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The Bounty Hunter's Baby Surprise
Lisa Childs
They could be a family… if he can win her heartWhen Lillian Davies is accused of a crime she didn’t commit, Jake Howard knows he must save her. But Lillian has bigger concerns and Jake has to fight even harder to win her trust and her heart.
“It’s whose baby?”
Top Secret Deliveries delivers again
When bounty hunter Jake Howard tries to apprehend bail jumper Lillian Davies, he gets a surprise: she’s pregnant! He’s more surprised that she’s accused of embezzlement...and someone wants her dead. Is she being framed? Having betrayed Lillian once, Jake wants to regain her trust and exonerate her. He’ll even risk his life to save her and their little family before it’s too late.
Ever since LISA CHILDS read her first romance novel (a Mills & Boon story, of course) at age eleven, all she wanted was to be a romance writer. With over forty novels published with Mills & Boon, Lisa is living her dream. She is an award-winning, bestselling romance author. Lisa loves to hear from readers, who can contact her on Facebook, through her website, www.lisachilds.com (http://www.lisachilds.com), or her snail-mail address, PO Box 139, Marne, MI 49435, USA.
Also by Lisa Childs (#uc73a48e1-d6dc-5411-b7f2-fb468cf58a4b)
The Bounty Hunter’s Baby Surprise
His Christmas Assignment
Bodyguard Daddy
Bodyguard’s Baby Surprise
Beauty and the Bodyguard
Nanny Bodyguard
Single Mom’s Bodyguard
In the Bodyguard’s Arms
The Colton Marine
Discover more at millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
The Bounty Hunter’s Baby Surprise
Lisa Childs
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
ISBN: 978-1-474-07901-3
THE BOUNTY HUNTER’S BABY SURPRISE
© 2018 Lisa Childs
Published in Great Britain 2018
by Mills & Boon, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street, London, SE1 9GF
All rights reserved including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form. This edition is published by arrangement with Harlequin Books S.A.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, locations and incidents are purely fictional and bear no relationship to any real life individuals, living or dead, or to any actual places, business establishments, locations, events or incidents. Any resemblance is entirely coincidental.
By payment of the required fees, you are granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right and licence to download and install this e-book on your personal computer, tablet computer, smart phone or other electronic reading device only (each a “Licensed Device”) and to access, display and read the text of this e-book on-screen on your Licensed Device. Except to the extent any of these acts shall be permitted pursuant to any mandatory provision of applicable law but no further, no part of this e-book or its text or images may be reproduced, transmitted, distributed, translated, converted or adapted for use on another file format, communicated to the public, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of publisher.
® and ™ are trademarks owned and used by the trademark owner and/or its licensee. Trademarks marked with ® are registered with the United Kingdom Patent Office and/or the Office for Harmonisation in the Internal Market and in other countries.
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
With great appreciation for Patience Bloom; it is a privilege and a joy to work with you!
Contents
Cover (#uf658b746-c8bd-58bd-8f22-600697e5eb13)
Back Cover Text (#u4c232ffd-496f-5333-a6b1-c3a5424ef3df)
About the Author (#uc97d8df8-0463-59d5-af6e-4f73f3988d58)
Booklist (#ub6a7d48d-82fd-5653-90dd-92eebecf0400)
Title Page (#u73fc049a-5089-5ceb-9fee-d221cc7e45c0)
Copyright (#u4b73a20f-c9f7-5bd4-8540-09c226280559)
Dedication (#u18ed7d8a-7b00-5f80-8224-79d7b7c5335f)
Prologue (#uf1292c12-8666-549f-9776-d24874576152)
Chapter 1 (#u453573cc-478b-587a-906f-c243ffcbdd10)
Chapter 2 (#u6bbcb5c1-f97a-53b2-aee0-244314974253)
Chapter 3 (#uf220d756-db35-52e7-ab41-a5c5b11f33fe)
Chapter 4 (#u537b6928-bdf2-53c4-8e9b-da6b4938f3ac)
Chapter 5 (#u76d753a1-42f3-5379-a229-4780139b0735)
Chapter 6 (#u5ddf1057-d3c9-558a-b56b-daca31b95555)
Chapter 7 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 8 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 9 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 10 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 11 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 12 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 13 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 14 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 15 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 16 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 17 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 18 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 19 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 20 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 21 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 22 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 23 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 24 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 25 (#litres_trial_promo)
Extract (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
Prologue (#uc73a48e1-d6dc-5411-b7f2-fb468cf58a4b)
Pulling the flash drive from the computer with trembling fingers, Lillian Davies ducked under the desk just as the office door creaked open to the corridor. A beam of light flashed across the space, bouncing off the filing cabinets and the back of the chair she’d pulled up against the desk to cover her. She closed her eyes so the beam would not glint in them, and she crouched even lower. Her heart pounded wildly with fear that she would be caught.
If that happened, she would never have a chance to show anyone the evidence that would clear her name. And she would be sent to prison for certain. She held her breath, waiting to be discovered.
If the security guard noticed that the monitor was on...
She could only hope that he would call the police. Because if he called his boss—her former boss—first...
Then she might not make it back to jail. He would undoubtedly kill to cover up his crime—the one for which he’d framed her. Tom Kuipers must have hired her so he would have a scapegoat for the blame. She’d thought he was one of the few people in River City, Michigan, who hadn’t judged her based on her last name and who her family was and had been giving her a chance to prove herself.
But she had been wrong. Again.
Tears stung her eyes. She should have been used to it, used to being used. She blinked back the tears, opened her eyes and lifted her chin.
No. She damn well was not going to get used to it. She was going to fight back this time. Because she wasn’t fighting just for herself anymore.
And if the security guard discovered her, she would fight him, too. Sure, he carried a gun. But he wouldn’t actually shoot her, would he? Maybe if she propelled the chair into his legs and knocked him over she would have a chance to run for it.
She locked the trembling fingers of her free hand around the legs of the chair, ready to use it as a weapon. But the beam shut off, plunging the office into darkness again, except for the faint glow from the parking lot lights outside the windows. Then the door creaked closed and snapped shut.
Lillian finally released the breath she’d been holding. She waited several more moments, though, before she pushed out the chair and crawled out of her hiding space. She opened her purse and dropped the flash drive inside it. The plastic device slid to the bottom where she’d dropped the pregnancy test. She’d enclosed that in a bag, and through the clear plastic she could see the results that she hadn’t waited to read.
She already knew she was pregnant. She’d never missed one month let alone two, going on three. The plus sign staring up at her confirmed it, though. That was why she had risked her life and her freedom to come back here. She needed the evidence to prove her innocence, so that yet another Davies didn’t wind up in prison.
If the flash drive didn’t get the charges dropped against her, she was going to run. She was not going to have her baby behind bars. It was bad enough that was where most of the Davies family wound up later in life; her child was not going to begin his or her life in jail.
Chapter 1 (#uc73a48e1-d6dc-5411-b7f2-fb468cf58a4b)
Six months later...
“I should have listened to you,” Seymour Tuttle said. The bail bondsman paced the small confines of his office, nearly tripping over Jake Howard’s feet as the little man made the pass between his desk and the door Jake was leaning his back against, his long legs crossed at the ankles.
Tuttle had called him into his office and told him to shut the door. That was never a good sign for Jake. Every time someone had spoken to him in private before, it had been to give him bad news.
Your mother is dead...
Your father is gone...
But usually Tuttle didn’t give a damn about privacy—his or anyone else’s. But since he’d just admitted he was wrong, Jake understood his not wanting anyone else to overhear his admission. He was surprised the stubborn old guy had admitted it even to himself, let alone Jake. That must have been Tuttle’s version of bad news: being wrong.
“What should you have listened to me about?” Jake asked, holding back his “I told you so” until he knew the specifics.
“The Davies family.” Tuttle uttered the last name as if it was a vulgar curse word.
Jake flinched at just the mention of it, and a twinge of pain clenched his heart, stealing away his breath and his words. He couldn’t speak.
But Tuttle didn’t stop talking. He rarely did. His wide mouth was nearly as big as his short body. “You told me not to bail out another one of them.” He shook his little bald head in self-disgust. “You warned me that they always run.”
Jake’s pulse was running now in overtime. He didn’t want to think about the Davies family, didn’t want to think about what he’d done, the extremes he’d gone to the last time that he’d had to apprehend two of them.
“Why aren’t you saying it?” Tuttle demanded as he stopped in front of him.
Jake blinked and stared down at the little man. Tuttle was barely five feet tall to Jake’s well over six-foot height. “Saying what?”
“I told you so,” Tuttle said. “You were right. I paid the bail and now you need to go bring back another damn Davies for me.”
Jake shook his head and ran a slightly shaking hand through his thick hair. He needed a haircut. But then he always needed a haircut. “Not me. That’s not going to happen.”
“You’re the expert on the Davies family,” Tuttle persisted. “You know where to find them.”
“In jail,” Jake said. “That’s where most of them are.” He couldn’t believe Don or Dave would have gotten bail again after jumping it last time. And if a judge had been stupid enough to give it to them, Seymour had been even stupider to pay it. “I told you so” wasn’t enough recrimination for risking his money on one of them again.
“Not her,” Seymour said.
