A Match for the Single Dad

“I never thought you were the type to play with fire, Maggie.”

She chuckled softly, her heart racing now in response to that all-too-brief kiss. “I’ve been known to scorch my fingertips a few times.”

His hands settled at her hips before she could move away. “My fingers are still feeling a little cold.”

What the hell. She wrapped her arms around his neck, momentarily abandoning caution. “Then maybe we should heat them up.”

“Maybe we should.” He settled his mouth against hers, their smiles meeting then melding into a kiss hot enough to scorch much more than her fingertips. She felt the heat surging all the way through her, simmering deep inside her. This buttoned-down, ex-military single dad definitely knew how to kiss.

GINA WILKINS is a bestselling and award-winning author who has written more than seventy novels for Mills & Boon. She credits her successful career in romance to her long, happy marriage and her three “extraordinary” children.

A lifelong resident of central Arkansas, Ms Wilkins sold her first book to Mills & Boon in 1988 and has been writing full-time since. She has appeared on the Walden-books, B. Dalton and USA TODAY bestseller lists. She is a three-time recipient of a Maggie Award for Excellence, sponsored by Georgia Romance Writers, and has won several awards from the reviewers of RT Book Reviews.

A Match for the Single Dad

Gina Wilkins

www.millsandboon.co.uk

For Patience Bloom, a dedicated editor, fellow romance fan and genuinely nice person.

Chapter One

“He’ll say no. Daddy always says no,” almost-eleven-year-old Kristina McHale said glumly. She was known to her family and friends as Kix, a nickname bestowed on her by her slightly older sister, Payton, who’d had trouble as a toddler saying her baby sister’s formal name.

With the wisdom of her thirteen years, Payton waved a hand dismissively. “We can talk him into it. You know how he’s always nagging about ‘family time.’ Well, a week together in a cabin would count for that, right? Besides, that week includes both your birthday and the Fourth of July. How can he say no?”

“He’ll find a way,” Kix predicted.

Payton sighed in response to her sister’s pessimism. “We can at least ask. You ask. Give him the look. You know, puppy-dog eyes. I’ll act like I think it’s sort of a dumb idea, so he won’t figure out we’re conspirators.”

“Con—cons—?”

“Working together,” Payton explained impatiently.

“Oh.” Kix practiced widening her already-big blue eyes. “You think this will help?”

Eyeing her critically, Payton shrugged. “Couldn’t hurt. Lower your chin a little and maybe poke out your bottom lip. If you could make it kind of quiver a little, it would be even better.”

“Like this?” Kix gave her sister a limpid look from beneath thick dark lashes, her rosy mouth pursed in a hint of a pout.

“Not bad. I bet he’ll say yes. Once we have him at the resort for a whole week, we’ll make sure he spends time with her.”

“How are we going to do that?”

Payton sighed impatiently and pushed an auburn strand out of her face. “I can’t think of everything all at once, Kix. We just will, okay?”

“Okay.”

Pacing the length of her bedroom, Payton continued her scheming. “Once Dad spends more time with Maggie, surely he’ll get around to asking her out. I mean, we know he likes her because he always smiles when she’s around, right?”

Sitting cross-legged on her sister’s bed, Kix nodded enthusiastically, her brighter-red hair tumbling into her freckled face. “He has to like her. He’d be crazy if he didn’t.”

“Well, it is Dad,” Payton muttered, making Kix giggle. “Still, maybe he’ll finally do something right and ask her out. And maybe we’ll finally have someone on our side for a change who’ll tell Dad he has to stop treating us like dumb little girls. Maggie always looks so pretty. I bet she’d convince Dad and Grammy that we’re old enough for makeup and double-pierced ears and cool clothes. At least, I am.”

“Hey!”

“Well, you’re almost old enough,” Payton conceded. “And there are other things she could take your side about.”

“Yeah, I guess.”

“So we’re agreed? You’ll tell him tonight at dinner that you know where you want to spend your birthday week?”

“Agreed.”

They exchanged a complicated handshake to seal the deal.

Early on a Sunday morning in June, Maggie Bell shifted on the wooden picnic table bench beneath the big pavilion at Bell Resort and Marina. The newly risen sun glittered on the rippling waters of southeast Texas’s Lake Livingston ahead, making the lake look like liquid silver streaked with veins of gold. Even this early, the air was already quite warm, though she was comfortable enough in her scoop-neck, cap-sleeve yellow T-shirt dress and wedge-heeled sandals.

Seated around her at long wooden picnic tables and in folding chairs beneath the big pavilion at Bell Resort and Marina, a small crowd sang the chorus of “Amazing Grace,” most of them even in the same key. In a long-standing tradition at the resort owned by Maggie’s family, nondenominational sunrise worship services were held year-round for guests and any area residents who chose to participate. Attendance had always been good, but especially during the past few months. Specifically, since good-looking and personable Jasper Bettencourt had started leading the services.

Golden-haired, blue-eyed, male-model handsome, always casually dressed in jeans and cotton shirts, Jasper, known to his friends as Jay, hardly fit the stereotype of a small-town minister. Longtime locals remembered him as a hell-raising teen from a dysfunctional family who had escaped the area more than fifteen years before. It had been quite a shock when he’d returned with a theology degree, founded a little nondenominational church and dedicated himself to community service and caring for the aging, former-pastor uncle who was his only living relative. He was a compelling speaker, a talented singer and a genuinely nice guy who drew people to him with his mix of humor, kindness and compassion. Each Sunday he led the sunrise service attendees in a few well-known hymns, accompanied on guitar by his friend Garrett McHale, before presenting a brief but always moving sermon.

Seated in a folding chair beneath the pavilion with the morning’s printed program gripped loosely in her hands, Maggie sang the familiar song without needing to refer to the lyrics. She chose instead to watch the accompanist.

Dressed in a green shirt and neatly pressed khakis, Garrett looked like the ex-Air Force officer he was. Tall and lean, he wore his brown hair in a crisp, short cut that emphasized the few gray strands at his temples. His posture was impeccable, his movements measured and efficient. His eyes were the same clear gray-blue as the early-morning sky. Garrett, too, had grown up in this area, leaving to join the military at about the same time his lifelong best buddy, Jay, had struck off for parts unknown. Garrett wasn’t as strikingly handsome as Jay, yet for some reason Maggie’s attention was always drawn to him. She wasn’t sure of his exact age, but she’d guess he was maybe ten or eleven years older than her own twenty-seven. The age difference didn’t bother her. The fact that he was a single dad to two girls just heading into their teens was a different matter altogether.

She glanced at the auburn-haired thirteen-year-old at her left, then at the almost-eleven-year-old redhead on her right. Garrett’s daughters, Payton and Kix, always sat near her during services. A few months ago, she’d filled in part-time for a few weeks at the local country club for a tennis instructor recuperating from emergency surgery. She’d gotten to know Payton and Kix in the kids’ class. She was hardly a tennis pro, but the club owner was a family friend who’d been in a bind and who knew Maggie had played competitively during high school and college. Somehow, Maggie had allowed herself to be persuaded to fill in.

At about the same time Maggie had taught his daughters, Garrett had started joining his friend Jay for Sunday sunrise services, bringing Maggie and his girls together even more often. She was fond of both Payton and Kix, but they were a handful. She couldn’t imagine being responsible for their full-time care and well-being.

Jay closed the meeting with a prayer and an open invitation to the little church in town where he would hold services later that morning. He made himself available to shake hands and speak with guests afterward while Garrett packed away his acoustic guitar. Payton and Kix started chattering the moment the service ended, telling her about their activities since they’d seen her last Sunday, talking over each other in attempts to claim her full attention.

“… and I love your red leather sandals with the cork wedge heels so much, but Dad won’t let me even look at heels yet because he says they aren’t practical for someone my age …”

“… and my friend Kim my got her own smartphone, but Daddy says no way can I have one …”

“… and there was a really great party at Nikea’s house, but of course Dad wouldn’t let me go just because most of the kids were older than me …”

“… and I wanted to play video games with my friend but Grammy made me clean my room, and it could have waited until later, but she …”

Laughing, Maggie held up both hands. “Girls, girls! I can only listen to one of you at a time.”

They started again without noticeable success in being patient, but Maggie managed to follow along for the most part. A litany of complaints about their father was not-so-well buried in their babbling. She had already observed that he ran a fairly strict household, though it was obvious—to her, at least—that he was crazy about his girls. She suspected he was simply overwhelmed at times. His only assistance in raising them came from his mother and grandmother, who shared a house on the same block as the one in which Garrett lived with his daughters. From what little she had seen of the family, it seemed as though Garrett was almost as responsible for the older women as he was for his daughters.

This was a man encumbered by serious baggage.

Guitar case in hand, he approached with a faint smile. Why did she find the slight curve of his firm lips so much more appealing than Jay’s bright, beaming grins? She liked Jay very much, but there was just something about Garrett….

“Good morning, Maggie,” he said in his deep voice that never failed to elicit a shiver of reaction from her.

She liked to believe she’d become an expert at hiding that response behind a breezy smile. “Good morning, Garrett. The music was especially nice today.”

“I just play some chords,” he said with a little shrug. “Jay chooses the songs. But I’m glad you enjoyed it.”

“I was just going to tell her about my birthday plans, Daddy,” Kix said, bouncing up and down on her white sandals. “I’m so excited!”

Maggie smiled indulgently at the littlest McHale sister. As she almost always did, Kix wore her favorite pink, which clashed cheerfully with her flame-red hair but looked just right, somehow, on the adorable girl. “Sounds intriguing. What’s the plan, Kix?”

“We’re coming here,” Kix almost shouted in reply. “For a whole week! Isn’t that sweet?”

“Not quite a week,” her father corrected. “Monday afternoon through Sunday service.”

Kix waved off those details as unimportant. “Daddy rented a cabin and we’re coming a week from tomorrow. My birthday is that Tuesday and we’re going to have a party in the cabin—and you can come! And Grammy and Meemaw are coming, too. And we’re going swimming and fishing and hiking and boating and Daddy’s going to take the whole week off work and we’ll make s’mores and—”

“Kix,” her father interrupted firmly, “take a breath.”

“I hadn’t heard you were coming,” Maggie said in the brief ensuing lull. She wondered why the information shook her a little. After all, she saw Garrett—er, the McHale family—every Sunday, so why did the thought of him—er, them—being here every day for almost a week throw off her usual equilibrium?

“Kix just sprang this request on me last week,” Garrett admitted. “I was actually surprised a cabin was available on such short notice, especially considering it’s the Fourth of July week. I told Kix I couldn’t promise anything, but fortunately for us there was a late cancellation, so we were able to grab the reservation.”

“I’m glad we could accommodate you,” Maggie said automatically, then glanced at Kix. “So you wanted to spend your birthday week here, so close to home?”

“I wanted to go to the beach.” Payton looked and sounded utterly bored. “Like Padre Island or somewhere cool. But no, Kix had to come here where we come every single Sunday. Lame, huh?”

“But, Payton—Ouch!”

“Payton, did you just punch your sister?” Garrett demanded sternly.

“No, Daddy,” Kix assured him, innocently wide-eyed as she not-so-surreptitiously rubbed her arm. “She just sort of bumped into me.”

“There’s a bunch of geese swimming by the pier,” Payton said quickly. “Can I take Kix down to look at them?”

He hesitated a moment, then nodded. “Don’t get too close to the water. And we can’t stay long. I have things to do today.”

“You can talk to Maggie while we look at the geese,” Payton told him before turning to dash toward the lake with her sister.

Something in the teen’s voice made Maggie blink a couple of times. Surely Payton wasn’t trying her hand at matchmaking? But Garrett didn’t react, so she told herself she must have misunderstood. After all, why would Payton want yet another adult in her already oversuper-vised—according to her, at least—life?

“How have you been, Maggie?” he asked politely when they were alone.

“Fine, thank you,” she replied, equally cordial. “And you?”

He shrugged. “Busy. But fine.”

She knew that in addition to taking care of his daughters, his mother and his grandmother, Garrett taught flying lessons and piloted charter flights out of the small local airport. During the past few months, Payton and Kix had told her he’d left the military, in which he’d most recently served as a flight instructor at Laughlin Air Force Base, after the unexpected death a little more than a year ago of their mother, his ex-wife. He had moved back to this area to be closer to his mother and grandmother.

Garrett and the girls’ mother had divorced when Kix was only a baby. They had shared custody afterward, though the girls had lived primarily with their mother. Their home with her had been in San Antonio, a three-hour drive from the base, so they’d seen their father on alternate weekends and holidays for the most part, which had meant a huge adjustment for all of them when he’d become solely responsible for them.

In listening to the girls chatter about their lives, Maggie had gotten the impression that they had loved their mother but had spent as much time with nannies and babysitters as with her. “She was gone a lot,” Payton had said simply. “She was a lawyer, so she worked long hours and she had lots of professional clubs and parties and stuff she had to go to most evenings. She liked to hang out with her friends on weekends, because she said she worked so hard during the week that she needed down time.”

Time away from her children, Maggie had interpreted in a knee-jerk reaction of disapproval she’d tried to suppress. She told herself she had no right to judge a woman she’d never even met based on perhaps-exaggerated stories from two children.

“Maybe you need a vacation as much as the girls do,” she suggested to Garrett. “We’ll try to make sure you have a good time while you’re here.”

She spoke, of course, as a representative of the resort. No personal messages intended.

“Thank you,” he said.

She cleared her throat silently. Darn, but this man made her teeth tingle. How very inconvenient of him.

“So, um, your grandmother is coming with you for the week?” she asked with a lift of her eyebrows.

His smile turned rueful. “She is. She doesn’t want to be left out, even though she has given me an earful about how she’ll be spending six days in enemy territory.”

Maggie couldn’t help laughing. Her grandmother, Dixie Bell, and his, Esther Lincoln, were lifelong rivals who saw each other as mortal enemies. It had begun back when they were in junior high competing for the attentions of the same boys, though Esther was a year ahead in school. The rivalry had continued when they participated in county-fair cooking contests after they’d married, competing for blue ribbons and each bitterly accusing the other of underhandedness.

“I’m sure Mimi will be a gracious host,” she said, mentally crossing her fingers. “They probably won’t see each other much, anyway. Mimi’s usually in the offices or the store.”

“I’ve already told Meemaw that she has to be polite while she’s here,” Garrett replied with a chuckle.

She found it incredibly appealing to hear this serious-natured, somewhat stern-looking ex-military officer talk about his “Meemaw.” But then, she found entirely too much appealing about Garrett.

He glanced at his watch. “I’d better collect the girls. I’ve got some appointments this afternoon. Nice to visit with you as always, Maggie. We’ll see you next Sunday morning.”

“Actually, I’ll be out of town next weekend. I’m visiting my sister in Dallas to spend some time with her and the baby while her husband’s at a conference in Chicago. But I’ll be back Sunday evening, so I’ll be around if your family needs anything during your stay.”

Garrett nodded, then looked at her with a bemused expression. “I have to admit Kix’s request to spend her birthday week here caught me by surprise. It seemed to come out of the blue. She said she didn’t even need another present, just the time here.”

“Maybe she just wanted to spend a week with her family without the usual distractions at home,” she suggested.

Garrett appeared skeptical. “According to her and Payton, they spend too much time with family as it is. Payton wanted to go to Padre Island for our vacation, but Kix was insistent on coming here, so Payton agreed since it’s Kix’s birthday.”

“That was nice of her.”

“Yeah.” But she noted that Garrett still seemed perplexed by his daughters’ behavior when he bade her goodbye and walked away.

She wished him luck dealing with two girls of that age. It was certainly more responsibility than she’d want to take on.

“Let’s go to the playground!” Kix hopped out of the SUV immediately upon arrival at the resort just after noon on the Monday of their vacation week. “C’mon, Payton, let’s see who can make it all the way across the monkey bars without falling.”

“Whoa. Hold up there.” Garrett moved to stand in front of her. “We have a ton of stuff to carry inside, and you’re helping.”

“Okay,” she said cheerfully enough, changing course to head for the back of the vehicle. “We can go to the playground later.”

“Don’t you be running off without permission or supervision,” Garrett’s mom fussed to Kix. Sixty-year-old Paulette Lincoln McHale was medium height, broad-shouldered and hipped, with crisp gray hair and strong features. Yet despite her sturdy, rather imposing appearance, she was a compulsive worrier who tended to hover over the girls. “There are strangers in the campgrounds and the motel and the other cabins. One of us adults will need to go with you when you wander around the resort, you hear?”

Garrett watched as his daughters swapped exasperated looks and heaved long-suffering sighs before loading their arms with bags to carry inside the cabin.

Eighty-one-year-old Esther Lincoln, known in the family as Meemaw, was stronger than her daughter emotionally, though her body was going frail. Her hair was a cap of bright white curls around her soft face. Her shoulders were stooped and she relied on a walker to steady her gait, but her fiery spirit was undimmed. “Let the girls have some fun, Paulette. They’re not going to run wild around the place, and they know to be careful.”

“You can’t be too careful these days,” Garrett’s mother retorted darkly.

Garrett juggled two suitcases and a bag of groceries he’d removed from the well-packed vehicle. “Let’s just take the stuff inside and then we’ll make plans.”

Though it bore the number six, the cabin to which they’d been assigned sat in the center of five lakeside rentals numbered four through eight. The cabins ranged in size from the little one-bedroom A-frames at each end of the row to the four-bedroom cottage where Garrett’s family would spend the next six days. A long, welcoming front porch held rockers and a swing. Inside, the living area, kitchen and dining nook made up the open central floor plan. There was a separate bedroom for each adult and a sleeping loft for the girls to share. A big back deck furnished with wrought-iron tables and chairs invited guests to sit and admire the lake.

Kix looked forward to gathering around the fire pit in the evening to roast hot dogs and marshmallows, both of which Garrett had brought along. Between the groceries he’d purchased and the home-cooked goodies his mother and grandmother had insisted on preparing and bringing along, they probably had enough food for at least twice as many days as he’d booked for their stay.

He insisted the girls help put everything away before they played. He’d already launched the boat he’d towed behind the SUV, secured it into a slip he’d rented for the week and parked the trailer in the provided lot near the marina. The lot had been crowded; even this early in the holiday week, business was brisk at the resort.

He’d owned the fish-and-ski boat for several years. The girls always liked going out in it, one of the few things they seemed to enjoy doing with him these days. When their mother was alive, he’d spent many of his custody weekends taking them boating on waters near the base. They hadn’t considered him quite so lame back then, he thought regretfully. Probably due to a combination of them being younger and seeing him more rarely, making him less of a constant authority figure to be rebelled against.

Breanne had been more indulgent with them, spoiling them with material possessions to assuage her guilt for spending so little time with them. She hadn’t been a bad mother, just a distracted one. Breanne had been easily bored. Most especially with him.

Shaking off thoughts of his late ex-wife—and what had brought her to mind, anyway?—he nodded in approval when the girls reported that their things were all stowed away upstairs.

“Okay, what’s on the agenda?” he asked, having promised to leave the activities for the week to them—within reason.

Kix bounced around him. “We want to go out in the boat and have milk shakes at the diner and hike through the resort and play board games and cook hot dogs and—”

“Breathe, Kix.”

She giggled.

“Let’s go find Maggie and see if she wants to go out in the boat with us,” Payton suggested.

Both the girls had expressed disappointment that they hadn’t yet seen Maggie. A resort employee introducing herself as Rosie had checked them in at the main desk, and Maggie’s uncle, C. J. Bell, had assisted with the boat launch and slip parking at the marina. They had seen a few other faces familiar from Sunday services and Saturday boating-and-swimming visits to the resort, but there’d been no sight of Maggie.