Daddy By Choice
SECOND CHANCE…Dr. Luke Jarrod remembered Madelyn Foster as a seventeen-year-old beauty with whom he'd shared one night of stolen passion. Nine months too late, he returned to discover she'd had his child but had been forced to give their daughter away. Now, after twenty years, Madelyn was back in his life, pregnant again, and needing his help desperately. Luke knew this was his chance to make good on the one truly wonderful thing that had ever happened to him. This amazing woman deserved a knight in shining armor. Could the wary Luke be both a father to her baby–and a man worthy of her precious love?
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At seventeen, she’d never seen a more perfect example of manliness,
Madelyn thought, thinking back to when she first met Luke. One look and she’d wanted him to be the first to make love to her. Now, watching him sleep, a shimmer of female appreciation still ran through her.
She wasn’t sure about anything when it came to Luke. She just knew he was important to her—and not just as her doctor.
His lashes fluttered as he opened his eyes, and he frowned.
“Maddy?” His voice was rusty and threaded with disbelief.
“Go to sleep, Luke,” she soothed.
“Baby?” he muttered.
“He’s fine.”
His mouth moved. “Sorry he’s not mine.”
“So am I,” she said on a suddenly shaky breath.
He smiled then. “Keep you safe, sweetheart,” he murmured. “Even from me.”
It was at that moment that she realized she still loved him.
Dear Reader,
This is a very special month here at Intimate Moments. We’re celebrating the publication of our 1000th novel, and what a book it is! Angel Meets the Badman is the latest from award-winning and bestselling Maggie Shayne, and it’s part of her ongoing miniseries, THE TEXAS BRAND. It’s a page-turner par excellence, so take it home, sit back and prepare to be enthralled.
Ruth Langan’s back, and Intimate Moments has got her. This month this historical romance star continues to win contemporary readers’ hearts with The Wildes of Wyoming—Hazard, the latest in her wonderful contemporary miniseries about the three Wilde brothers. Paula Detmer Riggs returns to MATERNITY ROW, the site of so many births—and so many happy endings—with Daddy by Choice. And look for the connected MATERNITY ROW short story, “Family by Fate,” in our new Mother’s Day collection, A Bouquet of Babies. Merline Lovelace brings readers another of the MEN OF THE BAR H in The Harder They Fall—and you’re definitely going to fall for hero Evan Henderson. Cinderella and the Spy is the latest from Sally Tyler Hayes, an author with a real knack for mixing romance and suspense in just the right proportions. And finally, there’s Safe in His Arms, a wonderful amnesia story from Christine Scott.
Enjoy them all, and we’ll see you again next month, when you can once again find some of the best and most exciting romance reading around, right here in Silhouette Intimate Moments.
Yours,
Leslie J. Wainger
Executive Senior Editor
For Annette Broadrick
A great Texas lady and a treasured friend.
PAULA DETMER RIGGS
discovers material for her writing in her varied life experiences. During her first five years of marriage to a naval officer, she lived in nineteen different locations on the West Coast, gaining familiarity with places as diverse as San Diego and Seattle. While working at an historical site in San Diego she wrote, directed and narrated fashion shows and became fascinated with the early history of California.
She writes romances because “I think we all need an escape from the high-tech pressures that face us every day, and I believe in happy endings. Isn’t that why we keep trying, in spite of all the roadblocks and disappointments along the way?”
Contents
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Epilogue
Prologue
It was hotter than hell the day Luke Jarrod returned to West Texas. Overhead the merciless sun beat down on the cab of his truck, while inside the air conditioner blasted ice from the vents.
Slouched behind the wheel, his eyes gritty from too little sleep and his shoulders stiff from too many hours driving without a break, Luke was sweating like a bridegroom with a .12-gauge shotgun at his backbone. Which was real appropriate, considerin’ he was about to become a daddy at eighteen.
It scared him some to think of his Maddy girl having a baby, her being so tiny and all. And only seventeen. Too damn young to know better, so he should have.
It had been opening day of the Whiskey Bend Stampede at the county fairgrounds when he’d first laid eyes on her. A bunch of ROTC kids from Whiskey Bend High School had been bringing in the flag, just like every other rodeo in every other town he’d seen that season. Strung tight and desperate for prize money to keep himself in tacos and his cutting horse, Cochise, in oats, he’d been standing with the more seasoned competitors in the dusty ring with his hand over his heart, watching the chicks twirling batons when his buddy Buck Mehan had dug an elbow into his ribs.
“Son,” he said, “were I ten years younger I’d be all over that little yeller-haired darlin’ in the third row, the one swishing all that glorious hair like there was no tomorrow. Man could die happy did he belong to her.”
Luke had never wanted to belong to anyone. Belonging meant obligations and responsibilities, two things he’d avoided for as long as he could remember. But one look at those slinky tanned legs and tight little butt sashaying past him, her itty-bitty skirt swishing this way and that, and he’d fallen about as hard as a man can fall without cracking wide open.
