He tilted his head in confusion.
Her smile grew. “She said I was going to win big-time tonight. And I just did.”
Dear Reader,
Some books are harder to write than others.
Two Nights with His Bride
was one of my toughest yet. I sweated over this story for so long, trying to figure out what experiences have made Nancy and Wyatt the people they are. The more I dug into their characters, the more I discovered Nancy’s determination to triumph over adversity, to overcome superficial stereotypes and to have faith
in herself. And Wyatt—who started out with the hardest exterior of any hero I’ve written—ended up having the strong values and moral code necessary to help Nancy see how worthy she is of love.
I hope you enjoyed reading the end result! If you did, there are lots of ways you can spread the love:
• Leave a review at your favorite review site.
• Recommend this book to your friends.
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for access to giveaways and information about upcoming books.
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I’m happy to say that Wyatt’s siblings all have their own stories! In
One Night with Her Bachelor
, Gabriel Morales discovers that no good deed goes unpunished when he agrees to be auctioned off to help Molly Dekker pay her son’s medical bills. In
Taming the Legend
, Camila Morales’s
past comes back to haunt her when she has to beg for help from the super-hot English rugby player who broke her heart. And Austin Wilder will meet his one true love in October 2015.
Thank you for reading
Two Nights with His Bride
. I hope you loved it!
With very best wishes,
Kat Latham
Kat Latham is a California girl who moved to Europe the day after graduating from UCLA, ditching her tank tops for raincoats. She taught English in Prague and worked as an editor in London before she and her British husband moved to the Netherlands. Kat’s other career involves writing and editing for charities, and she’s traveled to Kenya, Ethiopia and India to meet heroic people
helping their communities survive disasters. She loves to hear from readers!
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Books for Montana Born
One Night with Her Bachelor
(Bachelor Auction series—Gabriel Morales and Molly Dekker)
Two Nights with His Bride
(Montana Born Brides series—Wyatt Wilder and Nancy Parsons)
London Legends Series
Knowing the Score
(Book 1—Spencer Bailey and Caitlyn Sweeney)
Playing It Close
(Book 2—Liam Callaghan and Tess Chambers)
Tempting the Player
(Book 3—Matt Ogden and Libby Hart)
Unwrapping Her Perfect Match
(Book 3.5—John Sheldon and Gwen Chambers)
Taming the Legend
(Book 4—Ash Trenton and Camila Morales)
Standalone Novellas
Mine Under the Mistletoe
(Nominated for a 2014 RITA® Award)
Want to read more about Wyatt’s family? Turn the page to read the first chapter of Gabriel and Molly’s story,
One Night with Her Bachelor
!
Bid on a date with this wounded warrior for an unforgettable night of adventure. Aim high—and bid higher!—because no one comes close to local hero Gabriel Morales.
Molly Dekker hates being the town charity case, but when her son Josh is seriously injured she has no choice. She lets her best friend organize a bachelor auction to help pay her massive bills and make
Josh’s life more comfortable. She can’t bid on any of the men, but a surprise bidder gives her a gift she never expected: a date with the man who saved her son’s life—the only one she’s in danger of losing her heart to.
Former Air Force pararescueman Gabriel Morales made a career of flying to the rescue, until a tragic helicopter crash stole more than his livelihood. Being auctioned off like
a slab of beef isn’t in his recovery plan. But one look, one touch and one night unlocking Molly’s pent-up passion make him realize how badly he needs to be rescued…and how badly he wants to rescue Molly right back.
Will Molly and Gabriel’s never-quit attitude have them rushing head-first into love? Or will Gabriel’s secret pain stall their relationship before it can get off the ground?
September
S
ometimes getting lucky
had nothing to do with luck and everything to do with the right footwear and a willingness to get sweaty. Today, Molly Dekker was more than willing to get sweaty—and she had the right footwear.
She tossed her hiking boots into the extended cab of her pickup and shouted across the lawn. “Josh! Get your tush in gear! We’re going to be late!”
Her ten-year-old
son was a flash of movement as he sprinted out the front door and jumped off the porch. It was only three feet high, a distance he could easily land, but he chose to hit the ground in a roll and jump to his feet without pausing. She laid her arm across the truck’s open window and tried not to let her eyes do the same roll his body had just done. “Just watching you makes me tired.”
“I gotta know
how to roll when the bull bucks me off. Otherwise I could break my neck.”
“I know, and that’s why I won’t let you near a bull till you’re at least fifty-seven. You still got plenty of years to practice before you ever get near an arena, cowpoke.”
He skidded to a halt in front of her. “Fifty-seven! I might as well be dead by then.”
“You won’t be dead. You’ll be happily married with two sweet
babies and a safe job in an office. Ooh! I know! You could be an accountant,” she teased.
“I don’t know what that is, Mom, but I’m pretty sure I won’t be one.”
“You don’t think so? It’s someone who does math all day.”
He gagged, jabbing his finger toward the back of his throat before miming throttling himself. Then, just in case she hadn’t gotten the picture, he collapsed onto the driveway
and his limbs twitched in a macabre death dance. Her face contorted as she watched his grotesque display. She knew he did it for a reaction, but she couldn’t help giving it to him. When his twitches died down to tiny flinches, she tapped his leg with her toe. “The scouts’ll leave without you if we don’t get going.”
He shot back to his feet, and a strange vision flitted through her mind—Josh,
tall and muscular, rolling in the dirt of some arena as a crowd screamed and a bloodthirsty bull pawed the ground behind him. She shivered and it disappeared. Sometimes she wondered whether he’d gotten a single one of her genes, but then she looked at him and saw her father’s shaggy brown hair and never-met-a-person-I-didn’t-like smile and realized he was a Dekker through and through.
Except
for all the frenetic energy. That belonged to her ex, Greg.
He tried to skip past her, but her arm shot out and wrapped around his chest, dragging him close for a big, smothering hug.
“Mom! Gross!” he cried as he pretended not to cuddle closer.
Both arms around him, his back to her front, she held him tight and rocked back and forth. “You know you’ll always be my little boy, right?”
“Nope.
One day I’ll be a grown man with a job as a count-it and then I’ll quit because I’ll be fifty-seven and you promised I could join the rodeo circuit then.”
“What about your two sweet kids?” she asked, pretending concern. “My grandbabies will miss their daddy if he’s traveling all the time.”
This she knew from experience—her own growing up and as a single mom raising her son a thousand miles from
his dad.
“They won’t be sweet. They’ll be wild, and I’ll let them. They won’t have to go to school, and they can travel with me. I’ll need someone to muck out the stalls.”
She laughed and pressed a quick kiss against his soft cheek. “Go shut the front door and get in the truck.”
He swiped at the mama-cooties on his cheek and dashed off, leaping onto the porch instead of taking the three stairs
and—
“
Gent
—”
—slamming the door shut.
“—ly.” She sighed. She probably should’ve given up asking this kid to be gentle about anything by now, but something still drove her to do it. Some sort of perverse desire for a moment’s peace and stillness. She never got it at work—being the ringleader in a circus of kindergartners meant she left work every day smelling like Play-Doh and hearing the echo
of laughing, crying, and whining for hours until she thought her head would burst open like a jack-in-the-box.
But tonight Josh was going camping on Copper Mountain with his scout troop, one last gasp of summer before school started on Tuesday. And that meant it was Mama time.
Not that she’d call it that when she got to Gabriel’s cabin.
Hi, want some Mama time? Mama wants some time with you!
Talk about a turnoff.
At least, she hoped he didn’t have any mama fetishes.
As Josh hoisted himself into the truck, slammed the passenger door and started chattering about spending the night in a tent, she turned the key in the ignition and let her mind find peace and stillness in her fantasies about the way things would go down—
ahem
—tonight.
Gabriel had grown up on her street and been best
friends with her brother, Scott. He was five years older than her, so they hadn’t overlapped in school, but he’d probably spent more time at her house than his own. And who could blame him? His family could’ve had their own reality TV show, while hers had been as boring as the Cleavers.
She’d worshiped Gabriel throughout her childhood, but he’d barely noticed her. He and Scott had spent almost
every second together. They’d graduated together, enlisted in the Air Force together, and joined the elite force of combat search-and-rescue specialists together.
They’d even been together when Scott died in a helicopter crash in Afghanistan last year. The only time they hadn’t been together was at Scott’s funeral, since Gabriel had also been wounded and was being treated in Germany.
She had
no idea when he’d come back home. He hadn’t visited her or made his presence known. People had simply started sharing snippets of gossip whenever they saw her, as if she had the same claim on him her brother had.
Did you hear Gabriel’s back? He’s moved up to his grandpa’s cabin on Copper Mountain, just outside the National Forest land. I don’t even think that place has electricity!
All summer
she’d debated hiking out to his cabin to see how he was doing. He had to be grieving Scott’s loss as much as she was, and she wanted to see how he was recovering from his own injuries, whatever they were. According to Carol Bingley, Marietta’s most accomplished gossip, he walked a little stiffly but otherwise seemed fine. And if he needed prescriptions, he wasn’t getting them filled at Carol’s pharmacy,
or the whole town would’ve known.
But something had held her back, a gut feeling he would’ve spotted her motives from a mile off. Pity for all he had to be suffering. Desperation to see his gorgeous face, hear his deep voice, smell his scent.
Gabriel wouldn’t welcome either her pity or her desperation, so she’d talked herself out of the trek time and again.
Molly hadn’t caught a glimpse of
him until last week at the grocery store. She’d only gone in for milk, so she hadn’t picked up a basket. But then she’d remembered she was out of Josh’s favorite cereal. And she didn’t have enough sugar for her coffee in the morning, which meant she was liable to kill someone by lunchtime. Oh, and eggs—she needed eggs. As she’d grabbed everything, she’d experienced an irritating twitch in her lower
belly that signaled the start of God’s monthly revenge on her distant ancestor for eating that dang apple. Unsure whether she had any tampons at home, she’d grabbed a small box and got in line at the checkout, realizing with a start that Gabriel stood right in front of her.
He hadn’t noticed her, a blessing for which she was grateful since she was wearing a T-shirt decorated with her former students’
handprints, and the tampon box was balanced precariously in her overloaded arms. He just stood there, looking fit, healthy, tall, and beautiful. But then the woman in front of him had frantically searched through her purse to find her wallet and pulled it out with such triumph that Gabriel had taken a hasty step back and bumped into her. She’d been so captivated by the broad sweep of his
shoulders that her groceries had gone flying before she’d realized he’d moved.
The eggs had taken a suicide plunge onto his boots. The milk carton had exploded at her feet, soaking into the hem of her long skirt and creeping upwards. The sugar bag had hit the edge of the counter and torn before tumbling over and dumping granules into the milk and eggs. And the tampons had fallen onto his bag
of carrots on the conveyor belt.
Her cheeks had burst into flames. She’d always wanted to be the kind of woman who could toss around tampons or condoms without giving a fig—a woman like her friend Lily, who came off as overflowing with confidence until you got to know her. But she wasn’t. Never had been. Bodies were private and bodily functions even more so. So she’d stood there frozen, wishing
she could sink into the batter at her feet and die a thousand gloopy deaths.
But he simply gave her a sympathetic twist of his lips before picking up one of those plastic divider thingies, laying it down behind his groceries, and plunking her tampons on her section of the belt without a word. Like a true gentleman. A worldly gentleman who knew women got periods but wasn’t fazed by it—unlike that
nimrod Scooter Gibbons behind her, who’d said loudly, “Someone get paper towels—oh, wait. Molly has her super-absorbency tampons for extra-heavy flow here. They should soak all that up.”