Major Daddy

“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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