Chapter 1

Jennifer Brazelton sat, an intense look of concentration on her face. The tip of her unruly tongue was gripped lightly between perfectly even white teeth as she carefully penned the last of the letter she was writing to her Uncle Bob. She took great pride in the flowing script of her penmanship and wanted it to be perfect.

Though she wasn't conscious of it, the perfection Jennifer strove for in her written communication was an attempt to compensate for the fact that her verbal communication was typically a disaster. Jennifer stuttered - she had stuttered all her life.

If you never heard Jennifer speak, you would have thought she was no different than any other eighteen year old girl. She drew the eye, in fact, with her slim, athletic body and the hank of carelessly styled platinum blond hair that hung, usually straight, just past her shoulders. She looked like a California girl, straight off the beach, though she was missing the tan.

But when she was forced to speak, it was agonizing, both for her and the listener. Typically, whoever she was talking with ended up leaning forward, mouth working, subconsciously trying to help Jennifer get the words out. Her face was a picture of frustration in these situations, and the face of the listener was one of pity or sorrow.

Growing up as a stutterer is an education in how hostile the world can be. She'd had to learn to ignore the other children's cruel barbs and teasing. Kids who called her "J-j-j-Jenny" were put in the class of humans who didn't deserve any of her attention. She got used to being called "stupid" or "retarded."

Each new year meant new teachers, and new teachers always attempted to make her participate in class by answering questions aloud. She knew they thought they were trying to help her improve in some way, but they were simply torturing her. And when they finally gave up and stopped calling on her, she was immensely relieved.

All she wanted was to blend into the background and be as invisible as possible.

As time went on, the armor she developed to keep the hostile and uncaring world away from her tender underbelly got a little stronger, and she cried a little less. It no longer bothered her when someone assumed she was stupid because she couldn't say a complete sentence in less than a minute or so. She knew she wasn't stupid. Her teachers did too, once they graded her papers.

And she learned that the "do-gooders" as her father called them, really were trying to help, even if they didn't know how to and even if their efforts to include her in conversation only pulled her into the light, instead of letting her rest comfortably out of sight.

Most importantly, Jennifer learned that the majority of communication, when it takes place on a face-to-face basis, isn't done with the voice at all. She became a master of non-verbal communication, using a shrug, or nod, or any of a number of facial muscles to say something without words that almost anyone could understand at once.

Home was the most comfortable place for her to be. Don and Susan, her parents, were used to getting information in a halting, stumbling kind of way. It was normal for them. They'd tried everything when she was young, of course. Even now they had Jennifer in speech therapy on a regular basis. But, after years of disappointment, they had finally accepted their daughter as a beautiful, if slightly flawed young woman whom they loved, whether she stuttered or not.

She knew they loved her and home was a fortress in which she felt completely safe and mostly happy.

When puberty rumbled into her life, it was another disappointment. The girls she knew started dating the boys she knew. They didn't abandon her for these boys. Not really, because they had never taken her into their inner circles in the first place. But she heard them talking, and saw their body language as they flirted, and teased, and did the mating dance that almost all young women learn to do.

Almost all.

Other than her inability to speak without stuttering, there was nothing wrong with Jennifer. That included her hormones. Those hormones provided the same stimulus to her body that they did in other girls. She just had no outlet for it.

She was cute, and she smiled a lot, because she had learned that smiling was a way to satisfy people. If you looked happy, most people left you alone. And, boys being boys, when they looked at her and imagined her naked, writhing under them as they performed their part in the mating dance, they were interested. Some of them even asked her out. It always ended badly, though.

Four of them hadn't been able to make it through even an hour of a first date. They were used to rushing a girl through the conversation stage of things and getting right to the necking part. Jennifer, of course, never rushed anything ... even if she tried.

Two others thought they would be able to just skip the talking part altogether, and tried to go straight to the petting stage. One got slapped, the other walked bowlegged for two days.

One might wonder how a girl, then merely sixteen, with no real experience with the male of the species, might be knowledgeable of how to handle a boy in that particular situation.

She had a tutor, of sorts. And that tutor was her Uncle Bob.

He wasn't really her uncle. Bob Jefferson was her father's best friend. Other than her father, he was the only man in her life who really meant something to her. She had known him for as long as she could remember.

Bob was a confirmed bachelor, but it was more by choice of lifestyle, rather than any intent to avoid a lasting relationship with any particular woman. Bob loved women. But, he also loved the life of the nomad.

When he was seventeen he joined the Navy to see the world. He'd read books and seen movies about Navy SEALs and dreamed, like many young men dream, about how cool it would be to be accepted into that very special fraternity of men. Don Brazelton felt the same way, and fate had brought them together in boot camp.

The reality, of course, was quite different than the books and movies, but both young men were good at being challenged, and the teamwork they learned and participated in made them inseparable. Initially, it was them, and the rest of the trainees, against the Chiefs who seemed to be trying their best to kill them all during training. Later, when they were stationed together in the same SEAL team, they trusted their lives to each other on a regular basis during missions. While Don still dreamed of settling down some day, though, Bob was more the type to revel in the knowledge that he was a thoroughly dangerous man.

Six years later they both got out of the Navy. Don had seen the world, and there was a girl back home he was interested in. Bob's reasons for getting out were more complicated. First off, even though he trusted all his teammates, if Don didn't have his back, it wouldn't be fun any more. He'd have to worry. Another reason was that he'd seen the inside of a brig more often than he would have liked, both military and civilian. He was pretty familiar with the procedures involved in a Captain's Mast too, though he always got his rank back eventually. He was one of their best team leaders, and they knew it. The rules and assholes who always seemed to end up with the most brass on their collar chafed at him, though. Had he been able to stay a team leader while the rest of the Navy (except a few logistics folks who kept the teams in beans and bullets) went on permanent shore leave, he'd have stayed in.

So, while Don went off to woo a wife, Bob did a stint as a Merchant Mariner. He'd gotten to see the world as a SEAL, but he'd never had time to explore all the exotic locales the Navy had whisked him to and away from. He spent seven years roaming the world before he'd seen enough to realize that people were pretty much people, wherever they were.

He left the Merchant Marine and went to see his "brother," where he met the wife and their seven year old daughter for the first time. He was captivated by the little girl almost instantly. She spoke to his soul in many ways. Having been in twenty-three countries where he didn't speak the language, communicating with this cute little girl was a piece of cake, and he could care less how long it took. She was a doll and her shy smile, as she looked up at the beefy man with the long black hair and bushy black beard, made his heart melt. Unlike most children, she didn't run screaming when she saw him. Instead she sat, rapt, as he told her stories about where he'd been and what he'd done there. He told her stories about her daddy too, when he could get away with it. Neither Don nor his wife, Susan were keen for little Jenny to know some of the things Don had had to do as a SEAL.

Of course those were the best stories and Bob loved telling them, when Don and Susan weren't around to tell him to knock it off.

He spent two months with them, doing basically nothing. Not that he was a drag on the family. He was good with tools and Susan's car had been giving them problems. It was soon running better than when it was new. Bob wiped out Don's "honeydo" list within a week and went on to find other things that needed to be done.

He spent a lot of time with Jennifer. It might be argued that both were a little lonely. He had no real ties, except to Don, and she had no friends to play with.

He took her with him grocery shopping one day. He liked to eat and his big frame took a lot of fuel. He didn't expect his brother's family to support that need.

Jennifer, on that shopping trip, was in seventh heaven.

As any parent knows, who has taken a seven year old to the grocery store, the vast majority of the communication between parent and child consists of "No," or "Put that back!" and maybe "That's not good for you. Let's get something healthy instead."

Bob didn't speak that language.

"Sure, baby," he usually said. "Get two packages. One for you and one for me." In another case he said, "Oh yeah, Jeny. I love them. And that brand is the best! Those things will kill us for sure. They're loaded with sugar. Better get three."

They came home with eight boxes of cereal, three boxes of Ding Dongs, a variety of chips and dips, a jar of peanut butter that already had jelly mixed in with it, the giant community-sized economy assortment bag of practically everything the Hershey's chocolate company produced, and twelve frozen pizzas. There was also an assortment of Hamburger Helper, canned tuna, Spam and six pounds of string cheese. Of the twenty-four cans that spilled out onto the counter top at home, one was green beans. The rest were an assortment of Chef Boyardee's culinary offerings.

Susan didn't have a fit.

"Where are the fresh vegetables and fruits?" she asked.

"That's sissy food," replied Bob, smiling. "Scurvy is a thing of the past."

"We're sissies, Bob," she said calmly.

"No way!" he groused.

"Go back and get the vegetables and fruits, Bob."

"But I don't have to take anything back ... right?" he asked hopefully.

"Don't you think five flavors of ice cream is a bit much?"

"Of course not. Variety is the spice of life. I got cones, too. The good ones-the ones that look like waffles." He beamed proudly.

Susan gestured toward the refrigerator. "We don't have that much room in the freezer, Bob."

"Yeah, I noticed you guys need a deep freeze. Where could I get one of those? Does Don know anybody with a pickup truck?"

Jennifer had stood and watched, fascinated as the huge man stood politely while her mother looked up at him and calmly straightened him out.

And it was Jennifer who picked out the fruits and vegetables when they went back to the store.

Susan Brazelton was intimately aware of how important Bob was to her husband. He had talked with her about everything he'd done as a SEAL. She was fully aware that the reason she had a husband she was madly in love with was because this bear-like man had always brought the team back safely. For that reason, she considered his hijinks to be more of a distraction than a fault.

And he was very good for Jennifer.

It was impossible, however, for Bob to miss the fact that he was a square peg, while Don and Susan's world was full of round holes. He loved the time he spent with them, but didn't want to wear out his welcome.

Having seen the whole world, Bob decided that now he'd spend some time seeing the country of his birth. He had money and he had time. He bought a big touring bike, waved to the only family he had, and disappeared for three years.

His return, when Jennifer was ten, had been a surprise to both of them. It was as if he'd never left, except that he had more stories to tell.

Oak Valley, where Don and Susan lived with the delightful little girl who called him "Uncle Bob," wasn't big enough to support the idea Bob had for the foreseeable future. To do what he wanted to do required a larger population base.

He took his life savings and with two other former SEALs, opened a bike shop outside Atlanta. They specialized in custom bikes, both building them and servicing them. As with most things he'd tried, he was successful.

He thought of the house Don and Susan lived in as "home", but he only got home infrequently. Still, his time was still his own and he was the boss, so he was able to spend a week, several times a year, with the man he considered to be his brother. And each time, as far as Jennifer was concerned, it was like the big teddy bear, as she sometimes called him, had never left. He always had a big grin for her and always sat patiently as she brought him up to date on what had happened in his absence.

And, because he now had a fixed address, she began writing him letters.

She wrote him one a week. It took all week to write it, but it was almost like a hobby for her, so she didn't mind. On paper she could say whatever she liked, in long, complicated sentences that flew onto the white surface. Her letters were often five or six pages long, and she said everything to him that she couldn't say to the friends she didn't have, or the parents who no child can confide everything to.