by Cora Seton
Thank God Connor had come and restored her belief in love in time so that she could help Jean. Her healing legacy was restored. Sadie didn’t know what she’d have done if the General hadn’t sent him. The walled garden would be a legacy that lasted long after she was gone, but her healing was far more important to her.
Sadie asked Jean question after question, until Jean asked a question of her own.
“Where are you going for your honeymoon?”
“India,” Sadie confessed. She hadn’t even thought about a honeymoon until Connor had showed her the tickets last night. “Can you believe it? I’ve hardly ever been off the ranch!”
“You’ll have a marvelous time. What will we do without you, though?”
Sadie understood her concern. “I’ve left plenty of tonics of all kinds in the greenhouse. Come find Alice whenever you need something. I’ve left her a million instructions. It’s only for two weeks; I’ll be back before you notice I’m gone.”
“Good. I want you to have fun, but I need you, Sadie. We all do. Don’t ever leave.”
“I won’t.” She knew that in her heart. Two Willows was her home, for now and for always. Her family was here. Her connection to the land was back as strong as ever.
And she was happy.
Connor found them like that ten minutes later. “It’s time to cut the cake,” he told Sadie. “Is something wrong?”
Sadie realized her cheeks were damp. “No, everything’s right.” She shared Jean’s news. “You have to take some of the credit; you helped me make the crucial batch of tonic.”
Jean thanked both of them again, and left to rejoin the party. Connor kissed Sadie.
“Didn’t you say we have to go cut the cake?” she asked.
“In a minute,” he said. “I want to be alone with my wife.”
“Your wife,” she echoed. “That sounds so strange. But right, too, you know I mean?”
He tightened his arms around her. “I know exactly what you mean. Sadie O’Riley, I’ve spent a lifetime looking for you, and never even realized it. Now you’re mine.”
“Now I’m yours,” she agreed and stood on tiptoe to meet his kiss. “Forever.”
Jo was stacking dirty dishes near the sink in the kitchen when she heard a knock on the front door. She should have been out mingling with the guests, but while she was thrilled for the happiness Sadie had found with Connor, she found it hard to feel much enthusiasm about anything these days. The counselor she was seeing twice a week said that was to be expected, and that it would pass. She recommended lots of time being active. “Get out in the sun, work with your animals. The heart has a tremendous capacity to heal.”
Jo rinsed her hands, dried them on a tea towel and headed toward the door. People needed to go home, not keep arriving, she thought dispiritedly. No matter what the counselor said, she wasn’t ready to be among company.
Twice she’d ignored her instincts. Twice she’d been burned. First by Sean Pittson, who’d twisted her around his little finger and nearly helped to yank her ranch right out from under her feet, and then by Grant, who’d held her puppies ransom, then tried to kidnap her at gunpoint.
She still couldn’t believe she’d stabbed him.
And shot him.
Helped kill him.
After spending her life dedicated to helping living things.
Never again, she promised herself for the hundredth time that day. She’d learned her lesson: animals were to be trusted. People weren’t—especially men. She was done with them.
Forever.
So when she pulled the door open and took in the stranger on the other side, she stopped in her tracks. He was tall, muscular, with a sharp gaze that seemed to take in everything about her at once. Older than her by at least a decade, he was dressed for the wedding in clean dark jeans, a crisp white shirt, a dark blazer and a black cowboy hat. He was handsome—oh, so handsome—but there was something haunted about him.
This was a man who’d seen war, Jo realized.
A man who’d seen death.
Which meant the General had sent him.
“Howdy.” His Southern drawl was thick as molasses, and his voice threaded through her, waking places she’d sworn to herself were asleep for good. “Name’s Hunter. Hunter Powell. You must be Jo.”
“I’m not marrying you,” she blurted. Best to get it out there right now. His gaze had fixed on hers like an eagle spotting its prey. The General had sent Brian, and Cass had married him. He’d sent Connor, and Sadie stood out back in her wedding dress right now, cutting her cake. There was no way—no way—she’d fall for this trap.
A slow grin spread over Hunter’s face, tangling Jo’s emotions into a breathless knot.
“We’ll see about that.”
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Other books in the Brides of Chance Creek Series:
Issued to the Bride One Navy SEAL
Issued to the Bride One Marine
Issued to the Bride One Sniper
Issued to the Bride One Soldier
Read on for an excerpt of Volume 1 of The SEALs of Chance Creek series – A SEAL’s Oath.
A SEAL’s Oath
By Cora Seton
Chapter One
‡
Navy SEAL Boone Rudman should have been concentrating on the pile of paperwork in front of him. Instead he was brooding over a woman he hadn’t seen in thirteen years. If he’d been alone, he would have pulled up Riley Eaton’s photograph on his laptop, but three other men ringed the table in the small office he occupied at the Naval Amphibious Base at Little Creek, Virginia, so instead he mentally ran over the information he’d found out about her on the Internet. Riley lived in Boston, where she’d gone to school. She’d graduated with a fine arts degree, something which confused Boone; she’d never talked about wanting to study art when they were young. She worked at a vitamin manufacturer, which made no sense at all. And why was she living in a city, when Riley had only ever come alive when she’d visited Chance Creek, Montana, every summer as a child?
Too many questions. Questions he should know the answer to, since Riley had once been such an integral part of his life. If only he hadn’t been such a fool, Boone knew she still would be. Still a friend at least, or maybe much, much more. Pride had kept him from finding out.
He was done with pride.
He reached for his laptop, ready to pull up her photograph, whether he was alone or not, but stopped when it chimed to announce a video call. For one crazy second, Boone wondered if his thoughts had conjured Riley up, but he quickly shook away that ridiculous notion.
Probably his parents wondering once again why he wasn’t coming home when he left the Navy. He’d explained time and again the plans he’d made, but they couldn’t comprehend why he wouldn’t take the job his father had found him at a local ranch.
“Working with horses,” his dad had said the last time they talked. “What more do you want?”
It was tempting. Boone had always loved horses. But he had something else in mind. Something his parents found difficult to comprehend. The laptop chimed again.
“You going to get that?” Jericho Cook said, looking up from his work. Blond, blue-eyed, and six-foot-one inches of muscle, he looked out of place hunched over his paperwork. He and the other two men sitting at the table were three of Boone’s most trusted buddies and members of his strike team. Like him, they were far more at home jumping out of airplanes, infiltrating terrorist organizations and negotiating their way through disaster areas than sitting on their asses filling out forms. But paperwork caught up to everyone at some point.
He wouldn’t have to do it much longer, though. Boone was due to separate from the Navy in less than a month. The others were due to leave soon after. They’d joined up together—egging each other on when they turned eighteen over their parents’ objections. They’d survived the brutal process of becoming Navy SEALs together, too, adamant that they�
��d never leave each other behind. They’d served together whenever they could. Now, thirteen years later, they’d transition back to civilian life together as well.
The computer chimed a third time and his mind finally registered the name on the screen. Boone slapped a hand on the table to get the others’ attention.
“It’s him!”
“Him, who?” Jericho asked.
“Martin Fulsom, from the Fulsom Foundation. He’s calling me!”
“Are you sure?” Clay Pickett shifted his chair over to where he could see. He was an inch or two shorter than Jericho, with dark hair and a wiry build that concealed a perpetual source of energy. Even now Clay’s foot was tapping as he worked.
Boone understood his confusion. Why would Martin Fulsom, who must have a legion of secretaries and assistants at his command, call him personally?
“It says Martin Fulsom.”
“Holy shit. Answer it,” Jericho said. He shifted his chair over, too. Walker Norton, the final member of their little group, stood up silently and moved behind the others. Walker had dark hair and dark eyes that hinted at his Native American ancestry. Unlike the others, he’d taken the time to get his schooling and become an officer. As Lieutenant, he was the highest ranked. He was also the tallest of the group, with a heavy muscular frame that could move faster than most gave him credit for. He was quiet, though. So quiet that those who didn’t know him tended to write him off. They did so at their own peril.
Boone stifled an oath at the tremor that ran through him as he reached out to accept the call, but it wasn’t every day you got to meet your hero face to face. Martin Fulsom wasn’t a Navy SEAL. He wasn’t in the military at all. He’d once been an oil man, and had amassed a fortune in the industry before he’d learned about global warming and had a change of heart. For the last decade he’d spearheaded a movement to prevent carbon dioxide particulates from exceeding the disastrous level of 450 ppm. He’d backed his foundation with his entire fortune, invested it in green technology and used his earnings to fund projects around the world aimed at helping him reach his goal. Fulsom was a force of nature, with an oversized personality to match his incredible wealth. Boone liked his can-do attitude and his refusal to mince words when the situation called for plain speaking.
Boone clicked Accept and his screen resolved into an image of a man seated at a large wooden desk. He was gray-haired but virile, with large hands and an impressively large watch. Beside him stood a middle aged woman in a severely tailored black suit, who handed him pieces of paper one at a time, waited for him to sign them and took them back, placing them in various folders she cradled in her arm.
“Boone!” The man’s hearty voice was almost too much for the laptop’s speakers. “Good to finally meet you. This is an impressive proposal you have here.”
Boone swallowed. It was true. Martin Fulsom—one of the greatest innovators of their time—had actually called him. “It’s good to meet you, too, Mr. Fulsom,” he managed to say.
“Call me Martin,” Fulsom boomed. “Everybody does. Like I said, it’s a hell of a proposal. To build a fully operational sustainable community in less than six months? That take guts. Can you deliver?”
“Yes, sir.” Boone was confident he could. He’d studied this stuff for years. Dreamed about it, debated it, played with the numbers and particulars until he could speak with confidence about every aspect of the community he wanted to build. He and his friends had gained a greater working knowledge of the fallout from climate change than any of them had gone looking for when they joined the Navy SEALs. They’d realized most of the conflicts that spawned the missions they took on were caused in one way or the other by struggles over resources, usually exacerbated by climate conditions. When rains didn’t come and crops failed, unrest was sure to follow. Next came partisan politics, rebellions, coups and more. It didn’t take a genius to see that climate change and scarcity of resources would be two prongs spearheading trouble around the world for decades to come.
“And you’ll start with four families, building up to ten within that time frame?”
Boone blinked. Families? “Actually, sir…” He’d said nothing about families. Four men, building up to ten. That’s what he had written in his proposal.
“This is brilliant. Too brilliant.” Fulsom’s direct gaze caught his own. “You see, we were going to launch a community of our own, but when I saw your proposal, I said, ‘This man has already done the hard work; why reinvent the wheel? I can’t think of anyone better to lead such a project than someone like Boone Rudman.’”
Boone stifled a grin. This was going better than he could have dreamed. “Thank you, sir.”
Fulsom leaned forward. “The thing is, Boone, you have to do it right.”
“Of course, sir, but about—”
“It has to be airtight. You have to prove you’re sustainable. You have to prove your food systems are self-perpetuating, that you have a strategy to deal with waste, that you have contingency plans. What you’ve written here?” He held up Boone’s proposal package. “It’s genius. Genius. But the real question is—who’s going to give a shit about it?”
“Well, hell—” Fulsom’s abrupt change of tone startled Boone into defensiveness. He knew about the man’s legendary high-octane personality, but he hadn’t been prepared for this kind of bait and switch. “You yourself just said—”
Fulsom waved the application at him. “I love this stuff. It makes me hard. But the American public? That’s a totally different matter. They don’t find this shit sexy. It’s not enough to jerk me off, Boone. We’re trying to turn on the whole world.”
“O-okay.” Shit. Fulsom was going to turn him down after all. Boone gripped the arms of his chair, waiting for the axe to fall.
“So the question is, how do we make the world care about your community? And not just care about it—be so damn obsessed with it they can’t think about anything else?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “I’ll tell you how. We’re going to give you your own reality television show. Think of it. The whole world watching you go from ground zero to full-on sustainable community. Rooting for you. Cheering when you triumph. Crying when you fail. A worldwide audience fully engaged with you and your followers.”
“That’s an interesting idea,” Boone said slowly. It was an insane idea. There was no way anyone would spend their time watching him dig garden beds and install photovoltaic panels. He couldn’t think of anything less exciting to watch on television. And he didn’t have followers. He had three like-minded friends who’d signed on to work with him. Friends who even now were bristling at this characterization of their roles. “Like I said, Mr. Fulsom, each of the equal participants in the community have pledged to document our progress. We’ll take lots of photos and post them with our entries on a daily blog.”
“Blogs are for losers.” Fulsom leaned forward. “Come on, Boone. Don’t you want to change the world?”
“Yes, I do.” Anger curled within him. He was serious about these issues. Deadly serious. Why was Fulsom making a mockery of him? You couldn’t win any kind of war with reality television, and Boone approached his sustainable community as if he was waging a war—a war on waste, a war on the future pain and suffering of the entire planet.
“I get it. You think I’m nuts,” Fulsom said. “You think I’ve finally blown my lid. Well, I haven’t. I’m a free-thinker, Boone, not a crazy man. I know how to get the message across to the masses. Always have. And I’ve always been criticized for it, too. Who cares? You know what I care about? This world. The people on it. The plants and animals and atmosphere. The whole grand, beautiful spectacle that we’re currently dragging down into the muck of overconsumption. That’s what I care about. What about you?”
“I care about it, too, but I don’t want—”
“You don’t want to be made a fool of. Fair enough. You’re afraid of exposing yourself to scrutiny. You’re afraid you’ll fuck up on television. Well guess what? You’re right; you will fuck up.
But the audience is going to love you so much by that time, that if you cry, they’ll cry with you. And when you triumph—and you will triumph—they’ll feel as ecstatic as if they’d done it all themselves. Along the way they’ll learn more about solar power, wind power, sustainable agriculture and all the rest of it than we could ever force-feed them through documentaries or classes. You watch, Boone. We’re going to do something magical.”
Boone stared at him. Fulsom was persuasive, he’d give him that. “About the families, sir.”
“Families are non-negotiable.” Fulsom set the application down and gazed at Boone, then each of his friends in turn. “You men are pioneers, but pioneers are a yawn-fest until they bring their wives to the frontier. Throw in women, and goddamn, that’s interesting! Women talk. They complain. They’ll take your plans for sustainability and kick them to the curb unless you make them easy to use and satisfying. What’s more, women are a hell of lot more interesting than men. Sex, Boone. Sex sells cars and we’re going to use it to sell sustainability, too. Are you with me?”
“I…” Boone didn’t know what to say. Use sex to sell sustainability? “I don’t think—”
“Of course you’re with me. A handsome Navy SEAL like you has to have a girl. You do, don’t you? Have a girl?”
“A girl?” Had he been reduced to parroting everything Fulsom said? Boone tried to pull himself together. He definitely did not have a girl. He dated when he had time, but he kept things light. He’d never felt it was fair to enter a more serious relationship as long as he was throwing himself into danger on a daily basis. He’d always figured he’d settle down when he left the service and he was looking forward to finally having the time to meet a potential mate. God knew his parents were all too ready for grandkids. They talked about it all the time.
“A woman, a fiancée. Maybe you already have a wife?” Fulsom looked hopeful and his secretary nodded at Boone, as if telling him to say yes.
