I've been SEALed

by Mary Margret Daughtridge


When I'm asked how I came to write SEALed With a Promise, I have to admit the first person who got “SEALed” with a promise was me.

Like a true bad-boy hero, Caleb aka “Do-Lord” Dulaude did not behave well in our first encounters. He was only supposed to be Jax’s perceptive sidekick. Instead, he took SEALed With a Kiss hostage, and wouldn’t give it back!— until I wrote down the story of what he was before he was a SEAL. A trailer-trash kid who faked his IQ down, hid out in libraries between bootleg deliveries, and had only one moral yardstick—whatever took care of his mother.

It took two weeks but when I was done, he still wouldn’t let me finish Jax’s story—not until I promised this SEAL his own HEA.

Promising wasn’t hard. Do-Lord had touched my heart. Delivering on the promise was.

I understood why he longed for a relationship like Jax had found, but a sweet-to-the-bone heroine like Pickett would be a disaster. I had in mind someone bright, sassy, savvy, and super-confident—-anyone else he’d run circles around, and be bored with in less than a week.

I was designing the perfect woman when in butted Emelina Caddington, PhD. She demanded his covert operations help with her cockamamie scheme for a wedding cake heist.

Emmie had the “bright” qualification, in fact she was a brilliant, out-of-the-box thinker—hence the cake caper. The rest? Not so much.

She tended to freeze up around what she called jocks, and really, Miami Dolphins, Navy SEALs—-what was the difference? She recognized the type.

She was clueless about hair, clothes and makeup, and despite all her brain power, a little naïve about man-woman relationships.

I didn’t see this ending well—and then it got worse. Do-Lord discovered Emmie was a family friend of Senator Teague Calhoun. "What’s wrong with that?" you ask. Let me show you the first sentence of SEALed With A Promise.

Chief Petty Officer Caleb “Do-Lord” Dulaude always said if he ever saw Teague Calhoun again, he’d kill him.

So what's your challenge with bad-boy heroes?