Truly Daddy

But after a week, he came to the stunning realization that he could search the world over and never find another soul who could love her as deeply as he did.

And so he learned. About tears. And teddy bears. And skin so sensitive he had to buy special laundry soap. About Woody and Buzz, Chance and Sassy. About macaroni and cheese being considered edible by people under four feet high.

This month she wanted a French braid.

He sighed. He didn’t think he was ever going to get the braid right or ever quit trying to get it, either. Angelica had ended up with some pretty exotic hairdos while he tried to get his hands, which could tie a dozen kinds of knots with ease, to make her hair look like the hair in the picture.

The picture of her mom.

Juggling this plunge into fatherhood with a busy career was more of a challenge than getting a skier off a rock precipice with a helicopter in the middle of a blizzard. He had a four-day intensive rescue course coming in less than twenty-four hours.

When Angelica first arrived, she had come on a rescue with him, simply because every time he tried to part from her, she’d become hysterical Given that her loss was so recent and the situation so urgently required action, he’d broken the rules. She’d loved it—being the center of attention at rescue headquarters, trudging courageously up the Diamond Head behind him, taking turns being carried by various members of the search party. Luckily, it had been August and a straightforward search, if there was such a thing.

She’d loved it, but he had felt the intensity of his concentration diluted by her presence. Part of him was always looking after her when he needed to be one hundred percent focused on what he was doing.

But it had been Angelica who called to him to stop, said she had heard something on the lonely wind.

He’d heard nothing. No one had heard anything.

But she had scrambled down from his arms and begun to run.

He’d been so annoyed. Until she ran directly to a cave where a weary hiker lay very close to death. A hiker in no condition to make any kind of sound.

When he asked her how she’d found the hiker, she had just shrugged. “I don’t know. I heard something.”

By some twist of fate or luck, she had been an asset on the rescue. But he didn’t think he could count on that kind of luck to hold for the four intense and exhausting days of the school. She wasn’t exactly the kind of kid who would sit contentedly at the back of the class with a coloring book.

She called him Unkie, a particularly unflattering name that he loved when it came off her lips. A little less by the time he’d heard it for the hundredth time in one day. A lot less if he was trying to teach a class.

Candy would help him.

His good-natured next-door neighbor. Unfortunately, she had always looked at him with something a little more than just neighborly interest, and she was now shamelessly using his need for a sitter to try to get involved in his personal life.

Which she could not seem to believe was nonexistent. And that he liked it that way.

He could do worse. Candy was, as the name might imply, cute as a button and a little on the plump side. She was the single mom of two active preschoolers. If her conversation was limited to the daily soap operas she was able to bring in on the huge satellite dish that dominated her front yard, well, so what?

She actually liked the town of Eliza and had no wish to live anywhere else. She was able to do the ribbonsand-curls thing for Angelica. French braids were nothing to her. She could do amazing things with canned tuna and cornflakes.

He was thirty. Totally engrossed in his work. Marriage had never crossed his mind.

He was of these mountains. He understood them as much as any man ever would in all their lonely and harsh glory. The mysteries that remained called to him. They were magnificent mistresses and he had never needed another.

But Angelica needed something more.

A mommy.

A picture of coming home every day to Candy entered his mind. Everything in him rebelled against it. He couldn’t do it. Not even for love of Angelica.

“A nanny,” he said out loud, firmly, and sent a pleading look heavenward. “One small helper.” He snapped off the radio before Garth got to the part about the blessings hidden in unanswered prayers.

He had turned off the main highway and was only about ten minutes from Eliza when he heard the sound in the back seat. He wasn’t quite sure what it was. A breath. A whisper of clothing.

He was a man who relied on instinct far more than average men, and his hackles rose now on the back of his neck.

There was someone back there.

He knew it with such sudden force and certainty he wondered how he had not known it the whole time. But he did not let on that he knew, keeping his speed steady, his eyes checking the locks.

Both back passenger doors were unlocked.

He cursed his stupidity. In Eliza, a locked car door was unheard of. In Vancouver, he’d made a concession to the big city by locking the one he’d gotten out of. The rest of them had slipped his mind.

And now he had an unwanted passenger.

What he wasn’t going to do was drive a psychopath, possibly armed, right up in front of Candy’s house in Eliza, where it might endanger Angelica and Candy’s own children.

He made a split-second decision.

Smoothly, he pulled off the road onto the shoulder. He stopped the vehicle but didn’t turn off the engine.

He eased his pocketknife out of his blue jeans pocket. Then with lightning swiftness, he hurled himself over the back seat, whipped the blanket off the person huddled under it on the floorboard.

Shock rippled through him.

The woman looking at him with huge green eyes and red hair that spiraled wildly in every direction was absolutely beautiful.

Of course, it was very dark in the back of the car. Maybe he was mistaken. He reached up and turned on the dome light.

She blinked, if anything, more beautiful in the brighter light than she had been before.

He sighed uneasily and slipped the knife into his pocket.

The animal terror went out of her eyes.

“I don’t suppose you’re a nanny, are you?” he asked dryly. No, he’d asked for a small helper. The way she was crammed into that space, small she was not. In fact, she seemed to be kind of stuck, so he took her wrist and helped her, none too gently, onto the seat beside him.

She had on a very tight gray skirt and it rode up a long slender leg as she settled herself beside him. She saw the direction of his gaze and yanked it down.

“A nanny?” she asked weakly. “Like Mary Poppins?”

“Hmmm,” he said.

“Que sera, sera?” she said hopefully.

“That’s Doris Day.”

“Damn,” she said.