Soldier And The Society Girl

“If I’m going to do this, you have to play by my rules,” Derek said. Letter to Reader Title Page About the Author Letter to Reader Prologue Chapter One Chapter Two Chapter Three Chapter Four Chapter Five Chapter Six Chapter Seven Chapter Eight Chapter Nine Copyright

“If I’m going to do this, you have to play by my rules,” Derek said.

“Rule number one is we use first names. Rule number two is no getting emotional. This is just business. Nothing personal. Rule number three,” he said, sitting down beside Chessey, “I give you thirty days of my life. Not a second longer.”

Chessey drew in a sharp breath. Derek knew what she was thinking and he felt like a heel. She was thinking about their last kiss and whether she meant anything to him. He should explain.

He should tell her that she wasn’t the kind of woman who could have an affair and say goodbye without a whisper of regret. And she certainly wasn’t the kind of woman he could take home to live on a farm. And he wasn’t the kind of man who could kiss a woman and not want more. A lot more.

It was better, far better, not to start.

Dear Reader,

March roars in like a lion at Silhouette Romance, starting with popular author Susan Meier and Husband from 9 to 5, her exciting contribution to LOVING THE BOSS, a six-book series in which office romance leads to happily-ever-after. In this sparkling story, a bump on the head has a boss-loving woman believing she’s married to the man of her dreams....

In March 1998, beloved author Diana Palmer launched VIRGIN BRIDES. This month, Callaghan’s Bride not only marks the anniversary of this special Romance promotion, but it continues her wildly successful LONG. TALL TEXANS series! As a rule, hard-edged, hard-bodied Callaghan Hart distrusted sweet, virginal, starry-eyed young ladies. But ranch cook Tess Brady had this cowboy hankerin’ to break all his rules.

Judy Christenberry’s LUCKY CHARM SISTERS miniseries resumes with a warm, emotional pretend engagement story that might just lead to A Ring for Cinderella. When a jaded attorney delivers a very pregnant stranger’s baby, he starts a journey toward healing...and making this woman his Texas Bride, the heartwarming new novel by Kate Thomas. In Soldier and the Society Girl by Vivian Leiber, the month’s HE’S MY HERO selection, sparks fly when a true-blue, true-grit American hero requires the protocol services of a refined blue blood. A lonewolf lawman meets his match in an indomitable schoolteacher—and her moonshining granny—in Gayle Kaye’s Sheriff Takes a Bride, part of FAMILY MATTERS.

Enjoy this month’s fantastic offerings, and make sure to return each and every month to Silhouette Romance!

Mary-Theresa Hussey

Senior Editor, Silhouette Romance

Please address questions and book requests to:

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VIVIAN LEIBER’s

writing talent runs in the family. Her great-grandmother wrote a popular collection of Civil War-era poetry, her grandfather Fritz was an award-winning science fiction writer and her father still writes science fiction and fantasy today. Vivian hopes that her two sons follow the family tradition, but so far the older boy’s ambition is to be a construction worker and own a toy store, while the other wants to be a truck driver.

Dear Reader,

Even with magazine and moisturizer labels exhorting me to defy my age or at least turn back the clock, I’ve always felt four hundred years too young. I’m meant for the days when a lady could turn to a knightly hero for protection, poetry...and passion.

But although I haven’t seen any armored knights traipsing through my neighborhood or dragon slayers in my local supermarket, I’m starting to wonder if I’m just the right age for heroes. After all, there are heroes all around us. Like the paramedic who popped the quarter out of my son’s throat, saving his life. Or the fireman who coaxed my elderly neighbor out of her house as its top floor burned. Or even the crossing guard who, day after day, makes sure that every child gets to school safely.

Silhouette is proudly honoring our modern-day American heroes, and I’m thrilled to be part of the celebration! My contribution to HE’S MY HERO! is Lieutenant Derek McKenna, a very traditional hero—he brought back his men alive from a dangerous mission overseas. But he’s not very traditional when he’s taking a gander at Chessey Banks Bailey’s slim showgirl legs or when he’s kissing her within an inch of her life in a Kentucky airfield, a State Department office or the White House!

Maybe I’m not so young. Maybe I could use a little of that moisturizer to defy my age. Maybe I was born at just the right time, the time of heroes in our own neighborhoods, heroes in our hometowns, Silhouette heroes. Open this book and meet Lieutenant Derek McKenna, a real hero. When you’ve finished the final Chapter, walk down the street where you live—you might just meet another!

Best,

Prologue

The head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff shrugged a thank-you to the secretary who placed his coffee on the low table in front of him even as he remained transfixed by the flickering images on the television screen set inside a bookshelf panel across the eighth-floor office of the State Department.

“I’ve watched this tape a hundred times over the weekend and I still get goose bumps,” he said, leaning over a low-slung mahogany coffee table to get sugar for his coffee. “A hero. A real hero. Don’t get too many of his type these days.”

He dropped three cubes into his cup, affecting irritation when his aide reminded him that sugar had already been added. The general didn’t like to admit that he really wanted six sugar cubes, more if possible. A sweet tooth was a weakness—he didn’t have many.

“We’ve seen enough, I think,” the congressman from New York said, flipping off the television set with the remote. An aide closed the armoire doors.

The congressman sat on a comfortable armchair by the window.

“I want this guy in Manhattan for the Fourth of July,” he said.

“We get him in Washington,” corrected the general. “Can’t have a hero in New York on the Fourth of July—he’s got to be in his nation’s capital.”

The New York congressman narrowed his eyes.

Winston Fairchild III pulled a sheaf of papers from a manila envelope and cleared his throat to get the meeting started. The group was ordinarily of a type not given to listening. In addition to the general and his aide, an assistant undersecretary to the Defense secretary had been sent over by the White House, and three congressmen who held key chairmanships of committees affecting the military had asked to attend. His office facing Twenty-third Street had been transformed into a gentleman’s tea party, with real china instead of foam cups and dainty pastries instead of the stale bagels sold at the basement cafeteria.

But while it all looked very cozy, this was a serious meeting about a serious opportunity and everyone was paying close attention to the soft-spoken Fairchild because he had something that everyone wanted—a real-life honest-to-God true blue American hero.

Winston was descended from a long line of behind-the-scenes advisers—his great-great-great-grandfather had served as George Washington’s aide-de-camp, his great-grandfather had advised Lincoln to shave his mustache, and his father had told Franklin Delano Roosevelt that cigars were bad for his health. Fairchilds had seen generals and presidents come and go. Winston had some perspective on the men gathered in his office—any one of them could be retired, disgraced, dishonored or just plain tired of Washington within the year.

But a hero! A little of the stardust of heroism could rub off on any or all of these men and a career could be made.

“McKenna could reinvigorate the military’s image,” murmured the honorable congressman from Arizona. “We sure need that.”

“Absolutely,” the general snorted.

“Let’s begin, shall we? Lieutenant Derek McKenna is thirty-three years old,” Winston said, nodding to the summer intern to pass out copies of the fact sheet he had prepared over the weekend. He pulled his wire-rimmed glasses from a small tortoise case. “He was born and raised in Kentucky on a farm in the mountains between Elizabethtown and Bowling Green.”

“E’town,” corrected the general.

“Pardon?”

“Kentucky folks call it E’town,” the general said. “You don’t pronounce the L, the I, the Z, the A, the B, the E, the T as the H.”

“I see,” Winston said, and dutifully crossed out the unnecessary letters on his copy of his report. “Thank you, General. Now, continuing, he received good grades in school, but dropped out of his first year in college at Bowling Green University in order to help his father on the farm. Two years later, the farm back in order, he joined the Army. He is a career soldier with a distinguished record. A list of his medals is Appendix B on page seven of your handout.”

Everyone except the general turned to page seven.

“And then there was Iraq,” Winston said.

An uncomfortable silence. Everyone knew about Iraq and the terrible fate that had befallen McKenna and his men. Part of the team sent in to help with humanitarian relief for Kurdish rebels on the border with Turkey, he and his men had been presumed killed in a firefight with Iraqi Republican guards. A United Nations resolution condemning the killings, the President expressing outrage in his weekly radio address, a Congressional team of negotiators failing to get the bodies back, a darkly foreboding article in the New York Times and then...nothing.

Lieutenant McKenna’s story faded from public consciousness, replaced with the Los Angeles celebrity trial of the week and new scandals at the upper reaches of government.

Until last week, when Derek McKenna—sporting a chest-grazing beard, a tobacco-colored tan, native chuprah dress and a haircut as crude as a caveman’s—stepped across the Turkish border. He led his men, having not lost a single one, on an impossible journey to freedom from a Baghdad prison. By the time the Wiesbaden military hospital in Germany gave him a haircut, lent him a razor and issued him a new uniform, America remembered it had a hero. The television news conference from Wiesbaden where Derek McKenna announced that all he wanted was to go home and live a quiet life had put a lump in the throat of the most cynical of Americans.

And the men gathered in the well-appointed State Department offices knew they had a solid gold, all-American, apple-pie opportunity.

“The President’s position is that we have him by rights,” the undersecretary said. “We put him on every news outlet, every parade, every ribbon-cutting ceremony. every graduating class...”

“And every campaign fund-raiser?” the general asked archly. “After all, this is an election year.”

“No, of course not,” the undersecretary said, placing his hand over his heart as if to quell his outrage. “But we can at least agree that we all want a piece of him. The only question is how to divide the hero pie, right, gentlemen?”

The men gathered around the low table nodded, and Winston, sensing that his briefing on McKenna’s attributes was over, laid a large appointment calendar on a space he cleared of clutter.

“Gentlemen,” he said, shoving his glasses to the bridge of his nose. “May I present Derek McKenna?”

And for the next four hours, the men argued, cajoled, coerced, ranted, threatened and bargained behind the locked doors of the office of Winston Fairchild III until they had every minute of Lieutenant Derek McKenna’s next six months accounted for.

Chapter One

“No,” said Lieutenant Derek McKenna.

He looked around the swank State Department corner office. The men he addressed hadn’t quite absorbed the word he had uttered, but their baffled expressions suggested their brains were working feverishly. Derek would be patient—after all, no wasn’t a word any of these men heard all that often.

Any right-thinking soldier would be scared to tell the gathering that he wasn’t going along with their carefully laid plans. Who was Derek McKenna to say no to the general at the helm of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, two congressmen, several State Department officials and somebody from the White House who had been identified as the undersecretary of the undersecretary of the chairman of something that had been lost in the rush of handshakes and salutes that had started this meeting?

But Derek had spent two years in hell and wasn’t scared of a few suits or a chestful of medals.

“No,” Derek repeated, in case anyone in this room still didn’t get it.

They didn’t

Just stared at him, the congressmen from New York worrying a pencil with his teeth, a bubble of dribble erupting on the open mouth of the congressman from Arizona, the State Department official whose office this was rubbing his glasses on his tie.

“Did you say no, son?” the head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff asked.

“Yes, sir. I mean, that was a no, sir,” Derek said. And then he lifted his chin, challenging the general to disagree. He was going back to the farm. No more of this see-the-world, broaden-your-horizons, more-to-life-than-this for him.

Kentucky was just fine.

“I said no and, with all due respect, General, I meant it,” Derek said. He shoved the appointment calendar off his lap. An aide rushed to pick it up. “I’m not doing any of this.”

“But, soldier...”

“General, I didn’t dream every night in my prison cell about going on Barbara Walters or hitting the rubber chicken lecture circuit or even having dinner at the White House and getting a photo op with the first family. I didn’t dream of shaking hands, parades or even giving stump speeches to the League of Women Voters.”

Actually, Derek had spent most of his daydreams back in the green, lush fields of Kentucky. Planting and replanting in his head the plot of land that belonged to his father. Feeling the soft tender shoots in his hands. Smelling the heavy, damp air of morning. Hearing the cicadas’ nighttime mating call and the creak of the rocking chair on the front porch.

Sometimes his dreams had been so real, so fresh, so vibrant that he had thought the hellish prison cell was itself the dream and that he could awaken. A deep and brooding loneliness would overtake him when he would realize the truth. That he couldn’t awaken, he could only endure. And find a way out.

The fact that he was in Washington was proof enough to these men that he had indeed found a way out.

But Derek knew they were wrong.

And that’s why he had to say no.

“Besides,” Derek added, bringing out his trump card with a devilish smile. He had figured this one out about six months into his captivity. “General, you can’t tell me what to do because my enlistment expired while I was away.”

A bespectacled suit who had been seated in a folding chair next to the ficus plant pulled a yellow legal pad out of a briefcase.

“Joe Morris, Justice Department,” he introduced himself. “Lieutenant McKenna, a soldier may be called back to active duty or held back from a discharge under special circumstances.”

Morris glanced at his notes.

“The case of Green versus Grant is most instructive on this point,” he said. “And I’ll just read you a quote from the Supreme Court opinion. Justice Thomas, writing on behalf of the court, states that—”

“I don’t think we need the legal mumbo jumbo at this point,” the general interrupted. Joe Morris looked crestfallen, having lost his moment to show off what he had produced in a week of research into legal lore. “Just give us the bottom line.”

“The bottom line, sir?”

“Yes, the special circumstances.”

Morris swallowed and then looked at Derek.

“All it takes is a request from the President to reinstate you, Lieutenant. And he can actually reactivate the request repeatedly, for as long as he feels that your services are required for the national interest. In other words, as the Supreme Court stated—”

“Get the President on the phone,” the general told his aide, slyly adding another cube of sugar to his coffee.

Derek lifted his hand. The aide hesitated, a slim, manicured hand held aloft at the phone.

“All right, fine, I’ll give you two weeks if you don’t call,” he said.

“Three months,” the general countered.

“A month.”

“All right, a month, but we’re going to shuffle this schedule so that it’s heavy. Very heavy. That means appearances every day.”

Winston leaned his head back and signaled to his aide.

“Get an alternate schedule produced stat.”

“Yes, sir. I’ll have it by tomorrow, sir.”

“No, you’ll sit down at my desk right now and put it together while we wait. A month divided into three-hour appearances, four a day, comes out to...”

“Fairchild, even combat soldiers get some rotation time,” Derek said.

“This isn’t war,” the general said archly. “This is a pleasure.”

“A pleasure in which I’m not so sure I want to indulge,” Derek said, leaning back in the comfortable pillows on the couch. He lifted his boots, noting with joyful mischief that they carried just a few drops of tar from the recently repaved streets of Washington. “I’m willing to start next week.”

“Tomorrow, soldier.”

“Three days from now.”

“Hey!” Winston exclaimed. “You can’t put your feet there. That table was purchased by the wife of Martin Van Buren! It’s a national treasure.”

The upper-floor offices of the drably modern State Department building had been recently refurbished with elegant furniture, rugs, paintings and fixtures from the early 1800s.

Derek crossed his boots comfortably on the priceless table. A globule of tar was dislodged from the sole of his right boot and dropped onto the leather writing pad of the congressman from Arizona before he could snatch it away. Ignoring the elected official’s distress, Derek snagged a soda can from a hospitality tray next to the couch.

“Can I borrow your pen?” he asked the Justice Department lawyer. Joe Morris held out a Mont Blanc.

“My mother gave it to me as a graduation present,” he explained.

Derek rejected it in favor of a disposable ballpoint in the hands of the undersecretary.

He turned the pop can over and stabbed the pen’s point into its bottom. Then, holding the can aloft so that the tab was scant inches from his open mouth, he popped it open and removed the pen. The soda shot downward in a violent stream. Derek’s Adam’s apple bobbed only five times as he swallowed the entire contents of the can.

He had had two years to practice this chugging method, learned in college but then fallen into disuse. But the Iraqis love American colas and chess. Coached by his men, Derek had become a master of the latter in order to bargain for the former. He and his men had been living on sodas, smuggled-in food and a strong solidarity. The small pleasures and fun they created daily had been their salvation in a hell that civilization forgot.

Still, he could be a gentleman if he wanted.

But for his purposes, being a gentleman didn’t suit.

After emptying the can, he put it on the hospitality tray. He returned the pen.

And then he let loose a burp.

Not a grotesque burp, but loud, clearly satisfying and utterly unrepentant.

“Mr. Fairchild, are you sure you want me to continue working on this calendar?” the aide said.

Her words hung in the air. Winston stared in horror. Derek shifted his crossed legs just a bit so that another drop of Washington street tar divebombed onto Mrs. Martin Van Buren’s precious coffee table.

“Don’t you think it would be a mistake to send me anywhere?” he asked, letting loose another burp. Resisting the urge to put his hand over his mouth.

“General, maybe this isn’t such a good idea. After all, he’s not housebroken,” the representative from Arizona pointed out. “He could do anything out there.”

“I could,” Derek agreed and burped for emphasis.

“He does that once on Larry King Live and we’ve got a real situation,” the undersecretary said.

The congressman from New York gnawed at his pencil.

The general glared at Derek, willing him into an embarrassed apology.

“Soldier,” he warned.

“General,” Winston Fairchild said, leaning forward in his seat. “If I might offer a possible solution...”

“What?” the general snarled.

“Call Protocol,” Winston said to his aide. “Get Chessey Banks Bailey on the phone. Gentleman, this man needs the functional equivalent of Mary Poppins.”

On the other side of the building, in a basement office of an annex to an annex with a single six-inch-square dusty window near its ceiling, Chessey Banks Bailey arranged ten linen envelopes on her gunmetal government-issue desk. Each proper and perfect envelope had her name on it, and each one posed a problem.

Chessey was a Banks Bailey of the Banks Baileys whose ancestors crossed over on the Mayflower, the same Baileys that had made a fortune in diamonds or furs or maybe it was farming—but it was so far in the past that no one could remember. However, the family members were pleased with the way their money doubled and tripled and quadrupled over the years. Banks Bailey women appeared regularly in the pages of Town & Country . Their husbands were featured in Forbes and Fortune. Their homes in House Beautiful and their pets in Pedigree.

It would have been a surprise to the columnists of any of these papers to learn that none of the Banks Bailey money had ended up in Chessey’s purse.

The linen envelopes were this June’s invitations to family weddings and christenings and dinner parties. For each and every one of them, Chessey would come up with something to wear and something to give. The former was not too much of a problem, because her cousins were quite generous about last year’s clothes. Although the Chanel suits and dresses by Dior ran short because Chessey inherited her legs from her mother, Chessey kept these hand-me-downs neatly mended and pressed. She was quite confident that she’d manage to have something appropriate to wear for every occasion she was duty-bound to attend.

The second problem, what to give, was more daunting. Her cousins had, in quite rapid succession upon reaching their twenties, married men of highly developed pedigrees and portfolios. Chessey was always thrilled by love matches and considered the fact that every cousin had married a millionaire a wondrous statistical oddity. Still, weddings required a gift and millionaires marrying Baileys expected more than a toaster from the local housewares store. And christenings—well, something engraved was always nice. She snuck a peek at her checking account balance.

In a toss-up between eating and presents, she’d pick presents. Besides, she could always make up for her choices by eating well at the parties. She made a list of the RSVP’s she’d have to return, the presents to select and the times of all these events.

She picked up her phone on its first ring. “Good morning, Chessey Banks Bailey, Protocol.”

“Get up to the eighth floor, stat,” a voice snarled and then hung up without waiting for a reply.