There was so much to think about each day. So many new things to learn.
So many people to love.
She breathed in the familiar scent of her husband. Looked down into the shining eyes of her daughter.
This had to be paradise, she thought.
And she was going to stay right here.
“He’s asleep,” Avery whispered.
Walker leaned over from where he was sitting in bed and peeked into their son’s bassinet, tucked between the bed and the wall. Joe Walker Norton was breathing softly, his tiny chest going up and down, his expression serious even now.
Avery liked to tell him their three-and-a-half-month-old son was like a little man.
“He’s already solving the world’s problems,” Walker would say.
“How about we solve those problems so he can just be a kid.”
Soon enough he’d be crawling and walking and running around with the other children here at Base Camp. Walker was enjoying this quiet stage when he could snuggle his son on his chest at night and let him fall asleep to the sound of his heartbeat. During those times, he let all his problems slip away and took long, deep breaths to calm them both. It worked every time.
Joe wanted his mother most of the time, but Walker was the king of bedtime.
He lifted the covers so Avery could snuggle in beside him, amazed as usual at how natural it felt for her to be there. Probably since they’d been denied the chance to be together so long, they tended to stay close. Walker figured he touched his wife a hundred times each day. Held her hand when they walked places, touched her leg when they sat next to each other at meals, guided her through a door, stealing a kiss.
He couldn’t keep his hands off her.
Luckily Avery was similarly minded and leaned into him whenever he reached for her. They cuddled their way through the days, laughing and talking. People remarked that he smiled more. He supposed that was true. He’d grown up in a household marked by loss. Now he lived in one marked by joy.
“What are you thinking?” Avery asked, running a hand over his chest.
“I’m thinking I couldn’t have built a better life for myself if I tried.”
“I know. I keep waiting for something bad to happen,” she admitted.
“Things will happen, and we’ll get through them together.
“I guess so. I think it’s going to be another hot summer.”
“Are there any other kind these days?”
She shook her head. “I think it’s going to be pretty hot right here in our bed in a few minutes.”
“That’s a prediction I can get behind.”
When she was done making love to her husband, Avery lay on her back, holding his hand. “We should have added a skylight up here.”
“Not too late for that.”
“Really? Would that work with a green roof?”
“We can ask.”
“I love that about you, you know,” she told him, giving his hand a squeeze. “You don’t shoot down my ideas.”
“It’s my job to lift you up, ideas and all.”
She thought about that. “You’re good at it.”
“I hope so.” He turned over and curled around her. “That first day I saw you charging down the hill from the manor ready to tear Boone a new one, I knew you’d be the love of my life.”
“So it was my righteous anger that hooked you?” she teased.
“It was everything about you. I was trying to convince you to stick around, and the whole time I couldn’t stop thinking about lying in bed with you just like this.”
“That first day?” She pushed up to her elbows. “Really?”
“What did you think when you first saw me?”
Walker talked a lot more these days than he had when she’d first met him, but this was the type of personal question he didn’t often put into words. Avery knew it deserved a serious answer.
“I thought, there’s a man I could worship.”
Walker stilled. After a moment, she lifted a hand to touch his face. “You are amazing. You don’t know that about yourself, but you are. I would follow you anywhere, Walker Norton. I’d do whatever you told me to do. I trust you not only with my life but also with my heart. Utterly.”
When he reached to pull her close, burying his face in her hair, Avery wrapped her arms around his neck and held him. And when they came together minutes later, making love all over again, she gave herself to him heart and soul.
This was what it meant to be with Walker.
This was what it meant to find her true home.
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Read on for an excerpt of Issued to the Bride One Navy SEAL.
Issued to the Bride One Navy SEAL
By Cora Seton
Prologue
Four months ago
On the first of February, General Augustus Reed entered his office at USSOCOM at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa, Florida, placed his battered leather briefcase on the floor, sat down at his wide, wooden desk and pulled a sealed envelope from a drawer. It bore the date written in his wife’s beautiful script, and the General ran his thumb over the words before turning it over and opening the flap.
He pulled out a single page and began to read.
Dear Augustus,
It’s time to think of our daughters’ future, beginning with Cass.
The General nodded. Spot on, as usual; he’d been thinking about Cass a lot these days. Thinking about all the girls. They’d run yet another of his overseers off Two Willows, his wife’s Montana ranch, several months ago, and he’d been forced to replace him with a man he didn’t know. There was a long-standing feud between him and the girls over who should run the place, and the truth was, they were wearing him down. Ten overseers in eleven years; that had to be some kind of a record, and no ranch could function well under those circumstances. Still, he’d be damned if he was going
