Romancing the SEAL: The Complete Box Set (SEAL Military Romance Series Book 4)
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Romancing the SEAL
The Complete Box Set
By Abigail Austin
Copyright 2016 by Abigail Austin - All rights reserved.
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Table of Contents
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
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty One
Chapter Twenty Two
Chapter One
Ty whistled and pointed one of his platoon leader’s to the other side of the road. Several soldiers dropped to their knees as others continued on. There was a serious feeling among the men today. Ty could feel the undercurrent of the last few days riding underneath their movements. There had been Taliban activity only two days ago on one of their patrol roads and each and everyone of their movements was laced with the knowledge of it.
The Afghan soldiers walked steadily next to Ty’s men. They’d been doing joint patrols in this neighborhood for the last few months and Ty had taken a liking to the group’s patrol leader, Sabeir Nawabi.
Sabeir turned to Ty and pointed to two small men walking toward them. Ty nodded.
Just as Ty did for his own men, Sabeir whistled to two of his soldiers and the small group moved toward the men walking in their direction.
“Wadarega. Stop.” Sabeir’s voice snapped out at the men who immediately stopped moving forward. Ty had never seen the men before and understood Sabeir’s desire to check them. He had personally seen equally waifish men, women, and even children carrying out the misdeeds of the Taliban.
A group of three little boys ran out from one of the houses on Ty’s left and Ty put a hand up. The American soldiers had taken to the children who lived in the mud houses that lined every street. One boy stopped, the one behind him collided with his back, and the other continued on towards the American soldiers who were normally so playful with them.
“Na,” Ty’s voice took on a new fatherly tone and the one rogue boy stopped. He looked back at his companions, surprised to find they weren’t behind him. Ty never appreciated being an enforcer and generally kept himself from it unless it was absolutely necessary. “Dza korta larsha,” Ty told the boys to go home. They looked disappointed but the streets weren’t safe for children now, and every man had to keep his eyes and attention on the road.
“It isn’t safe,” Ty said. The two boys furthest away turned but the boy closest looked as if he was still considering his options. “Da zay amn na day,” Ty told the boy again that it wasn’t safe. The boy frowned and exhaled loudly. It struck Ty as he watched the boy that all children were essentially the same, no matter their upbringing or cultural differences. A flicker of something mischievous crossed the boy’s face and Ty swept his hand in the direction of the boy’s house. The look left his face and the boy turned with a scowl. Ty smiled before turning back to the two men who were being searched.
It appeared that nothing of great interest was found and the two men were left to continue on their way.
“Nothing,” Sabeir said to Ty who nodded. The group continued moving forward and a sudden nicotine craving rolled over Ty. He’d decided to quit before he’d left on his third tour but that had gone to shit as soon as he was face to face with deployed life again. This was not the place to quit anything. As soon as he’d received the call he’d gone straight out to buy a carton of Marlboro reds. No matter how a person tried to avoid it, the overwhelming realization that “imminent danger pay” was called that for the very reason that you may never get to spend it, left a man very little motivation for nixing bad habits. What was the point of wasting what could be your last days on self-deprivation?
For the last two days Ty had been putting his entire company out on the streets doing patrols. The car bomb that the Taliban had planted hadn’t injured any of his soldiers but it had been a very clear warning that it only took one overlooked mistake to cost someone their life. Each group of American soldiers was paired up with a similar group of Afghani soldiers. There were regular stops and searches being made as they went and progress was slower then it had been before the threat of insurgents.
Trying to fight the craving for a cigarette Ty focused his attention around him. He was determined to notice things he might overlook on another day. His boots hit the dirt road with a thud as his eyes grazed the neighboring mud bricks that walled off a house of the same color.
“Sir, look. Please just look,” A throaty female voice grew loud behind him and Ty could hear a clear strain and frustration in her words. It was a foreign voice, not Afghan not American. French, he thought.
Looking down the block the way they’d come, Ty saw three people standing in front of the entrance to the Doctor’s Without Borders hospital. The door had been closed only a few minutes before when Ty had walked past it. Now, standing at the entrance to the MSF complex was a local man with a very pregnant woman in a bright green hijab and matching abaya who stood quietly behind him.
The woman who was speaking to the man obviously worked for Médecins Sans Frontières. She was small and wore her hair in a short bob with a fringe of bangs across her forehead. Her face was growing pink and she kept jabbing her finger at the papers in her hand.
“Khatar,” She pointed then squeezed her eyes shut as if trying to remember the word for
something else. Ty turned and began walking back toward the entrance. The woman opened her eyes. “This isn’t safe,” She spoke loudly and slowly which didn’t seem to help the man understand any better.
“I don’t think he speaks English,” Ty said as he moved closer to the three people.
“Thank you for that astute observation,” The woman snapped at him. Ty’s mind was ready to turn away and walk straight back up the road but his feet didn’t move.
As he looked at the woman’s face he caught his breath. Up close she was strikingly beautiful. Her face was clear with large blue eyes. She looked at Ty with annoyance that Ty found oddly attractive. Ty held an apologetic hand up.
He tried to pull all the Pashto he knew together in his mind. He didn’t need a very large vocabulary most of the time. If he needed to communicate in an emergency he could. If he needed something more extensive he could usually get one of his guys, who’d trained in the language, to translate.
His medical vocabulary was even more for shit but the wrath of the woman standing next to him prodded him on nonetheless. Ty looked at the small white identifying badge on her shirt, Dr. Léonie Fournier. Definitely French then, he thought.
The man standing next to Ty said something in Pashto that he could not understand but Ty nodded his head a bit anyway hoping to mollify him.
“Daa...duh daakter,” He told the man that she was a doctor though he thought it highly doubtful that the man didn’t already know this. Ty raised his hand to Dr. Fournier.
“She needs to stay in the hospital,” Dr. Fournier said to Ty. He’d apparently done a good job of making it seem like he knew the language. He turned up the road to look at his men, trying to see if a good Pashto speaker was nearby. But, his company had continued on without him and they were too far up the street. Guilt nipped at him but he turned back to the group as his mind wandered through all the Pashto phrases and words that he knew.
“She needs, hagha da roghtun,” As soon as he said it he realized that he’d said, “she is hospital,” rather then “she needs a hospital.”
The man rattled off two or three sentences that Ty could not understand and Ty turned to the doctor with a perplexed look.
“Her baby is not one baby but two babies. She has twins and they are sharing the same amniotic sac. She needs to have her babies here so we can help her.” Dr. Fournier looked between Ty and the man as she gestured. She held up the paper, which Ty now saw was a print out of an ultrasound. Dr. Fournier turned her large blue eyes on Ty, prodding him to tell the man what she’d said.
“I can’t translate that. It’s too compl—”
“—Please, come back in.” She cut Ty off, obviously not interested in his excuses, and turned completely to the man and woman. She moved and took hold of the woman’s forearm and elbow but this seemed to make the man upset. He yelled a few words to the woman who turned and began walking away. The man watched the doctor with large eyes until he was satisfied that she would not pursue them and he too walked off.
“Great,” The woman said in a cold voice. “Thank you very much for scaring them off.”
“Scaring them off?” Ty turned to watch the couple walking away from the hospital. The doctor let out a slow exhale and Ty watched as the air in her chest diminished. She had her eyes closed and Ty wondered if she was always this high strung or if it were particular to the circumstance. “If I remember correctly I did something nice for you. Trying to help?”
“Really nice, you’ve scared away a woman who needs to stay here with me. You know things could go very badly for her trying to have those babies on her own?”
“I was trying to get her to stay.”
She took a very deep breath and Ty knew instinctively that he would do best just to leave but he didn’t move.
“Thank you so much for your incredible help.” She said through a clenched jaw. Ty opened his mouth to respond but before he could, she’d turned and walked back through the wall and slammed the gated door closed behind her.
Ty turned back to where one of his platoons had just been and saw only dirt road. He walked up the road as he went through the entire encounter over again in his mind.
“I don’t get it,” He said under his breath. How could she be so mad at him? What had he done? Usually Ty understood very well why someone was mad with him. This didn’t fit though. Usually he’d done something to deserve it.
He turned a right at the end of the road and saw his men moving slowly up the next road in tow with the Afghan soldiers.
Ty shook his head. He wondered if her eyes were always so bright or if it was just a product of her anger.
Chapter Two
It took the platoon the rest of the afternoon to make it through their patrol. They continued to move at double their normal pace and Ty had already planned the routes for the next two platoon patrols that he would hand over to his junior officer.
Two things were stuck to his mind like barnacles, a cigarette and the doctor with the bright eyes. As soon as he was able he pulled out a cigarette and lit up. At least he could get one thing off his mind. Unfortunately, this just left more time for him to think about the other.
“Ty man, you want to work out later?” Donnie Cartwright yelled at Ty from a hundred feet away. He was walking with two other guys that Ty recognized but didn’t know personally.
“Sure,” Ty yelled back. “Come get me when you’re ready.” He pointed toward his room and Donnie nodded. Donnie was a bit of a wildcard but a good guy. Ty had liked him when he’d first met him seven years ago. They had two mutual friends who hadn’t made it home from their first tour in Iraq and another who went home a paraplegic. Ty knew others but those guys had been special.
Working out on base was one major form of occupation during Ty’s non-working hours. There were only so many movies he could watch without craving takeout from his favorite spots in Capitol Hill. Back home there was an Indian restaurant that made the best curry he had ever tasted, and a local pizza place that would bring pizza, beer, and pie at any hour of the night.
There were other guys he could talk to but inevitably he would end up in his head. There were too many off hours and too many things packed into his brain to keep himself from it. Smoking helped but it didn’t take away the thoughts.
Rachel, his ex-girlfriend of four years, had left him in the middle of his second tour. She’d broken it off via Skype, such a stereotype it was laughable. He didn’t blame her though. She hadn’t set out to fall in love with someone else and he had been able to tell how difficult it was for her to come out with the truth. The blow had rocked him and he hadn’t even had his motorcycle, his friends, copious amounts of alcohol, or other women to fall back on. He’d had to just sit it out in his fatigues, his fingers constantly at the ready to curl around his gun, in the heat and dirt of the Middle East.
He’d had time to make up for it when he’d gotten home. By the time he got home her things were out of the house they’d rented together in DC. He’d had to get a roommate after that. Dan was a DC wannabe who wore his suits too tight but the guy knew how to party. They would go for all night drinking binges then both wake up and go to work the next day. Ty hadn’t been as good at covering it up as he’d thought. Two rather severe reprimands had shown him that. One thing Ty had gained from the experience was how to make a good apology.
Now, back in the thick air of a different world his mind had been returning to Rachel. It was the worst when he tried to sleep. Up she would bubble up from the depths of his mind. Her black hair and lithe athletic body clear enough to touch. She was a competitive swimmer, a lawyer, and one of the smartest people Ty had ever met. She was almost too smart. Rachel had taken a fancy to correcting him whenever he mispronounced a word, got a fact wrong, or did something else she deemed idiotic. She loved being right. She took so much pleasure in being right that Ty almost wanted to let her be right all the time just so she could be happy.
But, there was something about Rachel, the way she would be
t with him over trivia that she inevitably got right and even on the rare occasion that Ty was the winner of such a battle, Rachel never gave in. She would throw it off as a fluke or find something somewhere that would make her answer slightly more palatable. It made victory unsatisfying for Ty, which in turn pushed him on to be even more competitive with her.
More then anything else that came up when he was trying to close his eyes, was the scene of Rachel with her new man. Ralph. It had to have been the shittiest name she could have fallen for. Just the sound of, Rachel and Ralph, was hideous. For some reason that made it all worse for Ty. How stupid his name was, how he was a financial guy, the way he looked extremely tight-laced in the photos Ty had found on the Internet. In short, he looked like the polar opposite of Ty. That all made the bite just a bit more potent.
Just before he would fall asleep Ty would see Rachel and Ralph together in bed. He would imagine all of her quirks and intimacies that he knew so well being displayed for another man. For a Ralph.
Out here, sleep was not his friend. Even his dreams turned on him. He would see the explosion that had taken his two friends and maimed the other. He would hear the popping sound of gunshots but wouldn’t be able to tell where they were coming from. He would be in a truck heading down the road, in his dreaming mind he would know that there was a bomb ahead of the truck but he was unable to communicate. Unable to say or do anything to prevent what he knew was about to happen.
Waking up didn’t help much, since his worst nightmares had been based on the realities of this very land.
Ty had just made it back to the beginning of the cot tents where he hoped to get a little time alone when Major John O’Donnell stopped him.
“I’ve been looking for you,” Major O’Donnell didn’t look like much. He was maybe five years older then Ty. He maintained a doughy and soft appearance, but Ty had only had to see him run one time to know that Major O’Donnell could outpace his entire company.