Major Daddy

“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

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

*Husband by Inheritance #1532

*The Heiress Takes a Husband #1538

*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

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Epilogue

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.