Waiting... On You (Force Recon Marines) Read Online Free PDF Page A

the azure
blue water like butterflies floating on air currents.
    Hanna half wished she was out there
with them. She loved sailing. She loved the water. She often imagined she must
have been a fish in another life. The water had always beckoned her. It was
cold most of the year this far north, but in the summer, she put on her wet
suit to dive and swim from her boat.
    As a child she’d learned to sail and
dive alongside her brother and the Kelly boys. Her grandfather had frequently
taken all of them out on his fishing boat. As teenagers, they had earned money
by helping him bring in the catch.
    While they had learned to crew a
fishing troller from Ben McHenry, Sean Price had taught them to dive and sail.
In addition to the boat shop Jessie and Sean Price had operated, they’d
conducted underwater salvage operations. Dylan and Hanna had regularly joined
the Price family on their salvage dives in and around Puget Sound. Except for
Jessie, they were all avid divers.
    Life with her maternal grandparents
had been good. Colleen and Ben McHenry lived on the west side of Quimper
Peninsula, fifteen miles or so from the little coastal community of Port George,
Washington. The original hundred acres settled by the McHenry ancestors was
situated on a headland that was landmarked with their name.
    Their neighbors, the Prices, lived on
land adjacent to the McHenrys. When Sean Price had come back from Vietnam, he sought
out his commanding officer’s young wife to personally tell her about his
friend’s heroism. A year later, he and Jessie Kelly married one another, and
when he got out of the Marine Corps, he took his new family home with him to
the Pacific Northwest.
    Hanna had been five when she had first
met Lance and Nick Kelly. Despite their initial reluctance to let a girl tag
along, they had eventually let Hanna join them on all of their adventures. It
had been a happy carefree childhood, full of many wonderful memories.
    Born with an extremely high IQ, Hanna
had moved rapidly through school. At fifteen, she had graduated from high
school with Nick, though she was nearly four years younger than him.
    High school had been difficult.
Besides the social impediment of being pathetically shy, she’d been too young,
too smart, and too geeky-looking in her thick-lensed, dark-rimmed glasses.
Trendy eyeglasses and clothes were beyond her grandparents’ financial capability.
She couldn’t compete with the popular girls in looks or social maturity. As a
result, she’d been the target of frequent, often malicious teasing.
    She’d tried to avoid the kids who had bullied
her, but nothing had really worked―except Nick Kelly. He was a popular,
good-looking athlete who had excelled at several sports. Whenever he caught
someone teasing her, he put a stop to it. He’d always been her defender and her
champion. His support had made high school bearable.
    Maybe if she’d gotten a few social
genes along with all her smart ones, she would have been less alone all through
school. By her senior year, she was more than ready to see high school come to
an end. She’d always known what she was going to do with her life. Her parents’
altruistic lifestyle and self-sacrifice had inspired Hanna to become a doctor.
Being inspired by the deeds of their parents was something she and Nick had in
common.
    Her senior year, she applied for and
won an academic scholarship to the University of Washington, in Seattle. The
only thing she’d wanted more, at that point, was to attend her senior prom with
Nick Kelly.
    It was kind of like wishing for the
moon. He was simply too popular with the girls. He’d always had lots of dates
and lots of girlfriends; one right after the other. Hanna had sadly watched the
endless parade of them. It wasn’t any surprise that he had a date for the prom
months in advance. In fact by that point, he had been exclusively dating one of
the cheerleaders. But two weeks before the end-of-school-year event, the stupid
girl broke up with