A SEAL's Purpose Read online

  A SEAL’s Purpose

  By Cora Seton

  Copyright © 2017 Cora Seton

  Kindle Edition

  Published by One Acre Press

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Author’s Note

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Excerpt from Issued to the Bride One Navy SEAL

  About the Author

  Author’s Note

  A SEAL’s Consent is the fourth volume in the SEALs of Chance Creek series, set in the fictional town of Chance Creek, Montana. To find out more about Boone, Clay, Jericho and Walker, look for the rest of the books in the series, including:

  A SEAL’s Oath

  A SEAL’s Vow

  A SEAL’s Pledge

  A SEAL’s Consent

  A SEAL’s Resolve

  A SEAL’s Devotion

  A SEAL’s Desire

  A SEAL’s Struggle

  A SEAL’s Triumph

  Also, don’t miss Cora Seton’s other Chance Creek series, the Cowboys of Chance Creek, the Heroes of Chance Creek, and the Brides of Chance Creek

  The Cowboys of Chance Creek Series:

  The Cowboy Inherits a Bride (Volume 0)

  The Cowboy’s E-Mail Order Bride (Volume 1)

  The Cowboy Wins a Bride (Volume 2)

  The Cowboy Imports a Bride (Volume 3)

  The Cowgirl Ropes a Billionaire (Volume 4)

  The Sheriff Catches a Bride (Volume 5)

  The Cowboy Lassos a Bride (Volume 6)

  The Cowboy Rescues a Bride (Volume 7)

  The Cowboy Earns a Bride (Volume 8)

  The Cowboy’s Christmas Bride (Volume 9)

  The Heroes of Chance Creek Series:

  The Navy SEAL’s E-Mail Order Bride (Volume 1)

  The Soldier’s E-Mail Order Bride (Volume 2)

  The Marine’s E-Mail Order Bride (Volume 3)

  The Navy SEAL’s Christmas Bride (Volume 4)

  The Airman’s E-Mail Order Bride (Volume 5)

  The Brides of Chance Creek Series:

  Issued to the Bride One Navy SEAL

  Issued to the Bride One Airman

  Issued to the Bride One Sniper

  Issued to the Bride One Marine

  Issued to the Bride One Soldier

  The Turners v. Coopers Series:

  The Cowboy’s Secret Bride (Volume 1)

  The Cowboy’s Outlaw Bride (Volume 2)

  The Cowboy’s Hidden Bride (Volume 3)

  The Cowboy’s Stolen Bride (Volume 4)

  The Cowboy’s Forbidden Bride (Volume 5)

  Visit Cora’s website at www.coraseton.com

  Find Cora on Facebook at facebook.com/CoraSeton

  Sign up for my newsletter HERE.

  Chapter One

  ‡

  “If I have to marry a stranger in order to save the world, I’ll do it,” Kai Green told Boone Rudman as the sun broke over the horizon. “But I don’t want Jericho’s leavings. I want a woman who wants me.”

  The two men stood by a campfire near the bunkhouse that formed the headquarters of Base Camp, the sustainable community they were helping to build in Chance Creek, Montana, on an old ranch named Westfield. They both had served their country for years as Navy SEALs, but they couldn’t be more different, Kai thought as he watched Boone consider his request. Boone’s upright bearing and short clipped hair announced his military background wherever he went. Kai’s blond hair had already grown until he once more looked like the California surfer he’d been growing up. Boone was just back from his morning run. Kai had already done his traditional 45-minute yoga routine, plus a half hour of meditation.

  He’d almost got his head screwed back on after the unwelcome surprise he’d received the previous day.

  Almost—but not quite.

  It should have been a happy occasion—the wedding between his good friend Jericho Cook and Savannah Edwards, one of the women who helped run the Jane Austen–style bed-and-breakfast in the “manor” at the top of the hill—a large three-story stone building that looked straight out of Regency England. He’d been all set to celebrate—until he and the rest of the unmarried men had drawn straws to see who had to marry next.

  And he’d pulled the short one.

  Kai prided himself on the calm personality he’d worked so hard to attain. His adoptive family had practiced meditation every morning and night, and taught him and his sister to do so as well. It had been an antidote to the chaos of their younger years, and his ability to stay focused while everyone else was panicking had served him time and time again during his years as a Navy SEAL. It allowed him to see details others missed—and make good decisions about what to do next. It was what had held him together when his friends and family had protested his choice to join the military at age nineteen. Those had been difficult years, but he’d kept his course. Stayed true to who he was—and his need to protect those around him.

  Back then he’d thought becoming a SEAL would confer on him a kind of superpower, one that would enable him to prevent suffering around the world. He was proud of his time in the service and of the missions he’d helped bring to fruition, but now he wanted something different. Not just to save others from suffering; but to prevent it in the first place. Base Camp was giving him that opportunity.

  Still, the second he’d pulled that short straw, all that Zen serenity he’d worked for years to build came crashing down around his feet. He’d barely held his shit together during the ceremony and reception last night, struggling when the ever-present cameras focused on him. Kai and the others at Base Camp had made a devil’s bargain with a billionaire named Martin Fulsom to be filmed night and day as part of the reality television show that documented their progress building their sustainable community, and there was nothing the show’s director, Renata, liked better than to hound the poor schmuck whose turn it was next to take a trip to the altar.

  She’d sure hounded him—all night long—until he’d finally gone to bed early just to get the cameras out of his face.

  Marriage.

  To someone he hadn’t even met yet—

  In the next forty days.

  Now that it was his turn, he didn’t think he could do it. Just thinking about it made his palms sweaty, his stomach tight. But he had to go through with it. There was no way out. If he didn’t beat that deadline, Base Camp would be toast. And Base Camp was too important to lose. All around the world people struggled with food insecurity, and his new mission was to teach them how to make the most of whatever they had. He was participating in experiments with gardening techniques aimed at producing the most food for the least effort under all kinds of circumstances. More to the point, he was developing food preparation techniques that cut down on waste and used the least energy. He was building toward a future where he could share his message on his own cooking show.

  And he was prepared to do whatever it took, he told himself sternly.

  “Finding a bunch of new women for you to choose from is a waste of time,” Boone said, bringing him back to the present. “I’ve got tons of eligible women who answered the wife wanted
ad for Jericho. Why not just—”

  “I said, I want someone who wants me.” Kai winced. Now he sounded like an entitled teenager. He prided himself in taking what came his way, going with the flow—accepting what the Universe offered. Like his adopted parents had always told him—you could fight what life handed you, or you could take it and transform it into a future worth living. That philosophy had gotten him through all kinds of rough spots—even when the shit really hit the fan.

  What was different now?

  Why couldn’t he see this twist of fate as just another step on the path to where he was meant to be? He’d been practicing acceptance for years, but today he was struggling to accept anything about this situation. He’d marry. He had to, or risk destroying everything he and his friends had worked so hard to build. But he didn’t want Jericho’s leavings. It was just good sense, he told himself. Those women had answered a call to marry Jericho, not him. Choosing one of them wouldn’t work—the wavelength of her desire wouldn’t match his.

  Boone rubbed his stubbled jaw, but like a good leader, he kept his cool. Kai had no doubt the man wanted to throttle him. Boone was right; this was a total waste of time.

  It was a stall tactic.

  The truth was, Kai was panicking. He didn’t trust the Universe to provide when it came to women. Or rather, he couldn’t reconcile such a belief with his past experiences with them. When it came to women, he was—

  What the hell was he?

  Kai held out his hands over the flames in the fire pit. The nights were getting cool in Montana, and since many of Base Camp’s residents still slept in tents, for the first time in months Boone had deemed it prudent to start a fire to warm everyone up that morning. Soon enough, hungry men and women would come looking for their breakfast. Kai needed to hop to it and get cooking, but he didn’t feel much like hopping today.

  When it came to women, he was—

  Well, he had a bad habit of picking the wrong ones.

  “If women were stray dogs,” his adoptive mother, Wanda, had once remarked, “you’d be the guy choosing the crazy-ass mutt in the corner. The animal who refuses to come to the door of the cage to be pet. The one that bites you when you try to feed it.”

  At the time Kai had thought she was being unfair, but he was older now. Wiser.

  And he knew she was right.

  There’d been Kelsie, the one who sold pinecone collages at the local swap meet and lived with a family of gypsies in Cerritos. There’d been Holly, the exotic dancer he’d convinced himself was ready to settle down. There’d been Rachel, who wrote post-feminist poetry under the nom-de-plume Guerrilla Pistol. And India, who’d decided to become a superhero for cats and paced the dark underbelly of Long Beach at night in a tabby-colored leotard and cape, collecting strays until her family had her admitted to a cushy hospital for a good long rest.

  All interesting in their own way, but as his mother pointed out—

  “Far too skinny. Far too insubstantial. Far more interested in navel-gazing than in you. Kai,” she’d added, with more than a touch of exasperation. “Do you think you chase these women because they remind you of your mother?”

  “You’re my mother.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  She was probably right, Kai had to admit. His birth mother, whom he hadn’t seen since he was seven, had been as fly-by-night as the women he’d dated. What did that say about his intelligence? He kept finding new people to leave him high and dry, when he’d been saved from that pain by the Ledbetters.

  “All right. Fine. What do you want in your ad? Describe your perfect woman,” Boone said, cutting into his thoughts again.

  What did he want? An image popped into his head. The kind of image that always got him into trouble. A barefoot, waifish, gypsy-clothed, elfin-faced wild child with a tortured past and an intriguing way of making it through the world.

  “Sensible,” he said out loud.

  Boone raised an eyebrow. “Sensible?”

  Kai pictured Kelsie—the way she drifted from idea to idea. “Grounded.”

  “O-kay,” Boone drawled. He pulled out his phone and started tapping the keys.

  Kai thought about Holly, who was late to almost everything—including the job where she took off her clothes. “Competent.”

  Boone kept tapping, and Kai thought about Rachel’s bitter, acid observations about life and love—and the people around them. “Optimistic.”

  He thought about India and her superhero costume. “Sane,” he added. Although he had to admit, he had a soft spot for stray animals, too. In fact, wanting to save cats wasn’t all that odd if you asked—

  “Looking for a sensible, grounded, competent, optimistic, sane woman for a lifetime commitment,” Boone read back.

  “That ought to do it.” But Kai was cringing. Accept what life brings you, he reminded himself. It was the only way.

  “I’ll just polish that up and submit it to some dating sites. Renata will make sure to show it during the next episode, too,” Boone told him.

  “I’ll get breakfast going.” Kai was grateful to escape to his kitchen, off to one side of the bunkhouse’s main room. When it came to food, he knew exactly what he was doing. In fact, he had it down to a science.

  “Save me some coffee,” Boone called as he headed for his desk.

  “Will do.” Find me the right wife, he wanted to add but didn’t.

  Even Boone couldn’t pull that off.

  Back in his kitchen, Kai tried to get himself together. At least here he was in control. He had his ingredients, his appliances, and the knowledge he’d gathered through years of study and practice. Throw him scraps, and he’d transform them into a feast.

  As he chopped and diced fresh ingredients for an omelet, Kai found a semblance of calm. The sky outside was brightening by the moment. A new day was a new beginning, and maybe Boone would surprise him and actually find a woman who—

  Angus McBride burst into the kitchen and shut the door behind him with a click, turning the old-fashioned key in the lock. He was a large man with red hair and hazel eyes. Normally cheerful, he’d been quiet since his girlfriend, Win Lisle, had left Base Camp to return home a few weeks ago.

  Kai stopped what he was doing. He’d forgotten the kitchen even had a door; they never closed it, let alone used the lock.

  “We’ve got a problem,” Angus said. “A big one.”

  Kai had never seen the man so upset, except when Win had left. “What problem?” He tried to recapture a little of the calm he’d felt just moments ago, but it was like grasping at smoke.

  “The root cellar. It’s…” Angus threw his hands up in a defeated gesture. “It’s… empty.”

  “Empty? What do you mean, empty?” Kai dropped his knife onto the cutting board and wiped his hands on his apron. Without those food stores, they were in trouble. The reality television show Martin Fulsom had forced them to participate in included a series of difficult tasks they needed to accomplish in order to keep their land. One of them was to produce all the food they needed over the winter. Since they’d only started last spring, he’d given them a grace period during which they could purchase food, but that grace period was over as of the beginning of October. Fulsom had allowed them to stock up on coffee, chocolate, salt and pepper. Otherwise they were on their own. They had a huge vegetable garden, two heated greenhouses in which they would grow greens over the winter, several old fruit trees someone had planted on the ranch years ago, chickens, pigs, several beehives, a field of wheat, a herd of bison and a milk cow.

  Kai had been so proud of the progress they’d made toward producing their own food. Their meals would be plain over the next seven months, but filling and delicious nonetheless. They had plenty of honey stored up for sweetener, and while they hadn’t harvested and ground their wheat, they’d picked bushels of starchy vegetables for the interim. He wouldn’t be able to make any more breakfast burritos until they had flour again, but he could still fry up a mess of potatoes and keep h
is people happy.

  One of his triumphs had been the cheeses he’d produced. He’d learned to make mozzarella-style and other soft cheeses that took little time to prepare—and cheddar varieties that would need to cure for months, but that they’d enjoy next year. He’d learned to churn butter, a daily chore that was time-consuming and took more skill than he’d expected. One by one, he’d learned to make most things he needed from scratch.

  Still, without those vegetables they’d harvested and stored in the root cellar, their meals were going to be nothing but meat, eggs and cheese, whatever greens they could grow in the dead of winter… and an apple now and then.

  Angus shushed him. “We can’t let anyone else know. Definitely not Renata.”

  Kai scrubbed a hand over his jaw. Thank goodness they weren’t being filmed right now; Renata had so much footage of him cooking she’d stopped sending cameras into the kitchen. “What happened?” he asked in a lower tone, struggling to calm himself again. There was a way out of this. All he had to do was listen, think things over and make rational decisions.

  “Someone must have broken in. I’m not kidding, Kai. It’s all gone. Every last potato.”

  Kai knew why he was emphasizing potatoes. Until they could harvest the wheat and make flour, they’d be low on carbohydrates without potatoes, winter squashes and other root vegetables. That’s why they’d planted so many of them. If they were all gone…

  “That’s a hell of a lot of food. How could someone get it without our seeing?”

  Angus shrugged. “They must have come at night. The cellar isn’t locked. It’s far enough away from the houses that someone could sneak in if they were quiet. We never thought to guard it. We keep making that mistake; thinking there’s safety in numbers or that we’re not in danger because we’re home in the United States rather than abroad in some war zone.”

  Kai knew what he meant; a stalker had already penetrated their encampment once and nearly killed Nora, Clay Pickett’s wife.

  “Hell.” Kai thought fast, but he could barely process the information. Someone had stolen their entire harvest? Bushels and bushels of potatoes, onions, carrots and more? That would take a lot of people a lot of time.