Father Of The Brat

With much love, for Dorothy and Harold Stucker

(aka Aunt Dot and Uncle Washie).

You’re the best second set of parents a kid could have.

ELIZABETH BEVARLY

is an honors graduate of the University of Louisville and achieved her dream of writing full-time before she even turned thirty! At heart, she is also an avid voyager who once helped navigate a friend’s thirtyfive-foot sailboat across the Bermuda Triangle. “I really love to travel,” says this self-avowed beach bum. “To me, it’s the best education a person can give to herself.” Her dream is to one day have her own sailboat, a beautifully renovated older-model fortytwo-footer, and to enjoy the freedom and tranquillity seafaring can bring. Elizabeth likes to think she has a lot in common with the characters she creates, people who know love and life go hand in hand. And she’s getting some firsthand experience with maternity as well—she and her husband recently welcomed their firstborn baby, a son.

Dear Reader,

When I first discovered I was going to be included in Celebration 1000, I experienced an immediate flashback to college, when I was living in my parents’ basement, reading my very first Silhouette Desire. I had received it after responding to a Silhouette ad in Cosmopolitan magazine (I was very cosmopolitan in college, you see), and after reading the last page of the novel, I thought, “Wow, where have these books been all my life?”

I was in my final year of earning a B.A. in English, Yet nothing I had studied came close to leaving me with the sense of contentment that I received from that single red book.

I started reading every Desire I could get my hands on. And eventually, because I had always wanted to be a novelist, romance was what came out when I sat down to write my first book. It amazes me still to realize that I’m now responsible for creating the kind of books that provided me with so much for so long—romance, adventure, escape…and those wonderful happy endings that even a degree in English couldn’t stop making me crave.

I’m so delighted to be included in Celebration 1000. I’m not sure I can adequately describe what it means to be keeping literary company with the novelists I’ve always admired, to be and writing for a publisher and a line of books I’ve always loved—-to be a part of the festivities surrounding the publication of the 1000th Desire… Somehow, it fills me with a sense of completion and satisfaction that I haven’t found anywhere else.

For years, Silhouette Desire has brought me unrivaled reading pleasure. Now the folks at Silhouette provide me with unrivaled writing pleasure, too. And I can only hope you enjoy reading my books as much as I enjoy writing them.

Very best wishes,

Elizabeth Bevarly

One (#ulink_3bae1aeb-68a8-52ad-ad64-15b68930416d)

Carver Venner was beat. In the last seventy-two hours, he’d logged over eight thousand miles on his frequent flyer account, had been slapped in the face, kicked in the shins, bitten by an angry cat and shocked by an electric fence. He’d been shot at—twice—and called a filthy, stinking capitalist, an imperialist dog and a lousy tipper. He’d survived a taxi ride in a town that had few—if any—traffic laws, had eaten food he’d been hard-pressed to identify—which in itself was probably a blessing—and had somehow stumbled onto a literal den of thieves. He had a stubbed toe and a throbbing hangnail, and he could scarcely remember the last time he’d slept.

Man, the life of a journalist hadn’t turned out to be anything at all like he’d thought it would be when he’d enrolled at Columbia University twenty years ago.

How he’d managed to make it back to his South Philadelphia apartment in one piece was some vague memory he knew he was going to have to write up tomorrow. For now, though, he dropped his battered, ragged duffel bag in the middle of his bedroom floor and fell backward onto his bed with a sigh. Almost as an afterthought, he sat up to skim off his faded green polo, then found himself too exhausted to bother with the blue jeans and hiking boots he’d also been wearing since yesterday morning. Instead, he dropped onto his back again.

Sleep, he thought. Finally, finally, he could get some real sleep. He ran a restless hand over the three-day stubble of beard on his face, shoved his overly long, dark brown hair from his forehead and closed his eyes. He was just about to lose himself in the welcome relief of slumber when someone—someone who obviously had a death wish—launched into a ceaseless pounding on his front door.

“Dammit,” he muttered without moving. Maybe whoever the someone was would go away, and then he wouldn’t have to kill them after all.

But whoever it was keeping him from sleep did indeed seem to have suicidal tendencies, because the knocking just increased more loudly.

Carver sighed again, jackknifed up from his bed and staggered out to his living room. He flattened one big hand against the front door and curled the other over the knob, then stood with his chin dropped to his chest and one final hope that his visitor had gone away. But the rapping started again, even more annoying than it had been before, so he jerked the door open hard.

“What?” he barked. “What is it?”

A woman stood in the hall with her curled fingers poised at shoulder level. She was about to knock again, something that would have landed her fist in the middle of Carver’s naked chest, but she stopped herself just shy of completing the action and dropped her hand quickly back to her side. In the other hand, she carried a battered leather satchel not unlike the kind elementary schoolchildren had carried way back when Carver was young enough to have been one of them himself.

She was a good foot shorter than he, her black hair liberally threaded with silver and cropped shorter than his own. She wore round, tortoiseshell-rimmed glasses that made her brown eyes appear huge, and a shapeless olive drab trench coat over a white, baggy, man-styled shirt and brown, even baggier, man-styled trousers. Her only concession to her femininity was a filigreed antique brooch pinned at her collar and matching earrings that dangled from her ears.

She was in no way the kind of woman with whom Carver normally associated. But somehow she looked very familiar.

“Carver Venner?” she asked in a no-nonsense voice of efficiency that immediately grated on his nerves.

“Yeah, that’s me.”

“I’m with the Child Welfare Office. I’ve been assigned to your case.”

Okay, he was tired, Carver thought as he studied the woman harder, still trying to place where he might have met her. But there was no way he was so tired that he had forgotten about the presence of a child in his life.

“I beg your pardon?” he asked.

“Your daughter,” she clarified, aiding him not at all. “I’m here to assist the two of you—to help you get acquainted and settled in.”

He closed his eyes and shook his head, trying to wake himself from what was one of the most bizarre dreams he’d ever had. Unfortunately, when he opened his eyes again, he was still standing in front of his open door, and the oddly familiar woman was still staring at him.

“Do I know you?” he asked.

Her eyes widened for a moment in what he could only liken to panic, something that just compounded his confusion. Without replying, she lifted her satchel and flipped it open, shoved her hand inside and withdrew a pristine, white business card.

M. H. Garrett, L.C.S.W., it read in bold black type. Caseworker, Child Welfare Office of Pennsylvania. It was decorated with the official state seal and seemed to be legitimate.

M. H. Garrett, he repeated to himself. Nope, not a name that rang any bells. “What’s the M.H. stand for?”

“Mostly Harmless,” she told him without missing a beat.

He glanced up at the woman again only to find her staring back at him in silence, daring him to press the issue. Dammit, even her prissy voice was familiar. He was sure he knew her from somewhere, he just couldn’t remember where. It was about to drive him crazier than he already felt when he recalled that she had just accused him of having a daughter.

He smiled wryly. “I think somebody got their wires crossed somewhere, Ms. Garrett. I don’t have a daughter. In fact, I’ve never even been married, so it doesn’t seem likely that there’s a little Venner kid out there running around somewhere.”

M. H. Garrett, Caseworker, narrowed her eyes at Carver and stuck her hand back into her satchel, this time pulling out a very thick, very well used binder. She flipped through it easily until she found whatever she had been looking for, scanned a few pages, then looked up at Carver again.

“Rachel Stillman,” she said, as if those two words would explain everything.

Carver shook his head. “Sorry, never heard of her.”

Mostly Harmless Garrett eyed him warily. “She’s your daughter, Mr. Venner.”

“No, she isn’t.”

“Yes, she is.”

He chuckled, feeling more and more bizarre with every passing moment. “Oh, come on. She doesn’t even have the same last name as me. Boy, you folks at Welfare really are overworked.” He relented when he saw her lips thin into a tight line. “I assure you, Ms. Garrett, that I do not have a daughter named Rachel anything. Somebody at your office has sent you on a wild-goose chase.”

The caseworker glanced down at her notebook again. “Abigail Stillman,” she said this time.

Carver was about to tell her that he didn’t have a daughter named Abigail Stillman, either, when he remembered that he did in fact know someone by that name. Or rather, he used to know someone by that name. Another journalist he’d met in Guatemala about ten or twelve years ago. The two of them had shared a very hot, very heavy, very brief affair. One week, he recalled now, unable to halt the lascivious smile that curled his lips. And what a week it had been.

“Okay, I do know an Abby Stillman,” he told M. H. Garrett, still smiling at his heated memories. “But I haven’t heard from her in years. Have you seen her recently? How is she?”

“She’s dead.”