The Mercenary and the New Mom Read online

  Letter to Reader

  Title Page

  Acknowledgments

  Books by Merline Lovelace

  About the Author

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Epilogue

  Copyright

  Powerful, prominent, proud—the Oklahoma Wentworths’

  greatest fortune was family. So when they discovered that

  pregnant mom-to-be Sabrina Jensen was carrying the

  newest Wentworth heir—and had vanished without a

  trace—they vowed to...Follow That Baby!

  Sabrina Jensen: After her

  daughter’s delivery, the diner

  waitress turned doting mom finally

  stopped running, taking up residence

  at the Wentworth estate...where she

  received the second shock of her life

  when she discovered her baby’s

  daddy wasn’t dead.

  Jack Wentworth: An undercover mission gone awry

  had separated the lovestruck CEO from the woman

  of his dreams. But before he could stake his claim on

  mother and child, he needed to confront his

  ultimate betrayer....

  Trey McGill: Jack’s turncoat friend was now his

  family’s greatest enemy. Only the strong would

  survive the final showdown....

  Don’t miss this exciting conclusion to Follow That Baby!

  Dear Reader,

  Once again, we’ve rounded up the best romantic reading for you right here in Silhouette Intimate Moments. Start off with Maggie Shayne’s The Baddest Bride in Texas, part of her top-selling miniseries THE TEXAS BRAND, and you’ll see what I mean. Secrets, steam and romance...this book has everything.

  And how many of you have been following that baby? A lot, I’ll bet. And this month our FOLLOW THAT BABY cross-line miniseries concludes with The Mercenary and the New Mom, by Merline Lovelace. At last the baby’s found—and there’s romance in the air, as well

  If Western loving’s your thing, we’ve got a trio of books to keep you happy. Home Is Where the Cowboy Is, by Doreen Roberts, launches a terrific new miniseries called RODEO MEN.THE SULLIVAN BROTHERS continue their wickedly sexy ways in Heartbreak Ranch, by Kylie Brant And Cheryl Biggs’s The Cowboy She Never Forgot—a book you’ll find totally memorable—sports our WAY OUT WEST flash Then complete your month’s reading with Suddenly a Family, by Leann Hams. This FAMILIES ARE FOREVER title features an adorable set of twins, their delicious dad and the woman who captures all three of their hearts.

  Enjoy them all—then come back next month for six more wonderful Intimate Moments novels, the most exciting romantic reading around.

  Yours,

  Leslie J. Wainger

  Executive Senior Editor

  Please address questions and book requests to

  Silhouette Reader Service

  U.S. 3010 Walden Ave., P.O Box 1325, Buffalo, NY 14269

  Canadian P.O. Box 609, Fort Erie, Ont. L2A 5X3

  Merline Lovelace

  THE MERCENARY AND THE NEW MOM

  Special thanks and acknowledgment to Merline Lovelace for her contribution to the Follow That Baby miniseries.

  Books by Merline Lovelace

  Silhouette Intimate Moments

  Somewhere in Time #593

  *Night of the Jaguar #637

  *The Cowboy and the Cossack #657

  *Undercover Man #669

  *Perfect Double #692

  †The 14th. and Forever #764

  Return to Sender #866

  If a Man Answers #878

  The Mercenary and the New Mom #908

  Silhouette Desire

  Dreams and Schemes #872

  †Halloween Honeymoon #1030

  †Wrong Bride, Right Groom #1037

  *Code Name: Danger

  †Holiday Honeymoons

  Silhouette Books

  Fortune’s Children

  Beauty and the Bodyguard

  MERLIN LOVELACE

  After an exciting career as an air force officer, Merline Lovelace hung up her uniform and started writing romances. When not glued to her keyboard, Merline and her handsome hero, Al, enjoy golf, traveling and each other.

  Merline enjoys hearing from readers, and can be reached at P.O. Box 892717, Oklahoma City, OK, 73189.

  And watch for her next book, Undercover Groom, another sizzler about the fabulous Fortune family, coming from Silhouette Desire in June.

  This one’s for Gail and Leslie and all the folks at

  Silhouette who make murder and mayhem and

  breathtaking romantic suspense such fun!

  Prologue

  Sabrina Jensen would never know what pulled her from her light doze that cold, foggy March afternoon.

  It could have been the heightened instincts of a new mom, still on constant red alert to the slightest sound from the newborn napping in the hooded white wicker bassinet.

  It could have been the sense of danger that had dogged Sabrina day and night for the past several months. The danger that had kept her on the run, alone and pregnant and increasingly desperate, until finally she’d been forced to accept help from the family of the man she’d loved and lost so many months ago. The same family she’d believed wanted to take her baby from her.

  Whatever woke her, Sabrina’s gaze went instantly to the bassinet she’d rolled into the toasty-warm living room of the luxurious guest cottage. Still nervous, still frightened for her baby even here, on the heavily guarded grounds of the Wentworth estate, she’d wanted her three-week-old infant near her while she tried to absorb the intricacies of Advanced Marketing Statistics.

  When Sabrina saw the bassinet’s snowy white outline in the dim shadows and heard no fretful sounds from the infant tucked inside, the fear gripping her heart eased. She was safe here. At last, she’d found sanctuary. Tomorrow, her baby would be christened. Everyone was coming tonight for dinner, and would stay over for the ceremony.

  Everyone except the baby’s father.

  Aching with the constant sense of loss she carried tucked just under her heart, Sabrina felt the need to touch her baby. To brush a knuckle down the sleeping child’s feather-soft cheek. Tossing aside a fleecy orange-and-black Oklahoma State University throw, she started to push herself off the leather sofa placed to catch both light and warmth from the fire in the stone fireplace. Her statistics textbook tumbled off her lap and hit the colorful, braided rag rug with a thud.

  The noise caused a small movement in the shadows. The stir was so slight, so instantly stilled, that Sabrina almost missed it. She blinked once more to clear the last of the sleepy haze from her eyes. This time, her gaze penetrated the gloom beyond the heirloom wicker basket that held her baby.

  Shock froze her where she stood. Her chest squeezed. She felt a single instant of pure joy.

  “Jack!”

  At her strangled gasp, the gaunt, bearded figure in the shadows turned his head. Slowly, so slowly, his mouth twisted into a travesty of the smile that had melted her bones the first time she saw it.

  “Well, well. Sleeping Beauty wakes.”

  It was the Oklahoma drawl she remembered all too well. Husky. Masculine. As soft and as tough as rainwater on rawhide.

  “And without a kiss from
her prince,” he added in a low growl.

  His words evoked a memory that sent sharp, stinging hurt piercing into every inch of Sabrina’s skin. The pain needled right through the terror that was rushing in to replace her brief, soaring instant of joy. He’d said those same words to her before, the day they’d met. The agony of hearing them again after so many months of heartache almost tore her apart.

  Even greater than her agony, however, was her fear for her baby. Her whole body shaking, Sabrina pushed herself off the couch and faced the man she’d tumbled headlong into love with a short lifetime ago.

  “You don’t...” Her throat tight and aching, she forced out the same response she’d given him then. “You don’t look much like a prince.”

  “I guess we’ve both learned that appearances can be deceiving.”

  A sudden wave of terror gripped her as Jack stepped around the bassinet and into the light. With his skin stretched tight across his cheekbones and his face stubbled with a rough, straggly beard, he looked as though he’d traveled to hell and back.

  He had! She saw it in his eyes. Heard it in his voice.

  Oh, God! How could she ache for him? How could she want to throw herself into his arms, and at the same time feel her fingers curling into claws at the thought of his hands on her body? How could he raise a flood of heat in her belly with that twisted smile, even as she furtively searched the shadowy living room for her purse with its concealed handgun?

  As if sensing her rising panic, he halted a few steps away. The firelight glinted on his tobacco brown hair, once so short and neat, despite its stubborn tendency to curl when Sabrina ran her fingers through it.

  Desperately, she inched sideways. Away from the bassinet. Toward the gun she’d bought after the first attempt on her life.

  “They said...” She wet her lips. In a ragged whisper, she begged him to understand what she’d done. What she had to do to protect her child. “They said you died when that offshore rig blew up.”

  His eyes went so hard Sabrina felt their slice where she stood. “There were times I wished I had.”

  A million questions crashed through her, but the months of fear she’d lived with, the desperation she’d experienced, winnowed them down to just a few.

  “How could you...?” She fought to drag breath into her aching lungs. “How could you go off like that? How could you rush off to fight a battle that wasn’t your own like...like some damned mercenary when I...when we...?”

  “I came back, Sabrina.” A muscle worked in the side of his face. “I promised you I would. I made the same promise the day I met you.”

  “I remember,” she whispered. “I remember.”

  Blue eyes locked with green. For a brief, searing moment, hostility, suspicion and fear receded. For that instant, they weren’t standing in a room filled with the shadows of a wet March afternoon.

  Almost, Sabrina could feel the heat of an early June sun on her upturned face. Almost, she could smell the riot of wild honeysuckle. Hear the screech of metal on metal as the oil pump in the field next to the Route 66 Diner shrieked its irritating, rhythmic song...

  Chapter 1

  With a bone-deep sigh, Sabrina propped her sneakered feet against a stack of empty wooden crates. A push of her toes tipped her fan-backed iron lawn chair against the wall. Lazily, she tilted her face to the warm June sun. The tantalizing scents of wild honeysuckle and fried onions teased her senses. Even after a year and a half of waitressing at the Route 66 Diner a half hour from Tulsa, Hank’s onion-smothered chicken-fried steak could still make her mouth water.

  Behind her, the diner’s fitful air conditioner musttered and spit. The ancient unit kept the customers comfortable enough, but it couldn’t battle the heat in the kitchen or the perspiration that had filmed Sabnna’s temples as she’d thrown orders together for the breakfast rush. This morning’s crowd had kept her hopping. The noon mob had been even worse...or better, depending on whether she considered her aching feet or how much today’s crowd had added to the register take.

  The noontime stream of truckers and locals had finally dwindled to a trickle. Sabrina had left the latecomers to Peg, the dark-eyed, imperturbable quarter Cherokee who’d taught Sabrina the ropes when she’d first started at the diner, and to her boss, who served as chief cook and wisecracking counselor to the truckers who’d made the diner a regular stop. With Hank’s ribald advice to the lovelorn bluing the air, she’d sneaked out back for her first break since flicking on the pink neon Open sign at five-thirty this morning.

  Raising her arms above her head, she wiggled and waved them a few times to work the kinks from her shoulders, then crossed her wrists on top of her loosely piled dark brown hair. The sun caught the patch of tummy between her jeans and white knit top bared by her lazy stretch. Smiling, Sabrina lifted her face another few degrees to drink in the sunshine. Surprisingly, the late afternoon heat soothed her instead of adding to her layers of gritty fatigue. By some magical alchemy, the warmth transformed her weariness into mere lethargy.

  She closed her eyes, drowsing like a cat in the sun’s rays. She might even have snatched a little snooze if not for the blasted oil well in the alfalfa field behind the diner. The walking arm on the pump had been screeching like a witch with her broom on fire since yesterday morning. Inside the diner, the nerve-scratching noise carried even over the raucous chatter of the patrons and the blare of the jukebox. Outside, it totally destroyed the peace of Sabrina’s private little sanctuary. She’d stood it as long as she could yesterday, then called Wentworth Oil Works headquarters in Tulsa to complain. They’d promised to send a crew out as soon as possible.

  As soon as possible had better be pretty darn quick, she thought, wincing as the metal arm took another, earsplitting plunge, then scraped upward. With a conscious effort of will, she blanked the irritating shriek from her mind. Like water pouring into a well, a host of other thoughts gushed in to fill the void.

  She should be studying, not idling lazily in the sun, she thought with a little niggle of guilt. She had an accounting test tomorrow. Lord, she’d be glad when she finally finished her business degree. Only one more semester to go after this one, thank goodness. Between studying, waitressing, trying to make sense of Hank’s casual approach to bookkeeping, hunting down antiques for the diner she was slowly transforming into an authentic Route 66 landmark, and taking care of Pop when his cross-country hauls brought him through Oklahoma, her cup runneth over.

  At moments like this, though, the long shifts and late nights were worth all the effort she put into them. After a childhood spent drifting with her truck-driving father and twin sister, Sabrina had finally found her niche. More by chance than by choice, she’d enrolled at Oklahoma State University some years ago. Since then, she’d come to love the green, rolling hills of eastern Oklahoma almost as much as the warmhearted people who populated them. She’d worked several part-time jobs to pay for her college tuition before she started slinging hamburgers and chili at the Route 66 Diner.

  Smiling, Sabrina remembered how the forties era relic had tugged at her imagination the first moment she’d spotted it from I-44. On impulse, she’d pulled off the interstate onto a narrow, two-lane access road. A brown-and-white historical marker proclaimed that this stretch of road had been part of the old Route 66, which once ran for 2,400 miles in an unbroken ribbon of asphalt from Chicago to Santa Monica, California. The diner named for the famous highway looked like a squat, round-shaped hut with a conical roof. Its flyspecked neon sign tipped at an angle over the front entrance, giving the entire establishment a lopsided look. Despite its ramshackle exterior, it had a charm and a history that instantly appealed to a woman who’d grown up on the road.

  Once inside the place, Sabrina had been hooked. With no roots to the past herself, she’d delighted in the dented chrome counter stools, the shabby leatherette booths, even the broken-down jukebox that recalled a bygone era. On impulse, she’d plucked the hand-lettered Help Wanted sign out of the window and had been wor
king with Hank and Peg ever since.

  Bit by bit, she’d wheedled and argued and cajoled her boss into fixing up the old eatery. If everything went as planned, she’d buy it from Hank when he retired next year. She’d already submitted a small business loan preapproval package for review. If the loan went through, maybe, just maybe, the Route 66 Diner would become the first of a string of restored restaurants along the famous highway once known as America’s Main Street.

  Her dreams danced tantalizingly close, mingling with the sizzle of fried onions and the rumble of an eighteen-wheeler pulling out of the parking lot. Sabrina arched her back in another long, lazy stretch. She was still spinning out her particular vision of the future when the sun’s warmth was suddenly cut off. Frowning, she opened her eyes.

  “Well, well,” a hazy shadow drawled. “Sleeping Beauty wakes.”

  Narrowing her eyes against the sun, Sabrina squinted at the stranger smiling down at her. His grin was pure, rogue male.

  “And here I was hoping she’d need a kiss from her prince.”

  At the glint in his blue eyes, her stomach gave a queer little lurch that had nothing to do with the brimming bowl of Hank’s supercharged chili she’d gulped down on the run a couple of hours ago. Dropping her arms, she cocked her head and looked the stranger over from the toes of his dusty boots to his blue denim shirt to the black ball cap with the Wentworth Oil logo on its crown.