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

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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.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

BONNIE GARDNER has 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.

Books by Bonnie Gardner

MILLS & BOON AMERICAN ROMANCE

876—UNCLE SARGE

911—SGT. BILLY’S BRIDE

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

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Author Note

Prologue

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.

Chapter One

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.

“Hi, I’m Darcy,” she said, sticking out her hand as she slid onto the seat. “You aren’t a serial killer, are you?”

“Bill Hays,” he said, then laughed. “Hell, no,” he finally managed between chuckles. “I’m one of the good guys according to Uncle Sam.”

“Your uncle’s recommendation works for me,” Darcy said as she buckled herself in. “Where’re you heading?”

Bill didn’t know what to make of this unexpected passenger, and he wondered what had made her throw caution aside and hop into his car in the middle of nowhere, in the middle of the night. “Mattison, Alabama,” he said. “About three hours up the road.”

“You came from Florida, then? Me, too.”

He nodded, then glanced sideways at her. Darcy might have said she’d been through college, but she didn’t look much older than fourteen in that T-shirt and jeans.

Her hair was short, wispy, and flew around her face as she spoke using animated gestures and expressions. She was clean-scrubbed and fresh-looking, with a delicate mouth that seemed very kissable.

Now, where the hell had that thought come from?

Hadn’t he just assured her that she could trust him? It might have been a long time since he’d been out with a woman, but he wasn’t that hard up that he’d get the hots for the first one he came upon. The first one close enough to allow him to smell her perfume.

He had a hard-and-fast rule about remaining free of complications while he was in Special Ops, and this girl—woman—looked like a keeper. He had no room for a woman in his life. Hadn’t he seen enough families torn apart because of the demands of the job? Not to mention families broken apart when the service member didn’t come home. He would never leave a woman in the same desperate situation his mother had found herself in when his father had died too young and too poor. Or in the same dire straits his sister Lougenia was in when that skunk of a husband had left her.

Women were to be loved, protected, cherished. A man couldn’t do a decent job of that if he was off attending to hot spots on the other side of the world.

He shook his head. If he continued to think about kissing her, he might not be able to trust himself. He drew a deep breath and cleared his throat, if not his thoughts. “Where were you going?” he finally managed after he realized that she hadn’t said. She hadn’t told him much other than that her car had broken down.

“Don’t really know,” she told him after what seemed to be a long, pregnant silence. “I just graduated nursing school, and I haven’t quite figured out what to do with my life. I just knew I had to get away from my family and be on my own for a while.”

Bill thought about that for a minute. Maybe her reluctance to talk about herself told him volumes more than if she’d prattled on. He shrugged. “I can take you to the next town,” he allowed. “You can get a motel and somebody to tow and fix your car.”

He wondered about this small woman who had apparently climbed into a stranger’s car without a second thought. She was either desperate or stupid.

He glanced at her and decided that desperate was more the thing. He’d bet she was escaping an abusive family, and climbing into a car with a man she didn’t know was probably preferable to going back to a situation she did.

“You sure you want to ride with me?” he wondered out loud before he put the car into gear.

She did what almost seemed to be a double take, then flashed a grin that seemed impossibly large from that small mouth. “I’m game,” she said. “It beats walking.”

Darcy settled against the seat and breathed in the wonderful, new-car scent. She had worried that she’d be picked up by some Friday-night liquored-up weirdo, and that she’d have to fight for her virtue, if not her life. But the minute she’d seen the clean-cut man in the driver’s seat, she’d known she’d be fine. As soon as her gaze had settled on his face, her doubts had vanished.

One look and she knew she’d be safe in his arms.

In his arms?

What had made her think that? The last thing she needed was to be thinking about another man, considering the close call she’d just had. No, as soon as they reached civilization, she was going to thank Bill Hays sweetly for picking her up, then she’d get out of his car and do her best to get on with the rest of her life.

Darcy risked a glance at the man driving, his eyes trained steadfastly on the dark road ahead. It was hard to tell much in the dim glow of the dashboard lights, but what she could see was pleasing to the eye.

He was young, maybe a few years older than she. His clothes were clean, and he smelled like he’d just come from a shower. Was he hurrying to meet a sweetheart?

If he was, Darcy thought, she was one lucky girl.

Though he’d made that remark about Uncle Sam, he didn’t look much like a soldier. He looked like the college boys she’d known in school, a little bigger, maybe, and rougher around the edges. He wore jeans, faded but not too worn. His pullover shirt stretched tight across a broad chest, not too muscled, but lean and taut. Physical activities were obviously a regular part of his life.

“Say, Darcy,” Bill said, interrupting Darcy’s thoughts. “I took off without eating. I could sure use a burger or something. What say we stop in Brewton for some eats?”

Why was he asking her? Darcy wondered as they rolled into the marginally congested area of a small, country town. He was the one doing her the favor. She spotted the brightly lit sign of a familiar fast-food chain looming above the trees. Though she’d recognized the fast-food logo, she had yet to see a chain motel she was familiar with. After all, he was just supposed to take her to a motel so she could arrange to have her car towed.

There was no harm in stopping for a bite, though. Sure, she wanted to get as far away from Hurlburt and Dick as she could, but a ten-minute delay to grab a burger wouldn’t make that much difference in the scheme of things.

“Thank you. I’d like that,” she finally said. “I skipped dinner, too.” And breakfast and lunch, thanks to pre-wedding jitters, she didn’t say. Darcy pressed her hand against her stomach to silence the rumbling that Bill surely must have heard. Maybe that’s why he’d decided to stop.

She felt her face grow hot, and Darcy thanked the powers that be that the car was dark, and Bill wouldn’t see her red face. Maybe he wasn’t hungry at all, and he’d only decided to stop because of her noisy stomach.

“Let me buy your meal,” Darcy suggested. “My way of thanking you for rescuing me. It’s the least I can do.”

She glanced over at him as they pulled into the parking lot. Hoo boy. His expression looked like a thundercloud on a sultry summer afternoon. She must have wounded his sense of macho. She shrugged. Tough. If he wanted to pay for his dinner, she couldn’t stop him. But she wouldn’t let him pay for hers.

Truthfully, she was too hungry to argue. She just wanted to eat. Anything to quell that empty feeling in her belly, not to mention her heart.

BILL WATCHED Darcy from over the rim of his cup. Now that he could see her in the bright light of the restaurant, he could see that she was old enough to have graduated from nursing school. She carried a certain degree of confidence that the girls he’d known in Mattison didn’t.

He could see, however, how he could have mistaken her for a teenaged runaway in the dark. She was small and slight and wore a short-cropped do that seemed more pixie-like than sophisticated. He’d thought she was blond when he’d first seen her, but in the brightness inside, he could see that her hair was light brown.

Though she wore the uniform common to teenagers and college students—one that he favored, too—the figure that lay beneath the worn T-shirt appeared mature and well-developed. Darcy was tiny, but she wasn’t skinny. She must be closer to his age than he’d originally thought.

Not that it mattered that much. He would never see her again after tonight.

In spite of his fatigue, he felt a stirring in his lower regions, but shrugged it away. He’d just met the woman, it was late, and he had promised that she had nothing to fear from him. He raised his cup to his mouth.

He wondered, though, if he should be careful of her. She seemed safe enough on the outside, but it was what you couldn’t see that was the problem.

“Penny for your thoughts.”

Bill looked up, startled by the intrusion into his mental meanderings. “What?”

Darcy grinned, the expression making her look as young as he’d judged her to be. “Just wondering what you were thinking about.” She nodded toward his drink. “You emptied your cup and didn’t even seem to notice.”

He put the cup down. Well, he damn sure couldn’t tell her what he’d really been thinking about. “Nothing, I guess. And everything.”

“Everything?” She arched an eyebrow. “That’s heavy. Have you solved the problems of the world?”

Bill shrugged. “Hell. I don’t even have a solution for my own,” he said, grimacing. “I’d settle for that.”

Darcy leaned against the red plastic booth back and gave him an assessing look that made Bill want to squirm. “You don’t look like you could possibly have a care in the world,” she said finally. “You look healthy, you’ve recently bought a new car—judging from the smell—and you’re just back from Florida.”

“It damned sure wasn’t a vacation,” Bill chuckled dryly. “I’m stationed there and just back from two glorious weeks playing war in the sand in Nevada on a field exercise with my air force combat control team. Now I’m on my way home to visit my dying mother.”

Maybe the statement seemed harsh, but he’d had to say it that way at least a thousand times before he could do it without breaking down. It might seem hardhearted, but he had forced himself to face the reality. He was going to have to deal with it sooner or later. Might as well get a head start on it.

Darcy gasped, started to say something, but snapped her mouth shut. Bill wondered what had stopped her. Was it the cold way he had spoken about his mother’s illness, or was it that he wasn’t the kind of man she’d wanted him to be? Who had she expected him to be?

Darcy looked down and selected a cold, limp French fry, dragged it through a puddle of ketchup on the paper from her burger, then put it slowly into her mouth. She chewed thoughtfully as if she were using the exercise as a stalling tactic. Was she trying to decide what to say, or was she trying to avoid putting her foot in her mouth again?

Or was he just reading too damned much into the whole thing?

The silence between them grew awkwardly long.

It was hard not having anyone to talk to about it. It sure wasn’t anything he could discuss with any of the guys on the team. Not even his roommate, Ski Warsinski, knew how he felt. He’d tried talking with the chaplain, but he’d only mouthed the standard platitudes. Bill didn’t want comfort. He wanted to yell, to shout, to curse God. He couldn’t do that with the chaplain. Maybe he could unload on Darcy, because after tonight, he’d never see her again.

He reached across the table and snagged one of Darcy’s French fries. He wanted to talk about it, but he didn’t know what to say.

“I’m sorry about your mother,” she said softly. “Are you in Florida to be closer to home?”

Bill swallowed, then swallowed again. This time it was a lump of emotion he forced down his throat, not a morsel of potato. “Yeah,” he said, his voice thick and husky. “We don’t know how much time she has.”