The Bachelor Daddy

A sudden chasm in the Alaskan permafrost swallows Joe Pelton, leaving his boisterous quintet of offspring orphaned on the edge of civilization. Richard Chester, silver-mine Midas and unapologetic lone wolf, inherits both the claim and the kids, hurtling from the savage snowscape to a velvet-lined Pullman sarcophagus where propriety goes to die. Between the clatter of rails and the wails of five pint-sized anarchists, he drags his unwelcome cargo into Manhattan’s marble mausoleum of decorum. The mansion’s hush shatters: porcelain trembles, butlers defect, and a fiancée carved from glacier-ice recoils at the riot. Only Sally Lockwood—quiet stenographer with ink-stained fingers and a lullaby for the fevered baby—threads chaos into cradle, coaxing the bachelor to trade his gilt isolation for the raucous music of family.