Special Forces Father Read online

  First comes fatherhood...

  Then comes love?

  Marine Liam Madison has always been focused on serving his country. But when he learns that he’s the father of orphaned four-year-old twins, service takes on a whole new meaning. Fortunately, the kids’ loving, gorgeous nanny, Dani Cooper, is by his side every step of the way as he learns the ropes. And as Liam falls hopelessly in love with his children, he might just be falling in love with their nanny, too...

  “You were spying,” she accused.

  “It wasn’t like I could have missed it,” he defended. “Go out and see.”

  “If I do, will you dance?” she goaded.

  He laughed again. “Not a chance.”

  “Then we won’t be even.”

  “It was quite a sight,” he teased. “I wouldn’t say you have a lot of rhythm...”

  “We were just playing.”

  He shook his head, denying that, clearly giving her a hard time. “You were totally into it.”

  “For the kids!”

  “Nah... Your eyes were closed and you were cutting loose.”

  “I know my eyes weren’t closed.”

  “They were,” he insisted with another laugh. Then, in a voice that changed to match that intimate look in his eyes, he said, “You were a sight to see...”

  He was looking at her so intently there seemed to be something to see now, too. And out of nowhere a memory flooded her: the vivid image of him walking out of the locker room at the pool today.

  Oh, that body.

  That face and hair.

  Those cobalt blue eyes that were holding hers...

  AMERICAN HEROES:

  They’re coming home—and finding love!

  Dear Reader,

  Nanny Dani Cooper is the temporary guardian of four-year-old twins until their biological father can be determined. She’s using this time to regroup after a sad loss of her own that left her with some life-changing choices to make for herself.

  Liam Madison is a Special Forces marine who returned from a lengthy mission to find two surprising and disturbing messages—his twin brother has been seriously injured in an IED explosion, and an old flame has claimed on her deathbed that he’s the father of two four-year-olds.

  Liam rushes stateside to deal with both issues, but the last thing he expects is to find a delightful, beautiful nanny willing to help him sort through his problems in trade for him lending a hand with hers. But that’s what happens. And while they wait for DNA paternity results, a whole lot more happens, too, that could—or could not—make them a family.

  As always, happy reading!

  Victoria Pade

  SPECIAL FORCES FATHER

  Victoria Pade

  www.millsandboon.com.au

  VICTORIA PADE is a USA TODAY bestselling author of numerous romance novels. She has two beautiful and talented daughters—Cori and Erin—and is a native of Colorado, where she lives and writes. A devoted chocolate lover, she’s in search of the perfect chocolate-chip-cookie recipe.

  To my editor, Elizabeth Mazer,

  who kindly, tactfully and with humor embraces

  my characters, kicks them in the shins and

  complicates their lives in ways that make better books.

  I have so, so enjoyed our collaborations

  and would give much for it to go on and on.

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Excerpt from How to Be a Blissful Bride by Stacy Connelly

  Excerpt from The Texas Cowboy’s Quadruplets by Cathy Gillen Thacker

  Chapter One

  “It’s princess hair.”

  Really bad princess hair, Dani Cooper thought as she looked at herself in the hand mirror that her four-year-old hairstylist Evie Freelander brought her.

  But she said, “Oh, I feel like a princess now.”

  “That’s not princess hair,” Evie’s twin brother, Grady, decreed when he looked up from his coloring book to assess his sister’s work. “Princess hair looks pretty.”

  “It’s pretty because Dani is pretty!” Evie insisted.

  “Thank you,” Dani said with a laugh, turning her head from side to side to get the full view of her long dark mahogany hair. Evie had attempted to braid four different clumps of it and then secured those clumps with neon hair clips haphazardly around her head.

  Dani had applied light makeup that April morning to accentuate her golden-brown eyes, her thin nose and her full lips, and that was still in place this evening, but she was glad no one outside the Freelander home would be seeing her like this.

  “Okay, clean up now,” she said. “It’s time for our ten-minute dance party to get the wiggles out, and then it’s pajamas and your wind-down for bed.”

  “Dance party!” Grady shouted, quickly putting his markers in their box while Evie made a face and fell back on the sofa as if in a faint.

  “Can Grady help me?” she moaned.

  After three years as the twins’ nanny, Dani knew this routine. “Nope,” she answered Evie. “Grady is picking up his stuff and you need to pick up yours. Or we’ll dance without you!” she finished with a cheery reminder of what the consequences would be.

  Evie groaned again, sat up as if it was a chore for her and gathered the mirror, toy hairbrush and what remained of the clips to put away.

  “I’ll meet you in the dance room,” Dani called after them when they headed for their rooms to return their things.

  The Freelander house was a large, starkly contemporary structure of glass, steel and concrete. It sat far back on a huge lot at the end of a cul-de-sac in one of Denver’s upscale gated communities in the Cherry Creek area. The distance from the street allowed for some privacy despite the undraped windows that comprised almost the entire front of the house.

  The twins’ mother had taken ballet lessons several times a week as her workout and the in-home studio occupied one of the front-facing rooms. The kids liked to cut loose there. They got a kick out of the echo. So that was where Dani let them have their dance parties.

  As she went into the dark room she could see outside, where the curved drive was illuminated by in-ground lighting. But the minute she turned on the lights the windows reflected only inside the room.

  She got the music started just as the four-year-olds ran back in.

  “Ready?” she asked them before all three of them launched into some free-form jumping, footwork and wiggling around that amounted to wild gyrations more than anything that resembled dancing.

  Their ten minutes were nearly up when the doorbell rang.

  Dani’s friend Bryan had said he might stop by tonight after the kids were asleep, so she hadn’t yet turned on the security system. He was early.

  At the sound of the doorbell the dancing stopped and, as Dani turned off the music, both kids went to the window, where they bracketed their eyes with their hands and pressed their faces to the glass to see out.

  “It’s a so-dyer,” Grady announced.

  “A soldier?” Dani repeated the word he’d mispronounced.

  “It is,” Evie confirmed.

  With the twins following behind, Dani left the studio and went to the marble entry hall, certain that the eight-foot-high steel front door was locked. Beside the door were an intercom and a small scre
en that displayed the images picked up by the camera outside.

  “You’re right, it is a soldier,” she mused, convinced by the officer’s service uniform and the straight, stiff military stance of their visitor that made him look as if he were at attention out there.

  She pushed the button on the intercom and said, “Can I help you?”

  “I’m Liam Madison. I got a message from someone named Dani Cooper. I’m looking for the Freelander house...”

  Ohhh, she knew the name Liam Madison.

  Not the man but the name.

  But since she didn’t know the man and she was very protective of the twins, she said, “Do you have some identification?”

  He produced a military ID, complete with a picture, and held it up to the camera.

  Holy cow, he was handsome!

  And that was only his ID picture.

  She’d been distracted by the uniform, but when he took the ID away from the camera lens she took in the sight of his face, realizing that he was definitely hella-handsome. He also was, indeed, Liam Madison, and since it was Dani who had reached out to him, and the twins who were in need of him, she unlocked the door and opened it.

  “Hi,” she said simply, taking in what neither the four-inch security screen nor the ID picture had done justice to.

  Not only was the guy gorgeous, he was also over six feet tall, broad shouldered, toned and muscular. His hair was closely cropped and the color of unsweetened chocolate. His face was a masterpiece of chiseled bone that gave him refined cheekbones, a sharp jawline, a sculpted chin and a nose that was kept from being completely perfect by a bit of a boney bridge. He had slightly thin lips, and the bluest eyes she’d ever seen, streaked by silver to make them even more remarkable.

  “I’m Dani Cooper,” she introduced.

  “Ma’am,” he said formally to acknowledge the introduction.

  “This is a surprise,” she said.

  “I was granted an emergency family leave and just got off a plane at Buckley Air Force Base.”

  “Even though you’re a—”

  “Marine. Yes, ma’am.”

  “Is he a so-dyer?” Grady asked, hiding behind Dani while Evie stood to one side of her.

  “Soldiers are army,” he corrected.

  He got points for understanding the word, but getting so technical with a four-year-old only made Dani smile.

  Just before she remembered what Evie had done to her hair and how she looked meeting this man for the first time.

  But if he’d noticed that she was unsightly there was no evidence of it. And there was nothing she could do about it now, so she merely said, “This is Grady and this is Evie,” nodding to each child in turn. “Guys, this was a friend of your mom’s. His name is Liam.”

  Any mention of their late parents sobered them and this was no exception.

  “Say hello,” she prompted when neither the kids nor Liam Madison responded to the introduction.

  “H’lo,” both children parroted, eyeing him somberly the way they did all strangers.

  “Nice to meet you,” the marine said as much by rote as the kids’ greeting had been.

  It occurred to Dani just then that she’d kept their guest outside long enough. She invited him in and dispatched the twins to put on their pajamas.

  “Get your blankets for wind-down and I’ll bring your yogurts and milk in just a minute,” she instructed as Liam Madison stepped across the threshold to stand at attention inside rather than out.

  Hella-handsome but not warm and fuzzy. Dani was familiar with that military-instilled rigidity.

  As the kids bounded out of the entry she closed the door, motioned behind her with a thumb over her shoulder and said, “Why don’t we talk in the kitchen? I’ll be able to hear them better from there.”

  The marine nodded curtly and followed her as she led him in the same direction the kids had gone, to the rear of the expansive house.

  “Can I get you something to eat or drink?” she asked along the way.

  “Thank you, no. But you could tell me who you are, exactly.”

  Like the rest of the house, the kitchen was industrial, and she offered him a seat on one of the metal bar stools at the stainless steel island in the center of it.

  He didn’t accept the offer, remaining standing at one end of the island while Dani went behind it and got out bowls, spoons and glasses, and then took yogurt and milk from the fridge.

  “I’ve been Evie and Grady’s nanny since they turned a year old and switched from a baby-nurse. Well, I’ve been their primary nanny. There was one who came in at bedtime for overnights, and another for the weekends. But after the accident—”

  “What kind of accident?” he interrupted. “Your message said that’s how Audrey and her husband died but you didn’t give any details.”

  Dani had no idea what kind of feelings this man might still have for Audrey, so she trod lightly when she answered. “It was a car wreck. I don’t know what you know about Owen, Audrey’s husband...”

  “When she ended things with me she just said she’d met someone else,” he said matter-of-factly, giving no indication that he had any lingering resentments. Or tender feelings either.

  “Owen Freelander was an acclaimed architect. He designed and built this place—it was his showpiece. His crowning glory just before he retired.”

  “Retired?”

  “He was a lot older than Audrey. He’d just turned sixty-eight a few weeks before the accident.”

  “Sixty-eight?” the marine repeated in surprise. “Audrey was a year younger than I am so she was thirty-one... Her husband was thirty-seven years older?”

  “He seemed like a young sixty-eight, but there was definitely an age difference. And even though he also seemed healthy, he had a heart attack driving home that night three weeks ago. He died when he lost control of the car and hit a tree. Audrey was critically injured. She only lived for two days...”

  Still unsure how the marine felt about her late employer, Dani paused a moment and then said, “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s a shock—this whole thing is a shock—but I haven’t seen or heard from Audrey in over five years. I didn’t wish her any harm but I moved on a long time ago. I don’t think I’m in line for condolences.”

  Dani nodded as she finished spooning yogurt into bowls. “Audrey lived just long enough to tell me about you, to ask me to try to contact you to take the twins.”

  “Because I’m their father?”

  The guy seemed tough as nails until he said that, and Dani heard an underlying note in his voice, clueing her in to how dumbfounded and unsettled he really was by the prospect.

  “She told me that she knew she was pregnant when she broke up with you but there was something about a phone call when she hadn’t been able to talk to you for months? Whatever you said to her made her know that was how it would always be?”

  “I’m Force Recon... Reconnaissance... That’s US Marine Special Forces. When I’m on a mission I’m out of touch. I can’t be reached. That’s how it had been for a while before I had the chance to call her, after we’d seen each other the last time. It’s how every mission is, how my next mission was going to be. And I never know how long a mission will take. Plus I couldn’t ever tell her where I was or what I was doing either. She couldn’t know anything,” he explained. “No one can.”

  “Well, I guess that conversation, learning that, convinced her that she didn’t want a relationship anymore with someone who wasn’t available to her. She’d found out that she was having twins. She’d met Owen and he wanted her to marry him. He was even willing to claim the babies as his own. Owen’s name is on the birth certificates as Evie and Grady’s dad.” Dani said that last part gently because she also had no idea how it might affect him.

  He scowled but she wasn’t sure whether that was out of anger o
r hurt or what. But since he didn’t say anything, she went on answering his initial question about who she was.

  “Anyway, Audrey told me that you—not Owen—are the twins’ father. She knew she wasn’t going to make it and neither Audrey nor Owen had any family to turn to for the kids. She said you were all they would have left and that I needed to let you know about them. To try to contact you through the marines...”

  He was still just frowning, saying nothing, so she merely continued.

  “There wasn’t even a guardian named in their wills, so when Audrey passed, Evie and Grady became wards of the state. But I just couldn’t see them go into foster care. I sent you that message right away and talked to Owen’s attorney so he could approach the court to ask that I be named the twins’ temporary guardian. I told the judge what Audrey had confessed about you, and that I’d sent you word, and asked that they let me do whatever needed to be done so Evie and Grady could at least stay at home, with a familiar face, until this gets sorted through. So that’s who I am—formerly their nanny, now their guardian.”

  “We’re ready,” Evie called.

  “I’ll be right back,” Dani said, taking a tray with the bowls of yogurt and the glasses of milk across the kitchen to the stairs that led to the children’s portion of the house. It was four steps down from the main floor and devoted to the twins’ bedrooms and a nanny’s suite she was using. There was also a play area and a living room complete with the kids’ own entertainment center.

  “Is that man still here?” Grady whispered as she got them set up to watch the animated shows they were allowed before bed.

  “He is. We’re talking in the kitchen if you need me.”

  “He’s kinda scary,” Evie whispered, too.

  “You don’t need to be scared of him. Remember he was a friend of your mom’s. She wouldn’t have been friends with him if there was anything to be scared about, would she?”

  There was no answer, so Dani said, “She wouldn’t have been. I think he’s just a little sad that she’s gone—like we all are.”