The Single Dad's Guarded Heart

The Single Dad's Guarded Heart
Roz Denny Fox

Enjoy the dreams, explore the emotions, experience the relationships.Fly away home Park ranger Wylie Ames doesn’t want a wife. His son, Dean, and he are getting on just fine on their own. But when Marlee Stein comes home to help run her family’s charter air service, their easy way of life comes crashing to the ground. First Dean falls for Marlee and her little daughter, Jo Beth. Suddenly there’s a distinctly feminine presence in their bachelor lifestyle. Then a tentative friendship forms between Marlee and Wylie.He’s been guarding himself from happiness for so long, Wylie almost doesn’t know how to ask for more – but surprisingly, wonderfully, things start to change between them…

“Mama, there’s a boy waving.”

Jo Beth waved back excitedly, and Marlee noticed a man standing at the end of the runway.

She throttled back, unable to take her eyes off him. It flashed through Marlee’s mind that from a distance the raven-haired, broad-shouldered man reminded her of Cole, her husband, before he’d taken ill and his fine body had wasted away. Suddenly her hands shook and the plane dipped.

She quickly regained control, but landed with an irritating hop – a beginner’s mistake that unnerved her as she powered down. Ripping off her headset, Marlee leaped from the cockpit and shook out her hair, only to discover as she watched the taciturn Wylie Ames that he watched her, too.

Marlee hurried around the plane’s nose to assist Jo Beth. For some reason, Marlee disliked the fact that Ames was too far away for her to tell the colour of his eyes. Ace-of-spades black would be her guess – to go with the scowl he wore.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

wrote her first book in 1989. She moved to the Superromance line a few years later and has published over twenty-five novels to date. Roz has been a finalist for the prestigious RITA

Award and also for the Holt Medallion and the Golden Quill award, among others. She lives in Tucson, Arizona, with her husband, Denny. They have two daughters.

Dear Reader,

I read an article in a rural newspaper about the area’s inclusion in a much-needed and longed-for volunteer life-flight organisation. The article discussed the vital role these groups play in helping with critical-care patients living in remote regions of the United States.

Intrigued, I began to look up and gather information on the many groups of volunteer pilots that exist across this vast country.

If my fictional flight group, Angel Fleet, bears any resemblance to a real mercy-flight corps, it’s purely accidental. The services they provide, of course, are similar, but my characters are totally of my own making.

Since my books are first and foremost love stories, I wanted to integrate my characters’ work with a story about how they meet and fall in love.

The first of these two linked books is The Single Dad’s Guarded Heart. It’s about renewal and finding love a second time around.

Best always,

Roz Denny Fox

I love to hear from readers.

Roz Denny Fox

e-mail rdfox@worldnet.att.net

PO Box 17480-101

Tucson, AZ 85731, USA.

The Single Dad’s

Guarded Heart

ROZ DENNY FOX

www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)

CHAPTER ONE

MARLEE STEIN TOPPED a ridge, leaving behind Whitepine, Montana, the town closest to where she’d been born and raised. She rolled down the driver’s window, breathing in the autumn scent of the piney wilderness, and felt herself relax. Until then, she hadn’t been aware of how tense she’d gotten on the long drive from San Diego.

Who was she kidding? She’d been riddled with tension for the past five years.

But now, on this lonely stretch of highway with nothing but fall sunlight sprinkling pine-needle patterns across her windshield, she began to shed the stress that had become so crushing.

She’d realized that the sense of heaviness and regret might always be with her. It was barely a year since she’d lost Cole to the ravages of lymphatic cancer. Too young. His life snuffed out at thirty-six. There was so much they hadn’t done. One of the many things they’d talked about but never got around to was visiting this beautiful country Marlee loved.

They’d been introduced by mutual friends. Had dated for a whirlwind thirty days, married on base in a fever pitch driven by the demands of their jobs—she, a navy helicopter pilot on the verge of shipping out; he an officer with an eye to one day commanding his own ship. It seemed a lifetime ago, those scant six years they’d shared. Or not shared, since much of it had been spent apart. But…so many dreams, all left in tatters. Widowed at thirty-four, Marlee was running home to hide.

No, to rebuild a shattered life—according to her twin brother, anyway.

Mick Callen, her twin, knew about rebuilding a life. A pilot, too, he’d been shot down over Afghanistan—what was it—four years ago? Mick had come home to Whitepine and forged a new life. On almost a weekly basis during the past awful year, he’d insisted that Marlee could do the same. She wanted to believe him.

Averting her eyes from the ribbon of highway, she glanced in the rearview mirror of her packed-to-the-ceiling Ford Excursion. Jo Beth slept on. Without doubt, her daughter was the most precious part of her too-brief marriage.

Maybe their lives could get back on track. Mick thought so, or he wouldn’t have badgered his twin to join the family airfreight business, Cloud Chasers, originally started by their grandfather, Jack Callen. Everybody called him Pappy. He’d taught her and Mick to fly anything with wings, and they’d developed a love affair with flying.

It seemed unreal that they’d both come full circle. Fate, maybe? In the days immediately following Cole’s death, Marlee had thought about the circle of life, but Whitepine was the last place she’d envisioned herself ending up. Big plans, she’d discovered, were best left to starry-eyed innocents. Reality made its own claims. And to think she and Cole had worried that her naval career presented a greater risk of death. She, who’d done two tours in the Gulf.

Releasing a sigh, she wiped a sweaty palm on her jeans. Really baggy jeans, she noticed, and grimaced. She’d lost weight—was down to a hundred and five pounds. Skeletal, her lieutenant commander had growled when he’d signed her discharge papers.

Mick would probably be shocked. Or maybe not. He’d suffered through his own months of hell in military hospitals after he took a legful of shrapnel and debris from his F/A-18, when a handheld surface-to-air missile blasted him out of the sky.

The Callen twins, who’d left Whitepine for the naval academy with grandiose ideas, had come full circle, all right.

A mile to go. Nervous, Marlee wasn’t altogether sure what to expect. Three years ago Mick had said he’d found Cloud Chasers in sad shape. Pappy Jack apparently suffered from arteriosclerotic heart disease, which caused bouts of dementia. It must be true; otherwise he’d never have let the business decline.

Through hard work, Mick said he’d enticed old customers back and added new accounts. He regularly groused about needing an extra pair of hands. Marlee hoped he truly did. Because it was crucial to end her former mother-in-law’s influence on Jo Beth. Rose Stein spoiled her and undermined Marlee’s control. It had taken an unpleasant court skirmish to defeat her attempt at custody.

Dipping into the last valley, Marlee was finally home. The family holdings, house business—the whole panorama—was a welcome sight. The main log house and the three smaller cabins that were added over the fifty years Pappy built Cloud Chasers.

Marlee battled tears as she saw the runway, still with that tacky wind sock at the end. Home looked refreshingly the same. As did the metal hangar with its add-on maintenance bay and cubbyhole office—so small an area their mom used to complain about it daily when she answered phones and kept the books. Before Shane and Eve Callen were killed coming home one foggy night. At an unmarked train crossing out of Whitepine. Two more senseless deaths.

Marlee blinked rapidly and swung onto the gravel drive. Memories of the parents they’d lost when she and Mick were starting junior high threatened to overwhelm her; instead, she busied herself counting planes. A single-engine Piper Arrow and a newer turboprop Piper Seneca, a silver gleam in the last bay. The battered, refurbished Huey army helicopter she loved sat in the clearing between the smaller two cabins.

Marlee could handle every machine there. But she’d told Mick she wouldn’t fly. As Jo Beth’s sole guardian, she owed it to her daughter not to take any more risks. Her brother had expressed disappointment, but in the end he’d agreed that if she reduced his overflowing paperwork and helped ride herd on Pappy, who sometimes tended to wander, it’d be enough. A godsend, in fact. So here she was.

Her thoughts of Mick and Pappy Jack must have made them materialize—there they were, looking solid and welcoming and, well—beautiful.

She jammed on the brakes and the Ford’s tires skidded. Uncaring, Marlee jumped out, flinging her arms wide. Hugging Mick, she felt her tears on his blue cotton shirt. Still tall and blond and muscular, her twin squeezed her hard. And when he let go, Pappy Jack hugged her, too. At eighty-five, he was thinner than she remembered. His full head of hair was nearly white where it’d been nut-brown. Still the same, though, were his aquamarine eyes, a trait borne by all Callens. And his shimmered with unshed tears.

All three began talking at once. They were stopped abruptly by a wail from inside the Excursion. Spinning, Marlee dashed to the open door. She tried unsuccessfully to quiet the sobs and coax five-year-old Jo Beth Stein out to meet her uncle and great-grandpa. “Hey, tiddledywink, I’m right here. It’s okay, I haven’t left you. Jo Beth, this is our new home. Come say hi to Uncle Mick, and to Pappy Jack. Remember I showed you pictures of them before we packed my albums?”