Double Duty For The Cowboy
A marriage of convenience...
Turns into the love of their lives!
When Regan Channing finds herself in the family way, the last thing she expects is for another man to make her his wife! Especially not former bad boy Connor Neal. But Connor’s changed. Pretty soon Regan’s newborn twins have him wrapped around their fingers. And the electricity sizzling between Connor and Regan could power Haven for days. But can the deputy’s debt of obligation ever become true love?
BRENDA HARLEN is a former lawyer who once had the privilege of appearing before the Supreme Court of Canada. The practice of law taught her a lot about the world and reinforced her determination to become a writer—because in fiction, she could promise a happy ending! Now she is an award-winning, RITA® Award–nominated national bestselling author of more than thirty titles for Mills & Boon. You can keep up-to-date with Brenda on Facebook and Twitter or through her website, brendaharlen.com.
Also by Brenda Harlen
The Sheriff’s Nine-Month Surprise HerSeven-Day FiancéSix Weeks to Catch a CowboyClaiming the Cowboy’s Heart
A Wife for One YearThe Daddy WishA Forever Kind of FamilyThe Bachelor Takes a BrideTwo Doctors & a BabyBuilding the Perfect Daddy
Discover more at millsandboon.co.uk
Double Duty for the Cowboy
Brenda Harlen
www.millsandboon.co.uk
ISBN: 978-1-474-09108-4
DOUBLE DUTY FOR THE COWBOY
© 2019 Brenda Harlen
Published in Great Britain 2019
by Mills & Boon, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers 1 London Bridge Street, London, SE1 9GF
All rights reserved including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form. This edition is published by arrangement with Harlequin Books S.A.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, locations and incidents are purely fictional and bear no relationship to any real life individuals, living or dead, or to any actual places, business establishments, locations, events or incidents. Any resemblance is entirely coincidental.
By payment of the required fees, you are granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right and licence to download and install this e-book on your personal computer, tablet computer, smart phone or other electronic reading device only (each a “Licensed Device”) and to access, display and read the text of this e-book on-screen on your Licensed Device. Except to the extent any of these acts shall be permitted pursuant to any mandatory provision of applicable law but no further, no part of this e-book or its text or images may be reproduced, transmitted, distributed, translated, converted or adapted for use on another file format, communicated to the public, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of publisher.
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Version: 2020-03-02
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Contents
Cover
Back Cover Text
About the Author
Booklist
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Epilogue
Extract
About the Publisher
Prologue
It had been a fairly quiet week in Haven, and Connor Neal was grateful that trend seemed to be continuing on this Friday night of the last long weekend of summer. Sometimes the presence of law enforcement was enough to deter trouble, so the deputy had parked his patrol car in front of Diggers’ Bar & Grill and strolled along Main Street.
There was a crowd gathered outside Mann’s Theater, moviegoers waiting for the early show to let out so they could find their seats for the late viewing. Construction workers were sawing and hammering inside The Stagecoach Inn, preparing the old building for its grand reopening early in the New Year. Half a dozen vehicles were parked by The Trading Post; several people lingered over coffee and conversation at The Daily Grind.
He waved at Glenn Davis, as the owner of the hardware store locked up, then resumed his journey. Making his way back toward Diggers’, he heard the unmistakable sound of retching. Apparently, patrol tonight was going to include chauffeur service for at least one inebriated resident, which was preferable to letting a drunk navigate the streets. He only hoped that whoever would be getting into the backseat of his car for the ride home had thoroughly emptied their stomach first.
He followed the sound around to the side of the building, where he discovered a nicely shaped derriere in a short navy skirt, beneath the hem of which stretched long, shapely legs. He felt a familiar tug low in his belly that immediately identified the owner of those sexy legs—it was the same reaction he had whenever he was in close proximity to Regan Channing.
She braced a hand on the brick and slowly straightened up, and he could see that she wore a tailored shirt in a lighter shade of blue with the skirt, and her long blond hair was tied back in a loose ponytail. She turned around then, and her eyes—an intriguing mix of green and gray—widened with surprise.
Her face was pale and drawn, her cheekbones sharply defined, her lips full and perfectly shaped. It didn’t seem to matter that she’d been throwing up in the bushes, Regan Channing was still—to Connor’s mind—the prettiest girl in all of Haven, Nevada.
She pulled a tissue out of her handbag and wiped her mouth.
He gave her a moment to compose herself before he said, “Are you okay?”
“No.” She shook her head, those gorgeous eyes filling with tears. “But thanks for asking.”
He waited a beat, but apparently she didn’t intend to say anything more on the subject. He took the initiative again. “Can I give you a ride home?”
“No need,” she said. “I’ve got my car.”
“Maybe so, but I don’t think you should be driving.”
“I’m feeling a lot better now—really,” she told him.
“I’m glad,” he said. “But I can’t let you get behind the wheel in your condition.”
“My condition?” she echoed, visibly shaken by his remark. “How do you know—” she cut herself off, shaking her head again. “You don’t know. You think I’ve been drinking.”
“It’s the usual reason for someone throwing up outside the town’s favorite watering hole,” he noted.
Regan nodded, acknowledging the validity of his point. “But I’m not drunk... I’m pregnant.”
Chapter One
Six and a half months later
Regan shifted carefully in the bed.
She felt as if every muscle in her body had been stretched and strained, but maybe that was normal after twenty-two hours of labor had finally resulted in the birth of her twin baby girls. Despite her aches, the new mom felt a smile tug at her lips when she looked at the bassinet beside her hospital bed and saw Piper and Poppy snuggled close together, as they’d been in her womb.
The nurse had advocated for “cobedding,” suggesting that it might help the newborns sleep better and longer. Regan didn’t know if the close proximity was responsible for their slumber now or if they were just exhausted from the whole birthing ordeal, but she was grateful that they were sleeping soundly.
And they weren’t the only ones, she realized, when she saw a familiar figure slumped in a chair in the corner. “Connor?”
He was immediately awake, leaning forward to ask, “What do you need?”
She just shook her head. “What time is it?”
He glanced at his watch. “A few minutes after eleven.”
Which meant that she’d been out for less than two hours. Still, she felt a little better now than when she’d closed her eyes. Not exactly rested and refreshed, but better.
Her husband hadn’t left her side for a moment during her labor, which made her wonder, “Why are you still here?”
Thick, dark brows rose over warm brown eyes. “Where did you think I’d be?”
“Home,” she suggested. “Where you could get some real sleep in a real bed.”
He shrugged, his broad shoulders straining the seams of the Columbia Law sweatshirt—a Christmas gift from his brother—that he’d tugged over his head when she’d awakened him to say that her water had broken. “I didn’t want to leave you.”
Her throat tightened with emotion and she silently cursed the hormones that had kept her strapped into an emotional roller coaster for the past eight months. Since that long ago night when she’d first told Connor about her pregnancy, he’d been there for her, every step of the way. He’d held her hand at the first prenatal appointment—where they’d both been shocked to learn that she was going to have twins; he’d coached her through every contraction as she worked to bring their babies into the world; he’d even cut the umbilical cords—an act that somehow bonded them even more closely than the platinum bands they’d exchanged six months earlier.
“I think you couldn’t stand to let the girls out of your sight,” she teased now.
“That might be true, too.” He covered her hand with his, squeezing gently. “Because they’re every bit as beautiful as their mama.”
She lifted her other hand to brush her hair away from her face. “I’d be afraid to even look in a mirror right now,” she confided, all too aware that she hadn’t washed her hair or even showered after sweating through the arduous labor.
“You’re beautiful,” Connor said again, and sounded as if he meant it.
She glanced away, uncertain how to respond. Over the past few months, there had been hints of something growing between them—aside from the girth of her belly—tempting Regan to hope that the marriage they’d entered into for the sake of their babies might someday become more.
Then a movement in the bassinet caught her eye. “It looks like Poppy’s waking up.”
He followed the direction of her gaze and smiled at the big yawn on the little girl’s face. “Are you sure that’s not Piper?”
“No,” she admitted.
Although the twins weren’t genetically identical, it wasn’t easy to tell them apart. Poppy’s hair was a shade darker than her sister’s, and Piper had a half-moon-shaped birthmark beside her belly button, but of course, they were swaddled in blankets with caps on their heads, so neither telltale feature was visible right now.
He chuckled softly.
“Do you think she’s hungry?” Regan asked worriedly.
The nurse had encouraged her to feed on demand, which meant putting the babies to her breast whenever they were awake and hungry. But her milk hadn’t come in yet, so naturally Regan worried that her babies were always hungry because they weren’t getting any sustenance.
“Let me change her diaper and then we’ll see,” Connor suggested.
She appreciated that he didn’t balk at doing the messy jobs. Of course, parenthood was brand new to both of them, and changing diapers was still more of a novelty than a chore. With two infants, she suspected that would change quickly. The doting daddy might be ducking out of diaper changes before the week was out, but for now, she was grateful for the offer because it meant that her weary and aching body didn’t have to get out of bed.
“She’s so tiny,” he said again, as he carefully lifted one of the pink-blanketed bundles out of the bassinet.
They were the first words he’d spoken when newborn Piper had been placed in his hands, his voice thick with a combination of reverence and fear.
“Not according to Dr. Amaro,” she reminded him.
In fact, the doctor had remarked that the babies were good sizes for twins born two weeks early. Piper had weighed in at five pounds, eight ounces and measured eighteen and a half inches; Poppy had tipped the scale at five pounds, ten ounces and stretched out to an even eighteen inches. Still, she’d recommended that the new mom spend several days in the hospital with her babies to ensure they were feeding and growing before they went home.
But Regan agreed with Connor that the baby did look tiny, especially cradled as she was now in her daddy’s big hands.
“And you were right,” he said, as he unsnapped the baby’s onesie to access her diaper. “This is Poppy.”
Which only meant that the newborn didn’t have a birthmark, not that her mother was particularly astute or intuitive.
Throughout her pregnancy, Regan had often felt out of her element and completely overwhelmed by the prospect of motherhood. When she was younger, several of her friends had earned money by babysitting, but Regan had never done so. She liked kids well enough; she just didn’t have any experience with them.
She’d quickly taken to her niece—the daughter of her younger brother, Spencer. But Dani had been almost four years old the first time Regan met her, a little girl already walking and talking. A baby was a completely different puzzle—not just smaller but so much more fragile, unable to communicate except through cries that might mean she was hungry or wet or unhappy or any number of other things. And even after months spent preparing for the birth of her babies, Regan didn’t feel prepared.
Thankfully, Connor didn’t seem to suffer from the same worries and doubts. He warmed the wipe between his palms before folding back the wet diaper to gently clean the baby’s skin.
“Did you borrow that plastic baby from our prenatal classes to practice on?” she wondered aloud.
He chuckled as he slid a clean diaper beneath Poppy’s bottom. “No.”
“Then how do you seem to know what you’re doing already?”
“My brother’s eight years younger than me,” he reminded her. “And I changed enough of Deacon’s diapers way back when to remember the basics of how it’s done.”
There was a photo in Brielle’s baby album of Regan holding her infant sister in her lap and a bottle in the baby’s mouth, but she didn’t have any recollection of the event. She’d certainly never been responsible for taking care of her younger siblings. Instead, the routine childcare tasks had fallen to the family housekeeper, Celeste, because both Margaret and Ben Channing had spent most of their waking hours at Blake Mining.
But Connor’s mom hadn’t had the help of a live-in cook and housekeeper. If even half the stories that circulated around town were true, Faith Parrish worked three part-time jobs to pay the bills, often leaving her youngest son in the care of his big brother. Deacon’s father had been in the picture for half a dozen years or so, but the general consensus in town was that he’d done nothing to help out at home and Faith was better off when he left. But everything Regan thought she knew about Connor’s childhood was based on hearsay and innuendo, because even after six months of marriage, her husband remained tight-lipped about his family history.
Which didn’t prevent her from asking: “Your father didn’t help out much, did he?”
“Stepfather,” he corrected automatically. “And no. He was always too busy.”
“Doing what?” she asked, having heard that a serious fall had left the man with a back injury and unable to work.
“Watching TV and drinking beer,” Connor said bluntly, as he slathered petroleum jelly on Poppy’s bottom to protect her delicate skin before fastening the Velcro tabs on the new diaper.
“I guess you didn’t miss him much when he left,” she remarked.
He lifted the baby, cradling her gently against his chest as he carried her over to the bed. “I certainly didn’t miss being knocked around.”
She felt her skin go cold. “Your stepfather hit you?”
“Only when he was drinking.”
Which he’d just admitted the man spent most of his time doing.
“How did I not know any of this?” she wondered aloud, as she unfastened her top to put the baby to her breast.
He shrugged again and turned away, as if to give her privacy.
If the topic of their conversation hadn’t been so serious, Regan might have laughed at the idea of preserving even a shred of modesty with a man who’d watched the same baby now suckling at her breast come into the world between her widely spread legs.
“It’s not something I like to talk about,” he said, facing the closed blinds of the window.
“So why are you telling me now?” she asked curiously.
It was a good question, Connor acknowledged to himself.
He’d tried to bury that part of his past in the past. He didn’t even like to think about those dark days when Dwayne Parrish had lived in the rented, ramshackle bungalow with him and his brother and their mother. To Dwayne, ruling with an iron fist wasn’t just an expression but a point of pride most often made at his stepson’s expense.
He turned back around, silently acknowledging that if he was going to have this conversation with his wife, they needed to have it face-to-face.
“Because part of me worries that, after living with him for seven years, I might have picked up his short fuse,” he finally confided.
Regan immediately shook her head. “You didn’t.”
“We’ve only been married for six months. How can you know?”
“Because I know you,” she said. “You are gentle and generous and giving.”
“I hit him back once,” he revealed.
She didn’t seem bothered or even surprised by the admission. “Only once?”
“I never thought to fight back.”
As a kid, he’d believed he was being disciplined for misbehavior. By the time he was old enough to question what was happening, he was so accustomed to being smacked around, it was no more or less than he expected.
“Not until he backhanded Deacon,” he confided.
His little brother had been about seven years old when he’d accidentally kicked over a bottle of beer on the floor by Dwayne’s recliner, spilling half its contents. Deacon’s father had responded with a string of curses and a swift backhand that knocked the child off his feet.
“You wouldn’t stand up for yourself, but you stood up for your brother,” she mused.
“Someone had to,” he pointed out. “He was just a kid.”
“And how old were you?”
“Fifteen.”
“Still a kid yourself,” she remarked. “What did he... How did your stepfather respond?”
“He was furious with me—that I dared to interfere.” And he’d expressed his anger with his fists and his feet, while Deacon cowered in the corner, sobbing. “But I guess one of our neighbors heard the ruckus and called the sheriff.”
Faith had arrived home at almost the same time as the lawman. Connor didn’t know if his mother would have found the strength to ask her husband to leave if Jed Traynor hadn’t been there with his badge and gun. But he was and she did, and Dwayne opted to pack up and take off rather than spend the night—or maybe several years—in lockup.
“He left that night and never came back,” Connor said.
“Is that when you decided that you wanted to wear a badge someday?” Regan asked.
“It was,” he confirmed. “I know it sounds cheesy, but I wanted to help those who couldn’t help themselves.”
She shook her head. “I don’t think it sounds cheesy. And that’s how I know you’re going to be an amazing dad.”
“Because I finally stood up to my stepfather?”
“Because you didn’t hesitate to do what was necessary to protect someone you care about,” she clarified.
“There isn’t anything I wouldn’t do for my brother,” Connor acknowledged.
And apparently, that included lying to his wife about the reasons he’d married her.
Chapter Two
As Regan climbed the steps toward the front door of the modest two-story on Larrea Drive that had been her home since she married the deputy, she knew that she should be accustomed to surprises by now. Over the past eight months, her life had been a seemingly endless parade of unexpected news and events.
It had all started with the plus sign in the little window on the home pregnancy test. The second—and even bigger surprise—had come in the form of not one but two heartbeats on the screen at her ultrasound appointment. The third—and perhaps the biggest shock of all—Connor Neal’s unexpected marriage proposal, followed by her equally unexpected yes.
She hadn’t known him very well when they exchanged vows, and if she hadn’t been pregnant, she never would have said yes to his proposal. Of course, if she hadn’t been pregnant, he never would have proposed. And though marriage had required a lot of adjustments from both of them, Connor had proven himself to be a devoted husband.
He’d been attentive to her wants and needs, considerate of her roller-coaster emotions and indulgent of her various pregnancy cravings. He’d attended childbirth classes, painted the babies’ room, assembled their furniture and diligently researched car seat safety. And in the eight days that she’d spent in the hospital since their babies were born, he’d barely left her side.
But when she finally stepped inside the house, after fussing over the dog, whose whole back end was wagging with excitement as if she’d finally returned from eight weeks rather than only eight days away, she found another surprise.
The living room was filled with flowers and balloons and streamers. There was even a banner that read: Welcome Home Mommy, Piper & Poppy!
She looked at him, stunned. “When did you—”
“It wasn’t my doing,” he said, as he set the babies’ car seats down inside the doorway.
Baxter immediately came to investigate, which meant sniffing the tiny humans all over, but he dutifully backed off when Connor held up a hand.
“Then who...” The rest of her question was forgotten as Regan looked past the bouquets of pink and white balloons to see a familiar figure standing there. “Ohmygod... Brie.”