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.
He was what every man longed for and every man envied. Cole Standen was free.
And then that little girl clutching a baby had come to his door in the middle of the night. Even though he was an expert on handling disasters, his well-ordered world felt as if it had been tipped on its axis from the moment he had opened his door.
And now it tilted more wildly still. Brooke Callan appeared to be a new twist in the horrible unraveling of the retired major’s perfect and controlled life.
Exposure to the genuine sweetness of Granny and those kids, with their incessant demands for hugs—never mind all their other constant demands for food, games, stories, clothing, snacks, noses wiped, bottoms wiped, diaper changes—seemed to be wearing him down, tenderizing the toughness of his heart, because why did he feel the threat of this woman so strongly?
And it had nothing to do with her Mace. Though he hoped he didn’t have to wrestle it away from her. Her curves, under her somewhat sodden outfit, were delectable, and if it came to a hand-to-hand struggle, he might win control of the Mace but lose control of something much more vital.
It occurred to him that maybe he’d been doing the man-alone-on-the-mountain routine for a little too long.
He deliberately changed his focus, away from her, her curves and her vulnerability.
“Number One,” he called, turning away from the door. “Number One! We have a Code Yellow.”
He was rewarded instantly with the sound of many feet stampeding across the floor above his head, and, moments later, Saffron, dressed in a winter jacket against the cold in the house, appeared on the top of the curved stairway, a heap of towels clutched to her chest.
“Auntie Brooke,” she shrieked and dropped the towels, flying down the stairs and flinging herself at Brooke.
“She’s not really my aunt,” she informed Cole, just as if he cared. “It’s an honorary title.”
“And one I enjoy immensely,” Brooke said, and then asked in a suspicious undertone. “Are you okay, Saffron? Is everything okay here?”
“Of course I’m okay. Everything is fine, Auntie.”
She was a beautiful woman to begin with, but when her face softened with relief and then lit from within as she returned that wholehearted hug, Cole had to turn abruptly away. This was precisely why he needed to keep Brooke Callan sour, defensive and irritated.
Unfortunately, he turned back just in time to see her expression of delight deepen as the boys tumbled down the stairs. They were unaccountably attached to the socks he had given them to wear on their heads and still had them on. And when Brooke smiled at that, her lips looked distinctly and temptingly kissable.
Discipline, Cole reminded himself.
“I’m fine now. But it was soooo awful,” Saffron breathed, and Cole noticed, not for the first time, that the child had a precocious flair for drama. She probably took after her mother. “Granny fell down the stairs, and there was blood absolutely everywhere, and she didn’t move. Not even a blink. Not even when I shook her. It was like shaking a rag doll.”
Boy Number Two chipped in. “I slipped in the blood, and I thought her brains were on the stairs.”
Cole couldn’t help but notice that Ms. Callan turned a little pale, though he told himself it wasn’t for her benefit that he cut off the tale-telling.
“Number Two,” Cole interrupted sternly, before the whole episode could be reenacted, “we have a Code Yellow here.”
“Code Yellow. Thank God,” the boy said to Brooke. “I hate Code Brown.”
“You and me both,” Cole agreed under his breath.
“Darrance, you don’t say thank God, like that, you say thank goodness.”
That was much better. Brooke had a prissy and disapproving look on her face. Her lips had thinned into a downward line that a sane man would not think was the least bit kissable.
But a man who had spent too much time alone on the edge of a mountain-shadowed lake could still see the puffy sensuality of that bottom lip if he looked hard enough.
“Mr. Herman says thank God all the time. And also thank Ch—”
“Code Yellow,” he reminded his troops sternly.
To his satisfaction, Saffron broke away from Brooke, raced up the stairs and gathered the towels that had fallen.
“The children are cursing. And why on earth are you calling them numbers?” Brooke asked, folding her arms over her chest and tapping her foot sternly.
This was much better. Much, much better. A less vulnerable-looking woman would have been very hard to imagine.
But out loud, he replied, calmly, ignoring the challenge in her voice because he knew that would irritate her more, “Where I come from, that wouldn’t be considered cursing, Miss Brooke. Not even close.”
“And where would that be? That you come from?” she asked snootily.
Hoping she would chalk it up to evasiveness, a quality she had already told him she disliked in men—and it seemed imperative that she dislike him—he chose to ignore her. “Just between you and me, I have never heard such strange and unpronounceable names in my life.” He gave Kolina, Number Four, who was still wearing what looked to be a silk party dress, an absent pat on her messy hair. “This one has a name like colon. Who would do that to a kid?”
“You’ll hurt her feelings,” Brooke snapped at him in an undertone.
The accusation caught him off guard, and he scanned Kolina’s face for any sign of hurt. The child gave him her toothiest grin, her psyche apparently undamaged by his dislike of her name.
“She was named after the heroine in her mother’s movie, Sinking of the Suzanne. Kolina is a beautiful name,” she assured the little girl, who didn’t have a clue what they were talking about.
Obviously, he was supposed to be impressed. He wasn’t. “Suzanne would have been a good name. Solid. Sensible.”
“That was the ship!”
“Better than a colon.”
“Kolina is a Swedish variation of Katharine,” she informed him regally.
“Yeah, so what’s wrong with the English version?” he asked.
He found he enjoyed baiting Brooke. Keeping her dislike for him high was going to be more fun than he had originally imagined. The new danger was that he rather liked how she looked when she was annoyed. Her cheeks were rosy as apples, her eyes flashed fire, and, with the barest little shove on his part, she could probably be coaxed to stamp her
