A SEAL's Pledge (SEALs of Chance Creek Book 3)

by Cora Seton

  Last night’s rain hadn’t dispelled that hushed, close, storm is coming feeling, and clouds hung low and threatening in the sky. He stared into the creek’s depths for a long time, thinking about what he wanted to say to Samantha when they met at breakfast, and became so deeply engaged in the exercise he didn’t hear footsteps approaching. Jolted out of his thoughts at the sound of a twig breaking, he spun, prepared for anything, but stopped short when he saw Samantha.

  “I’m glad I found you,” she said. She was dressed in a plain gown today, in a soft shade of violet that set off her lovely skin. She wore a bonnet, as all the women did when they were outside, and—as always—he had to smother a flicker of irritation about the way the bonnets’ brims blocked the wearer’s vision. He wanted to warn the women they were making themselves vulnerable by hampering their peripheral vision, but so far he’d managed to stop himself before he said such a ridiculous thing to any of them.

  “I’m glad you did, too.” He hesitated. For all the thought he had put into it, he still didn’t know what to say now she was here. How could he let her know how sorry he was? How much he wished he could take back what he’d said yesterday?

  “Harris, I—” She stopped, as if she didn’t know what to say, either. Harris couldn’t interpret the way she was looking at him. It was different than the way she’d looked at him yesterday. Almost as if she’d grown shy—or nervous—around him. Was it because she’d spent time with Curtis last night?

  Had she done something she felt badly about?

  Harris couldn’t ask her. He’d only upset her again. He figured there was one way he could make sure of where he stood with Samantha, though. They were alone—no camera crew nearby to film them. He stepped forward to close the gap between them, pulled her into his arms and kissed her. As soon as their mouths met, he had his answer. She melted against him, and the way she responded to his touch told him she wanted him as much as he wanted her. Whatever it was that sparked between them hadn’t been put out by last night’s storm.

  As long as he was holding her, things would be all right.

  If only he never had to let her go.

  “I want to be with you,” Samantha whispered against his neck.

  “I want to be with you, too,” Harris said. “I didn’t mean what I said last night.”

  “I know. You were angry. I was angry, too.”

  “That doesn’t make what I did right. It’s just—” Harris didn’t know how to put it into words. He worried he couldn’t be enough for her. He felt he never quite belonged. He was beginning to be afraid that even if Samantha joined him, they would both end up on the far side of the roof, instead of becoming part of the community together. He didn’t want to do that to her.

  He didn’t want to be alone, either.

  “This is a difficult situation,” she said, pulling back. “We’re hardly ever going to be alone together like this. I’m going to be forced to go on dates with Curtis. You’re going to be forced to watch us. It’s all unnatural. But we have to take the time to get to know each other. It’ll be worth it in the end.”

  Harris stilled. So Curtis had gotten to her.

  “You didn’t tell him to back off.” It wasn’t a question. He could read the answer in her face.

  “No, I didn’t. Not because I’ve changed my mind about you, but because neither of us knows the other well enough to make a decision that will affect the rest of our lives.”

  She hadn’t felt that way yesterday when she’d married him. Curtis had changed her mind.

  “You’ll pick him.” He hadn’t meant to say that out loud, but it was true. What woman wouldn’t pick an outgoing, fun-loving man over him?

  “What happened to make you think no one could love you?”

  Harris stepped back. He had a sudden, uncomfortable memory of being seven, standing at the cheap metal screen door of his family’s trailer, both hands pressed against its frame, waiting for his father. His dad had left one day and simply hadn’t returned. Harris hadn’t been able to understand how someone so important could disappear like that.

  “Don’t bother,” his mother had said tiredly as she passed him for the fourth time doing chores around the trailer. “I told you; he’s not coming back.”

  His mother had been right. He’d never seen his father again. When he’d asked her later what had happened, she waved his question away with that same tired, glazed look he remembered from their first days alone. He doesn’t love us, Harris. Sometimes you just don’t win.

  Harris swallowed against a lump that had risen in his throat. He’d overcome all that. He’d made something of himself, kept his family together through thick and thin, made it possible for his sisters to attend college. If his father was stupid enough to throw away the love of an entire family, they didn’t need him.

  Samantha was waiting for his answer, though. “I know who I am,” he said. “All I’m saying is Curtis might suit you better. You don’t know yet.”

  “You’re right; I don’t,” she said quietly. “I’m going to give it thirty days. That will give us all a chance to make the right decision.”

  He’d lost. No matter what she was saying to soften it, he’d lost.

  “We better be getting back.” Harris couldn’t talk about this. He didn’t have the words. He wanted to kiss her again, but after everything she’d said, he couldn’t make himself reach out to her.

  “I know.” She nodded, but didn’t move. “Listen, we might not get any more chances to speak like this before the thirty days are up. So whatever happens, whatever this television show makes us do, you need to know that I care about you.”

  It was Harris’s turn to nod, but caring wasn’t enough. She had to love him to make this work, and that’s what this conversation was really about. She was telling him she didn’t love him. Not yet.

  Maybe not ever.

  A month of dates with Curtis could change everything.

  “I need to know if you feel the same way,” she added when he didn’t say anything.

  Harris nodded. Of course he did. He’d made his pledge to her; she was his life now. She was the wild card here. Didn’t Sam know that?

  She didn’t seem entirely satisfied, but even as she opened her mouth to speak again, voices carried on the wind toward them—Jericho and Boone. Harris knew if they were found alone together like this, the men would assume they’d broken Renata’s rules.

  “See you back at the camp.”

  She nodded quickly, and tilted up her chin as if she expected a kiss. Harris wanted to kiss her, wanted that more than anything else, but if he started, he wasn’t sure he would be able to stop. It was hard enough, knowing what was to come. So instead, he touched her cheek and strode away.

  The morning seemed endless to Samantha. She’d greeted Boone and Jericho, exchanged some small talk with them about the weather and hurried back to her tent. When she heard the other women talking as they got ready for the day, she joined them. Avery, who’d also been up early, had lent her the fresh work gown until Alice brought the rest of the clothes over, and helped her with her stays earlier, but Sam took advantage of the time in her tent to smooth her hair again and re-tie her bonnet.

  Ten minutes later, Harris walked up the dirt path from Pittance Creek, whistling. His hair was wet and slicked back, and it looked as if he taken an early morning swim. Renata met him at the edge of the camp, and appeared to be scolding him for not telling one of the camera crews where he was going.

  “We’ll re-create that scene later today,” she said. “A wet, bare-chested Navy SEAL will do wonders for our ratings.”

  Samantha wondered what Renata would say if she knew the two of them had been together. She would probably want to re-create that, too, although Samantha had a feeling Renata would prefer an R-rated version to the conversation they’d actually had.

  It still hurt to think about Harris’s expression when she’d let him know she hadn’t told Curtis to keep his distance. It had gone hard, as if he was filing
this loss with all the others he’d suffered in his life, and Sam had wanted to assure him it wasn’t like that.

  But it kind of was.

  After eating breakfast near the other women, she joined Harris and Curtis at the building site. Clay and Nora were still on their honeymoon, which left the three of them alone. Curtis and Harris each had a job to do, and each of them tried to co-opt her as his assistant. She did her best to take turns, but the two men had her running back and forth, and soon she grew irritated.

  She was bracing a 2x4 for Harris when Curtis called from the makeshift workbench he’d set up on two sawhorses nearby, “Sam? I need an extra pair of hands here.”

  “I’ll be there in a minute,” she called back.

  “I need you now.”

  “You’ll have to wait.”

  A second later, Curtis stormed over to see you what the delay was, just as Harris finished his task.

  “You managed to do all of this without her before,” he told Harris.

  “So did you,” Harris said.

  “Clay was here working with me, or did you forget him?”

  “I haven’t forgotten anything.” Harris straightened, the drill in his hand, and his watchful, steady stance called forth an image in Samantha’s mind—one that Curtis had put there only the night before. Harris in uniform, a gun in his hand, his eagle gaze locked on the target. Samantha inadvertently took a step back, realizing too late that left her closer to Curtis. A flicker of Harris’s gaze let her know he noticed. His expression tightened. “Go on. Help him now,” he said, then turned around without another word and got back to work.

  Samantha, kicking herself for what she’d done, followed Curtis to the sawhorses.

  “This piece needs to be sanded down until its smooth all over,” Curtis told her. It was an interestingly curved piece of wood that he told her he was planning to use over the mantle of one of the doors. It had once been a tree branch, but he had cut away all the excess wood, leaving just the stubs of branches. “It will take some time, so go easy. You don’t have to push hard on the wood; let the sandpaper do the work for you.”

  He demonstrated what he wanted, and left her to it, moving to sort through a stack of logs like the one she was working on.

  Samantha expected Harris to call her back at any moment, but as seconds stretched out into minutes, and a half hour passed, and then an hour, she realized he wasn’t going to play the game anymore. It hurt her feelings more than she’d expected. Maybe he was taking the higher road, refusing to treat her like a ping-pong ball in a match between him and Curtis, but it felt to her like he had giving up already. She wanted him to fight for her.

  As the time went past, Curtis set up another pair of sawhorses and got to work on another piece of wood. He asked her questions about her childhood, her family and her aspirations. She did her best to answer him, although she considered her words carefully. Curtis was capable of playing dirty if it meant he got what he wanted. Still, now that Harris was keeping to himself, he proved an affable, easy companion. Despite her intentions to stay disengaged, she found herself relaxing as the morning went on, and asked him questions, too. He was a man she could’ve been friends with if not for the circumstances. Maybe someday they would laugh about this, all of them together.

  At the moment, that seemed unlikely.

  After an hour and a half, Boone came by to check on them. He examined the piece of work that Samantha was just finishing up. “That looks great.”

  “Thanks.” Samantha was feeling proud of what she’d done. When she’d stopped bouncing back and forth between the two men, she’d had enough time to accomplish something.

  “I’m going to steal Samantha from you, if you don’t mind,” Boone said loudly enough for both men to hear. “It’s time she had a tour of the whole operation here. She needs to be able to understand the big picture.”

  Samantha put down her sandpaper gratefully and rubbed her shoulder. She wasn’t used to this kind of work, and her arm was sore. She waved to Harris as they passed, and he nodded, but got right back to work without comment. Frustrated, Samantha decided to make the most of the tour and find out everything she could about Base Camp. She wasn’t going to let the tension between Harris and Curtis get her down.

  “Everything going smoothly this morning?” Boone asked, when they were far enough from the building site so that the men wouldn’t overhear.

  “Smoothly enough,” she said. “They make everything into a competition, don’t they?”

  Boone chuckled. “Yeah, I guess you could say that.”

  As he took her around to various points of interest, Samantha began to get a better idea of how things ran at Base Camp. Of course, she’d seen most of it on television, so there weren’t any real surprises, except that the people seemed as cheerful and hardworking in real life as they came across on TV. She viewed everything with interest, and listened to all that Boone had to say, but it wasn’t until they reached their last stop, the gardens, that her heart quickened and she really wanted to know more.

  As they walked through the rows of vegetables, and in and out of the greenhouses, Samantha knew she had to become a part of this, especially when Boone began to demonstrate the ways in which they were working to make their whole system self-sustaining. Win was there, cheerfully harvesting snap peas. She smiled and waved as they walked past.

  At one point, as Boone was showing her how they controlled the temperature in the greenhouses, he stopped and smiled. “You’re glowing,” he said.

  “I find it all fascinating,” she told him. “Do you have any books I could read to learn more about closed-system gardening?”

  “Sure,” Boone said. “Most of them are in my house, but I can move them into the bunkhouse and get Clay to build a bookshelf. We should have a library of resources that anyone can access. Let’s go find one or two to get you started.”

  Chapter Eight

  ‡

  Roy Egan was hard at work when Harris and Sam—and a camera crew—arrived at his property later that afternoon, but he set down his hammer, wiped his hands on his apron and came to greet them.

  “Welcome. Glad you could come.” He immediately began to give them a tour of the forge, pointing out tools and half-finished projects. The entire space was neat and tidy, every tool clean and in its place, and Harris recognized the trappings of a real expert. It had been a little awkward when he and Sam had met up again at lunch and she’d reiterated her desire to meet Egan and see his forge. Harris had thought she might have changed her mind after how surly he’d been this morning. He’d hated himself the whole time for acting that way, but didn’t know what else to do. Should he have kept calling her back to help him? Should he have flattened Curtis with his fists?

  Something told him he needed to give Sam time—but he also knew he had to pull it together and show her who he really was.

  Maybe this was his chance.

  Egan worked on everything from horseshoes to latches and hinges to fancy metalwork gates. “Pretty much, if you can draw me a picture of what you want, I can make it,” he said at one point.

  Harris’s fingers itched to pick up the tools and get to work. He’d had a metalwork class or two back in high school, and had always excelled at it. While the other kids had created clumsy ashtrays and candlesticks, he had made each of his sisters an intricate metal bracelet. His teacher had insisted that the bracelets be displayed in the yearly art show, much to his embarrassment.

  Egan must’ve seen his interest, because he took up a horseshoe-shaped piece of metal and a pair of tongs, held it over his forge to heat, put it on the anvil and gave a whack or two with his hammer, before turning to Harris and saying, “Now it’s your turn to give it a go. You can’t hurt this horseshoe, and it’ll give you a feel for the work.”

  Harris donned the protective gear Egan gave him, took the hammer and tongs, heated the metal again and gave it a try. He ignored the cameramen zooming in on his hands. He was confident he could learn the trade,
and if he didn’t do it right from the first, that was okay.

  The movement was as reflexive as if he was coming home to a job he’d always done, and Harris knew he’d found something he hadn’t even known he was looking for. He worked at the horseshoe, shaping it until he instinctively knew it was ready for use. When he looked up, Egan was nodding. “You’ve got the feel for it,” he said. “I had a hunch you would.”

  “I’d like to watch you work for a bit,” Harris told him. “I’d like to see how you do that fancy work.”

  Egan took over again without comment, set the horseshoe aside and picked up a long piece of metal. For the next hour, Harris and Sam watched in awe as Egan over and over again turned raw pieces of metal into art. Harris wasn’t sure when he’d seen the camera crews so intent; they were getting great footage for the next episode.

  Sam leaned close to him. “That’s what you want to do, isn’t it?” she asked in a low voice.

  Harris nodded. He wanted it more than anything else. “I’ve got responsibilities at Base Camp, though.” He made sure Egan overheard his words. “I’d like to study blacksmithing, but I need to do my part.”

  “Seems to me there will be plenty of uses for a blacksmith in that community of yours,” Egan said. “Plus, like I said, I’ve been looking for somebody to take over when I retire. As long as there’s horses, there will be a need. It will be a way to bring in a little extra cash for your operation.”

  “I’ll talk it over with Boone and the others. See what they have to say. But if you’ll have me, I’d like to spend a couple hours a day here.”

  “Any time.”

  When Egan was done with his demonstration, he showed the two of them over the rest of his property, and ended by ushering them into his small home, where his wife, Bertie, served them coffee, handing cups to the crew, as well.