Read Online SEALed with a Ring by Mary Margret Daughtridge - Free Book Online

understood at a level far deeper than rational thought.
       He had been right all along. He was supposed to die. His mother had known it. She had bargained with God or something—he was hazy on the details—and once she was sure he was safe and on the mend, she had taken his place.
     
    Davy had asked Lon to stay behind after the other SEALs who had come to his mother's funeral had left. Lon was the steadiest man he knew, and Lon had the experience to look at financial statements and sum up the situation.
       Even with Lon's help, Davy had looked too long at papers, straining to read with eyes that weren't quite used to their new, slightly different positions. Davy ignored the hot ice-pick of pain that stabbed through the back of his left eye. The pain made the walls he'd always thought of as a cheerful yellow glare with nauseating intensity under the overhead fluorescents.
       His pain would decrease as the swelling from his injuries abated. Being blown behind a rock by the rocket-propelled grenade had probably saved his life, but landing among rocks had smashed his cheekbone and fractured his eye socket.
       Everyone said he was lucky. Lucky to be alive, lucky not to lose an eye, lucky the shard that had sliced open his cheek hadn't severed… that nerve. He knew the anatomical name—he was a hospital corpsman, for chrissake—but the word wouldn't come.
       Yeah, he was lucky he wasn't killed or totally, per manently messed up, but he wasn't sure his family had been so fortunate.
       Shit, if he'd been killed, at least his family would have had his life insurance.
       "Is it true you might be up for the Medal of Honor?" Harris broke the silence, his steel-blue gaze both sharp and remote. He and his twin sister, Elle, short for Eleanor, had inherited their light brown hair and blue eyes from their father, Davy's stepfather, while Davy took his Italian looks from his own father. Harris's build was bonier than either his twin's or Davy's. He was an inch or so taller than Davy—or he would have been if not for an already noticeable scholar's slump.
       "It's true." Lon affirmed from Davy's mother's home-office desk where he had sat while going over bank statements. "Unfortunately, there's no money in it, unless you write a best-selling book about it, the way Audie Murphy did."
       "Who's Audie Murphy?" Harris asked.
       "World War II hero," Lon told him. "Pretty as our Davy here. Went on to be a movie star."
       Elle ignored the byplay. "Why didn't you tell us about the medal?" she demanded. "Didn't you know how proud we'd be?"
       "I'd sort of forgotten about it. It isn't likely. They don't hand out many Medals of Honor."
       "The men I overheard were talking about what you did. How you deliberately drew the Taliban fire until an air strike could arrive. Don't you think you deserve recognition?"
       "I can't remember what I'm supposed to have done, but I know this much: I'm not a hero… The whole thing just embarrasses me."
       Harris thought that over. "I guess that means 'no book.'"
       " Harris !" Elle's round blue eyes widened in outrage. Unlike her twin, her gaze was rarely remote. "Even for you, that's insensitive. Don't you realize David is relat ing his feelings?"
       "Oh. You mean because he said he was embar rassed? I'm sorry, David. But amnesia for the event is frequent in cases of traumatic brain injury," Harris informed them all, showing off his nascent medical knowledge. He and Elle were in their first year of medical school.
       Davy didn't feel up to explaining that being called a hero was what embarrassed him, not the amnesia.
       They all fell quiet again while Davy wondered how could he effortlessly use words like nascent and then blank on ordinary words that should have been easier to summon. It kept him constantly off balance, never knowing when he was going to hit a wall.
       Elle began to cry again. She made no sound. She pa tiently wiped