Husband Needed Read online

  Impossible, Irritable, Arrogant Man Looking For Blindly Devoted Slave To Run Errands Day And Night. Salary: Not Enough. Benefits: None. No Appreciation, No Courtesy.

  Letter to Reader

  Title Page

  Books by Cathie Linz

  About the Author

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Copyright

  Impossible, Irritable, Arrogant Man Looking For Blindly Devoted Slave To Run Errands Day And Night. Salary: Not Enough. Benefits: None. No Appreciation, No Courtesy.

  “That’s the ad you should run!” Kayla said. “And if you want to hire someone else to help you around here, I’ll gladly place it.”

  “Wrong,” Jack retorted. “The ad should read ‘Good-looking, smart guy with sense of humor looking for temporary help. Emotional types need not apply.’”

  “Emotional types?” Kayla repeated in disbelief. “I’m not emotional. You’re impossible! I’m irritated by your preposterous demands—”

  “Irritated? Oh, I think you’re past that! Try furious and bossy.”

  Too furious to say another word, she turned to leave.

  Afterward, Kayla couldn’t be sure if Jack reached out to prevent her from leaving...or to open the door and boot her out. Either way, he tottered on his crutches, tumbled into her arms—and she landed in trouble!

  Dear Reader,

  This month: strong and sexy heroes!

  First, the Tallchiefs—that intriguing, legendary family—are back, and this time it’s Birk Tallchief who meets his match in Cait London’s MAN OF THE MONTH, The Groom Candidate. Birk’s been pining for Lacey MacCandliss for years, but once he gets her, there’s nothing but trouble of the most romantic kind. Don’t miss this delightful story from one of Desire’s most beloved writers.

  Next, nobody creates a strong, sexy hero quite like Sara Orwig, and in her latest, Babes in Arms, she brings us Colin Whitefeather, a tough and tender man you’ll never forget. And in Judith McWilliams’s Another Man’s Baby we meet Philip Lysander, a Greek tycoon who will do anything to save his family...even pretend to be a child’s father.

  Peggy Moreland’s delightful miniseries, TROUBLE IN TEXAS, continues with Lone Star Kind of Man. The man in question is rugged rogue cowboy Cody Fipes. In Big Sky Drifter, by Doreen Owens Malek, a wild Wyoming man named Cal Winston tames a lonely woman. And in Cathie Linz’s Husband Needed, bachelor Jack Elliott surprises himself when he offers to trade his single days for married nights.

  In Silhouette Desire you’ll always find the most irresistible men around! So enjoy!

  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

  CATHIE LINZ

  HUSBAND NEEDED

  Books by Cathie Linz

  Silhouette Desire

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  A Friend in Need #443

  As Good as Gold #484

  Adam’s Way #519

  Smiles #575

  Handyman #616

  Smooth Sailing #665

  Flirting with Trouble #722

  Male Ordered Bride #761

  Escapades #804

  Midnight Ice #846

  Bridal Blues #894

  A Wife in Time #958

  *Michael’s Baby #1023

  *Seducing Hunter #1029

  *Abbie and the Cowboy #1036

  Husband Needed #1098

  *Three Weddings and a Gift

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  Montana Mavericks

  “Baby Wanted”

  CATHIE LINZ

  left her career in a university law library to become a USA Today bestselling author of over thirty contemporary romances. She is the recipient of the highly coveted Storyteller of the Year Award given by Romantic Times, and has been twice nominated for a Love and Laughter Career Achievement Award for the delightful humor in her books.

  Cathie often uses comic mishaps from her own trips as inspiration for her stories, but she set this book in her own backyard—her hometown of Chicago. After traveling, Cathie is always glad to return to her family, her two cats, her computer and her cookie jar full of Oreos!

  One

  Someone was trying to break into his place!

  Jack Elliott heard the doorknob to his apartment rattle again, ever so slightly. He’d already gotten robbed once since moving up to the north side of Chicago, he wasn’t about to have it happen twice.

  Sure, the building had a doorman as a security measure, but that hadn’t prevented the last robbery—probably because Ernie the Doorman had the IQ of a snail.

  The doorknob rattled once more and then turned slowly. There wasn’t time to call the police. There wasn’t time to think, just to act.

  Unfortunately, his broken leg prevented Jack from acting very quickly. Despite a life often spent living at the edge, this was the first time Jack had ever broken a bone and he was not a happy camper. He’d been swearing at his crutches all morning, but now they looked like they might come in handy.

  Standing up and hanging on to the bookcase beside the door with one hand, Jack raised one of the wooden crutches over his head, ready to bash whoever walked through his front door. A man had a right to protect his own property.

  The door opened slowly, furtively...

  Giving a war cry that would have done a warlord proud, Jack brought the crutch down...only to belatedly realize the burglar was a woman with a kid! Their ensuing screams were even noisier than his had been.

  Swearing loudly and succinctly, Jack somehow managed to avoid hitting either one of them. Instead he swung his crutch to the far right, poking a hole clear through the wallboard next to the door. He’d suspected the walls in this place were paper thin, now he knew it to be a fact.

  “Are you crazy?” the female intruder screeched at him even as she scooped up her little girl and protectively held her close. “You could have killed us!”

  “You bring a kid along with you to break into my apartment and you have the nerve to call me crazy?” Jack yelled back at her, hanging on to the bookcase for balance. He hated being at a physical disadvantage this way, and his mobility was even further hampered by the fact that one of his crutches was now imbedded in his apartment wall.

  “See what you’ve done? You’ve upset my daughter,” the woman said with an accusing glare.

  “Upset? Upset?” Jack repeated in disbelief. “You better answer my questions and answer them fast or I’ll show you upset! Who are you and why the hell were you breaking in here?”

  “I didn’t break in, I have a key,” the woman retorted, having soothed her daughter into silence while continuing to shield the little one with her own body.

  Now that the kid had stopped her ear-splitting screams, Jack could finally think. The woman didn’t look like a thief, with her big blue eyes and curtain of honey brown hair that fell around her shoulders like waves of silk. But then looks could be deceiving.

  “Where did you get a key?” he demanded.

  “From your uncle, Ralph Enteman.”

  Jack frowned. Now that he thought about it, his uncle had called him yesterday afternoon and said something about sending over a surprise.

  “I’m assuming you are Jack Elliott?” the woman continued.

  “That’s right. And you are?”

  �
�Kayla White.”

  “Am I supposed to know you?”

  “Your uncle hired me.”

  “Great,” Jack groaned, remembering the last person his uncle had hired for him, an “exotic dancer” he’d sent over on Jack’s last birthday. “Tell him thanks, but I’m not interested,” he said wearily. “You can just head right back where you came from.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “There’s the door. I want you on the other side of it.”

  “I don’t think you understand...” she began, when he interrupted her.

  “Look, honey, it’s nothing personal, although I can’t believe a girl like you would bring your kid with you when you’re on a job like this. But hey, that’s your business.”

  “You have a problem with me bringing my daughter with me?” Kayla repeated. “And what do you mean by ‘a girl like me’? I’m a woman, Mr. Elliott, not a girl.”

  “I noticed. Look, I’m just not in the mood, okay?”

  Kayla frowned at him. “In the mood for what?”

  “For—” remembering there was a kid present, Jack substituted, “—fun and games.”

  Her look became tinged with suspicion. “Just what is it that you think I’m here for?”

  “Why don’t you tell me?” he countered.

  “As I said, your uncle hired my company...”

  Jack interrupted her again. “You own a company that does this kind of thing?”

  Actually she co-owned it with her best friend, Diane, but Kayla saw no purpose in going into details like that at this point. So instead she merely said, “That’s right.”

  “So you must have a lot of...experience?”

  “You could say that.”

  “Do you go out a lot on jobs like this?”

  “Every day.”

  After giving her a head-to-toe once-over, Jack wondered if maybe he was being a little hasty here. She might not be as busty as he liked his women, but she wasn’t half-bad. The plaid skirt she wore stopped above her knees, and the black tights clinging to her legs accentuated their shapely length. She was almost dressed like a preppie college coed, probably a popular costume in her line of work. College coeds and nurses were big—that last exotic dancer had been dressed as a nurse. The only thing out of place was the little girl Kayla was holding.

  “Anyway,” Kayla continued, “your uncle told me that you needed some help temporarily, what with your broken leg. He assured me he’d already spoken to you about all this.”

  “He lied,” Jack said.

  “He didn’t tell you I was coming over?”

  “My uncle told me that he had a surprise for me, but that’s all he said.” Jack belatedly registered that she’d mentioned something about his needing help, which got him to wondering exactly what kind of help she was talking about. The possibilities were erotic and endless. But the woman had a kid with her. This was one of the strangest setups he’d seen. “I can’t believe he gave you a key to get in.”

  “He wasn’t sure if you’d be home.”

  “Where else am I gonna be with a busted leg?”

  “The doorman downstairs told me that you’d gone out.”

  “Yeah, well, Ernie is several cards short of a full deck,” Jack retorted. “So tell me, what exactly is it that you do? I mean, you really don’t find it inhibiting to have your daughter with you on jobs like this?”

  “No. Why should I?”

  “Hey, far be it from me to cast the first stone, but I would have thought...I mean...it kind of breaks the mood, you know what I mean?”

  “No, I don’t have a clue what you mean,” she replied. “Do you have something against kids?”

  “There’s a time and a place for everything and I don’t think this is the time or the place for a kid to be watching her mother...do...whatever it is you do. Just how exotic do you get?”

  “Exotic?”

  “Isn’t that the politically correct term for what you do? Exotic dancing, instead of stripping?”

  Kayla’s eyes widened and her mouth dropped open before she icily stated, “I am not an exotic dancer!”

  “What would you call what you do?”

  “Running errands. I own a company called Errands Unlimited. We do a variety of things, Mr. Elliott, but dancing and/or stripping is not one of them!”

  “Hey, it was a natural mistake for me to make.” Jack held out a hand, before remembering that he needed that hand to hang on to the bookcase. He only narrowly saved himself from falling flat on his face.

  But Kayla seemed unmoved by his difficulty. She was too busy spitting fire at him, her voice sizzling with anger. “A natural mistake? Really? I’d love to hear how you figure that.”

  “The last surprise my uncle sent over was an exotic dancer for my birthday. So naturally I thought...”

  “You thought wrong.”

  The haughty look Kayla gave Jack made him feel like something that had crawled out from under a rock. It was January and the weather outside was beyond chilly, it was downright frigid—but even so, the expression in Kayla’s blue eyes lowered the already cool temperature in his apartment by about twenty degrees. She had classy features, icy eyes and a passionate voice, not to mention pretty damn good legs. She was fire, coated with ice, and she didn’t seem the least bit impressed with him; that alone made her stand out among the women he knew.

  Okay, so he wasn’t exactly looking his best, but at least his gray running shorts accommodated the cast on his right leg. His sweatshirt had Northwestern University Wildcats emblazoned across the chest, bracketed by the spaghetti sauce he’d spilled on it when he’d tried carrying a plate of spaghetti from the kitchen to the living room earlier. Should he tell her that he looked better cleaned up?

  As he watched her, Kayla efficiently disengaged the wooden crutch from the wall and handed it to him. “Here. I think you might need this.”

  The crutch seemed to mock him, underscoring his temporary lack of independence. Irritably taking it from her, he demanded, “So why did you bring your kid with you?”

  The kid—who, after her first ear-piercing screams, had been remarkably quiet up to this point—promptly burst into tears again and hid her face in the crook of her mother’s neck, making Jack feel like an even worse heel.

  “All I did was ask a simple question—” he began.

  “You’s mean!” the little girl shouted from the safety of her mother’s arms.

  “Shhh, sweetie, it’ll be okay,” Kayla murmured in a soothing voice. “This is Mr. Elliott, and he’s not as bad as he seems.”

  “Gee, thanks,” Jack muttered.

  “If you’ll just give me the list, Mr. Elliott, I’ll get to work,” Kayla briskly stated.

  Jack stared at her blankly. “The list?”

  “The list of errands you want me to run.”

  He took exception to her maternal tone of voice. “Listen, I already have a mother, I don’t need—”

  “It’s my understanding that you’ve already driven your mother to distraction,” she interrupted him to say. “That’s why your uncle hired me.”

  Jack glared at her. “Okay, so I don’t like people fussing over me.”

  “I’ll remember that. Your uncle felt that you would prefer someone objective assisting you rather than being ‘fussed over’ as you put it.”

  Actually what Jack’s uncle had said was “My nephew is impossible! If you can handle him, you can manage anything and I can assure you that I’ll throw more work your way than you’ll know what to do with.” As a member of the Chicago Board of Trade, Mr. Enteman could throw a lot of work her way with other traders who were too busy to handle the details of their daily lives. This could be the break she and Diane were waiting for, their first big account.

  Meanwhile, Jack was reconsidering his position. He supposed there were worse things than being waited on hand and foot by a beautiful woman like Kayla. He’d noticed that she wasn’t wearing a wedding ring. Which meant what? That she was divorced? Available?


  “We got off on the wrong foot here, no pun intended,” he said, fitting the padded handle of the crutch under his arm. “What do you say we start over again? How about telling me your daughter’s name?”

  “It’s Ashley.”

  “Hey, Ashley, I’m sorry I was yelling before,” Jack said in his most charming voice, the one he’d been told on more than one occasion could charm the wings off an angel.

  But his charm apparently didn’t work on little girls, since Ashley refused to even look at him, just burrowing her face even further into her mother’s shoulder.

  Not that Jack should complain, since the kid’s actions did manage to shift the neckline of the black angora sweater Kayla was wearing so that it displayed the intriguing hollows of her collarbone and the soft curve of a shoulder. A flickering flame of awareness teased his senses and warmed his appetite.

  His gaze leisurely traveled upward, from the creamy skin of her throat over a chin that looked like it could be stubborn, to her lips.... Very nice lips. Her cheeks were flushed, with anger or attraction? When his eyes finally reached hers, he got his answer—she met his perusal head-on. She was looking at him as if he were a low-life and she a queen. Jack wasn’t sure whether to be insulted or intrigued.

  Women had always found him attractive—he wasn’t conceited about it, he was simply accustomed to it. He had gray eyes and a way with women; both were mere facts. Over the years there were plenty of women who’d found him to be irresistible.

  But not this one. This one was eyeing him with complete indifference and just a twinge of impatience. Jack saw no hint of attraction in Kayla’s blue eyes, not a smidgen of sympathy at his being laid up with a broken leg. Maybe it was time to bring up the fact that he was a firefighter—that usually got women’s attention.