A Bride Before Dawn

A Bride Before Dawn
Sandra Steffen

‘Lacey’s Back in Town.’ Pilot Noah Sullivan had hit some turbulence. First came the mystery baby left on the Sullivan brothers’ doorstep – who was the daddy? Plus, Noah’s ex-girlfriend Lacey Bell was back in Orchard Hill – coincidence? Noah wasted no time confronting her to get some answers…and steal a kiss.Now he wanted more. But to woo her back, he needed a new plan pronto. To Lacey, Noah’s questions and kisses came out of the blue. But she felt for the baby, the Sullivans…Noah. And even if the child wasn’t hers, she still had secrets of her own. Would revealing them lead to a crash landing? Or was a relationship that had started with a kiss on course to go the distance?

“Aw, Lace, don’t cry.”

“I told you, I must have gotten something in my—” The next thing she knew, she was toppling into Noah’s arms.

Noah didn’t think about what he was doing, because what he was doing felt as natural as flying. Wrapping his arms around Lacey, he tilted his chin to make room for her head and widened his stance to make room for her feet between his. It wasn’t the vibration of flight he sensed, but her trembling.

He kissed her. It was demanding and rousing, and once it started, it was too late to ask what she was doing back in Orchard Hill, too late to ask her anything, or to do anything but pull her even closer …

Dear Reader,

Three of my favorite occasions are weddings, a new baby’s arrival and Christmas. My latest book, A Bride Before Dawn, contains all three. I’m a planner by nature, and yet one of the things I love most about these celebrations is their sheer unpredictability. Will it rain on an outdoor wedding? Will the baby arrive early or late? Will the kids notice if I buy rolls instead of make them from scratch? Maybe, yes and definitely.

In A Bride Before Dawn, Lacey Bell is a planner, too. At the top of her to-do list is: Resist Noah Sullivan. But when Noah and his brothers find a baby on their doorstep and ask for Lacey’s much-needed help, resisting this fly-by-night test pilot is even trickier when he has a three-month-old baby in his arms.

For me, one of the most meaningful aspects of special occasions is thinking of the perfect gift. My gift to you, dear reader, is Lacey and Noah’s story. Good things are going to happen. (They really are.)

Sincerely,

Sandra Steffen

About the Author

SANDRA STEFFEN has always been a storyteller. She began nurturing this hidden talent by concocting adventures for her brothers and sisters, even though the boys were more interested in her ability to hit a baseball over the barn—an automatic home run. She didn’t begin her pursuit of publication until she was a young wife and mother of four sons. Since her thrilling debut as a published author in 1992, more than thirty-five of her novels have graced bookshelves across the country.

This winner of a RITA

Award, a Wish Award, and a National Readers’ Choice Award enjoys traveling with her husband. Usually their destinations are settings for her upcoming books. They are empty-nesters these days. Who knew it could be so much fun? Please visit her at www.sandrasteffen.com.

A Bride Before Dawn

Sandra Steffen

www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)

For my seven wonders of the world: Anora, Leah, Landen, Anna, Erin, Dalton & Brynn.

Chapter One

Noah Sullivan understood airplanes the way physicists understood atoms and bakers understood bread.

He pulled back on the yoke, pushed the throttle forward and sliced through the clouds. He dived, leveled off and climbed, listening intently to the engine all the while, the control held loosely in his hands. This old Piper Cherokee was soaring like a kite at eighteen hundred feet. She had a lot of years left in her.

The same couldn’t be said for all the planes he flew. The first time he’d executed an emergency landing he’d used a closed freeway outside of Detroit. Last month he’d had to set a Cessna down on a godforsaken strip of dirt in the Texas hill country. He’d never lost a plane, though, and was considered one of the best independent test pilots in his field.

He wasn’t fearless. He was relentless. He couldn’t take all the credit for that, though. He never forgot that.

When he was finished putting the Piper through her paces, he headed down, out of the clouds. He followed the Chestnut River west, then banked south above the tallest church spire in Orchard Hill. Halfway between the citylimit sign and the country airstrip was Sully’s Orchard. It was where Noah grew up, and where he collected his mail every month or so when he flew through.

He buzzed the orchard on his way by, as he always did when he came home, and tipped his wing when his oldest brother, Marsh, came running out the back door of the old cider house, his ball cap waving. Their mother used to say Marsh and Noah had been born looking up—Marsh to their apple trees and Noah to the sky above them. The second oldest, Reed, stepped out of the office, shading his eyes with his right hand. Tall, blond and shamelessly confident, he waved, too.

Those two deserved the credit for Noah’s success, for they’d given up their futures after their parents died in an icy pileup when Noah was fifteen and their baby sister, Madeline, was twelve. Noah hadn’t made it easy for them, either. Truancy when he was fifteen, speeding and curfew violations when he was sixteen, drinking long before it was legal. They never gave up on him, and helped him make his dream of flying come true. Maybe someday he would find a way to repay them.

He still enjoyed getting a rise out of them from time to time, but today he didn’t subject them to any grandstanding or showing off. He simply flashed his landing lights hello and started toward the airstrip a few miles away. He’d barely gotten turned around when a movement on the ground caught his eye.

A woman was hurrying across the wide front lawn. She was wearing a jacket and had a cumbersome-looking bag slung over each shoulder. He tipped his wing hello, but instead of looking up, she ducked.

That was odd, Noah thought. Not the snub. That he took in stride. But it was the middle of June, and too warm for a jacket of any kind.

And not even company used the Sullivans’ front door.

Thirty years ago Tom Bender looked out across his ramshackle rural airstrip five miles east of Orchard Hill, Michigan, and saw his future. Today the pasture that had once been a bumpy runway, where he’d landed his first airplane, was a diamond-in-the-rough airfield operation with tarmac runways and hangars for commuter planes, helicopters, charters and hobbyists.

With the stub of a cold cigar clamped between his teeth and all that was left of a sparse comb-over swirling in the June breeze, he was waiting when Noah rolled to a stop along the edge of the runway. “How’d she do?” Tom asked as soon as Noah climbed down.

Running his hand reverently along the underside of the Piper’s right wing, Noah said, “She handled like the prima donna she was destined to become.”

“I’m glad to hear it. The paperwork’s on the clipboard where it always is,” Tom said, his attention already turning to the biplane coming in for a landing on the other runway. “As soon as you fill it out, Em will cut you a check.”

With that check, Noah would make the final payment on the loan for his Airfield Operations Specialist training, a loan he’d been whittling away at for nine years. Anticipating the satisfaction he would feel when he read Paid in Full on his tattered IOU, he headed toward the small block building that comprised the customer waiting area and Tom’s office.

All eight chairs were empty and Tom’s wife, Emma, was verifying a reservation over the phone on the other side of the counter. She waved as Noah took the clipboard from the peg behind Tom’s desk and lowered himself into a cracked leather chair beside it.

He’d barely started on the checklist when the airstrip’s best mechanic moseyed inside. “You aren’t going to believe what I heard today, Noah,” Digger Brown said before the door even closed. As tall as Noah, Digger had a good start on a hardy paunch he was in the habit of patting. “You care to guess?”

Noah shook his head without looking up. “I’m in a hurry, Dig.”

“Lacey’s back in town.”

Noah’s ears perked up and the tip of his pen came off the page. Lacey was in Orchard Hill? For a few moments, he completely forgot what he’d been doing.

Digger was wearing a know-it-all grin when Noah looked up. “I figured that’d get your attention.”

A few grades behind Noah, Lacey Bell used to walk to school with a camera around her neck and a chip on her shoulder. Back then she’d worn her dark hair short and her jeans tight. Noah had been doing his best to get kicked out of the eleventh grade, so other than the fact that the boys her age used to taunt her, he hadn’t paid her a lot of attention. He’d heard a lot about her, though. Whether in bars, at air shows or loitering around watercoolers, men liked to talk. They’d said she was easy, bragging about their conquests the way they bragged about golf scores and fishing trips and cars. Noah’s relationship with Lacey had taught him what liars men could be.

One night after he’d come home following his Airfield Operations Specialist training in Florida, he’d noticed her sitting on the steps that led to the apartment over the bar where she’d lived with her father. They’d talked, him at the bottom of those rickety stairs, her at the top. He’d been twenty and by the end of the night he’d been completely enamored by an eighteen-year-old girl with dark hair, a sharp mind, a smart mouth and a smile she didn’t overuse. When he returned the next night, she moved down a few steps and he moved up. By the third night, they sat side by side.

She was the only girl he’d ever known who’d understood his affinity for the sky. She’d left Orchard Hill two-and-a-half years ago after the worst argument they’d ever had. Coming home hadn’t been the same for Noah since.

“I wondered if you’d already heard, or if Lacey’s return was news to you, too,” Digger said.

“Where would I have heard that? Air-traffic control?” Noah asked, for he’d spent the past month crop dusting in Texas, and Digger knew it.

“There’s no need to get huffy,” Digger groused. “Maybe you ought to pay Lacey a visit. I’ll bet she could put a smile on your face. Wait, I forgot. You’re just a notch on her bedpost nowadays, aren’t ya?”

Ten years ago, after saying something like that, Digger would have been wearing the wrench he was carrying. Luckily for everybody, Noah had developed a little willpower over the years.