Secret Service Dad

Mike caught sight of Charlie and as if on cue, his leg started to ache…. The pain reminded him of the night he’d been wounded in the line of duty.

In his book, trouble, Charlie and his aching leg were synonymous. He wasn’t afraid of what she might do next; he was afraid of a loose cannon, and that description custom-fit Charlie Norris to a T.

There was another concern, Mike thought uneasily as he made his way through the crowded room. He was way too fascinated with Charlie for his own good. It just might prove a fatal attraction in his line of work as an agent in the Secret Service…because Charlie Norris was a magnet for trouble!

Dear Reader,

Millionaire. Prince. Secret agent. Doctor. If any—or all—of these men strike your fancy, well…you’re in luck! These fabulous guys are waiting for you in the pages of this month’s offerings from Harlequin American Romance.

His best friend’s request to father her child leads millionaire Gabe Deveraux to offer a bold marriage proposal in My Secret Wife by Cathy Gillen Thacker, the latest installment of THE DEVERAUX LEGACY series. A royal request makes Prince Jace Carradigne heir to a throne—and in search of his missing fiancée—in Mindy Neff’s The Inconveniently Engaged Prince, part of our ongoing series THE CARRADIGNES: AMERICAN ROYALTY. (And there are royals galore to be found when the series comes to a sensational ending in Heir to the Throne, a special two-in-one collection by Kasey Michaels and Carolyn Davidson, available next month wherever Harlequin books are sold.)

Kids, kangaroos and a kindhearted woman are all in a day’s work for cool and collected secret agent Mike Wheeler in Secret Service Dad, the second book in Mollie Molay’s GROOMS IN UNIFORM series. And a big-city doctor attempts to hide his true identity—and his affections—for a Montana beauty in The Doctor Wore Boots by Debra Webb, the conclusion to the TRADING PLACES duo.

So be sure to catch all of these wonderful men this month—and every month—as you enjoy their wonderful love stories from Harlequin American Romance.

Happy reading,

Melissa Jeglinski

Associate Senior Editor

Harlequin American Romance

Secret Service Dad

Mollie Molay

www.millsandboon.co.uk

MILLS & BOON

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To June Arias for introducing me to the world of kangaroos. If there are any errors, they are solely mine.

Thank you.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

After working for a number of years as a logistics contract administrator in the aircraft industry, Mollie Molay turned to a career she found far more satisfying—writing romance novels. Mollie lives in Northridge, California, surrounded by her two daughters and eight grandchildren, many of whom find their way into her books. She enjoys hearing from her readers and welcomes comments. You can write to her at Harlequin Books, 300 East 42nd St., 6th Floor, New York, NY 10017.

Books by Mollie Molay

HARLEQUIN AMERICAN ROMANCE

560—FROM DRIFTER TO DADDY

597—HER TWO HUSBANDS

616—MARRIAGE BY MISTAKE

638—LIKE FATHER, LIKE SON

682—NANNY & THE BODYGUARD

703—OVERNIGHT WIFE

729—WANTED: DADDY

776—FATHER IN TRAINING

799—DADDY BY CHRISTMAS

815—MARRIED BY MIDNIGHT

839—THE GROOM CAME C.O.D.

879—BACHELOR-AUCTION BRIDEGROOM

897—THE BABY IN THE BACK SEAT

938—THE DUCHESS & HER BODYGUARD*

947—SECRET SERVICE DAD*

ALL-POINTS BULLETIN

The following fugitive is wanted by the MCLEAN, VIRGINIA, POLICE DEPARTMENT

WANTED

“Boomer” Norris

(aka “Joey”)

Norris is unarmed, but can turn overly affectionate if cornered. He has been on the run since escaping from the private zoo owned by Charlene “Charlie” Norris earlier this week. If you have any information regarding this individual or have knowledge of his whereabouts, please contact Sergeant Hawkins of the minor crime support division, McLean Police Department.

Contents

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

Epilogue

Prologue

Europe, the Country of Baronovia, February

Flailing helplessly, U.S. Secret Service agent Mike Wheeler tumbled to the ground. Moments before, he’d been idly checking out security measures around the palace where the wedding of Duchess Mary Louise to Commander Wade Stevens of the U.S. Navy was to take place in a few hours. Now, he was lying on his back in a bed of carefully tended petunias and staring up into a pair of startled blue eyes.

“Oh no! I’m so sorry! I’m afraid I wasn’t looking where I was going. Are you okay? Here, let me help you up!” A pair of manicured feminine hands pulled at his tuxedo jacket.

Mike bit back the paralyzing pain in his injured leg and grimly eyed his attacker, Charlie Norris, a fellow American and a member of the wedding party. She was the last person he wanted to meet.

He took a deep breath and struggled to his feet. Getting shot in the line of duty three months ago had been the pits. Getting knocked over by the woman who inadvertently had played a large part in the events that had led to the shooting didn’t make the pain any easier to bear.

“Are you sure you don’t need any help?” She took a corner of her silk stole, wet it between her lips and tried to scrub something off his chin.

To his chagrin, whether he approved of her or not, his body warmed at her touch. And tightened at the sight of full, tempting lips so close to his own. He grabbed her hand before things could become more personal.

“Thank you, no,” he said tightly. “Give me a minute. I’ll be fine.”

She waited hopefully, her concern evident. Considering how he felt about the way trouble seemed to follow Charlie and wind up affecting him, he would have been just as happy to see her leave.

“I understand that there are over two hundred rooms in the palace and that it is surrounded by hundreds of acres of grounds,” he said when he could breath freely again. “How did you manage to pick precisely the same two square feet of ground I was standing on to stumble about on?”

She colored. “I’m afraid I wasn’t thinking.”

“That’s the problem,” he agreed as he tried to balance himself squarely on two feet. He hadn’t approved of the lady’s methods as the concierge of Blair House even before she ignored security rules to aid and abet the forbidden courtship and subsequent fairy-tale marriage of today’s unlikely bride and groom. He didn’t approve of her any more now.

Charlie bristled. She had been about to tell Mike she’d barreled into him simply because she had slipped down the sloping lawn. “The only mistake I made was to head for the only friendly face I thought I recognized out here,” she said. “Strike the word friendly. And furthermore,” she went on as she tried to balance on one foot, “it looks as if I’ve sprained my ankle. All you have to show for this accident are a few grass stains!” Turning to leave, she teetered and flailed at empty air.

Instinctively, Mike reached to catch Charlie before she fell. Too late—she stumbled, squealed and, to his discomfort, landed squarely in his arms.

He closed his eyes and mentally counted to ten. However misguided Charlie Norris might be, and no matter how wary he was of what she might do next, she was every bit as soft and warm as he’d been afraid she would turn out to be.

Chapter One

Washington, D.C., April

It was said by some that Washington’s Blair House was jinxed.

Now that it looked as if a second State Department guest within six months had become the target of a disgruntled foreign nationalist, Secret Service agent Mike Wheeler was prepared to believe the rumor. At least this shooting, thank God, hadn’t happened on his watch.

For some reason, whenever Mike thought of Blair House, his thoughts turned to the Blair House concierge, Charlene Norris, dubbed Charlie by all who knew her. She was trouble, blond, blue-eyed trouble. If that wasn’t bad enough, she usually got him involved in whatever trouble she managed to get herself into.

His fears had been realized when he reported for duty that day. The foyer of the residence was teeming with activity. The air smelled of cordite. Cell phones were ringing. Sirens screamed outside, Secret Service agents, anyone with the credentials to get in the front door milled around the reception room where, to his dismay, it looked as if another attempted assassination had taken place.

His practiced eye took in a wounded man who lay sprawled, groaning on the marble entry floor clutching his bleeding shoulder. An agitated man dressed in a foreign military uniform stood handcuffed in the custody of two D.C. policemen. The cuffed man was protesting at the top of his lungs, but the police seemed to be ignoring their suspect. One D.C. lawman gingerly held a smoking gun by two fingers while a third was preparing to fit the gun into a plastic evidence bag.

Off to the side, six uniformed staff members stood gaping at the scene being played out in front of them. Mike didn’t blame them. He could hardly believe it himself.

He cut through the mob scene until he caught sight of Charlie Norris. She looked as if she was in a state of shock. There was blood on one of her wrists and on the skirt of her tailored beige suit. He was concerned at the sight, but not surprised. He’d had the sinking feeling that somehow she would be in the thick of any action, hadn’t he?

And not for the first time.

As if on cue, his leg started to ache. The pain reminded him of the night a disenchanted Baronovian nationalist had attempted to assassinate Prince Alexis of Baronovia and his daughter, the duchess Mary Louise, the night he’d been wounded in the line of duty.

In his book, trouble, Charlie and his aching leg were synonymous.

He wasn’t actually afraid of what she might do next. Almost half his size, he could have handled two of her. Besides, problem-solving was his job. What he was afraid of was a loose cannon, a description that custom-fit Charlie Norris to a T.

There was another concern, he thought uneasily as he made his way through the crowded room to where the shooting had taken place. He was too fascinated with Charlie for his own good. A fatal attraction if there ever was one, he thought unhappily.

Gazing at Charlie today, he realized that Charlie Norris, the coltish figure from the Baronovia caper, obviously was a magnet for trouble. Her hair was summer sunbeams, her eyes the color of clear blue summer skies. Used as a weapon, à la the famed Helen of Troy, her blue eyes could have sunk a thousand battleships. But instead of her usual professional, tailored appearance, tonight she looked distraught and disheveled.

Normally, Charlie had the most sinful and inviting smile he’d ever encountered on a woman. And, to his professional way of thinking, the darndest way of talking herself out of any problem she managed to get herself into. She wasn’t smiling now. After a glance around at the chaotic activity, he couldn’t blame her.

He bit back his frustration as he came up along her side. To his chagrin, his body reminded him he hadn’t been with a woman for a while; not since before the Baronovian shooting. Why in the hell he remembered this now, in a room full of people that resembled a scene out of a TV mystery comedy, beat the hell out of him. Maybe it was the excitement of the moment—he always seemed to feel high when danger threatened. If that weren’t so, he never would have joined the Secret Service nor would he have met Charlie.

Mike ground to a halt and turned his gaze on her. From the distressed expression on her face, he knew she had to have been present when all hell had broken loose.

“What?” she said before he could open his mouth. She glared at him from under narrowed eyebrows and crossed her arms in front of her as if to put some distance between them. She certainly didn’t look pleased to see him. Maybe it was difficult for her to read his opinion of the situation.

He might have been more surprised at her question, if he’d been paying closer attention. The truth was, he’d been so busy admiring the dimple on her left cheek he hadn’t been concentrating.

Wrong.

He knew better than most that the best defense, when you’ve painted yourself into a corner, was a good offense. After his experience with Charlie in Baronovia, he knew firsthand she was damn good at the offensive end of the game. To complicate matters, she made him feel guilty for not trusting her even when he had nothing to feel guilty about.

“Wheeler! Over here!” a loud voice cut through the noise and confusion.

Mike glanced over to where several Secret Service men and women were huddled in conference. His assistant gestured for him to come over. “In a minute,” he called, then turned back to Charlie. “What happened here?”

She glared at him, her blue eyes blazing. “You mean, what did I have to do with it, don’t you?”

“You’ve got it.” Damn, that fierce look cooled any sexual fantasies he might have entertained. Just as well. Another thing he’d learned the hard way was that it was never wise to fraternize with the people you worked with. It didn’t look as if she were interested in fraternizing, anyway. If looks could freeze, he would have been an icicle by now. He jammed his hands into his pockets and waited for the fur to fly.

“Nothing. Absolutely nothing,” she said and gestured to the handcuffed swarthy man who by now had lost his voice and was glowering at her. “All I did was introduce General Negri here, to Mr. Oberhammer of the visiting United Nations’ contingent over there.” She gestured to a man who lay on the marble floor in the entryway. “At the general’s request, I might add.”

“That’s all that happened?”

“No,” she answered breathlessly. “That was only the beginning. The general pulled a gun. At first I thought it had to be joke.”

“A joke?” Mike glanced over at the gun. “That doesn’t look like a toy gun to me.”

She plastered her hands on her hips before he got any further. “How was I to know the man was going to start shooting?”

Mike glanced at the man who lay moaning on the marble floor. “Have you called 911?”

“Of course. That’s part of my job.”

Mike nodded curtly. From his previous experiences with Charlie, he had the feeling she wrote her job description as she went along. As for the wounded man, from the look of things, he would keep until the paramedics arrived. “Anyone else get hurt?”

“Well,” she went on, brushing her hand across her forehead, seemingly unaware her wrist was bleeding. “I guess you could say so.” She aimed a shaking finger at a ceramic bas relief sculpture over the mantel that depicted a trio of angels holding hands and dancing across a cloud-filled sky. A bullet hole was visible where one of the angel’s belly button would have been. “He took the other bullet.”

“Get real,” he snapped to keep himself from laughing. Where else but here would a plaster angel have taken a bullet in its belly button? On the other hand, it wasn’t all that had happened. The bullet had apparently grazed Charlie’s hand in passing. “This is serious.”

“Yes, I know,” she said in a shaking voice. “I couldn’t believe it myself. But it’s true. I tried to grab the gun when I realized things were getting serious.” She stopped to catch her breath. “Anyway, it’s a little late to get upset about it now, isn’t it?”

“You haven’t learned much since the last time you set fire to a powder keg, have you?” Mike growled. He pulled a fresh white handkerchief from his back pocket and wrapped it around her right wrist. Thank goodness she was shaken enough to let him do it.

“You could have checked the guy’s credentials before you made the introduction,” he went on, surprised at the tender feeling that came over him as he wrapped the makeshift bandage around her slender wrist. That was Charlie all right. A mixed bag of sensuality and danger.

“It’s my job to introduce guests to each other, Mr. Wheeler, not to interrogate or to search them,” she retorted. “Among other things, I am the official hostess here. It says so in the fine print of my contract.”

Mike gave up. If Charlie hadn’t learned by now how to run a tight ship, nothing he could say was going to change her.

The alternative was to keep a close eye on her. To see to it she stopped trusting anyone who came along with some innocent request or another. Especially if they wore the uniform of a foreign country.

Somehow the prospect of watching over Charlie didn’t seem to bother him as much as it might have—if only he’d had his head on straight. Hell, he’d be the first to admit that she drove him nuts at the same time she fascinated the hell out of him. Without her, his job as the Blair House Special-Agent-in-Charge would have been boring as hell.

Not that he was looking for excitement. At thirty-five, he was looking forward to a peaceful period in his life. At least until his son Jake reached puberty.

“Don’t leave the premises,” he said and turned away. “I may want to talk to you later.”

“That’s what you think,” she answered. She gestured to the splatter of blood on her beige skirt. “I’m going home to change as soon as I can get out of here. And as for you, Mr. Wheeler, I don’t care if I never lay eyes on you again.”

To her chagrin, Mike winked and went on his way.

She grimly watched him stride over to the group waiting for him. If ever a man had the ability to get under her skin, it was this take-charge, go-by-the-book, stuffy Mike Wheeler. A man who apparently had never forgiven her for passing Commander Wade Stevens’s address to Prince Alexis’s turncoat bodyguard months ago. How was she to have known the man had been out to kidnap the prince’s daughter, Mary Louise? Or that an attempted assassination of the prince would follow?

She would have really been annoyed with Mike Wheeler tonight, if, heaven help her, she weren’t so attracted to him.

His hair, cut in the approved military style, topped a fit body that had to be the result of daily trips to the Blair House gym. As if that weren’t enough to feed his ego, he was tall, dark and, except for the scar at the side of his chin, handsome. Handsome enough to interest any woman foolish enough to fall for a lawman.

As for the Secret Service, from what she had observed in the two years she’d been working as the Blair House concierge, the profession was not only dangerous and demanding, it took all of a man’s time and attention, and sometimes his life. With her late father as an example, she didn’t want any part of it.

Not that she knew much about Mike. If he had any kind of a home life, she wasn’t aware of it. He kept his private life, what there was of it, to himself.

Which somehow seemed to make him more of a challenge.

She shook the cobwebs out of her mind. She would do well to remember that she wasn’t prepared to fall in love with any man she’d kiss goodbye in the morning and suffer the uncertainty of not knowing if he would live to come back to her at night. She never wanted to suffer as her mother had after her policeman father had been killed attempting to foil a bank robbery.

She wasn’t going to let herself fall in love with a lawman. Not even if he managed to make her hormones snap to attention whenever she laid eyes on him.

No way.

What really irked the heck out of her was the realization that he acted as if she couldn’t be relied on.

“Sorry to bother you at a time like this, Miss Norris,” a voice broke into her dark thoughts. “There’s a man out front who says he wants to talk to you.”

Charlie swung around to face Henry Ochoa, the Blair House doorman. Too frustrated with her mixed emotions over Mike’s evident low opinion of her to be polite, she snapped, “Too bad. Right now, there isn’t a man alive I want to talk to.”

Startled, the doorman took a step backward and cleared his throat. “But Miss Norris,” he stammered. “He says he’s Commander Daniel O’Hara from JAG. Since he’s wearing the uniform of a United States naval officer, I guess I have to believe him.”

Dan O’Hara! Of course! Commander Wade Stevens’s fellow lawyer at JAG and the best man at the recent wedding in Baronovia.

“Let him in, please.” She took a deep breath and tried to pull herself together. No way was she going to let Mike’s opinion of her make a difference in how she thought of herself. She was comfortable with herself and that was all that mattered. “He might turn out to be the only intelligent man around here I can talk to.”

Suddenly, the scene around her erupted in chaos as the general suddenly tried to wrestle his way out of custody. “I have diplomatic immunity, I tell you!” the distraught man shouted. “You cannot hold me against my will!”

“Unfortunately, the man is right,” Dan O’Hara muttered under his breath as he joined Charlie. “He doesn’t even have to make a statement if he doesn’t want to.” He paused to look at the numerous men in black and uniformed D.C. police milling around the room. “What kind of trouble did you manage to get yourself into this time?”

Charlie’s zero opinion of men immediately extended to O’Hara. What had happened to “innocent until proven guilty”?

“You too, Dan? What’s with you men? Why does it always have to be something I did?”

Seemingly unabashed, O’Hara grinned. “Maybe because I know how deeply you were involved the last time hell broke out around here?”

Charlie glared her frustration. “As I told Mike Wheeler, I was just doing my job back then. Just as I was trying to do it today. Can I help it if things don’t always go as planned?”

“If you say so.” Dan gazed around the foyer. “Say, who’s in charge around here, anyway?”

“Wheeler, but he’s busy right now,” Charlie answered with a frown as the general recovered his voice and began to rant and rave again. “Since you’re a lawyer, maybe you can do something with the general over there.”

“Thanks, but no thanks,” Dan laughed. “I’m a JAG lawyer, United States Navy, period. This is State Department business. I just dropped by to deliver a message from Wade and the duchess.”

“How is May doing?” Charlie thought back to the time when JAG Commander Wade Stevens and the Dowager Duchess of Lorrania, then a guest of the U.S. government, had met at a diplomatic function. And she remembered the fur that had flown between them before they realized they were meant for each other. If Stevens and his duchess had managed to find each other in spite of a similar, if not worse, mess than she found herself in now, then maybe there was some hope to get Mike to listen to reason.