A SEAL's Devotion (SEALs of Chance Creek Book 7)

by Cora Seton

  She wasn’t sad about losing a man she’d never met, she decided. She was sad about losing herself. About the choices she was making. The ones dooming her to a plain Jane existence rather than the boisterous, interesting, inspiring life Anders and his future wife would lead.

  The other men were teasing him. He was going along with it, but for the first time she glimpsed insecurity in his expression. Was he… afraid… he might not be able to pull this off?

  Anders—afraid?

  No.

  But the possibility made her heart squeeze. She wished she could reach out to him and tell him she was afraid, too. She wished she could tell him about AltaVista and Hansen Oil, and ask his advice. She wished she could find a man like Anders to partner with her as she went through life. Someone who would bolster her courage and help her be her best self.

  On the TV screen, Curtis’s wedding to Hope progressed quickly, and soon the happy couple trailed off to spend their wedding night in their brand-new tiny house. The reception wound down.

  The show ended with a shot of Anders climbing into one of Base Camp’s trucks and plowing the lane out to the road—alone.

  OMG—he’s so hot! Melissa texted.

  She was right. Anders was hot, and he wouldn’t be alone for long, would he? He needed to marry within forty days. Sooner, she amended. There had to be some delay before the show was aired.

  Eve blinked back the tears that suddenly stung her eyes.

  He was going to marry, and she was going to go on with her little life.

  And no one would stop Hansen Oil.

  This is what growing up looked like. This was what it meant to make practical choices.

  ANDERS needs a WIFE, Melissa texted.

  As if Eve didn’t know that. As if she hadn’t daydreamed a hundred times while watching the show that she’d be his choice when the time came.

  Just as she predicted, her phone rang. She debated not answering, but Melissa was like a bulldog and would keep calling all night if she had to.

  Eve took the call.

  “Are you crying?” Melissa demanded.

  How could she possibly know that? “No,” Eve lied.

  “Yes, you are, because you’re miserable.”

  “I’m not miserable, I’m just—”

  “You are miserable, and you’ve been that way ever since you got home. If I didn’t know you so well, I’d take it personally,” Melissa went on. “You’re not going to be happy in your parents’ backyard even if I am living a half mile away, and you’re not going to be happy not exposing what Hansen Oil is doing.”

  “It’s no use—”

  “Who stole my best friend and left this—wimp—in her place?” Melissa demanded. “The Eve I know would never give up without a fight!”

  “I promised my parents—”

  “You promised you’d settle down in time for classes. That gives you over three weeks to stop Hansen Oil.”

  “But how—?”

  “Did you watch the show or not?” Melissa didn’t wait for her answer. “Anders needs a wife. You need a way to tell the world what’s happening at Hansen Oil—a compelling way.”

  “You want me to marry Anders?”

  “Marrying Anders would be a bonus, but we can’t count on that.”

  That was Melissa all over: practical to a T. Her parents loved Melissa.

  “Ouch,” Eve said.

  “You just have to get on the show long enough to blurt out what you know. To make a splash. If you expose what’s happening at Hansen Oil while you’re on Base Camp, the news will pick it up, and people will talk about it on social media. You’ll seem so mysterious and interesting coming out of nowhere with this proof of wrongdoing, the audience will eat it up, and people will start sleuthing on their own. It will be like crowdsourcing an intervention against Hansen. In three weeks you can expose it and nail your fifteen minutes of fame. Then you can come home and start school, and hang out with me, all the while knowing you’ve already contributed greatly to society. What do you say?”

  “How on earth would I even get on the show?”

  “I think I have an idea, but it’s not a very practical one…”

  Chapter Three

  ‡

  “Maybe your wife will simply show up, like mine did,” Curtis said two days later when they were preparing to plow the lane again.

  Anders had spent the evening wading through women’s profiles on online dating apps—without any luck. If he was honest, he was finding it hard to figure out what he was looking for.

  “Not many women crash their cars in the ditch at the end of our lane,” Anders pointed out. “So far that’s only happened once.”

  “You’ve got over a month,” Curtis added. “It’s not quite time to panic yet.”

  Anders was panicking. Somehow he’d thought it would be easier than this to find a wife. As a teenager in Texas, he’d always had a girlfriend. With a family name like his and a fortune to inherit as soon as he came of age, Anders had rarely entered a room without some pretty girl sidling up closer, as if proximity could work a spell on him and make him hers.

  Even when he’d changed his name and joined the Navy, he’d done fine with women he met in bars and restaurants near his military bases. No one broadcasted their Navy SEAL status, but women who lived near bases always seemed to know, as if there were an underground information network among them.

  Since coming to Base Camp things had been different.

  He’d been different.

  He’d known he needed to find a wife, which was a lot different from finding a girlfriend. If he was going to share his life with a woman, he needed to be able to be honest with her. That meant telling her about his past. About his father’s business.

  Which would leave him exposed.

  That hadn’t stopped him from signing on, though. He’d wanted what Base Camp stood for far too much to back down. Now he admitted to himself it had been a stupid move.

  What if he got close to a woman, confided in her, and she blew the whistle on him? What if she left, and he wasn’t able to convince anyone else to marry him?

  What if he ruined things for everyone?

  He’d thought he’d escaped his father’s sins when he left home at eighteen, but he’d been wrong; they’d followed him all the way to Montana.

  Anders had no idea how Johannes lived with himself. Like any other person his age, he couldn’t remember a time when the words climate change weren’t a part of the nightly narrative on the news, but his father’s response to that narrative had never been interest or concern—or a desire to do something to fix the problem.

  His father’s response had been rage.

  Rage at the implication that climate change existed. Then, when its existence was proven beyond a shadow of a doubt, rage at the idea that human beings could influence it at all. He was adamant their family business certainly wasn’t to blame.

  After his mother’s death, his father’s rage had become far more personal, until Johannes became like a Medieval princeling, building rhetorical walls around his little fiefdom, patrolling them morning and night and bristling at any interlopers who might lay the blame about crumbling environmental conditions at his door.

  Like all children, Anders accepted his father’s worldview without question, and little outside thought had penetrated his sheltered world. His wasn’t the only family in town to make their fortune in oil. Even the people on the news shows they watched talked in the same language his father did and declared the entire idea of climate change preposterous.

  Anders was nearly fourteen when his science teacher played a movie he later found out most people in the country had seen many years earlier. It took two and a half periods over the course of several days for them to watch the whole thing. Anders still remembered the silence in that classroom as his peers took in information that contradicted everything they’d learned at home. The confusion. His wasn’t the only family who regularly debunked this kind of theory, but as the
movie’s narrator—a man who’d once run for president but lost to the conservative candidate all their families had voted for—explained on screen with charts and graphs and photographs and film footage what was happening in their world, Anders felt the walls of his father’s fortress crack, and for a moment, a scathing, searing light shone in.

  That’s all that would have happened if not for Thomas Craig, a skinny, bespectacled boy Anders knew only because they’d been in Cub Scouts together years before. After the third class, when the movie had reached its conclusion, Anders had met up with him by chance in the boys’ bathroom. While both of them gave their hands a cursory wash before heading to lunch, Thomas had glanced his way.

  “It’s true,” he said. “All of it. My dad’s been talking about climate change for years. Not in this town, obviously,” he went on with a glance over his shoulder as if they’d been discussing the overthrow of the city council. “When he goes to international symposiums, it’s all anyone’s talking about, all around the world. Scientists, politicians, economists, you name it.”

  Anders vaguely knew Mr. Craig was a scientist, but he couldn’t have said what kind. He wasn’t sure what economists even did, and everyone knew you couldn’t trust politicians. Still, another crack breached his father’s theoretical fortress. The problem was, Anders had a scientific bent himself, and the movie rang true in a way his father’s arguments against climate change didn’t.

  Thomas moved to pump the handle of the paper towel dispenser, ripped off a handful and dried his hands. “Dad says he’ll die before the worst of it hits, but you and me—we’re going to see big changes. We should have kept the oil in the ground.”

  He pitched the paper towels into the trash and left. Anders, alone, braced himself against the countertop, his stomach as unsettled as if the earth were shifting and roiling beneath him. Should have kept the oil in the ground. He looked up and met his own gaze in the mirror. Keeping oil in the ground was heresy. It ran contrary to everything the Hansen family stood for.

  Which was why Anders’s last name wasn’t Hansen anymore. He’d changed it to Olsen when he’d left home, going up the branches of his family tree to find an offshoot that had no stake in the oil business. He’d spent four years researching the situation and arguing with his father, first urging him to watch the movie, then to change the family business from the ground up.

  At eighteen he conceded defeat, walked out the door and never went back. The judge who allowed him to start over with a new name didn’t comment on his petition but shook his head in a way that Anders had recognized even then. It was foolish to turn your back on a fortune, no matter where that fortune came from.

  That fortune would have come in handy here at Base Camp, but he wouldn’t go back and change things even if he could. He shuddered to think what his friends here would say if they knew the truth about him.

  He knew one thing for sure—Boone would have flat-out rejected his application to become a part of this place. Base Camp’s goal was to run 100 percent on renewable energy sources. An oil baron’s son wouldn’t be welcome.

  Anders joined Curtis in the cab of the truck. Plowing the lane was easy, but as he’d predicted, the drift at the end of it was harder going. In the end, they had to park the truck and pull out their shovels. A moment later, a horn honked and an SUV came down the lane from the direction of Base Camp, its cab steaming in the frosty air. Renata and some of the crew members filled the vehicle. She rolled down her window.

  “This going to take long?”

  She’d been as cranky as a wet hen since Clem had arrived at Base Camp, and with each passing day her mood was deteriorating.

  “Just a few minutes. Where’s Clem?”

  Renata’s features hardened. “Staying at Base Camp tonight. Thinks maybe you all are getting up to something exciting after hours. Byron’s staying, too.” She closed her window before he could ask any more questions. Anders got to work, his unease increasing. They were supposed to get a respite from filming at nighttime. He hoped Renata had made that clear to her new co-director.

  When they’d cleared half of the pile, he and Curtis stepped aside to let the waiting truck past. Once it was gone, quiet descended.

  Anders appreciated the brief reprieve. He dreaded going back and facing Clem again. As the next one in line to marry, he knew he was already being tracked by the camera crews even more than usual. If Clem wanted drama, it would be coming his way, most likely.

  “That’s that,” Curtis said fifteen minutes later, throwing one more shovelful of snow onto the bank. “Let’s call it a night. God knows we’ll be back out here in the morning, doing it all over again.”

  “Sure thing.”

  Anders hesitated, looking down the road in both directions. Not a car in sight. They were alone out here, and he savored the peace. Snow drifted down quietly, landing on his skin in brief, cold pinpricks. In a minute he’d be back in the bunkhouse, settling down for the night in a sleeping bag on the floor with the other single members of Base Camp. There was always someone around there. Always talk and jokes. Just for a moment it was nice to be—

  Anders squinted, peering through the dark and slowly falling snow. “What’s that?” He pointed to a shape making its way slowly toward them. It was small figure. A child?

  No, not a child.

  “I don’t see anything.” Curtis moved to his side.

  “There.” The shape stopped. Wavered. Then it was coming at them again. “Is that—?”

  Curtis swore and began to run. A second later, Anders sprinted past him. He covered the hundred and fifty yards in record time, lunged forward—

  Just in time to catch the woman who fainted into his arms.

  “…in shock. We’ve got to get her warm.”

  “…ridiculous shoes, no jacket—how’d she make it this far?”

  “…come on, come on, wake up…”

  Eve listened to the voices spilling over her, having done her best to keep still while Curtis and Anders lugged her inside a building and set her gently on the floor.

  Thank God everything had gone according to plan so far. If she’d had to wait much longer, she would have frozen to death for real out there. She’d been hiding in a thicket of bushes down the road from the lane that led to Base Camp for nearly an hour—without the benefit of winter outer gear. She’d known she needed to make this as realistic as possible, and several previous episodes of the show had established that Anders—either with Curtis or alone—always plowed the lane just before bedtime if it was snowing. After a whirlwind twenty-four hours of planning, she and Melissa had landed at the Chance Creek airport this morning, rented a car, set up headquarters at a local motel and waited to see if the forecasted snow came.

  It had, and they’d put their plan into motion. It had taken a lot of arguing to get Melissa to drop her off more than a mile down the road and head back to town to eliminate the chance that anyone might see them.

  “If you wind up dead in a ditch, I’m going to kill you,” Melissa had said. “At least wear a jacket.”

  “I can’t. I have to look like I’ve been through hell.”

  “Don’t overplay this,” Melissa had retorted. “Keep to the script.”

  “I swear I’ll keep to the script,” Eve had intoned. “Thank you—for everything. This is a brilliant idea.”

  “I hope so.” Melissa hadn’t looked so sure anymore. Her first uncharacteristic bout of enthusiasm for this venture had worn off within hours, and it had been up to Eve to keep them on track ever since. Before Melissa could call it off completely, Eve had shut her car’s door, waved Melissa away and stood there until her friend turned around and drove back to town.

  Then she’d started walking.

  She was wearing a ridiculous pair of blue flats that were utterly ruined now. The cold wind had bitten through her thin clothing and started tears tracing down her cheeks. She was almost soaked through from the falling snow. Halfway to Base Camp she’d had to admit Melissa was right—sh
e could die before she made it.

  She’d kept going until her feet were so cold she couldn’t feel her toes. When she’d drawn near to the lane that led to Base Camp, she’d taken cover in the bushes and waited for headlights.

  By the time they finally approached, she was shivering so hard she could barely put one foot in front of the other, but she’d broken into an unsteady run. When she collapsed into Anders’s arms, she’d barely been acting.

  Now her feet and nose and the tips of her ears were burning. Eve hoped she hadn’t gone overboard and given herself frostbite.

  “Miss? Can you say something? Do you know where you are?”

  Eve pretended to struggle to open her eyes, although really, a nap would have been nice. So far, it was all going to plan. Curtis had fallen for Hope when her car crashed in front of Base Camp. Anders should fall for her. Men liked to save women, after all.

  She’d made herself utterly save-able.

  When she opened her eyes, she took in the knot of men clustered around her. Above them, a wooden ceiling. Below her, a rough floor. Her fingers slid over wide planks, quarter-inch gaps between their up-curled edges.

  The bunkhouse.

  Eve blinked. Shut her eyes and opened them again, as if she didn’t know what was happening. A true victim would be wondering how she’d made her way onto a television show. Base Camp didn’t advertise its location, but it hadn’t been all that hard to track down.

  She wondered where the rest of the men and women were. Only a handful were present.

  “…she’s coming around.”

  “…should get a doctor—”

  “Look. She’s awake!”

  Eve pretended to try to sit up. Groaned when the room actually spun and allowed hands to lay her back down. Hell, she’d pushed it too far, hadn’t she? She was cold to the bone.

  “What’s… going on?” she made herself murmur. The shiver in her voice was all too real.

  “We found you walking up the road. You had no jacket, no gloves or hat. You’re soaked. Your shoes are wrecked. It looks like you were walking a long time. Do you know what happened?” Curtis asked. Behind him she saw Hope, his new wife.