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The Cowboy, The Baby And The Bride-To-Be
Cara Colter
Fabulous FathersFIRST COMES BABY…Shayla Morrison's mission was to unite a rambunctious baby boy with the rugged cowboy who was his closest kin. But one look at long, tall Turner MacLeod and Shayla decided to stick around. After all, what did a rough and tough rancher know about babies? Then again, what did a sensible woman like Shayla know about sharing close quarters with a mysterious Montana man?THEN COMES MARRIAGE?Shayla should have hightailed it back to her ho-hum life. Then the sound of a child's laughter–and the sparkle in the cowboy's eyes–had her whistling the wedding march. But could she turn the brooding bachelor into a forever husband?Fabulous FathersThis cowboy found a baby on his doorstep–and a wife in waiting!
She wanted to be with him. (#uec979fef-e2e1-557b-8836-4d5daa2a9f8b)Letter to Reader (#ub54b7fa4-3ddb-54a7-acdc-3d68e9e72e40)Title Page (#u7e6ed410-3c5f-559c-bbbf-02924e1f9d41)Dedication (#uc8697403-af8f-522f-83f8-945de83f267b)About the Author (#u6d9dfeb9-4d8e-50d9-bc99-e296eb1da4b3)Chapter One (#u8b0e06ac-7f88-5bd2-bb23-c0bdd19d7ad2)Chapter Two (#ub183b6af-820b-519f-8c8b-7e31cb6f090c)Chapter Three (#udc434281-fb42-5150-b33b-766ede87e82d)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)Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
She wanted to be with him.
“I kind of thought—” Shayla was suddenly shy. “You and I could go horseback riding. I packed a lunch.”
Turner stared at her. “Well,” he said, his heart hammering at a ridiculous rate, “I guess if you went to all the trouble of packing a lunch.”
She burst out laughing.
And he realized it was funny. A grown man acting as though he found lunch irresistible, when it really was her.
He went to her in one long stride. He lifted her chin. Her eyes were huge, and her lips soft and moist. Calling his name, begging, though she spoke not a word.
“Maybe we’re going too fast,” he said softly.
“Too fast?” she whispered. “I thought there were no speed limits in Montana.”
He kissed her then. Surrendering his hard-held control.
Completely.
Dear Reader,
In 20 months Silhouette Romance will celebrate its 20th anniversary! To commemorate that momentous occasion, we’d like to ask you to share with us why you’ve chosen to read the Romance series, and which authors you particularly enjoy. We hope to publish some of your thoughtful comments during our anniversary year—2000! And this month’s selections will give you food for thought....
In The Guardian’s Bride by Laurie Paige, our VIRGIN BRIDES title, a 20-year-old heiress sets out to marry her older, wealthy—gorgeous—guardian. Problem is, he thinks she’s too young.... The Cowboy, the Baby and the Bride-to-Be is Cara Colter’s newest book, where a shy beauty reunites a lonely cowboy with his baby nephew...and lassoes love in the process! Karen Rose Smith’s new miniseries, DO YOU TAKE THIS STRANGER?, premieres with Wealth, Power and a Proper Wife. An all-work-and-no-play millionaire learns the value of his marriage vows when the wife he’d suspected of betraying him suffers a bout of amnesia.
Rounding out the month, we have Her Best Man by Christine Scott, part of the MEN! promotion, featuring a powerful tycoon who heroically offers protection to a struggling single mom. In Honey of a Husband by Laura Anthony, an ex-bull rider returns home to discover his childhood sweetheart is raising his child—by another woman. Finally, rising star Elizabeth Harbison returns to the lineup with True Love Ranch, where a city gal and a single-dad rancher lock horns—and live up to the Colorado spread’s name.
Enjoy!
Joan Marlow Golan
Senior Editor Silhouette Romance
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 Erie, Ont. L2A 5X3
The Cowboy, The Baby And The Bride-To-Be
Cara Colter
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
For Lynne Cormack,
my best friend
right through it all
CARA COLTER
shares ten acres in the wild Kootenay region of British Columbia with the man of her dreams, three children, two horses, a cat with no tail and a golden retriever who answers best to “bad dog.” She loves reading, writing and the woods in winter (no bears). She says life’s delights include an automatic garage door opener and the skylight over the bed that allows her to see the stars at night.
She also says, “I have not lived a neat and tidy life, and used to envy those who did. Now I see my struggles as having given me a deep appreciation of life, and of love, that I hope I succeed in passing on through the stories that I tell.”
Dear Nick,
I’m not a man too good with words. Or with babies, either. I can turn an honest day’s work, though, and I’m a fair hand with a horse.
I guess I’m trying to tell you I’m a cowboy, plain and simple. I can face down a ton or so of raging, red-eyed Brahma bull without turning a hair. But babies—and women—scare the heck out of me.
The first time I saw you, I knew you belonged out on the ranch. You may be only three, but it was still there. In your eyes, in the way you stand, in the way you hold yourself.
Being a cowboy is more than puttin’ on a hat and riding a bull. It’s more than rodeos and wranglers. It’s something in the soul.
Nicky, I don’t want you growing up in the middle of a city, living in some cramped apartment, playing on concrete playgrounds. You’re a boy who needs to run where there are no fences. You’re a boy who needs to lasso sawhorse steers. You’re a boy who needs to get bucked off old barrels rigged up with ropes.
How do I know? I look at you and see your daddy. And myself.
So I will teach you about this thing deep inside cowboys that needs blue skies and wide open spaces, that needs a good horse, and a herd of cattle, that needs to be strong.
And you will teach me about the most important thing of all.
Love. You will teach me about love.
Your uncle,
Turner
Chapter One
It was love at first sight.
Shayla had never used that expression before in her entire twenty-four years.
But then she had never seen anything like this before.
Montana.
The land was huge and breathtaking. Some people might have found the mile upon mile of treeless rolling plain desolate, but Shayla felt something in her opening up, soaring like that red-tailed hawk above her.
The prairie was in constant motion: the wind playing in tall golden grass, creating slow and sensuous waves; herds of pronghorns appearing in the distance, suddenly disappearing again; funny black-tipped spikes poking above the grass, turning out to be the ear tips of deer.
She unrolled the window on her ancient Volkswagen and took a deep breath of air that smelled of earth and sunshine, and something she couldn’t quite define.
“Love at first sight,” she repeated, out loud this time, letting it roll off her tongue.
“Bluv burst bite,” her passenger echoed.
Shayla started. “Nicky! You’re awake.”
She turned and looked over her shoulder at her little charge, strapped securely in the brand-new car seat in the back of her car.
“Did you see them? The deer and antelope? It’s just like the song,” she realized with delight. “You know the one. ‘Home, home on the range...”’
Nicky nodded solemnly, his eyes huge and black behind a sooty fringe of lashes. Dark loops of hair curled around his fat cheeks. He was a truly beautiful child, save for a tendency to beetle his brows and frown ferociously when he wanted his own way. Which was often.
“Me free,” he said, holding up a fistful of fingers.
Free, she thought. That’s what it was. The landscape spoke to something in her about wildness and freedom.
“That’s right,” she said, glancing at him in her rearview mirror. “Three.” She noticed bright dots of color on each of his cheeks. “We’re going to be at your uncle’s soon. What do you think about that?”
“Me free.”
She laughed. “Me, too. Having my first adventure at the ripe old age of twenty-four. Me, Shayla Morrison having an adventure!”
It wasn’t really an adventure. She was doing a friend a favor. That was all. But this landscape called out to a part of her that she hadn’t known existed.
A part of her that longed for an adventure.
Tentatively she pushed her foot down a little harder. No speed limit in Montana. She had never gone fast in her whole life. The road was good, straight, paved and empty. Why not fly?
“Me six,” Nicky announced.
“No, three.”
In her rearview mirror, she watched black eyebrows drop down, and a pug nose scrunch up.
“Six!”
“It doesn’t matter if you’re three, when you’re a tree,” Shayla sang lightly, “and it doesn’t matter if you are six if you are in a fix.”
“Ohhh,” Nicky breathed with delight. “Poppy Pepperseed.”
Shayla laughed again. Her laughter felt rich within her, as glorious as this sun-filled day. For the past two years she had worked out of her home, writing the music and lyrics for the “Poppy Pepperseed Show,” a locally-produced children’s TV program in Portland, Oregon. Though she didn’t do the voice or the singing for the program, Nicky invariably recognized when she became “Poppy.”
“Sing,” he commanded.
And so she sang. Nonsense lyrics that celebrated the huge sky and the circling hawks and the bouncing pronghorns. The next time she looked in the mirror her number-one fan was sound asleep.
She frowned. Again? How often did kids sleep? The red in his cheeks seemed to be deepening. He wasn’t sick, was he?
She gave herself a little shake. She worried too much. Worrying was her specialty.
It was probably just boredom. They had been traveling now for two days.
A week ago, her neighbor Maria, a young single mom she had met about a year ago at the apartment’s pool, had dropped Nicholas—Nicky—off for an afternoon as she occasionally did.
But by late that evening, the shy, beautiful Maria hadn’t come back. Nicky had fallen asleep on the couch, his thumb in his mouth, cuddling his hand-knit purple-and-turquoise dinosaur, Ralph. It wasn’t at all like Maria, who was soft-spoken and conscientious always, and Shayla began to wonder if she should start calling the hospitals.
When the phone rang, Shayla listened to the coins falling into place before Maria had come on the line.
“Shayla, I hate to ask, but could you keep Nicky for a day or two? Something has come up.”
“Are you all right?” Shayla asked. Maria’s voice sounded like it was coming from a long way away.
Maria laughed, and Shayla realized she had never heard her neighbor laugh before.
Of course she couldn’t keep Nicky. He was not exactly the kind of child content to play on the floor with his Tonka toys while she plunked away at her old piano. Her next deadline was looming large.
“Please?”
A note in Maria’s voice made her say yes. Her neighbor’s voice held the smallest thread of happiness.
Maria always seemed to Shayla to be too young to look so tired and overburdened.
What was a day or two? She would have to figure out a way to work with Nicky around. Maybe even test the songs on him. A novel concept, testing a children’s song on a real child.
What was a few days if it did something to take the sad and defeated slump out of Maria’s thin shoulders?
Two days had come and gone, and then Maria had phoned again. She couldn’t come back right away. Something had come up. An emergency. She wasn’t sure when she would be back, actually, maybe weeks. Could Shayla take Nicky to his uncle in Montana?
That thread of happiness ran even stronger in Maria’s voice.
“I can’t go to Montana, Maria. When are you going to be back? What do you mean weeks?”
She knew she could not keep Nicky for weeks. He was a small tyrant, ordering her around like some tiny generalissimo dictator. No wonder Maria always looked so tired!
“Nicky eat. Now.”
“Nicky go to pool. Now.”
“Nicky not sleep. Nicky swim. Now.”
“Nicky not eat green. Nicky eat red. Lick-rish. Now.”
“Nicky playground. Now.”
