Montana Secrets. Charlotte Douglas
He had a daughter!
He couldn’t remember the bomb that had almost killed him, but he doubted its impact had been greater than the news he’s just assimilated.
He was a father. Catherine Erickson had borne his child.
Stunned by the knowledge, overwhelmed by a myriad of emotions—joy, surprise, pride—he couldn’t move, couldn’t breathe.
You have to think like Trace Gallagher, damn you, or you’ll ruin everything!
His daughter. Damn, he couldn’t keep the tears from his eyes.
Hot anger flooded him suddenly and seared the tears away, and he crushed the fate that kept him from acknowledging his identity to the woman he loved more than life and to the daughter he hadn’t known existed.
Dear Harlequin Intrigue Reader,
The summer is here and we’ve got plenty of scorching suspense and smoldering romance for your reading pleasure. Starting with a couple of your favorite Harlequin Intrigue veterans…
Patricia Rosemoor winds up the reprisal of THE MCKENNA LEGACY with Cowboy Protector. Yet another of Moira McKenna’s kin feels the force of what real love can do if you’re open to it. And not to be outdone, Rebecca York celebrates a silver anniversary with the twenty-fifth title in her popular 43 LIGHT STREET series. From the Shadows is one more fabulous mystery coupled with a steamy romance. Prepare yourself for a super surprise ending with this one!
THE CARRADIGNES come to Harlequin Intrigue this month. The Duke’s Covert Mission by Julie Miller is a souped-up Cinderella story that will leave you breathless for sure. This brawny duke doesn’t pull up in a horse-drawn carriage. He relies on a nondescript sedan with unmarked plates instead. But I assure you he’s got all the breeding of the most regal royalty when it counts.
Finally, Charlotte Douglas brings you Montana Secrets, an emotional secret-baby story set in the Big Sky state. I dare you not to fall head over heels in love with this hidden-identity hero.
So grab the sunblock and stuff all four titles into your beach bag.
Happy reading!
Sincerely,
Denise O’Sullivan
Associate Senior Editor
Harlequin Intrigue
Montana Secrets
Charlotte Douglas
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Charlotte Douglas has loved a good story since learning to read at the age of three. After years of teaching that love of books to her students, she now enjoys creating stories of her own. Often her books are set in one of her three favorite places: Montana, where she and her husband spent their honeymoon; the mountains of North Carolina, where they’re building a summer home; or Florida, near the Gulf of Mexico on Florida’s west coast, where she’s lived most of her life.
CAST OF CHARACTERS
Ryan Christopher—A handsome and courageous marine lieutenant working undercover to fight terrorism, who loses more than his memory.
Trace Gallagher—Ryan Christopher’s alter ego…and determined to protect the Eriksons at any cost.
Catherine Erickson—A pretty schoolteacher and the love of Ryan’s life.
Megan Erickson—Catherine’s four-year-old daughter.
Gabriel Erickson—Catherine’s father.
Marc Erickson—Catherine’s brother, a marine who’s Ryan’s best friend.
Colonel Wentworth—Head of counterterrorism at the Pentagon.
Snake Larson—Town bully and troublemaker. This time he may have committed a much more serious crime.
Derrick Hutton—Head of the terrorist group Righteous Sword, and the man responsible for too many deaths.
Dear Reader,
Montana Secrets was completed in August 2001, one month before the September 11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. While the story is total fiction, some elements of it are eerie predictors of what was to come—Middle Eastern terrorists launching an attack against the United States.
In addition to those sinister elements, however, this story of U.S. Marine Lieutenant Ryan Christopher and his fiancée, Catherine Erickson, contains examples of all that is best in America. When their country is threatened, both Ryan and Catherine place the safety of the nation and the protection of its freedoms above their personal safety and desires. In the end, good triumphs over evil, and, in the best Harlequin tradition, Ryan and Catherine find happiness together.
Montana Secrets is dedicated to those who lost their lives on September 11, to those at home and abroad who deter and fight terrorists who attempt to cripple our nation and destroy our freedoms, and to the courage, tenacity and union of the American people.
Sincerely,
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
Epilogue
Prologue
Lieutenant Ryan Christopher closed the file on his desk, rubbed his tired eyes with the heels of his palms and swiveled his chair toward the third-floor picture window of his embassy office.
Below him stretched Bahira, capital of the Middle Eastern Emirate of Tabari, white and sparkling beneath the merciless desert sun. Minarets of ancient buildings mixed with pleasant symmetry among the gleaming glass of modern skyscrapers, towering date palms and the colorful blossoms of oleander. Even in the scorching heat, the narrow cobbled streets of the bazaar teemed with traffic and pedestrians.
North of the city shimmered the endless desert, its monotonous, undulating sands dotted with oil wells that provided the tiny country’s immense wealth. To the south stretched the Arabian Sea, its surface presently as calm as a single-faceted aquamarine, exactly the rich blue hue of Catherine Erickson’s eyes.
Ryan smiled at the memory of the devilish sparkle in those baby blues, a quality he’d noted the first time he’d met her six years ago. Marc, his college roommate and Catherine’s older brother, had invited twenty-year-old Ryan to spend the summer on their Montana ranch, and Cat, as her family called her, had been only sixteen. Like Marc, Ryan had considered the gangly teenager with a dusting of freckles across her nose and flyaway blond hair barely tamed by braids a major pest.
Young Cat had been interested in only two things—horses and spending every possible minute with her older brother, for whom she had a bad case of hero worship. Believing themselves sophisticated college men above socializing with a mere child, he and