Next of Kin: A Navy SEAL Romance

By Jenna Bristow

At 3:41 in the morning a man calls 911 from the marsh on Shore Drive, and I know his voice before he gives me his name.
Three years ago I tried every channel the Navy has to tell him I was pregnant. Every one of them wanted to know if I was family.

Secret baby: he comes home to a daughter he never knewShe tried every channel the Navy has to tell himNavy SEAL hero with forty-one days before deployment911 dispatcher heroine who hears what nobody else canSecond chanceProtector romance and forced proximity: one spare room, one legal padHis team becomes her familyRomantic suspense with a real threatNo cheating, no other woman, no silly misunderstandingGuaranteed happily ever after

HARPER

I've worked nights at the Virginia Beach 911 center for eight years. I'm good at it. I hear what's behind a caller: the wind, the bridge joints, the engine ticking in a ditch that nobody else can see.

Three years ago I had ten days with a Navy SEAL who told me not to wait for him. I wasn't planning to. Then I was pregnant, and he was somewhere nobody would name.

I texted. Every message said Not Delivered. I drove to the gate at Little Creek and argued with it. I called his Team's ombudsman, and she asked me, "Honey, are you family?" I called the Red Cross from the maternity ward. I mailed a letter through the Navy's locator, and it came back with RETURN TO SENDER written in capitals across his name.

So I put it all in a shoebox, and I raised our daughter.

Now Shep Boyd is on one knee on my porch, and Tilly is peeking out from behind my leg at a man with her gray-blue eyes and her cowlick.

I tell him he can walk away. He says, "I'm not asking whether. I'm asking how."

Two nights later there are police rifles in my yard, because somebody called in a gunman at my address. A week after that, a caseworker sits at my kitchen table and reads me a sentence from the letter he never got.

Somebody knows my hours, my house, and my daughter's name. Somebody has read my mail.

SHEP

I'm a Chief Special Warfare Operator. SEAL Team Sixteen, Echo Platoon, Little Creek. We deploy in forty-one days.

At 0341 on the morning I report in, a dispatcher hears an engine I was standing next to and missed. By 1810 I'm on her porch. The kid behind her leg has my eyes.

Harper tried five times to tell me. The Navy has a door for everything. None of them opened for a woman who wasn't family.

I didn't call when I got back. I had a reason. It doesn't count.

Now somebody is working against them, and it isn't random. So I move into her spare room. I fix the locks. I learn bedtime from a list on a legal pad. Bath to the belly button. The crab goes under her chin. I knock on every closed door, because that's the rule of the house.

Harper sets the pace. I keep to it.

I haven't slept a full night in three years. My platoon medic shows up with a ladder and three cameras he bought with his own money.

I can tell her the day we leave. I can't tell her where. She grew up on that sentence, and she hates it.

Forty-one days. I'm not going anywhere until the bus.

A Navy SEAL Romance. Tidewater SEALs, Book One. Every book follows a different couple and reads as a standalone. Steamy and open-door: five on-page love scenes between consenting adults, sensual rather than graphic. 18+.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0HMK5YTWB
• ISBN13: 9798161290507
• Release Date: October 2026
• Publisher: Independently published
• Length: 316 Pages
• Weight: 0.82 lbs.
• Dimensions: 8.5" x 0.8" x 5.5"