Navy Seal Promise

He made a promise he intends to keep

Harmony Savitt is off-limits for navy SEAL Kyle Bracken. Not only is she his best friend’s little sister, she’s also a single mother and the widow of a fellow SEAL killed in action. This soldier needs to keep his distance. But something between them has changed...

Despite the new complicated feelings he has for Harmony, when his family comes under attack, there’s no one Kyle trusts more than her to help him get answers. When that threat extends to her and her daughter, though, he vows to protect them...even if it means putting his own heart on the line.

Kyle swung the door open. “Inside.”

“No kiss this time?” Harmony asked, testing him. Her chin was high.

“That’s right.” He spoke quietly enough that it didn’t carry into the lobby when he said, “You want to know something I’m afraid of?”

“What’ve you got, superhero?”

“That whatever’s happened between us tonight wiped out everything that came before it. Is that what you want?” he asked.

“Are you kidding me?” For the first time, he saw the nerves behind her brave front. Her chin quavered even as she jabbed him with her finger. “Why do you think I didn’t say anything before? You think I want to lose my best friend?”

He didn’t reply.

She lifted her shoulders in a helpless shrug. “But I guess...at the end of the day...I’m not half as noble as you are.”

Dear Reader,

A hundred years ago, Lucy Maud Montgomery wrote, “No matter what life might hold for them, it could never alter that. Their happiness was in each other’s keeping.” Anne of Green Gables has clearly stayed with me.

When I set out to write the fifth book in my Fairhope series, I had no plan to draw on books I read as a young girl. I suppose it is no surprise, however, that irrepressible Harmony’s flaming red hair and her lifelong affection for noble Kyle drew subconscious parallels to a certain orphan from Avonlea and her dear friend Gilbert Blythe. By the second chapter, Kyle began to refer to his Harmony as “Carrots” and there may or may not be a reference to that infamous slate-breaking incident...

I’ve always had a soft spot for the friends-to-lovers romance. Harmony and Kyle take it a step further, because when your hero is a tried and true navy SEAL and your aviatrix heroine is an expert in aerobatics, matters like life and death are never far behind.

I have loved every moment of writing this series, mostly because I get to watch characters like Harmony and Kyle dream big, grow up and realize, like Anne, how close to home happiness truly is.

Happy reading!

Amber Leigh

Navy SEAL Promise

Amber Leigh Williams

www.millsandboon.co.uk

AMBER LEIGH WILLIAMSis a Harlequin romance writer who lives on the United States Gulf Coast. She lives for beach days, the smell of real books and spending time with her husband and their two young children. When she’s not keeping up with rambunctious little ones (and two large dogs), she can usually be found reading a good book or indulging her inner foodie. Amber is represented by the D4EO Literary Agency. Learn more at www.amberleighwilliams.com.

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For my moon child, brighter than the sun.

Read books, cover or no cover.

Gather seashells, whole or broken.

Make ripples on the pond.

Mostly, breathe fire, rebel baby, and

light up the world with who you are.

And for that person, my person—you know

exactly who you are. This SEAL belongs to you.

Contents

Cover

Back Cover Text

Introduction

Dear Reader

Title Page

About the Author

Dedication

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

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Extract

Copyright

PROLOGUE

HARMONY SAVITT LOVED nothing more than pulling Gs in her high-performance aircraft. She loved doing all the rash, death-defying maneuvers that made spectators gasp and her parents nauseated.

As a pilot, she was gutsy. A certified barnstormer. She’d graduated at the top of her class from the tip-of-the-sword aerobatics academy she’d moved out west to conquer.

She knew good and well that her parents back home in Alabama would’ve preferred that she’d never caught the flying bug. If she gave it all up now—maneuvers, air shows, flight in general—and returned to small-town life with her feet planted solidly on the ground, they’d only be too pleased.

However, they’d touted purpose and dreams from the moment they knew she was listening. They’d encouraged her to be who she was, what she was, without compromise. And so she had.

Regardless of all that, it wasn’t three minutes into the first show of the season in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, that she felt it—something she rarely felt behind the controls of her Pitts S2S. She pulled rapidly out of formation and radioed the tower that she was coming in hot.

She landed with a skip and a bounce, ripped off her flying helmet. Emergency personnel ran at her with hoses and med bags. “What is it? What happened?” they cried out. She nearly mowed them down as she ran for the first hangar, clawing the air and cursing with every step.

She rounded the structure, grabbed the wall and aimed for the cleanest patch of tarmac she could find.

Sick. Sick, sick, sick.

Where was Mom to hold her hair back now?

The personnel kept a respectful distance. By the time she was done, she’d ejected her entire breakfast. She’d also broken out into a fine cool sweat, and her limbs weren’t the least bit sturdy.

Sturdiness was her mien. She was never not sturdy. Whether it was pulling those happy Gs or rolling over in a barrel, she prided herself on a cast-iron stomach and rock-steady hands at the controls. Airsickness had never been a problem.

“Hey, winger. You sick?”

This from her mechanic. Harmony fell back into a crouch and leaned against the cool metal building at her back. Planes stormed overhead, tearing, roaring, whistling. In the distance, the sound of cheering echoed off the tarmac in a merry cacophony. And still her knees shook like the ground was quaking.

She lowered her head until her long fire-engine-red rope braid fell heavy against her stomach. “I don’t get sick, Danny,” she muttered. “Ever.”

Her mechanic snorted. “Those cookies you just tossed are bound to disagree with you. If you ain’t sick, you’re pregnant.” And he guffawed because the thought of balls-to-the-wall Harmony Savitt pregnant was...

Impossible.

It took a bit of time, but she got up. Unzipping the neck of her flight suit, she fanned herself and scurried back to her plane. She did a quick check to make sure the bumpy landing hadn’t jarred anything loose. The weakness chased her back to the hangar before she could even think about gearing up for the next phase of the show.

She hosed her face off and did her best to cleanse the taste from her mouth by drinking half a bottle of tepid water. When the backs of her eyes went fuzzy and her ears started in with a chorus of white noise, she had to sit down and put her head between her knees.

While she was there, she counted. She counted days. Then weeks.

“Hell in a handbasket,” she cursed. The nausea was fading, but the shakes remained. This time they weren’t just from weakness.

Something else Harmony Savitt didn’t get was scared. But the truth was all but written in front of her. Her long-held tenet of embracing the natural turbulence of life went up against denial—denial of what she’d most likely been carrying around with her in the cockpit of her S2S. Pulling 10 Gs. Slipping. Stalling. Spiraling.

“Shit.” She covered her mouth and made a dash for the port-a-john.

She was exhausted, bedraggled—on the verge of a breakdown, the kind other people had. Not her.

“Harm?”

Head low, she squinted. The voice was familiar. For a few seconds, she thought she’d conjured it out of some nausea-induced haze. The hand that came down on her shoulder was real, though. Hard and real.

“Carrots. You okay?”

Her heart lurched. Only one person in the world called her Carrots.

“Oh, God.” It came out on a wavering prayer. Prayer—another thing she rarely engaged in.

Turning her head, she rested her cheek on the back of Kyle Bracken’s hand and thanked the maker for summoning him here to this place so far from home where she had suddenly been feeling so wretchedly alone. Peering up, she felt a weak, relieved smile pull at the corners of her white-pressed lips.

They froze in place along with the rest of her. Sure, it was Kyle. Crystal-clear blue eyes like untouched lakes in Scandinavia. A face like a dream—sharp-cut and hard-boned, it was marked hither and thither by scars, old and new. It was always tan, the freckles peppered across his nose and cheekbones nearly faded by the same sun that had imprinted them there in youth. His cheekbones were high and wide. The only thing soft about him was the slight button nose he’d been graced with by his tiny, fierce mother.

It was a good face. She’d known it all her life, so she was aware, more than most, of the kindness behind it, as well as the inclination toward mischief. There was courage there in boatloads, integrity, too, and the propensity of a warrior living in stunning synchronicity with a heart forged from full-fledged gold.

Some of those new scars...they were reminders of his latest deployment where, less than a year ago, he’d been medevaced from deep conflict after a near-fatal run-in with a frag grenade.

None of it gave her pause. Not anymore. She’d abandoned the end of the flying season last summer when she heard he’d been injured and had sat for weeks at his bedside, trading shifts there with his mother, his father, his sister and his then-fiancée. You couldn’t keep a tried-and-true Navy SEAL down. She knew it because her big brother, Gavin, was a SEAL, as well. He and Kyle had survived BUD/S together, fighting through every wall to earn their Trident and their place in the good fight.

And they’d taken someone with them on their way to petty officer status. Someone who’d come to mean as much to Harmony as either of them. Someone she’d come to love, too, over the last few years.

Someone she suspected was jointly responsible for her fears and misplaced cookies.

Kyle offered her a ghost of a grin. When she was a girl, that smile had held the power to bring her to her knees. It wasn’t the expression, however, that made her go to them now.

It was the uniform. Full dress blues.

If Harmony knew anything about Kyle Bracken, it was that he didn’t flaunt his SEAL status. He rarely donned his uniform stateside unless it was required. T-shirt, jeans, ball cap—those were his go-to threads. Seeing him decked out in white cap and shiny medals struck another chord of fear in her, far worse than the last.

“What’re you doing here?” she asked. Though she knew. The sister and the girl of military men always knew.

The grip on her shoulder squeezed as the smile on his face tapered off. “Harm. I wish I could tell you I came for the show.”

She was holding her breath again. She reached up blindly and gripped his jacket. “Kyle. What are you doing here?” The words came through her teeth. They were clenched, near clattering.

Those eyes. They told her before his mouth could bring itself to move. Those Scandinavian lakes were as deep with sorrow as they were wide, and something broke inside her to see it. To know.

“It’s Benji,” he said. “I’m sorry, baby. He’s dead.”

CHAPTER ONE

Five Years Later

AN ILL WIND blew Kyle into his Alabama home port. As he docked his beloved one-man sloop, the Hellraiser, in its rightful slip, he felt change in the air.

By the pricking of my thumbs—

Looking south, far off south, he saw nothing but cerulean skies skidded with small white fat-bottomed clouds. It was June, however, and though temps were climbing fast into the blistering nineties, the breeze was high. Off the Hellraiser’s stern, the Stars and Stripes flapped raggedly, the line ticking a cadence off the metal flag pole.

—somethin’ wicked this way comes.

The dawn, too, heralded change for the shore of his coastal home, he remembered as he checked the bilge pump and turned all power off to the cabin. This had been his home away from home for the past week and a half, while he sailed from Virginia Beach near Naval Amphibious Base Little Creek, down the Atlantic seaboard, around Florida’s jutting peninsula and its glittering green keys. Watching the day break like a fire-soaked phoenix on his restive swath of the Gulf of Mexico, he recalled the old adage: Red sky morning—sailor’s fair warning.

Kyle had hoped that that warning was for what lay behind, what had drawn him to the refuge of the sea to decompress from his latest conflict as a Navy SEAL.

At sea, he could breathe. He could disconnect from the chaos and violence of his chosen profession. He could clear his head and reinvigorate his soul.

It had been harsh, the last string of operations. Harsh enough to wake him every night in the bunk of his sloop. But the cradle-like motion of the sea had helped beat back the tightness in his chest. And up on deck, with the salty wind in his hair and his sea-legs beneath him, he had slowly been able to realign the molecules between head and heart.

Out at sea, he wasn’t Chief Petty Officer Kyle Bracken. He was just a sailor having his go at the age-old existential clash between man and nature.

He loved his job. He loved his brothers-in-arms. He loved fighting the good fight. But even warriors needed a reprieve. Even the trained elite needed to unplug and get back to self. The little tropical cyclone he’d run into just off Cedar Key had been a welcome reception. A challenge. He’d turned the sloop’s bow right up underneath its cloudy, disordered skirt and sailed right through it.

It had been headed northeast, but the wind had now shifted, Kyle noted. He knew before his feet hit the dock of the marina, without switching on the weather radio. He had lived through enough summers on the Gulf to be able to sense the change in barometric pressure. Hell, he could practically taste it.

That damned storm was headed straight this way.

He spotted the man on the deck of the houseboat two slips down and whistled loudly. “’Ey, Nick!”

The white-headed gentleman turned. His face was leathered and bronzed, his beard bushy and white enough to rival Santa’s. He was wearing the same Hawaiian-print shirt as always, and the exact style of sunglasses that had died out sometime after the Kennedy assassination. “Hey, boy. Where the hell’ve you been?”

“Can’t say,” Kyle claimed, gripping the shiny silver rail on the Hellraiser’s port side. Nick had been calling Kyle “boy” since his first visit to the marina alongside his father at the age of seven. Kyle might have changed a good deal since their first meeting, but the salty seaman living on the houseboat had not.

Maybe he was Santa Claus.

“Still a person of mystery,” Nick grunted.

Kyle lifted a shoulder in answer.

“Saw your old man out and about...oh, Wednesday, I think it was,” Nick said, scratching his forehead.

“Yeah?” Kyle asked, lightening at the mention of his father.

“Gearing up for that big show this weekend up at that airfield of his. Reckon you heard about it.”

“Huh.” Big show. Airfield. Neither his father nor his mother had mentioned either in their weekly emails or the short phone calls they’d managed to grab with him over his last week of deployment. Though words like big show and James Bracken were no strangers to each other. And James did own an airfield, among a litany of other strange and wonderful things.

“Your folks know you’re in town?” Nick asked.

A grin managed to climb over the lower half of Kyle’s face. He hadn’t known when his vessel would bring him into port. That combined with the stormy run-in had kept him from contacting his parents.

Besides, he liked the element of surprise.

The far-off wail of a weather warning reached Kyle’s ears, and he straightened as Nick’s head swiveled in the direction of the houseboat’s wheelhouse. They both listened for a moment to the radio before Nick glanced back at Kyle, his caterpillar brows vee-ed. “What the sam hell did you bring home with you? Weatherman says that cyclone’s spun itself into a ripe-old tropical storm. Headed this way.”

The grin washed slowly from Kyle’s face as he picked up on the rest of the weather warning. It seemed the calm he’d sought in the waters that straddled Fort Morgan and Dauphin Island, the lull of the Eastern Shore and the bay that, to him, represented the flow and pace of what life should be, was about to be rudely disrupted. What had he brought with him?

Nick hocked loudly and spat a stream over the rail before he added, “Go on, boy. Tell your mama you’re here.” He raised his glasses and peered across the empty slip. “Or I will.”

Kyle gave a nod. “Yes, sir.” He began to gather his things from the Hellraiser’s cabin when Nick called to him again.

“It’s good to see you back.”

“Were you worried about me, Nick?” Kyle asked, teasing.

Nick’s laugh was a rusty tumble. Just the thing for a sailor as old and crusty as he. “Maybe.”

It was as heartfelt a sentiment as Kyle had ever heard the man utter. He nodded. “See you out at the airfield later?”

Nick barked. “Your crazy old man might’ve traded his sea legs for a pair of wings.” He stomped one rubber boot onto the deck of the houseboat. Kyle was surprised the ancient decking didn’t splinter under the abuse. “My place is right here.”

“Uh-huh. You might wanna shower,” Kyle suggested. He raised a brow at Nick’s questioning frown. “I can smell ya from here.”

That rusty laugh climbed into the air and followed Kyle belowdecks.

* * *

AFTER LONG ABSENCE, most sons brought their mothers roses.

What Kyle brought his he wrapped doubly in cotton swaths and stuffed carefully into the mid-leg pocket of his cargo pants. His motorcycle was housed under the awning next to his mother’s old bay cottage where he’d left it so many months ago, locked and chained and maintained no doubt by his father whose many professions included auto mechanic. He slung the travel bag over his shoulder and fired up the bike before speeding off along the shoreline.

It took minutes to reach the gravel lot just off South Mobile Street, Fairhope’s scenic highway. Kyle spotted the familiar sign for Flora. Adrian, his mother, had built her small business from the ground up to support herself and her young son after a disastrous first marriage. Kyle had spent many days after school behind the counter of the flower shop watching her work. If he was restless or naughty, she’d send him off to one of the neighboring small businesses owned by three women who had become aunts to him in everything but blood.

Attached to Flora on the bay side was Tavern of the Graces, owned by Olivia Leighton and her husband, Gerald, a bestselling author. Olivia had taught Kyle how to play pool and darts and how to woo chicks. Later, she’d taught him how to mix drinks and hold his liquor—not that his mother knew any of that. The now third-generation establishment was operated chiefly by Olivia and Gerald’s first son, William, these days.

Above Flora was the gleaming display windows of Belle Brides, bridal boutique and operating center of buzzy wedding coordinator and couturier, Roxie Strong. Kyle had tried to avoid Belle Brides as a kid. Most everything was off-limits there. However, Roxie always kept sweets behind the counter, which she used to her advantage whenever she needed stand-ins in lieu of mannequins.

Finally, beyond the shops and Flora’s greenhouse, there was the inn. The white antebellum structure was a real gem. Framed by gardens and supported by great columns, Hanna’s Inn was lovingly tended by Briar Savitt and her husband, Cole. They’d lived on the third floor for years and had only just expanded into a new wing.

Construction looked to be complete, Kyle noticed as he parked his motorcycle in front of Flora and took off his helmet. Leaning back on the seat, he removed his gloves one finger at a time. He wasn’t normally a fan of alteration, but the demand from the inn’s guest book had all but screamed expansion as far back as Kyle could remember. And the design was swell. He’d bet Briar was pleased as pie.

He always felt warm when he thought of the innkeeper. She’d often cooked for him, baked for him. Long before she married Cole and gained Gavin as a stepson, she’d let Kyle sleep in the linens she tended as religiously as the landscaping. He’d done homework at her kitchen table. He’d laughed himself silly chasing a giant Irish wolfhound named Rex across the kempt lawn—a lawn he’d regularly mowed as a teen to keep his Jeep full-up on gas.

He’d caught crab for supper from the traps tied off her dock, had learned to fish and swim there, had tied his first skiff there. It was also there he’d kissed a girl for the first time, hunkered down in the butterfly bushes. Amelia Blankenship. They were almost eleven. She wore pomegranate lip balm.

He’d slipped her the tongue, and she’d told his mother. He then spent two weeks sulking without video games as penance. But not two years later Amelia started cornering him behind the lockers at school looking for a French partner, and all was forgotten.

As Kyle shifted from the leather seat of his hog and planted his hard-soled riding boots in the gravel, he wondered if he’d be able to stick around long enough to catch the sunset from Hanna’s. There was nothing like the view from her sunporch at the day’s end.

He should know. He’d seen the sun set most everywhere.

The bells chimed over the door to Flora as he entered the shop, the sound as comforting as it was timeless. He stuffed his gloves in the riding helmet and tucked it against his side. The girl—well, woman—behind the checkout counter and the old-fashioned cash register was built like a willow branch. She had short-cropped raven-colored hair in a punk-ish sweep. There was a teensy diamond stud in the crease of her nose and several others creeping up the shell of her ear. She wore black makeup, black clothes. She always dressed in black, even in the thick of summer.