Major Daddy

“Exactly,” he said and, looking directly into his piercing gaze, she had the disconcerting sensation that he had just read her mind.

For just a second, the briefest spark of humor flickered to life in the depths of those eyes. If anything, it only made him look more dangerous. And more attractive. And more sexy. She felt that traitorous little twitch of her heart.

She could almost see Shauna rolling her eyes and saying with sweet southern sarcasm, “Brooke, you sure know how to pick ’em.”

“It isn’t a gun, anyway,” Brooke defended herself. “It’s Mace. And Lexandra wouldn’t have been hurt had I used it. I would have been very careful with my aim. Besides, there’s quite a bit of padding between me and her skin.”

“And for what reason exactly were you feeling a need to defend yourself?”

“I don’t know who you are! Or what you are doing in my employer’s home. With her children tucked under your arms. You haven’t exactly been forthcoming.”

“Ah. And straight from the embrace of Hollywood, you figured a plot was being hatched.” His voice, edged with sarcasm, was even sexier than when it was not. “Let me guess, your boss is filming suspense and terror, and all of you become so immersed that you see it everywhere. An easy leap to assume I have taken the children and their dear granny hostage.”

She disliked being so transparent, and, as a matter of fact, Shauna was filming a suspense thriller.

“Have you?” she said.

He snorted derisively. “Is it that easy to come up with a plot?”

“You are still not answering the question! You are being evasive, a quality I cannot stand in men.”

The smile died. He looked at her intently before saying, with disconcerting softness, “I think I hear the bitterness of experience.”

“No, you don’t!” she lied, a defensive lie if she had ever told one.

He sighed, then dismissed that topic with a shake of his head. “It’s the other way around,” he said. “I haven’t taken them hostage, they have taken me. I’m glad I don’t do this for a living. It’s exhausting being a hero. And then to get sprayed with Mace for my trouble.”

A hero? No, no, no! “I would have used it only if you did something to deserve it.”

“I don’t believe that. Once you got your finger on that sprayer, you would have been a dangerous woman. Trigger-happy.”

She did not dignify that with a reply.

“Mace is illegal in Canada,” he informed her dryly. “If they’d found it on you at the border you could have been refused entry. And that would have been a very bad thing for me, since I’m assuming you are the reinforcements, Addie Bwookie.”

“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.