A Tylerville Soldier, Book #4

• Sweet and Wholesome
• Reunited Lovers
• Small Town Romance
• Christmas Romance

Happy endings are a lie, and Laurel Samuels knows better than to fall for them.

Struggling to hold her family together as her mother faces a life-threatening illness and her teenage daughter goes wild, Laurel is desperately holding on to the only pieces of her world that make sense, the love of her family and that of her hometown. But when the soldier who abandoned her, just before she found out she was pregnant, makes his way back into her life, everything collides. He’s haunted her dreams for the last fifteen years, and not all of them were nightmares.

Dan Walters has lived a soldier’s life, traveling the world and serving his country for the last fourteen years, until an accident left him injured and unable to serve. Almost a year after the accident, he’s made peace, mostly, with the loss of his profession as he returns to civilian life. When a private investigator shows up on his doorstep with documents pointing him back to an unknown family in Tylerville, his world takes an unexpected turn. The woman he loved, who had never left his heart, needs him.

Will true love find a way to forgive deception, suffering, and tragedy? Only in Tylerville … where miracles are the norm.

A Tylerville Soldier is a contemporary romance written by USA Today bestselling author, Day Leclaire and her daughter-in-law, Dre Leclaire. With laugh out loud adventures and heartwarming kindness, this story of a wounded soldier and the woman he’s never forgotten will surely melt your heart. If you’re looking for a happily ever after, this is the perfect book for you!

Three minutes. Three measly minutes.

Laurel Samuels watched the timer counting down on her cell phone, her chest rising and falling in steady rhythm, sweat forming ever so slightly above her lip. It took three minutes to race from her house to the end of her street to catch the school bus every morning to Tylerville High.

Three minutes to make a bag of steaming popped corn sprinkled with hot sauce for a night in watching movies with her mom on the couch in the living room.

Three minutes to catch the eye of the new kid in school, Daniel Walters, at a Friday night football game her senior year. Three minutes to know the boy had captured her heart. Three minutes to shatter her heart into a million pieces with the news of boot camp, the Army, after months of exquisite teenage bliss and stolen moments. Less than three minutes to realize he was leaving her behind.

And now she found herself hidden away in the hallway bathroom of her mother’s derelict trailer, waiting an eternity for three measly, terrifying minutes to pass while avoiding eye contact with the pink capped, white plastic stick on the bathroom counter. She’d wept when Daniel left on the bus to go to his in-take with the Army, but he’d sworn he would reach out to her when allowed. He’d sworn he loved the beautiful, dark-eyed girl with all his heart and soul. And she believed him.

Two minutes. Her now racing heart clanged painfully in her chest. What would happen to her?

She’d written him diligently every week, placing perfume scented envelopes filled with the overly dramatic prose of teenage lovers in the mailbox at the end of her driveway, before racing to her summer job at the hardware store. She’d promised to wait for him. Held tight to memories of the stolen kisses and soft touches they’d shared. Wept over the painful moments of loneliness since he’d left.

It wasn’t until she’d put her eighth envelope in the mail, all without a response, that she realized she was missing another part of her world, the monthly reminder of her womanhood. She’d graduated third in her class, planned to attend college in the Fall with hopes of becoming a veterinarian, cursed herself for not realizing the obvious.

How could this have happened? They’d been careful, so careful. And yet, nature seemed to have found a way.

“Laurel, you all right in there?” Her mother Michelle’s voice, pitched with concern, snaked through the bathroom door. Laurel could almost feel the heat of her presence through the lightly stained hollow door. The doorknob gave a quiet rattle when her mother’s hand found resistance. Laurel thanked heaven she’d remembered to lock it.

“Fine, Mom.” She tried to use her normal voice, but it wasn’t there. Instead, it had been replaced by the voice of the little girl who had cried when she realized that her own father was gone.

“Sweetheart?” Her mother’s voice sounded so far away, and in that moment, all Laurel wanted to do was to be held and told it would be okay.

“I’ll be out in a moment, Mom. I’m fine.”

One minute.

“I know that voice, honey. Are you sick? Open the door.” The tone left no room for argument, no room for protection. Michelle Samuels was coming in that room whether Laurel wanted it or not.

Laurel’s hand trembled when she released the catch on the push lock. This was everything her mother feared for her. Cursed to repeat the same mistakes she and a long line of women in her family had made. Tears stung her eyes and her chin trembled. Her mother, an older version of herself but still in her own youth, came into the bathroom quietly, looking for the source of the upset that had found her daughter. An identical set of dark eyes, lined with worry, landed on the pregnancy test resting on the counter.

“Laurel?” Michelle’s voice cracked with tears, and the alarm sounded on Laurel’s phone. Even from the short distance away, the women could see two vibrant lines on the testing window.

“Mom…” Laurel tried to say something, anything, but nothing else would come out.

Three minutes. Three measly minutes, and everything in her world changed.