strain of using it more than she was supposed to.

It was only eight o’clock on Tuesday night. Even though she was completely worn out it was too early to go to sleep. But she didn’t dare turn on the television for fear that it might wake up the two-month-old infant finally asleep in the crib a few feet away.

Immy. Who had been crying since they’d both been released from the hospital and arrived at the motel a little after five.

Having no real experience with babies, Kyla didn’t know why Immy had been so unhappy. She had received a clean bill of health from the hospital, where she’d behaved normally.

But now, at the motel, in Kyla’s sole care, Immy hadn’t wanted to eat or sleep.

Was it possible for such a tiny baby to understand that something awful had happened? To miss her parents? To realize on some level that she’d lost them?

But if that was the case, wouldn’t she have also been inconsolable at the hospital?

It was only since Kyla had taken over tending to the baby that Immy had become so unhappy.

Maybe she knew...

That’s what Kyla kept thinking. Maybe Immy sensed that she was now in the hands of someone inept at caring for her, someone who didn’t have the foggiest idea what she was doing or how she was going to do what needed to be done from here on.

Or maybe Kyla’s own fears and insecurities about this job that was now hers were somehow infecting the baby.

But regardless of the cause, the baby had just gone on crying and crying and crying and Kyla had been useless—too battered, too weak, too afraid she might drop Immy to walk and jiggle her the way her parents had when Immy was upset.

So Kyla had been at a loss. And tired and hurt and frustrated and sad.

And at one point Kyla had just cried right along with Immy.

But she’d finally persuaded Immy to take a few ounces of formula—much less than she was supposed to be eating, but still, something—and then Immy had fallen asleep.

And now here Kyla was, afraid to even breathe.

Terrified, actually, of everything she was facing.

Terrified and terribly, terribly worried that she wasn’t going to be able to handle what was now on her plate even once she was well again.

Before this, Kyla had been a childless kindergarten teacher who shared an apartment in the small Montana town of Northbridge with a roommate. She came and went as she pleased. She dated now and then. She and Darla—her roommate and best friend—got along well and had a good time together. She enjoyed the community she’d become a part of. And she lived a simple, uncomplicated life.

A simple, uncomplicated life that she’d left behind a week and a half ago in order to spend the end of her summer vacation in Denver. Rachel—her cousin and only living relative—had invited her, asking her to become the godmother of Rachel’s daughter, Immogene.

Kyla had been enjoying her time with the small family that also included Rachel’s Australian husband, Eddie Burke. She’d been enjoying watching Rachel with Immy. Enjoying holding Immy herself for a few minutes here and there, awkwardly giving Immy an occasional bottle, then handing her back to one of her parents if Immy fussed.

Kyla had been honored to become Immy’s godmother, and had even offered to take Immy to sleep in the guesthouse with her after the christening.

She’d been happy to give Rachel and Eddie a night of romance rekindling and uninterrupted sleep. Immy was down to needing only one feeding during the night, and with the prepared bottle in the fridge and the bottle warmer on the counter, Kyla had been confident she was up to the task. After all, the guesthouse had occupied the top half of the garage just behind the main house and one call over the intercom would have Rachel or Eddie there in minutes if there were any problems.

But instead of Kyla having problems with Immy, the problem had been the fire that started at the very large, luxurious main house.

That horrible night had cost Rachel and Eddie their lives. Kyla barely escaped with Immy from flames that jumped to burn the guesthouse and garage to the ground, too.

Kyla still couldn’t believe it had happened...

A tiny whimper from the crib sent a fresh wave of panic through her right then.

Please stay asleep...

Please, please, please...

Kyla sat frozen and closed her eyes as though, if she pretended she was asleep herself, the tiny baby girl might opt not to disturb her.

She knew that was really dumb. But she was desperate.

When there were no more sounds from the crib after a few minutes, Kyla opened her eyes to mere slits to spy on the infant from a distance and found Immy still asleep.

Thank God...

Kyla breathed again. And felt guilty.

It wasn’t that she didn’t love the adorable baby with her head of wispy copper-colored hair, her enormous blue eyes, her button nose and beautiful Cupid’s-bow mouth. Because she did love her. She loved Immy and had envied Rachel. Especially when holding the baby in her arms had stirred old feelings of Kyla’s own loss that she’d thought were resolved a decade ago.

But the truth was that she wasn’t much more prepared to have a baby now than she had been when she was sixteen.

Only there Immy was, in the crib. All hers now...

Along with the responsibility of managing what Immy had inherited.

A baby. A huge business. What exactly was she supposed to do with either of those things?

Even if she was in tip-top shape, even if she wasn’t banged up and grieving the loss of her cousin, it would still be overwhelming. And she honestly didn’t know if she could do it. Any of it. All of it.

She closed her eyes again, this time in the futile hope that when she opened them she’d be back home in Northbridge, hearing Rachel’s voice on the other end of the phone saying she’d just given birth to Immy...

If she pictured it vividly enough maybe she could turn back time.

The knock on the door startled her and when her eyes shot open again she was, of course, still in the motel room.

Her first thought was that the knock could have disturbed Immy.

Thankfully it hadn’t. Yet.

Her second thought was that they were in a truck-stop motel. Yes, the business had belonged to Immy’s parents and Eddie had talked about striving for high standards in everything about his travel centers, but it still didn’t seem to Kyla like an ideal place for a woman alone with a baby.

And she certainly wasn’t expecting anyone. How could she be, when the only people she knew in Denver now were the few strangers who had offered help since the fire?

She considered ignoring whoever was there and keeping the door safely closed. But she couldn’t risk a second round of those heavy knocks, so she got off the bed as fast as she could and made her way to the window beside the door.

She was careful to only open the drape a crack, just enough for her to peek at whoever was out there before revealing herself.

There were lights in the overhang outside each room’s door, so she could see that there was a man just outside.

A really big man. Tall, broad-shouldered, standing ramrod straight, muscles barely contained by a white polo shirt that stretched tightly over his shoulders and biceps.

He didn’t look like the truckers she’d seen when she’d arrived. This guy was meticulously groomed and there didn’t seem to be a relaxed bone in his impressive body. In fact, between the way he was standing there—almost at attention—and the short cut of his espresso-colored hair, there was something about him that said military.

Military and strikingly handsome.

He had a square brow, deep-set eyes that stared straight ahead at the door, a nose that was a little flat across the bridge and somehow ruggedly distinguished, full, sensuous lips and a jawline that a sculptor’s knife couldn’t have shaped any better.

Good looks—a serial killer’s best asset, Kyla thought.

But as he raised his massive fist to knock a second time she decided she was less afraid of a serial killer than of waking Immy, so she poked her entire head past the curtain, opened the window just a crack and said a hushed, “Can I help you?”

His head alone turned in her direction, giving her a fuller view of his face.

Oh yeah, he was fantastic looking...

Now that he was peering directly at her, she could see that those deep-set eyes were an incredible, intense cobalt blue. A remarkable, unusual blue.

And it was those blue eyes that suddenly sparked familiarity.

“Kyla?” he said.

It couldn’t be...

“Can I help you?” she repeated as she convinced herself that she was imagining things.

“You don’t recognize me?” the man outside said.

“Who are you?” she asked even as she began to think that she knew.

“Beau. Beau Camden,” he said.

Despite confirmation, Kyla stared at him in disbelief.

She couldn’t help wondering if she was hallucinating. She’d refused pain medication because she hadn’t wanted to be impaired in any way when she had to take care of Immy. But she still wondered if something they’d given her in the hospital had come back to haunt her.