Cruisin' For A SEAL: SEAL Brotherhood #5 Read Online Free PDF Page B

over again. Sophie gone. Sophia lost forever in his dreams. He couldn’t do anything about either one of them.
    “She loves him still. She told me that. She’s never loved any other. He was her first, and she gave her heart to him, and it never belonged to any other man. Even when she married my step-dad.”
    Mark wondered what kind of wonderful guy would marry her anyway, knowing he had stepped into the shoes of another man who couldn’t carry out the mission. Gunny had the capacity to love, all right. He had just lacked the capacity to maintain.
    “She ever tell him?” Mark asked.
    “I’m not sure she had to. I think she showed him when she took care of him. She is that way. Right after my Thai father died, she started reading about America. Started taking English lessons, inquiring about positions, even thought about doing a cruise ship. We had little money, but somehow she needed to come back to him. And he never even wrote her one letter.”
    Sanouk’s brown eyes searched Mark’s.
    “Not one.”
    Mark looked back at the town that was beginning to look like a scale model.
    “That’s the way of it, Sanouk.”
    “What?”
    “Love. It’s crazy. Makes no sense. It drives you. It comes back like a homing beacon and makes you right. Makes you do the right thing. In the end, Gunny got what he deserved, a woman who had given her heart to him, even though he couldn’t reciprocate. She did the right thing by you…marrying and helping get you raised right so you could have a life she couldn’t have. She did that because she loved you. But she also loved the part of Gunny that is inside you. That’s partly why she did it, I think.”
    Sanouk nodded. He could see the kid was going to take that gym of Gunny’s, and, if they could get the proper strings pulled, he and his mother would make it something totally different than the old, crusty place they’d liked to hang out in. But he knew they wouldn’t touch the equipment, or the name. It would always be Gunny’s.
    And any SEAL or man or woman who served their country in uniform would always be welcome there too. One family. Many colors. Many countries.
    But one pretty fuckin’ awesome family.

Chapter 5
    ‡
    A t dinner, Mark brought his little black book, hoping to find an Italian waiter who could translate what Sophia had written for him. He sat in the middle of the long table that had been provided for them. The maître d’ came by, followed by a sommelier to announce the wine selections and the various meal packages available. Mark discovered the sommelier was Italian.
    “Please, would you help me?” he asked the older gentleman.
    “Si, si, si.”
    “A friend wrote this for me, and I wondered if you would translate it for me.”
    The heavyset sommelier put on his glasses and held Mark’s black book up to his face and then snatched it away. “Pornographic!” He tried to hand it back to Mark.
    “No, no. I really want to know what it says.”
    “This is not for polite company,” the gentleman said, eyeing the ladies in the group.
    “What the fuck have you done, Marky Mark?” Kyle demanded.
    “I got this note and I just hoped he would translate it for me.”
    And now he really wanted to know what it said. Nearly everyone was looking expectantly at the sommelier, not wanting to be deprived of some juicy fun.
    “Please, sir,” Kyle began in his velvet tongue. “Don’t worry about offending anyone. We are all very good friends.”
    “And I’m sure nothing you could say would be considered pornographic to this crowd,” Nick chimed in. The only two people who weren’t paying rapt attention were Armando and Gina. It was a sure bet they wouldn’t be sticking around long enough to have dinner.
    Kyle followed the sommelier’s gaze and noticed some hot and heavy going on at that end of the table. “Armani!” he hissed.
    Armando surfaced quickly, looking around, dazed, and noticed the LT’s frown.
    “Ixnay with the uckinfay in publicpay,” Kyle