Game Plan of the Heart

Cara Colter

www.millsandboon.co.uk

Contents

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter One

Vindication.

There was the name right on the mailbox. A. Burnadette. The very same name that had flashed on Bowen Reeve’s newly purchased Caller ID machine last night at midnight.

He had him. He had the little punk who had been pestering him with prank calls two or three times a week for the last three weeks.

“’Are you my daddy,’ indeed,” Bowen muttered to himself, and sank low in his truck seat, pulled his ball cap over his narrowed eyes, and surveyed the house.

Truthfully, it wasn’t quite what he was expecting. Kids who were running wild at midnight usually came from homes where nobody gave a damn about much of anything. And he considered himself something of an expert, having once been a kid who ran wild at midnight.

But looking at that little white house of A. Burnadette it was evident whoever lived here gave a damn. The picket fence was freshly painted, the grass in the small yard was neatly trimmed, red flowers bloomed in the window boxes. On the covered verandah a colorfully cushioned swing swayed gently in the slight breeze.

That was a good thing, Bowen told himself. A. Burnadette gave a damn. As a phys ed teacher at Montgomery Bridge Memorial High School, he dealt with lots of parents who didn’t. Lots of parents who, if he confronted them about their child being the prankster calling at midnight, would look at him blankly and wonder why he didn’t unplug his phone.

Why hadn’t he unplugged his phone?

Bowen had stubbornly picked up the phone every single time, even though he knew he had only one midnight caller, even though he knew the exact pattern of the call by heart.

“Hello.”

His greeting would be followed by a long silence.

“Hello?” he’d say again, irritated now, and then there would be another long silence.

And then a voice, cleverly disguised to sound like a young child, would whisper, “Are you my daddy?”

It was some sort of terrible cosmic joke, of course, that out of several million potential victims the prankster had found him, Bowen Reeve, a man haunted by a choice made while he was still in high school.

“I’ve decided to give the baby up for adoption,” Becky had said.

The right choice, of course. The only choice. They’d been unmarried, young, and poor, not so much in love as looking for an escape from the grim realities of their lives. Becky had moved away shortly after the birth of the baby, and Bowen had been saddened to read of her death in an automobile accident two years ago. It should have been the end of the chapter, but it wasn’t.

Because he had held his baby, his son, once.

It was something a man never forgot. Even though he tried. Even though, in the aftermath of that terrible time, he had made the decision that he would make a difference to other young men trying to find their way in a rough world, and even though he had followed through on that decision, he could not forget that somewhere out there was a child. His child.

It was this fact that made him so furious at the midnight caller. Bowen never went right back to sleep after. Oh, no. He had to reopen all the eight-year-old wounds, revisit all the old hurts. It made him so cranky he could barely stand himself.

“Coach,” one of his kids had finally said, “don’t bite my head off. What’s with you?”

“Sorry, Barkley. I’ve been getting prank calls. I’m not sleeping.”

Barkley had looked at him and rolled his eyes, a look reserved for those who had technology impairments. “So, you ever heard of Caller ID?”

As a matter of fact, he hadn’t.

But now that he had, this miracle of the modern age had led Bowen Reeve right to where he wanted to be. Sacrificing his Saturday had paid off.

Vindication.

As he studied the little white house that slumbered in the early spring sunshine, the garage door suddenly began to open.

He slumped down farther in his seat, and then began to smile.

There was the culprit, exactly as he had pictured him. Maybe thirteen or fourteen years old, the boy had his back to the opening door, and was squatted down beside a miniature motor bike, like the ones the monkeys rode in the circus.

He was a typical delinquent. Too large white T-shirt, a large streak of grease on one sleeve, vest over it, baseball cap on backwards, long dark brown hair protruding out from under the cap. The kid looked downright scrawny.

No match at all for six feet and one hundred and eighty-two pounds of angry football coach.

Still, just in case he did not look intimidating enough, Bowen lowered his sunglasses over his eyes, got out of his vehicle, slammed the door.

Bowen walked right up behind the kid, folded his arms over his chest and planted his legs. He cleared his throat.

“Excuse me.”

He was rewarded with a little squeal of fear, but his enjoyment was short-lived. The boy stood up and whirled around.

And was not a boy!

Bowen stared, startled, at the delectable curves under the T-shirt. And then, embarrassed, he looked up.

She was no girl, either. Perhaps thirty, her face was a small heart, dominated by huge eyes that were part gold and part brown. He realized he could study those eyes endlessly trying to decide what color they were.

At the moment, the eyes were sparking with irritation.

“You scared me,” she said, and folded her arms defensively over her chest.

“I’m sorry.” Then he felt annoyed with himself. He had pictured this conversation from beginning to end ever since the name had come up on the call display last night, and never once had it begun with the words I’m sorry.

She had a little smudge of grease across the bridge of her nose, and Bowen was aware of the strangest desire to reach over with his thumb and wipe it off.

Of course, there was the little matter of the wrench she was wielding. She looked prepared to use it if he took one step closer to her.

And there was the little matter of why he was here, which he felt suddenly a whole lot less certain about.

Obviously she was not making prank calls at midnight.

His mind seemed to be moving sluggishly, caught in the current of her eyes.

“I’m Bowen Reeve,” he said, finally, and offered his hand. It occurred to him this had not been in his script, either. Not even close. “I teach at the high school. And coach football.”

She hesitated, and as he had hoped, took his teaching position as proof he was not a door-to-door salesman, or worse. She juggled her wrench to her other hand, and accepted his proffered hand.

He saw immediately that it had been a mistake to take her hand. It was soft and delicate, not the hand of a woman who made it a habit to work on tiny motorbikes. He let it go abruptly, but not quickly enough to escape the little shiver of awareness he felt.

“Ashton Burnadette,” she offered. “What can I do for you, Mr. Reeve?”

“Make it Bowen.” What was he doing? He wasn’t here to make friends! “Have you got a child?” he asked, forcing himself to be all business.

She looked suddenly wary, as if Oprah had been coaching her not to talk to strangers and she suddenly realized she had not demanded proof that he worked at the high school.

“Not old enough for you to be scouting for the Mountain Lions,” she said.

She knew the name of his team. Before his ego lapped that up too eagerly, he said, “Actually, I’m here about some phone calls I’ve been getting.”

“Phone calls?”

“Prank calls. At midnight.”

“That’s impossible. Justin goes to bed at eight thirty. Besides he isn’t that kind of boy.”

Bowen had heard that line a few thousand times since he had started teaching. It was never their kid.

He should make his point and leave. But somehow making his point had become secondary to finding out if she was a single mom, or if a husband shared this cute little house with her and her prank-calling kid.

“Maybe I should come back when your husband is home,” he said.

“I’m a widow,” she said with stiff pride.

“I’m sorry.” There, he’d said it twice, and this time he didn’t mean it at all. He was glad she was single, which did not bode well for his mission here.

He might as well admit he had totally lost control of the script and leave. He tried to salvage something. “Look, if you could just talk to your kid about it. I need to get some sleep.”

“Mom!” A little boy came whipping around the corner into the garage and screeched to a halt. He looked from Bowen to his mother and back again, his chocolate hair falling over his eyes.

Bowen stared at him. The child’s eyes were huge. And green. The pure, undiluted green of an Irish meadow.

Bowen had seen eyes like that before. He saw them every morning when he looked in the mirror.

Chapter Two

“Justin, this is Mr. Reeve. He teaches at the high school,” said Ashton.

Her son came forward and politely extended his hand. “How do you do, Mr. Reeve?” he enquired solemnly.

Bowen listened carefully, trying to decide if this was the voice that haunted him at midnight. He took the small extended hand and shook it. Could such a well-mannered child really turn into Captain of the Telephone Terrorists at the stroke of midnight?

“Fine, thanks,” Bowen said gruffly. This was the problem with being technologically impaired. Could the new-fangled device sitting on his bedside table supplying him with the phone numbers of all who called lie? Could it make a mistake?

He was going to have to ask Barkley. Meanwhile, he felt himself trying to judge the kid’s age, and no matter how he looked at it, Justin Burnadette looked like he was about eight years old.

Bowen told himself sternly that it just wasn’t possible that this was the child he had held in his arms, so briefly, eight years ago. How could it be? How could a mere child track down his natural father?

Was it some kind of wishful thinking on his own part?

“Mr. Reeve says he’s been getting strange telephone calls, Justin. For some reason-” Ashton sent Bowen a dirty look from under lashes that were as thick and sooty as a chimney brush “-he thought you might be involved.”

Bowen focused very intently on the child now. He’d been teaching long enough to spot discomfort.

The boy seemed to shrivel before him, and he looked down and scuffed the garage floor with the toe of a worn sneaker.

“Not me,” he said, without an ounce of conviction.

Bowen would be willing to place odds that this was the boy who belonged to the voice on the other end of the midnight calls. But he suddenly knew, in the boy’s mind, it was not a game, not a trick, not a prank.

He glanced at Ashton. She was looking at her son with alarm and puzzlement.

And suddenly, Bowen’s desire to be vindicated died completely.

“This is 2218 Birchwood, isn’t it?” he asked. He hoped Ashton was as technologically impaired as he was, and that she would accept Bowen had traced his tormentor by address and not by name.

Her face melted into lines of relief. “Oh, no,” she said, and smiled. “It’s not. That’s two blocks over. This is 2218 Lodgepole.”

The smile was devastating to Bowen. It brought a light to her face that transformed her from pretty to beautiful.

He reminded himself, firmly, that he was a man who disliked complications. Women, generally speaking, were complicated. Ask one out for a beer and a pizza and before you knew it they were expecting a diamond ring and a wedding date.

And Ashton Burnadette came with more complications than most-namely the boy beside her who had Bowen’s own green eyes and had been calling in the middle of the night making daddy enquiries.

This was a situation a sane man would not touch.

“Well,” he said, “sorry to have bothered you. Two blocks which way?”

She pointed, not even trying to hide the fact that his departure filled her with relief. Apparently she was not one of the ones in search of a diamond ring and a wedding date. Bowen was amazed to find himself slightly miffed at this rare display of immunity to his masculine charm.

In a moment of insanity, he thought of staying, making small talk, getting around to the pizza and beer thing.

Sanity came back in a gratifying rush. This situation promised to bring nothing but confusion and chaos to his well ordered life.

He turned swiftly to go, promising he would never look back. He would never think about that question in the night. “Are you my daddy?”

He would never think about the little boy’s large green eyes or her somber golden brown ones again.

He would make a clean getaway. In moments he would be back to his neat and tidy life. He was willing to bet the prank phone calls were over.

But his clean getaway was impeded by a sturdy little body that was suddenly planted in front of him.

“What grade do you teach?” Justin asked, his words laced with just a touch of desperation.

Desperation that made Bowen realize the only one he’d been fooling was himself. He could never walk away from the Burnadettes without knowing the answer.

Was he this little boy’s dad? The possibility was remote. One in a million. One in a billion. One in a trillion, maybe.

But people did win lotteries all the time. And they got struck by lightning. Weird coincidences threaded human existence. At school last week, all the female teachers had been talking about a TV program they’d seen where two guys who met in a bar and became best friends for life later discovered they were brothers.

He could see that Ashton was not happy about this delay in his departure, and he had a purely masculine need to change that, to know if she felt even a little bit of the same sizzle he was feeling.

“I teach grades ten, eleven, and twelve boys P.E.,” he said. “And I coach football. Our senior team has been division champs three years in a row.”

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