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The Navy SEAL Bride Soraya Lane Books

Download As PDF : The Navy SEAL Bride Soraya Lane Books

The Navy SEAL Bride Soraya Lane Books

Currently in the Navy, I sometimes get the urge to read some fantasy book about the military instead of all of the history items we generally read. I read this on vacation in Florida and I couldn't put it down. It may be my mindset, but I think the book developed the story wonderfully and it was a great read. The plot went through smoothly and I liked the pricess fairtytale happy ending.


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The Navy SEAL Bride Soraya Lane Books Reviews

Soraya Lane excels at writing heart-wrenchingly emotional stories that resonate with readers everywhere and linger in the mind long after the last page is turned. Her last book for Harlequin Romance, The Navy SEAL's Bride, is a spellbinding tale of redemption, renewal, second chances and the power of love readers will simply adore!

Former Navy SEAL Tom Cartwright is looking forward to spending the next couple of weeks looking after his gorgeous niece. Tom hopes that dedicating his time to taking care of his brother's adorable child will stop him from brooding about memories he would rather forget. Tom's life used to revolve around his career. He was an excellent Navy SEAL and his courage, integrity and dedication was admired and respected by his peers and his superiors. However, Tom's illustrious career had been halted by a cruel twist of fate that had forced him to do something he's regretted ever since. Tom is unable to forget about the moment that had changed his life forever and he is unable to forgive himself for not saving the lives of those he was meant to protect. Telling a bunch of kids about his job in the Navy is the last thing Tom feels like doing, but there is nothing that he wouldn't do for his niece, so he reluctantly finds himself being dragged to her classroom for show-and-tell. Revisiting the glory of his career wasn't something Tom was looking forward to doing. However, he quickly changes his mind when he meets his niece's teacher, Caitlin Rose...

Relationships are strictly not on the agenda for Caitlin. Although her best friend is desperate to find her a man, Caitlin is adamant that she will never let anyone get close to her ever again. She had learned the hard way that men are not to be trusted and she is adamant that she will never allow another man to hurt her ever again. Caitlin loves her job and she is perfectly happy with her life. She doesn't need a man and she certainly does not want all the angst and heartache that are part and parcel of any relationship. However, when Tom Cartwright strides into her classroom, Caitlin cannot help but be attracted to the former Navy SEAL!

Caitlin vows to stay strong and not to let Tom breach the impenetrable defenses which she has built around herself. However, his kindness, sensitivity and understanding soon have her wondering whether she is ready to put her heart on the line again. Will Caitlin trust Tom with her heart? Or will she continue to be held hostage by her past?

Soraya Lane strikes gold once again with The Navy SEAL's Bride! This outstanding writer of emotional contemporary romance has penned a powerfully dramatic, wholly compelling and wonderfully uplifting story that readers will not be able to put down.

Soraya Lane creates believable characters readers take immediately to their hearts. She writes effectively about their dilemmas and their predicaments by abandoning hackneyed cliches and trivial sentimentality and writing with warmth, compassion and emotional veracity.

Nobody tugs at the heartstrings like Soraya Lane and with The Navy SEAL's Bride, this talented storyteller continues to affirm her position as one of the genre's boldest and most talented writers.
This book just didn't resonate with me. I wouldn't quite say that it's a bad book because I'm sure some people would think it was great, but I couldn't connect with it. The characters didn't feel real and their actions rarely made sense. And I must say that this is the first romance novel I've ever read where I was screaming "please don't describe the sex scene, please don't describe the sex scene" over and over in my head. Despite the fact that Tom was an uber in-shape ex-Navy SEAL and Caitlin was an allegedly drop-dead gorgeous ex-ballerina, the pair of them had about as much sex appeal and sizzle factor as a couple of rocks. And for me, the idea of listening to the audiobook narrator describe their lovemaking ranked right up there with watching my grandparents get it on. As a general rule, if I'm that skeeved out by the idea of my hero and heroine hooking up, then we're not talking about a good reading experience.

<Spoiler Alert>
Okay so we've got Tom who is dealing with some issues resulting from an explosion that occurred on his last mission. His hearing was damaged in such a way that he'd never be able to pass the physical required by the SEALs so now he trains recruits for a living. He also lost a man on this mission and is allegedly haunted by the knowledge that he and his team broke one of their sacred covenants to never leave a man behind. This part of Tom's past was never adequately explained. Did they fail to recover the dead man's body? Is that what he means by "leaving a man behind?" And if so, why? The description we get of the mission is that everything was going like clockwork when a bomb suddenly exploded. There's no talk of them having to evacuate under heavy enemy fire afterward, etc. So how and why did they "leave a man behind?" And what exactly was Tom's role in this? Was he unconscious at the time from his own injury? Did he give the order to leave the man behind? I just wasn't clear on what this part of the backstory meant.

And quite frankly, Tom was WAY more upset about the fact that he couldn't be a SEAL anymore than he was about his dead buddy. He mentioned once that he would always wonder if there was something he should have done differently or some detail he should have noticed that would have prevented the explosion and subsequently the man's death, but 90% of his angsting throughout the whole book was about his forcible change in professions. Heck, he never even thought of the dead guy by name!!! It was always "a man" or "his man," never "Johnson" or whatever. It made the whole dead soldier aspect of this backstory feel very superficial to the point where I thought it should have been cut out altogether. It didn't really affect the story and it felt down right disrespectful to real military personnel who actually HAVE lost fellow soldiers in battle.

When the story opens Tom is allowing himself to be his 6-year-old niece's show-and-tell for her class. He walks into the classroom and is basically bowled over by how gorgeous the teacher, Caitlin Rose is. Caitlin's behavior in this scene felt kind of off to me. She seemed to go out of her way to touch Tom an awful lot which felt contradictory to her inner monologue claims of being terrified of ultra-muscular military men.

One thing leads to another and soon Tom and his niece are over at Caitlin's house having dinner. The munchkin helpfully falls asleep so the grown ups can talk and Caitlin presses Tom to tell her about his time in the Navy. Tom opens up about his last mission and Caitlin tries to tell him that she knows exactly what he's going through. Tom gets pissed and tells her she doesn't and could never understand and then leaves. This is the central conflict of the story, Caitlin insisting that she knows just how he feels and Tom insisting that she doesn't. I kind of felt like both of them had a point but instead of this making me like and understand them both, it actually made me dislike them both for being such pompous jerks.

First, Tom was way over-the-top with his "no one can understand my pain" routine, considering that his fellow soldier had actually DIED on that mission and he himself still had all his limbs and so forth. He of all people should have recognized how much worse his situation could have been and how many other soldiers come home with far more debilitating injuries. There are, in point of fact, thousands of people who can "understand his pain." So it made him seem kind of whiny and full of himself that he insisted that he alone had gotten such a raw deal in life.

However, on the flip side, I thought Caitlin was equally full of herself for insisting that she knew exactly what Tom was going through. No, she doesn't. Being a soldier in combat is NOT the same as being in a car accident. I understand the parallel that the author was trying to draw between Caitlin's dancing career and Tom's driving need to be a SEAL but it's just not the same. Particularly the part about him losing a fellow soldier in the explosion. Caitlin's "do you think you're the only one who's ever lost anyone?" shot was out of line, particularly when the only person she'd ever lost was her mother to natural causes. And again, it felt disrespectful that the author kept downplaying the military life and the risks real soldiers take when they go on missions. MAYBE it would have worked if Caitlin's backstory had been a bit different. If she'd lost her ability to dance, not to a car accident, but to one of her abusive father's beatings and her mother had been killed in the same incident. Surviving a life of abuse and losing your fellow abuse victim, whom you feel you failed to protect, would be more similar to the life-and-death situations faced and the bonds formed by soldiers in combat. But that's not Caitlin's backstory so her insistence that she'd experienced the exact same pain as Tom was pompous crap.

Caitlin's very pissed at Tom for shouting at her and refusing to listen to her explanation of how she knows just how he feels. She was also terrified by his sudden display of anger because it reminds her of the way her abusive father and ex-boyfriend would erupt into uncontrollable rages just before lashing out to hit her. So she adopts a "good riddance" attitude about it and vows to never see him again. There's a really bizarre couple of scenes in this part of the book that made it feel like some of the pages got switched around because the timeline didn't work. Caitlin is talking to some friend about how Tom's such a jerk and the friend says what Caitlin needs is a night out on the town. She agrees and then heads off to teach her ballet class, thinking about how she hopes Tom just drops his niece at the door rather than coming inside so she won't have to see him. Then in the very next scene Tom is at home with the niece and the ballet class is never mentioned. Did she skip ballet that day? It was weird that the author called attention to the class and then didn't pay it off.

Next thing we know it's the following day and Caitlin is back in her classroom teaching the kids. What about her planned trip to the bar with the friend? Then a whole bunch of stuff happens that leads you to think the next scene will be Tom and Caitlin hiking together and instead suddenly we're with Tom at a bar and he see's Caitlin there. The timeline was just all messed up and poorly explained.

Getting back to the romance, Tom, still feels like he's 100% right that Caitlin could never understand his pain but is so attracted to her gorgeous self that he decides to apologize and try to make amends. So he sends an apology note to school with his niece, who passes it to Caitlin. I think this was supposed to be cute but I thought it was a cop-out that he apologized via a note and a third party instead of in person. Caitlin, however, goes from "I'll never speak to him again" to "all is forgiven" in the space of about 15 seconds and agrees to join him for a hike the following day. This didn't make sense to me. She basically talked herself into forgiving him with the very weak justification that she always tells her 6-year-old students to give people second chances so she'd be hypocritical if she refused to give Tom one, but it just doesn't jive with her backstory. If she'd really been afraid of him and his propensity to explode in anger, why on Earth would she agree to go to a secluded place in the wilderness with him? Why would she ever agree to see him again, period? She of all people should be suspicious of men who lash out in anger but then apologize after the fact. That's the classic cycle for abusers and as a survivor of just such abuse, she should have looked at this behavior and at least considered the possibility that the cycle was starting all over again, but she doesn't.

Then, as already mentioned, the scene shifts and we're at the bar and Caitlin is completely trashed. Again, this whole scene made no sense and really bothered me. For starters, nothing about Caitlin's personality that we've seen so far suggests that she'd EVER get so drunk at a public bar that she'd lose complete control of herself. She's been shown to be a sweet, sensitive, level-headed person who fears attacks by men above all else. Her character would never get so drunk that she'd be ripe for some strange man to assault her. For another thing, the whole reason she and the friend were going to the bar was so Caitlin could drown her sorrows over Tom. But she's already forgiven Tom and agreed to go on the hike with him the following day. So why the heck does she need to get trashed now if everything is fine? Third, when Tom sees her making a fool of herself in public and attracting the attention of every lecherous man in the bar, he goes all caveman and stalks over to grab her by the arm. He grabs her "harder than he'd meant to" to the point where, even as drunk as she is, she cries out in pain. Here again we have Tom behaving in a way that makes it seem like he really might be an abuser. He's so jealous that other men are looking at "his woman" and so angry with her for "putting on such a show" that he physically hurts her. Again, classic abusive boyfriend behavior here. And yet, the book keeps bashing us over the head with the notion that he just wants to "protect" her and he'd never, ever hurt her....even after he's just done so.

And finally, it really, really bugged me that Caitlin's friend let her get taken home by this guy. She's supposed to be looking out for her drunk friend. Protecting her from being abused by some man in her inebriated state. She also knows all about how badly Tom behaved the last time he and Caitlin were together, and just witnessed him physically hurting her. And she lets him take Caitlin home by himself just because he's cute and she'd rather to flirt with his military buddies? Are you kidding me?! And the next morning she calls Caitlin and wants to know all the juicy details about whether she and Tom had sex the night before. WHAT?!?! She knows Caitlin was too drunk to give consent and yet she's hoping Tom took advantage of the situation to bang her anyway??? This woman is a monster!

The next morning Caitlin is hung over but feels she "owes" it to Tom to still go hiking because he so nicely brought her home the night before and did not take the opportunity to molest her. She's barely functioning when Tom shows up and he can't resist rubbing her nose in the fact that he's fit as a fiddle and has already had a 2-hour run and done other assorted tasks. His behavior in this whole scene was kind of jerky and leaned heavily toward "paternal" rather than romantic. He lectured her on her behavior and the proper way to get rid of a hangover, even refusing to hand over her breakfast until she'd drunk the vegetable drink he'd brought for her. It didn't do anything to make me view them as a couple. They finally go on their hike and barely a mile in Caitlin manages to sprain her ankle so Tom has to carry her back to the car. On the way they sing a military marching song (or "cadence" as the author rather heavy-handedly points out is the correct term). This went on way longer than was necessary, especially considering it was the second time in the book we'd had to listen to such a cadence. This seemed like a case of the author yelling "I DID THE RESEARCH" by proving that she knew some of these marching tunes.

Tom takes Caitlin to his family's house for dinner, then they head back to her place and finally have sex which, as I've already said, was thankfully not described. The next morning, everything is great until they get in the car for a picnic at the beach. Just before they arrive, Caitlin starts in again on Tom's injury and it sparks another fight. He again becomes so enraged that he shouts at her grabs her by the arm without even realizing he's doing it. She panics and starts clawing as his hand and demanding to be let go. Once her screams manage to break through his rage, he releases her and again insists that he'd never, ever hurt her or any woman. Again, this just seems like classic abuser behavior. This is now the third time in just a few days that he's lost control of himself and lashed out at her in anger. Then he insists he'd never hurt her, just like an abuser would. Yet Caitlin doesn't recognize this as a pattern and instead focuses on the fact that he still won't listen to her insistence that she knows just how he feels.

So she tells him her tale of woe and, because this is a fiction book, Tom has a great epiphany about how totally right she's been that she understands. That he's been a fool for not seeing how great he's got it, what with his loving family to support him and all. It didn't feel like a real reaction because her story only proves that she DOESN'T know how he feels. Not really, and that's exactly what he'd say to her in reality. Be here in fiction world he's overcome with how wrong he's been and apologizes to her but she says that they're through and can never be together. Then she literally walks away, even though she's miles from home and Tom drove. I didn't really understand why Caitlin broke off the relationship at this point. Or why in the ensuing week she kept insisting in her inner monologue that they could never be together. She'd finally told him her story and he'd apologized and said she'd been right all along so...what's the problem here? She kept going on about how she'd finally opened up and let a man into her world but he'd betrayed that trust but, how exactly did he do that? By just not listening to her? He finally did listen and admitted he'd been wrong so what more is she waiting for? It felt like she was just punishing him for no reason other than for its own sake. Or rather, because the book needed a climax and this was the best the author could come up with.

Tom spends a few days wallowing in how badly he'd "stuffed up" the situation, which really yanked me out of the narrative. When I hear the term "stuffed up" I think of a blocked nose. I realize this is a cozy and the author wanted to avoid curse words but she could have said "messed up" or "screwed up" or something like that. The fact that she had multiple people in the book say this in just a couple of pages was really distracting. But anyway, he learns that Caitlin has a ballet class that day and rushes over to ask her to hear him out....without having even a shadow of a plan in mind for what he'll say to her. Is this the kind of planning that he used as a SEAL? Caitlin immediately agrees to hear him out after her class, which didn't jive with her "we can never be together" chant from the preceding week. She again justifies this with talk about how she tells her kids to give people second chances, apparently forgetting that she's ALREADY given Tom his second chance and he blew it, at least, according to her. I just didn't understand her thought process at all.

This feeling was reinforced when hear Tom's "apology." It was lame and didn't really do anything to change their situation. First he told her about how his parents had divorced when his dad cheated on his mom, which didn't have anything to do with anything in the book. It didn't make him want to become a SEAL or in any way influence Tom's behavior up to this point so it was totally gratuitous. Then he takes Caitlin to the Naval base so she can watch some recruits training. By the time she's done watching a "how long can you hold your breath" challenge, she's totally forgiven Tom. I'm sorry, what did that exercise have to do with his behavior?? Nothing. I didn't understand why she was still mad at him to begin with, but since she kept insisting that she was, how does this little show-and-tell session impact anything? She already understood how important being a SEAL was to him, at least, she kept insisting that she did, so how does seeing it in person change anything? I didn't get it.

Pretty much the only thing I DID understand and agree with was Caitlin's refusal of Tom's proposal. After the trip to the Naval base, he gets down on on knee and proposes. After they've only known each other for a week and a half, most of which they spent apart and/or mad at each other. Yeah, it was way too soon to pop the question.

<End Spoiler>

So in summary, I didn't understand the characters' behavior or motivations, there was zero sexual tension between the hero and heroine, and they both acted like self-important jerks with regards to the hero's trauma. I think it's fair to say nothing about this story worked for me.
I ENJOYED READING THIS BOOK. I LOVE TO READ GOOD ROMANCE NOVELS. THE NAVY SEALS BRIDE WAS A GOOD

READ .
This was the first book by this author for me and I felt she wrote a very toughing story. I will look for more books by her in the future.
this was a good read - a little slow in some spots, bit overall a good book. The building of the actual relationship was nice - although it seemed to develop more after the sex than before
it was okay. not as good as her Montana books. the main characters were too harsh, I felt. not enough understanding.
Currently in the Navy, I sometimes get the urge to read some fantasy book about the military instead of all of the history items we generally read. I read this on vacation in Florida and I couldn't put it down. It may be my mindset, but I think the book developed the story wonderfully and it was a great read. The plot went through smoothly and I liked the pricess fairtytale happy ending.