by Cora Seton
Waiting to be with Harris had been such sweet torture, and now she wasn’t sure she could hold back, but Harris moved slowly, teasing and touching her until her skin burned and she ached to feel him between her legs.
Harris urged her up the ladder after he’d undressed, too, taking liberties all the way up that left her even hungrier for him to fill her. Up on the bed, she lay back and stretched her arms over her head. “Would you take me already?”
“We have all night,” he said, lying beside her and running one hand over her body.
Samantha turned and pounced on him. “I’m not waiting all night for the good stuff. I’ve been patient long enough.” He chuckled good-naturedly and let her climb up to straddle his waist. Feeling the hard length of him against her was enough to draw another sigh from her throat. “Harris, I’m not kidding. I need you.”
“I’m right here.” He lifted her hips and held her over him so that he was just pressing against her. Samantha wriggled, wanting him to push in deeper. “I’ll always be here for you. Every night from now on.”
“Promise,” she begged him. “Because I never want to be apart from you again.”
“I promise.” Harris pushed into her, gently at first until she wanted to scream with impatience, and then with more authority until he filled her. Without a condom between them, the sensation was heavenly, and when he began to move inside her, Samantha closed her eyes and rocked with him, her breasts hanging heavy, almost within reach of his mouth.
She swallowed, trying not to be overcome by the feel of him inside her. Harris pushed up to take her nipple into his mouth, and ran his teeth over her sensitive skin. She gasped and leaned forward for more, each stroke of him inside her bringing her closer to the brink.
“Harris.” She couldn’t think of anything else. That said it all; she loved him, felt loved by him and was satisfied to think that this could be her whole world from here on in. The way he held her, the way he moved inside her showed his intimate knowledge of who she was and what she wanted. That was Harris through and through; a man who cared enough to take the time to learn her preferences and to put her desires in front of his.
She couldn’t wait to share her life with him—all of it.
And this was the start.
When she crashed over the edge a moment later, Samantha gave herself up to loving him, loving her life and loving whatever might come next. Harris came with her, his groans echoing her cries, until both of them collapsed, panting and gasping, against the bed. Samantha lay on Harris’s chest, breathing hard, and found herself blinking back tears.
“Hey, you all right?”
“More than all right. Perfect. How can you be mine?” she asked him.
“The same way you can be mine. Because we were meant for each other. Because Fate wanted us to be together—and we wanted it, too,” he told her.
“Once isn’t nearly enough,” she warned him a few minutes later, when her heart had slowed down and her breathing was normal again.
He chuckled. “No?”
“No. Not by a long shot. I want to be pregnant by the time the night’s over. Is that all right with you?”
“Hell, yeah.” Harris flipped her on her back and began to make love to her all over again.
To find out more about Harris, Samantha, Boone, Riley, Clay, Jericho, Walker and the other inhabitants of Westfield, look for A SEAL’s Consent, Volume 4 in the SEALs of Chance Creek series.
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Other books in the SEALs of Chance Creek Series:
A SEAL’s Oath
A SEAL’s Vow
A SEAL’s Consent
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 di
d 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.
“Well….”
He was about to say no, but the secretary shook her head rapidly and made a slicing motion across her neck. Since she hadn’t engaged in the conversation at all previously, Boone decided he’d better take her signals seriously. He’d gotten some of his best intel in the field just this way. A subtle nod from a veiled woman, or a pointed finger just protruding from a burka had saved his neck more than once. Women were crafty when it counted.
“I’m almost married,” he blurted. His grip on the arms of his chair tightened. None of this was going like he’d planned. Jericho and Clay turned to stare at him like he’d lost his mind. Behind him Walker chuckled. “I mean—”
“Excellent! Can’t wait to meet your better half. What about the rest of you?” Fulsom waved them off before anyone else could speak. “Never mind. Julie here will get all that information from you later. As long as you’ve got a girl, Boone, everything’s going to be all right. The fearless leader has to have a woman by his side. It gives him that sense of humanity our viewers crave.” Julie nodded like she’d heard this many times before.
Boone’s heart sunk even further. Fearless leader? Fulsom didn’t understand his relationship with the others at all. Walker was his superior officer, for God’s sake. Still, Fulsom was waiting for his answer, with a shrewd look in his eyes that told Boone he wasn’t fooled at all by his hasty words. Their funding would slip away unless he convinced Fulsom that he was dedicated to the project—as Fulsom wanted it to be done.