“More than any other words I’ve ever said. How about you?”
“Never more ready.”
He’d proved that to her in the past two months they’d been apart. There had never been a single day without a phone call, usually twice a day. While apart, they’d talk far into the night about their hopes and dreams and plans for the future. A future together.
In New York City, Carly had reconnected with her classmate Jenny and produced a portfolio that had impressed both her and her director. At the moment, Carly and the Cutting Edge were negotiating terms for an offer. Carly would work from Fortune, with two trips a year to the city.
Someday, she might even have her own label. RockYourBaby had a nice ring to it, and she thought Mom would like it, too.
“We have a lot of planning to do,” Carly said.
“Bring it on.”
Oh, she would. She had a surprise for him. He didn’t know it, but she’d be coming home sooner than planned. She’d done what she had to do. Finished school. She’d worked hard and had more credits than even she’d realized. And even though Levi had been more than patient, and as loyal to her as she’d been to him, she was ready to come home to Fortune. By spring, her father would be home from Maine, and soon after that there would be a wedding.
She’d done the tough work. Worked out her fears, and gained all her confidence back and then some. Now she wanted easy again, just for a little while.
Easy and perfect, like the rest of her life with Levi and Grace.
* * * * *
If you enjoyed this story,
you won’t want to miss
other titles in Heatherly Bell’s
HEROES OF FORTUNE VALLEY series:
BREAKING EMILY’S RULES
AIRMAN TO THE RESCUE
Available now!
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Navy SEAL Promise
by Amber Leigh Williams
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.”
Copyright © 2017 by Amber Leigh Williams
ISBN-13: 9781488017285
This Baby Business
Copyright © 2017 by Maria F. Buscher
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