Look What The Stork Brought In?

Look What The Stork Brought In?
Dixie Browning

MR. DECEMBER Instant Father: Former detective Joe Dana had a weakness for beautiful women - not pudgy babies! Earth Mother: Sophie Bayard knew all about natural childbirth - she just didn't expect a handsome stranger to practically deliver her baby in a vegetable garden!Little Miss Fatcheeks: Could this tiny dynamo hook Sophie a husband? Joe planned to hightail it back to Texas once he retrieved an heirloom from the brand-new mother, but before this bachelor knew it, he was strutting around like the proud papa. Uh-oh! And now these designing women were trying to turn this nonmarrying man into Father of the Year!MAN OF THE MONTH: Beneath his tough exterior beats a tender heart.

“Honey, Wake Up And Feed The Baby” Joe Said. (#u2b525ee8-17d2-5ac6-a0d2-d1866a9c9191)Letter to Reader (#u49516eec-6f7f-5317-bbcc-3c8da7184d83)Title Page (#ua3969d76-5ef8-5540-9429-6ced8c05abac)About the Author (#u1d4606eb-16f3-52ac-bb9c-832ca4c08302)Chapter One (#ud6ac6e1a-67d3-5e20-97ad-a67d3e49e96c)Chapter Two (#u915b25af-cb4a-5313-a7b5-346c36c1157b)Chapter Three (#u5434018d-2e81-54b0-894d-99a3f8ca631e)Chapter Four (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Five (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Six (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Seven (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Eight (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Nine (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Ten (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Eleven (#litres_trial_promo)Epilogue (#litres_trial_promo)Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)

“Honey, Wake Up And Feed The Baby” Joe Said.

It struck him that for a single man who intended to stay that way, he was beginning to sound dangerously domestic. Downright paternal, in fact.

And then he heard something that slammed him in the belly like a fist.

Sophie whimpered in her sleep, and Joe groaned. He touched her lightly on the arm, just enough to rouse her.

In the second before she awakened, she was totally vulnerable.

In that moment, Joe knew that he could no more walk out and leave her—leave her and her baby—than he could fly to the moon. It was even worse admitting he could be turned on by a woman who had just given birth to another man’s baby. Either he was totally depraved, or the human instinct for survival and reproduction was a hell of a lot stronger than he’d suspected.

Dear Reader,

Happy Holidays to all of you from the staff of Silhouette Desire! Our celebration of Desire’s fifteenth anniversary continues, and to kick off this holiday season, we have a wonderful new book from Dixie Browning called Look What the Stork Brought. Dixie, who is truly a Desire star, has written over sixty titles for Silhouette.

Next up, The Surprise Christmas Bride by Maureen Child. If you like stories chock-full of love and laughter, this is the book for you. And Anne Eames continues her MONTANA MALONES mimseries with The Best Little Joeville Christmas.

The month is completed with more Christmas treats:

A Husband in Her Stocking by Christine Pacheco;

I Married a Prince by Kathryn Jensen and Santa Cowboy by Barbara McMahon.

I hope you all enjoy your holidays, and hope that Silhouette Desire will add to the warmth of the season. So enjoy the very best in romance from Desire!

Senior Editor

Please address questions and book requests to:

Silhouette Reader Service

U.S.: 3010 Walden Ave., P.O. Box 1325, Buffalo, NY 14269

Canadian: P.O. Box 609. Fort Ene, Ont. L2A 5X3

Look What the Stork Brought In?

Dixie Browning

www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)

DIXIE BROWNING

celebrated her sixtieth book for Silhouette with the publication of Stryker’s Wife in 1996. She has also written a number of historical romances with her sister under the name Bronwyn Williams. A charter member of Romance Writers of America and a member of Novelists, Inc., Browning has won numerous awards for her work. She divides her time between Winston-Salem and the Outer Banks of North Carolina.

One

He was closing in. So close he could almost smell blood. Lifting one hand from the steering wheel, Joe Dana pinched the place between his eyes where it throbbed. It was just past ten on a steamy July morning, and he’d pulled over onto the side of the road. Briefly, he’d considered checking into a hotel, catching a shower and a few hours’ sleep first, but he was too close. After going flat out for the past five weeks—the last twenty-two hours of it without sleep—he wanted only to wind things up and go home.

Wherever home was. At the moment, it was a storage unit in Fort Worth. That and some unfinished plans.

For the time being, he’d seen enough sheriffs and small-town cops to last him a while. As for women hanging all over him, soaking his shirt with their tears, he could do without those, too.

He yawned again, inhaling the stale aroma of his own sweat and too many fast-food containers. Once this gig was finished, he was going to the best hotel in town to soak his carcass in hot water for a few hours, send his boots out to be polished, his laundry out to be finished, order in a slab of beef, cooked just the way he liked it, with a basket of fries, a gallon of milk and half-a-gallon of ice cream....

And then he was going to sleep for a week.

The slip of paper with instructions to the Bayard woman’s house said turn right off Highway 158 onto the first dirt road past Frenchman’s Creek; pass a mobile home on the left, a log tobacco barn on the right, go a mile farther and look for a mailbox mounted on a busted hay-rake.

“Can’t miss it,” the deputy had said. “Last place on the road. County don’t gravel past there. She wanted for something? Heard she worked in a bank in town till she moved to Davie County a few months back. I went and got a raccoon out of her attic, first week she moved in. Seemed like a real nice woman, but these days you never know, do you?”

No, thought Joe, you never know. He didn’t know if she was the brains of the organization—if there even was an organization, instead of just a one-man scam—or one more in a long line of tearful victims.

He did know that the eighteenth-century jade vase she’d described in The Antique and Artifact Trader was a part of the collection he’d been tracking all the way from Dallas. He’d picked up the trail in Amarillo, lost it in Guymon, found it again in Tulsa and chased it all the way to North Carolina. Along the way, he’d checked out every pawn shop, every law enforcement office and heard more sob stories than any broken-down ex-cop needed to hear when he was officially retired.

He had a hunch about this one, though. A strong feeling that he was finally closing in.

Then again, the feeling could be just the result of too many chili dogs. As for his headache, that was a result of too many hours behind the wheel. His knee was killing him—also the result of driving too long without a break.

On the other hand, it was usually at a time like this, when he was scraping the bottom of the barrel, that his luck suddenly took a turn for the better. Hell, he’d been flat on his back in a hospital bed when he’d thought of the one thing they’d overlooked in the Drayton case. Once he was back on his feet again, he’d been able to wrap things up. All three brothers were indicted and behind bars, and he’d earned himself another commendation to go with his early retirement papers.

Joe yawned again, then pulled onto the highway and turned right on the graveled state road. A mile or so farther, he turned off onto a rutted, weed-cluttered driveway. The house looked like a few million other old farmhouses. Four rooms up, four down, with a one-story shoot off the back. This one had flowers. Vine-covered trellises at each end of the porch and blooming beds underneath the windows. Crook or not, the lady had a way with plants.

He pulled up in front, set the parking brake and eased himself out of the cab, moving stiffly until he worked out a few kinks. Before he even reached the front door he had a feeling the house was empty, but he knocked anyway, because it was the polite thing to do.

Knocked twice and waited. And then his instincts kicked in. It was called situation awareness, and his was usually right on target when it came to sensing if a house was really empty or if somebody was in there hiding, ready to blow his head off.

This one was empty. He’d bet his best boots on it. Quietly he eased down off the porch and headed around back. With or without a badge, he wasn’t into breaking and entering, but if the back door just happened to be open...

And then he saw her and stopped dead in his tracks, staring over the chicken-wire fence. His first thought was that she was big. His second, that she was a genuine blond. No dark roots. His third, that she was in trouble, which was an indication of just how tired he was. Normally in a situation like this, he’d have taken her vitals by now, and might even be administering mouth-to-mouth.

She was lying flat on the ground—or as flat as possible under the circumstances—in some kind of a garden. Rows of growing stuff, mostly vegetables. Her knees were bent, there was a big floppy hat with a sunflower on the brim resting on one of them, and a pile of weeds beside her left elbow. Her face looked flushed to him, like she was either feverish or she’d been out in the sun too long.

Heatstroke? Possibly. The temperature was hovering around the century mark, with the humidity not far behind.

Her eyes were closed. Both her hands were resting on top of a belly so big it hiked her skirt halfway up her thighs.

As for the thighs, they were long, firm and tanned. Just for the record.

Long years of training kicked in before he could actually start drooling. Moving swiftly to her side, he let himself inside the fence, mentally skimming files of all the things that could go wrong with a woman who looked to be about twelve months pregnant. He was halfway down on his good knee, reaching for her pulse when she opened her eyes and smiled up at him.

It was the smile that froze him in a muscle-killing crouch. It was slow, sleepy and nowhere near as wary as it should have been, under the circumstances. “Do I know you?” she murmured.