With Valor And Devotion

Unfortunately he wasn’t there with her.

Admiring Kristin from across the room, Mike lowered his duffel quietly to the floor. Even without makeup, she looked vibrant, as though the smattering of freckles across the bridge of her nose and cheeks were a symbol of her energy. Her lips were slightly open in readiness for a kiss.

Eager to taste their flavor again, Mike moved beside her, sat down on the edge of the bed and bent over to touch her lips with his.

Warm and soft. Feminine. Parting on a sweet sigh that took possession of his senses.

His body reacted the way a fire ignites from spontaneous combustion. No amount of water on the flame would be able to put out the sensual blaze that rose within him.

He wanted Kristin McCoy as he’d never wanted any other woman in his life.

Dear Reader,

Welcome to Harlequin American Romance. With your search for satisfying reading in mind, every month Harlequin American Romance aims to offer you a stimulating blend of heartwarming, emotional and deeply romantic stories.

Unexpected arrivals lead to the sweetest of surprises as Harlequin American Romance celebrates the love only a baby can bring, in our brand-new promotion, AMERICAN BABY, which begins this month with Jacqueline Diamond’s delightful Surprise, Doc! You’re a Daddy! After months of searching for her missing husband, Meg Avery finally finds him—only, Dr. Hugh Menton doesn’t remember her or their child!

With Valor and Devotion, the latest book in Charlotte Maclay’s exciting MEN OF STATION SIX series, is a must-read about a valorous firefighter who rescues an orphaned boy. Will the steadfast bachelor consider becoming a devoted family man after meeting the little boy’s pretty social worker? JUST FOR KIDS, Mary Anne Wilson’s new miniseries, debuts with Regarding the Tycoon’s Toddler…. This trilogy focuses on a corporate day-care center and the lives and loves of those who work there. And don’t miss The Biological Bond by Jamie Denton, the dramatic story of a mother who is reunited with the child she’d been forced to give away, when her daughter’s adoptive single father seeks her help.

Enjoy this month’s offerings, and be sure to return each and every month to Harlequin American Romance!

Wishing you happy reading,

Melissa Jeglinski

Associate Senior Editor

Harlequin American Romance

With Valor and Devotion

Charlotte Maclay

www.millsandboon.co.uk

Dedicated to Kay Hyland and her fellow social workers, who give so much of themselves and receive so little thanks in return.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Charlotte Maclay can’t resist a happy ending. That’s why she’s had such fun writing more than twenty titles for Harlequin American Romance and Harlequin Duets, plus several Silhouette Romance books. Particularly well-known for her volunteer efforts in her hometown of Torrance, California, Charlotte’s philosophy is that you should make a difference in your community. She and her husband have two married daughters and two grandchildren, whom they are occasionally allowed to baby-sit. She loves to hear from readers and can be reached at P.O. Box 505, Torrance, CA 90501.

Books by Charlotte Maclay

HARLEQUIN AMERICAN ROMANCE

474—THE VILLAIN’S LADY

488—A GHOSTLY AFFAIR

503—ELUSIVE TREASURE

532—MICHAEL’S MAGIC

537—THE KIDNAPPED BRIDE

566—HOW TO MARRY A MILLIONAIRE

585—THE COWBOY & THE BELLY DANCER

620—THE BEWITCHING BACHELOR

643—WANTED: A DAD TO BRAG ABOUT

657—THE LITTLEST ANGEL

684—STEALING SAMANTHA

709—CATCHING A DADDY

728—A LITTLE BIT PREGNANT

743—THE HOG-TIED GROOM

766—DADDY’S LITTLE COWGIRL

788—DEPUTY DADDY

806—A DADDY FOR BECKY

821—THE RIGHT COWBOY’S BED*

825—IN A COWBOY’S EMBRACE*

886—BOLD AND BRAVE-HEARTED**

890—WITH VALOR AND DEVOTION**

Contents

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

Epilogue

Chapter One

Flames licked out the window and up the side of the house, red and orange tongues scorching the stucco black. Smoke wormed its way through the attic vents into the night sky. Glass popped, and the smell of burning wood filled the cool air of an early summer evening. A faded For Sale sign stood in the weed-choked front yard, as abandoned as the house itself.

Tightening his helmet strap, his adrenaline giving him a nice edge, Mike Gables swung down from his seat behind the driver of Engine 61 and jogged to the back of the truck. The gold and black crest on the side of the vehicle read Paseo del Real, California.

“Let’s put some wet on that red before the guys from 62 get to have all the fun,” he shouted to Jay Tolliver, his buddy and fellow firefighter. Mike wished they had been the first engine company on the scene, but the driver of Engine 62 had beaten 61 out of the station by milliseconds. They were already putting water on the fire.

We’ll get ’em next time, Mike thought with a competitive grin.

Giving Mike a thumbs-up, Jay took the nozzle and headed across the yard. Right behind him, Mike hefted the hose over his shoulder, reeling it out from the truck.

“Fireman! Fireman!” A gray-haired woman in a housecoat and slippers came running toward them, waving frantically. “There’s a little boy inside. He’s in the back bedroom. Oh, dear heaven! The poor little thing. I heard him crying. You’ve got to—”

With no more than a look that communicated what needed to be done, both Mike and Jay dropped the hose and raced toward the back of the house. The place was entirely dark. No curtains on the windows. No sign anyone had lived there for months.

Out front, a second police car arrived, siren screaming, lights flashing red-and-orange stripes along the shadowed path to the rear of the house.

“Suzie, where are you?” a child’s voice cried.

“Damn, there’re two of ’em,” Mike muttered. Kids. He hated it when the red devil went after kids, trying to suck the life out of them. Bad enough when it was grown-ups who were trapped. It wasn’t a fair fight when kids were involved. Mike’s job was to even the odds.

“I can’t see anything inside,” Jay shouted, trying to peer in the old-fashioned guillotine window. He gave it a shove but it didn’t open.

Mike pulled his heavy flashlight from its loop at his waist. “I got it. Stand back.”

He smashed the back of the flashlight through one of the panes, reached inside past the jagged glass, unlatched the window and opened it.

“Come here, Suzie,” the child coughed and sobbed. “Please, Suzie.”

“Give me a boost,” Mike ordered.

Jay cupped his hands, and Mike used them to lever himself inside, diving headfirst. He hit the floor with a thud, and coughed as smoke filled his lungs.

Stay low, you go; stay high, you die. Mike reminded himself of the old firefighters’ adage as he tried to get his bearings in the dark. Beyond two feet, smoke swallowed the light he shone around the room. He began circling to the right on his hands and knees so he’d know how to get back out again if there was a flashover.

But he wasn’t going anywhere until he found the children.

“Where are you, kid? Talk to me, okay?”

“I can’t find Suzie.”

Mike followed the sound of the young, frightened voice. “I’ll get her. You just stay put and keep talking.”

The child coughed again.

If the kid hadn’t made a sound right then, Mike might have missed him and passed right by what appeared to be a walk-in closet. He flashed his light inside and caught a glimpse of a boy with big brown terrified eyes. He looked to be five or six years old.

“Come on, fella, let’s get you out of here.” He reached for the boy.

The kid backed farther into the closet. “No! I won’t go without Suzie!”

Mike didn’t like the idea of manhandling the kid, but the smoke wasn’t getting any better. He had to get the youngster out of there in a hurry.

“I promise I’ll come back for Suzie, but for now you’ve got to do as I say.”

“No!” the child wailed, making himself as small as he could in the very back of the closet. “I want Suzie!”

Losing patience wouldn’t help. “What’s your name, son?”

The boy snuffled and coughed again. “Randy.”

“Great, Randy. Now this is what we’re gonna do. I’m gonna carry you out the window, then I’m gonna—”

“No!”

Clearing his own lungs with a cough, Mike flashed the light around. If he could spot Suzie—

“Is Suzie your sister, Randy?”

He shook his head. “Nuh-uh. She’s my dog ’n’ she’s all I’ve got.”

Mike heard a plea in the boy’s voice that was more than a spoiled kid wanting his pet back. Something that went far deeper.

From outside, Jay shouted, “You okay in there?”

Mike gritted his teeth. “Yeah, we’re just hunky-dory.”

He couldn’t mess around any longer. Kids couldn’t tolerate a whole lot of smoke. Neither could he.

Lunging for the boy, Mike wrapped his arm around the kid’s middle and started to back out of the closet, still keeping on his hands and knees. Toting the youngster around in that position was like carrying an angry, oversize centipede, a hundred arms and legs flailing while the boy screamed that he wouldn’t go anywhere without Suzie. Randy’s heel caught Mike in his solar plexus. He grunted as the air whooshed out of his lungs.

And they said dogs were loyal to their masters. Apparently, in Randy’s case, it worked both ways.

“Are there any other people in the house?” he asked the child.

“Just Suzie. And she’s mine!”

At the window, Mike passed the squirming, thrashing boy to Jay.

“You gotta save Suzie,” Randy cried. Great big tears filled the boy’s eyes, and his chin trembled. “You promised!”

“Who’s Suzie?” Jay asked, barely able to contain the youngster in his arms.

Mike rolled his eyes. “Don’t ask.”

Turning back into the smoke-filled room, Mike knew it was against departmental rules to risk a firefighter’s life for an animal. But dammit, it was the kid’s dog. Sometimes rules needed to be broken.

Getting as low as he could, he squirmed across the floor. Kids panicked in a fire. So did animals. Mike’s best guess was that the dog would go into hiding. But where?

The smoke was actually a little lighter now, making it easier for him to breathe as the rest of the fire crew got the flames under control. Mike flashed his light around. If the sense of loyalty between Randy and his dog was mutual, Suzie wouldn’t have gone far.

And she hadn’t. The dog was tucked under a makeshift bed that was little more than a cot. Who were these people who were living in an otherwise vacant house, Mike wondered. And where were Randy’s parents?

The dog didn’t react when Mike pulled her out from under the bed. A medium-sized dog of indiscriminate breeding, she lay limply in his arms as he lifted her. Mike couldn’t tell if she was still breathing or not.

“Come on, Suzie. If you die on ol’ Randy, it’s gonna kill the kid.”

He made it back to the window, climbing out awkwardly with the dog in his arms, then walked to the front of the house. Randy spotted him immediately.

With a cry that was so filled with desolation it nearly broke Mike’s heart, the boy pulled away from the paramedic who’d been working on him and ran through the weed-filled yard to Mike.

“Is she dead?” he sobbed.

“I don’t know, son. I really don’t know.” Mike continued walking toward the paramedic truck with the dog in his arms, Randy clutching his leg as if he and the boy were surgically attached. “You got any oxygen, Brett?” he asked the paramedic.

“For the dog?”

“Suzie’s real important to Randy. Let’s give it a shot.”

Brett shrugged. “Whatever.”

They all knelt together in what was a prayerful circle—Randy and Mike holding the dog, the paramedic cupping an oxygen mask over the dog’s muzzle. Tears of grief streamed down the boy’s face. If truth be known, Mike had a few tears in his eyes, too. As a kid he’d never been allowed to have a dog—not even a mutt like this shaggy-haired combination collie-terrier-and-who-knew-what-else. At Randy’s age, Mike would have cheerfully done chores for a year in any of the foster homes where he’d lived if they had let him have a dog of his own. It had never happened.

Suzie’s tail twitched.

“She’s alive!” Randy hugged the dog so tight, Suzie whined.

“Easy, son,” Mike said, and coughed. Gently, he rested his hand on the back of the boy’s head. “Let her catch her breath before you squeeze her to death.”

The paramedic backed off with the oxygen and smiled. “Looks like a good rescue to me.”

“Yep.” But Mike still wondered where the boy’s parents were, and why he’d been in the house all alone. The fire had been suppressed, nothing but the lingering smell of smoke as the crews mopped up. And still there was no sign of a family member or even a baby-sitter.

Brett said, “We’re going to transport the boy. He needs to be checked out for smoke inhalation.”

“You hear that, Randy? They’re going to take you to the hospital. You get to ride in an ambulance. Pretty cool, huh?”

Even as the dog was licking his face, the boy’s eyes were wide and distrustful. “What about Suzie?”

“Somebody will take care of her. She’ll be okay.”

“You promise?”

“Yeah, I promise.” When the boy still looked skeptical, Mike said, “I went back in and got Suzie, didn’t I?”

That seemed to convince Randy. He gave his dog another hug, burying his face in Suzie’s fur. “You be good, Suzie. I’ll come back and get you as soon as I can.”

Setting Suzie on the ground where the paramedic could grab the dog’s collar, Mike hefted the boy into his arms. “You want me to fix it so the guys in the ambulance use their siren?”

Randy’s expression brightened. “Can you do that?”

Mike grinned. “Sure. Firefighters can do anything.” He took off his helmet and plopped it on Randy’s head.

“Cool,” the boy said and settled comfortably to ride on Mike’s hip to the ambulance.

“Hey, Mike,” Brett called after him. “You’d better get checked out at the hospital, too. You were in that house a long time. You could have some inhalation problems.”

Mike looked at the paramedic in surprise. He’d been coughing a bit but he didn’t think he’d sucked in too much smoke. No big deal.

But then, there were a lot of good-looking nurses who worked at Paseo del Real Community Hospital. He might as well drop by to see how they were doing.

THE PHONE woke Kristin McCoy at 1:02 a.m. Groaning, she rolled over and stared at the instrument. Unless it was a drunk who’d dialed the wrong number, a call at this hour did not bode well. At the very least it meant she’d drawn the short straw tonight as the Immediate Response Social Worker for Children’s Services assigned to handle emergencies.

Moments later she discovered that was the case. A child in the hospital, no parents or guardians in sight. She’d be acting in loco parentis for the boy and trying to figure out where he belonged.

Dressing hastily, she brushed her unruly auburn curls into a loose ponytail and got in her car for the drive to the hospital. Suddenly a wave of grief swept over her, blindsiding her like a tsunami. The dark streets, the stillness of the hour, had triggered a memory of another time, a frantic drive to the hospital, ambulance siren blaring. Fear clawing at her with razor-sharp talons, so painful she thought her chest was being ripped open.

Her baby. Just two months old. Not breathing. His soft skin icy cold to the touch. His sweet little body limp. How was it possible? He’d been fine only hours before, despite a runny nose. Laughing at her. Squirming, feet kicking while she changed his diaper.

Bobby! A victim of SIDS—Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. Dead before he’d had a chance to really live.

Her throat clogged, and she had to blink away the tears that blurred her vision. Six years and the grief still hadn’t gone away. It lay there in her gut, twisting through her at unexpected moments. When she saw a child the age Bobby would have been if he had lived. When she heard an infant cry with a desperate hungry sound. Or simply when she woke to find her arms empty of the burden she had so lovingly carried.

Dear God, she missed him so much!

Forcing her anguish aside, she focused on the nearly empty streets of Paseo del Real en route to the hospital. Forced herself to think of something mundane. Something that didn’t tear up her insides and make her want to weep.

A college town in central California just east of the coastal range of mountains, Paseo del Real’s population had exploded during the eighties and nineties as people fled the Los Angeles area in search of a quieter lifestyle. They’d brought with them traffic congestion, miles of tract houses, and most of the problems of big cities—including abandoned children, Kristin mused as she pulled into the parking lot of the hospital.

She angled her Volkswagen convertible into a spot near the emergency entrance. The lot was only half full at this hour, mostly vehicles of employees working the eleven-to-seven shift.

Inside, a couple with an infant were waiting in the lobby, an older man was dozing nearby. Kristin waved to the security guard who was lounging against a faux-granite pillar in the center of the room and went through the automatic doors to the nursing station. Adrian Goodfellow was the charge nurse on duty, a woman with brassy-blond hair, a quick silver smile and a heart made of gold.

“Understand you have someone for me, Addy,” Kristin said.

The nurse looked up from the chart she’d been checking and gave a bright smile that lit her eyes. “Sakes, woman, this is Saturday night. Why aren’t you out on the town having a high ol’ time?”

“Same reason you’re here. I’m working.” Both she and Addy were single, but despite Addy’s twelve-hour shifts, she managed to have more dates in a week than Kristin had in a year. Not that Kristin was envious. She’d been burned once by a man and had learned to be wary.

“We gotta do somethin’ about your social life, girlfriend. It’s not healthy for a woman your age—”

“I’m not that old,” she objected. Though granted, between the heart-wrenching cases she handled and her own personal history, she sometimes felt ancient compared to her twenty-four years.

“Shoot, honey, by the time I was your—”

“Addy, there’s a child here,” Kristin interrupted. “No parents, no guardian. I’m supposed to leap into action.”

“Oh, right.” She pulled a chart from the pile on her desk. “You’re gonna love this one. Randy Marshall, a six-year-old minx if I ever saw one. A real charmer. Claims his mother is dead, and he can’t quite remember who he’s been living with.”

Kristin took the chart from her. “Is he hurt?”

“A little smoke inhalation. Doc Plum wants to keep him overnight for observation. They’ll move him upstairs pretty soon.”

“Okay, I’ll go meet our young minx.”

Addy gestured over her shoulder toward a curtained examining room and waggled her eyebrows. “Mike Gables is in there with him now.”

Kristin blinked, confused. “A relative?”

“Lord, no, honey. You really gotta get out more. Mike Gables is the most studly firefighter in town. He’s probably dated every single nurse in the hospital—yours truly included—plus a few of the married ones, would be my guess. In a world of hunks, he rates a solid ten. He’s the guy that rescued the little boy and ended up needing to be checked out himself.”

While it was all very noble that the firefighter had risked his own life to rescue a child, Kristin bristled at the thought of a man who dated every woman he met. She’d fallen once for a sweet-talker who hadn’t believed in commitment, a regular Prince Charming who’d walked out on her at the most critical moment of her life. She didn’t plan to go down that path again.

Squaring her shoulders, she headed for the examining room. As she reached for the curtain, a childish giggle greeted her, followed by the low rumble of baritone laughter.

A disquieting shiver of awareness rolled down her spine and she mentally chided herself. A deep, seductive voice did not make him a ten on her scale.

She pulled back the curtain and was met by two sets of dark brown eyes that flashed with amusement and intelligence. The owner of the older set stood, a slow smile curling lips that could only be described as dangerously kissable. Still dressed in his turnout coat and pants, his jacket hung open revealing a T-shirt pulled taut over a well-muscled chest. His mussed saddle-brown hair invited a woman to tame the rebellious waves.

Damn! An eleven!

Forcing her gaze away from the firefighter, Kristin smiled at the child. “You must be Randy. I’m Kristin McCoy from Children’s Services.”

“Did you bring Suzie?”

Her gaze darted to Mike for an explanation. What she got was a thousand-watt smile.

“His dog. Suzie’s real special to Randy. We rescued her from the fire, too. Had to give her oxygen.”

It was even harder this time to look away from the firefighter, which irritated Kristin no end. Normally she had far better control over her reactions to any man, particularly those who were smooth talkers. But then, she didn’t often meet an eleven.

Her gaze snapped back to the boy. “I’m sorry, Randy. I didn’t know about your dog, but I’m sure someone is taking good care of her.”

The child hung his head. “She probably misses me.”

“Yes, she probably does,” Kristin said softly. It was all she could do not to take the child in her arms and hold him close. But the ability to distance oneself from a client was sometimes all that kept a social worker sane in Children’s Services. That was a struggle Kristin fought almost every day. “Why don’t we talk about where your family is, and then we can get you and Suzie and your family all back together again.”