Bonnie Gardner - Sgt. Billy's Bride

“Sergeant Hays, you may kiss your bride.”

Darcy’s breath caught in her throat. She hadn’t bargained for this. This was only supposed to be a pretend wedding. But the handsome military man leaning in to kiss her was all too real.

Billy’s lips touched her mouth, landing feather soft, like a butterfly lighting on a flower.

She should have let him lift off and be done, and that would have been that.

But Darcy kissed him back.

Then Billy pulled her closer, pressing her against his hard, strong chest. And Darcy felt almost…loved.

Heavens, she couldn’t help wondering, what would it be like if they weren’t pretending?

Dear Reader,

Mills & Boon American Romance has rounded up the best romantic reading to help you celebrate Valentine’s Day. Start off with the final installment in the MAITLAND MATERNITY: TRIPLETS, QUADS & QUINTS series. The McCallum Quintuplets is a special three-in-one volume featuring New York Times bestselling author Kasey Michaels, Mindy Neff and Mary Anne Wilson.

BILLION-DOLLAR BRADDOCKS, Karen Toller Whittenburg’s new family-connected miniseries, premiers this month with The C.E.O.’s Unplanned Proposal. In this Cinderella story, a small-town waitress is swept into the Braddock world of wealth and power and puts eldest brother Adam Braddock’s bachelor status to the test. Next, in Bonnie Gardner’s Sgt. Billy’s Bride, an air force controller is in desperate need of a fiancée to appease his beloved, ailing mother, so he asks a beautiful stranger to become his wife. Can love bloom and turn their pretend engagement into wedded bliss? Finally, we welcome another new author to the Mills & Boon American family. Sharon Swan makes her irresistible debut with Cowboys and Cradles.

Enjoy this month’s offerings, and be sure to return next month when Mills & Boon American Romance launches a new cross-line continuity, THE CARRADIGNES: AMERICAN ROYALTY, with The Improperly Pregnant Princess by Jacqueline Diamond.

Wishing you happy reading,

Melissa Jeglinski

Associate Senior Editor

Mills & Boon American Romance

Sgt. Billy’s Bride

Bonnie Gardner

www.millsandboon.co.uk

To Mud, as always.

To Sue, who reminds me that I am woman and can roar, and Kathie and Kathy and Brenda. You know why.

To all the combat controllers and their families I have known through the years and even those I haven’t. You all have tough jobs and manage to do them well.

BONNIE GARDNERhas finally figured out what she wants to do when she grows up. After a varied career that included such jobs as switchboard operator, draftsman and exercise instructor, she went back to college and became an English teacher. As a teacher, she took a course on how to teach writing to high school students and caught the bug herself.

She lives in northern Alabama with her husband of over thirty years, her own military hero. After following him around from air force base to air force base, she has finally gotten to settle down. They have two grown sons, one of which is now serving in the air force. She loves to read, cook, garden and, of course, write.

She would love to hear from her readers. You can write to her at P.O. Box 442, Meridianville, AL 35759.

MILLS & BOON AMERICAN ROMANCE

876—UNCLE SARGE

911—SGT. BILLY’S BRIDE

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

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Author Note

Darcy Stanton sat in the bride’s room in the chapel at Hurlburt Air Force Base and clenched her hands in her lap with a grip of death. She couldn’t believe she was really going through with it.

She wasn’t ready to be a bride. She didn’t know what she was doing in this room getting ready to marry First Lieutenant Richard Harris III, a man she’d known all her life but wasn’t sure she knew at all. At this moment, she wasn’t sure she liked Dick, much less loved him.

She didn’t want to be Mrs. Dick Harris, the daughter of General and Mrs. Harrington Stanton. She didn’t want to play the role of the prim and proper niece of Colonel John Harbeson, the commander of the Special Tactics Squadron at Hurlburt. She wanted to be just plain Darcy. Not Tracy D’Arcy Harbeson Stanton, the namesake of four decorated generals.

She wanted to know how it would feel to work for a living, not to have to worry about protocol and which fork to use and what the other officers’ wives were wearing and what they would think of her. She’d planned to put her degree from Duke University in North Carolina to good use after graduation, but Dick would hear none of it.

Darcy drew in a deep, shuddering breath and tried to still her racing heart. She was a registered nurse as of last Tuesday, and she knew the signs. She was in severe stress, verging on a full-fledged panic attack.

“Mom,” Darcy whispered, her voice coming out in short, breathy gasps. “I’m not sure I can do this.” There, she’d finally said it, she’d voiced the doubts she’d been harboring for weeks, months—almost from the moment she’d let her mother convince her that accepting Dick’s proposal was the right thing to do.

Since her parents were out of the country because of Daddy’s posting at NATO Headquarters in Belgium, Mom had transferred much of the mother-of-the-bride wedding planning duties to Aunt Marianne. However, even from long distance and via e-mail, Mom had ruled with an iron hand.

Mom had enumerated a list of reasons for marrying Dick Harris and joining the Harris family. The Stantons had had a long history of military service. Though Darcy was their only child—and not a son, much to Daddy’s dismay—her parents believed that the Stanton military tradition, if not the name, would live on if their daughter married into another long-standing military family.

But Darcy wasn’t ready for offspring to carry on the family tradition. The thought of bearing any man’s child, much less Dick’s, set her into a panic.

Her mother, just in from Europe, took Darcy by the hands and turned her away from the mirror. She brushed a flyaway strand of hair away from Darcy’s face and looked into her eyes. “It’s normal to have jitters, Tracy. I felt that way before my wedding. Once it’s over, you’ll be fine.”

Darcy just looked at her and tried to blink the tears of frustration and panic out of her eyes. How could she explain that the wedding wasn’t making her nervous? It was the prospect of marriage…that was scaring the bejesus out of her.

Swallowing, Darcy forced herself to sit still in front of the makeup mirror. She had to do something before she made the biggest mistake of her life. She moistened her lips gone suddenly dry as the Sahara and looked at her mom. “May I have a few minutes to compose myself?”

Her mother nodded and shooed the bridesmaids out, then stepped out of the small room.

No sooner had the door closed behind them than Darcy leapt to action. She shot to her feet and locked the door. She knew what she had to do.

And it wasn’t marry Dick.

Darcy rummaged through the drawers of the makeup table for paper and a pen or pencil. Finding none, she grabbed an eyebrow pencil from the new makeup case her mother had insisted she use and scrawled a note on the mirror.

She hated that she’d let it go this far, but it wasn’t too late. There would be no wedding. She removed the engagement ring that had always weighed too heavy on her hand and left it on the dressing table.

Then, leaving her mother’s bridal veil hanging on a hook on the wall beside the mirror, she grabbed the backpack that contained her wallet and her other important papers and stuffed her jeans and T-shirt inside. Then she pushed open the window.

Taking a deep breath, Darcy unhooked the screen, hiked up her long skirt and perched on the windowsill. Then she swung her legs up over the edge. It wasn’t that far to the ground, and the bride’s room was on the blind side of the chapel so nobody would see. She could be in her car, still in the parking lot from the rehearsal the night before, and on the road before anyone missed her. A quick change at an out-of-the-way gas station would remove any evidence of the wedding that wasn’t to be.

Breathing a silent prayer, Darcy lowered herself to the ground and made her getaway.

In the sinking afternoon sunlight, Technical Sergeant Bill Hays pulled out of the parking lot of his apartment complex. As he drove onto Highway 98, he glanced at the clock on the new dashboard and frowned. Eight o’clock.

Surely the clock hadn’t been properly set before he’d taken possession of his new Jeep. He glanced at the government-issue dive watch on his wrist and muttered a curse. He was running even later than he’d thought.

It was bad enough that the two-week field exercise with his Special Tactics Squadron’s Silver Team had made him miss his regular trip to his family home in Alabama, but a maintenance problem on the C-130 transport plane bringing him back yesterday had delayed his departure for a week’s leave by yet another day. And the long debriefing had made him even later.

Hurlburt Air Force Base might have been the closest Special Tactics Base to his home in Mattison, Alabama, but he might as well have been at his last assignment in California, as difficult as it had been to get home lately. Since he’d been in Florida, it seemed as if circumstances had contrived to keep him away from home.

His late start would keep him from arriving before his mother went to bed. And the fifty miles or so of country road he had to traverse before he crossed the state line would make it impossible to save time. The roads wound and twisted enough in the daylight, but in the dark they were treacherous. He’d traveled these roads plenty of times, but as night had fallen, a thick, clinging fog had formed, making visibility next to nothing.

Hoping that each curve in the road would reveal a break in the fog and clearer conditions, he inched along.

Just after Bill drove into Alabama, he rounded a curve in the road and had to swerve sharply to avoid hitting something barely visible through the mist.

Muttering a curse, Bill slammed on the brakes and skidded to a halt some twenty or thirty feet beyond the apparition. He blinked and looked back over his shoulder to see what he had missed. A girl materialized and loped toward him with a duffel bag in one hand and a backpack slung over her shoulder.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing out here in the middle of the road in the dead of the night?” Bill yelled as she reached the car. “I could have hit you.”

She yanked open the passenger door without waiting for an invitation and tossed her bags over the seat to the back. “My old Volkswagen Beetle got me all the way through high school and nursing school, but it finally gave up a mile or so back. I was beginning to think that another car would never come along,” she said breathlessly.

“You can’t—” Billy stopped himself. It was late, and they were in the middle of nowhere. “Get in,” he muttered.