Sealed with a promise by Mary Margret Daughtridge

her hand. The teenage fantasy had dwelt so far beneath his consciousness he’d scarcely acknowledged it at the time and forgotten about it since. A boy from the wrong side of the tracks, from the wrong side of everywhere, who worked the hours he wasn’t in school, didn’t dream those dreams.
      Those girls had always been off-limits. He had no place in their lives, nor they in his. It wasn’t that he thought they were above him in the great scheme of things. Some essential part of him had always rejected the surface divisions of class. The problem was that girls like that required time, and time was exactly what he didn’t have-either then or now.
      And though he had felt the tug of attraction when he met them, they couldn’t offer him what life as a SEAL did.
      These girls symbolized what he sacrificed to stay on the course he had chosen. He wasn’t one to whine about playing the hand he had been dealt. He accepted his choices and all that went with them. And there were compensations. At an age when most boys are permanently horny he had all the sex he wanted.
      But not with girls like Emmie.
      Hot longing surged under his breastbone, rocking him.
      “This is your gig, Do-Lord.” His attention snapped back to the present and the senior chief’s curious look under shaggy eyebrows. “Don’t go to sleep on us.”
      Quickly, he replayed all that had been said while his thoughts were elsewhere, a skill he’d discovered early and found useful, especially after he learned other people couldn’t do it.
      “The two of us lift off the top layer.” Do-Lord summarized their strategy. “I hold the bow ends out of the way. Davy removes the second layer and replaces it.”
      “Right. Davy’s got the best hands,” Lon went on, “so he will transfer the little fruit doodads.”
      “The marzipan,” supplied Emmie, speaking from where she sat observing the process.
      “What is marzipan?” Davy asked.
      “A paste made from ground almonds, sugar, and a binder like egg white,” Do-Lord answered, still visualizing the steps needed, “which can be modeled and painted with food dye. Come on, let’s get into position.”
      Still surveying the cake from all angles, Do-Lord wasn’t aware he’d spoken aloud until Davy laughed. Crap. Jax knew he had something close to an eidetic memory, and Lon suspected. With the others he carefully maintained his slow-talking, country-boy disguise. Over the years Do-Lord had relaxed his vigilance, but still he shouldn’t have let something that… frivolous… slip out.
      “How the hell does he know these things?” Davy asked Lon, his bland tone belied by the wicked sparkle in his brown eyes. Among SEALs, teasing was an art form and a lubricant, a sublimation of the natural aggressiveness of alpha males forced into a cooperation that wasn’t wholly natural.
      A muscle in Do-Lord’s cheek tightened. Do-Lord had been hiding his brain power since he was ten years old. Duty demanded that if he had data impacting an operation, he had to share it, so most of the guys like Lon, who’d worked with him for years, had some idea. He didn’t make a big deal of it, and neither did they. SEALs were expected to be competent within their area of expertise. He didn’t usually let that kind of factoid, which his brain picked up as effortlessly as stuff he tried to learn, slip out. Davy was as friendly and eager to interact with everyone he met as a puppy. The marzipan story would be all over the base by lunchtime Monday. He’d be lucky if everybody didn’t start calling him “Marzipan.”
      “How do you know he’s not making it up?” Lon continued to study the construction of the cake. He indicated a marzipan apple. “These could be made of molded pigeon shit.”
       Saved. Do-Lord let his diaphragm relax as he made a mental note to return the master chief’s favor. He sighed gustily. “I shoulda known I couldn’t put one over on you,