Special Ops Seduction

by Megan Crane

  She didn’t know if she liked that simple fact, or if it made her sad that it could be true when the two of them had never quite figured out how to be close. Not in any real way.

  “I’ll admit it,” Ellen said on the drive back to the house when the luncheon was over. She’d waved off all her bridesmaids and had slipped into Bethan’s car instead. Jonas’s car, Bethan reminded herself. She had to think of it as Jonas’s car, not hers, because he was supposed to be her boyfriend and she had to remember not to act like she was on a mission. “This performance of yours is impressive.”

  “I beg your pardon. I’m no actor. I’m a soldier, thank you.”

  “You told Aunt Sarah that you worked in solutions, and I heard her telling people that she thought you worked in IT.”

  “Aunt Sarah is famously dim. And I do work in solutions.”

  Ellen laughed. “Dad has literally stood there talking about sports teams he doesn’t support rather than indicate he’s even aware you were ever in the army, and you just take it. You never used to take it.”

  “What?” Bethan demanded, but she was grinning despite herself. “I can’t mellow with age?”

  “You?” Her sister shook her head. “No.”

  “This week is about you, El. Not me.”

  “Sure it is.”

  Bethan was saved from having to further explain herself by Ellen’s phone, which was always ringing. And which she always answered, because you could take a lawyer out of the office, but you couldn’t make them change their habits.

  And despite herself, she felt guilty as she drove her sister back toward their parents’ house.

  Especially because driving her sister up into the hills over Santa Barbara felt a little too much like déjà vu. It could have been any scene from when they were younger, and Bethan and Ellen had been left to their own devices, as ever, while their parents were engaged in far more weighty matters, like roses and war games. Bethan had driven these same roads while, next to her, Ellen had chattered away, blithely unconcerned with whether or not anyone was responding to her.

  There had been years Bethan had found that annoying. Sometimes, if asked, she would have insisted that her sister was the most self-involved creature on earth. But then, other times, it made her feel almost . . . affectionate.

  Maybe that’s just family, she told herself.

  But whatever it was, she couldn’t help but feel almost ashamed that she wasn’t simply . . . here. That the only way she’d been able to do this was to come with a mission. A man who wasn’t hers but was pretending he was. An entire strategy.

  As if Ellen were the enemy, when she could still look across a table and see straight through her older sister.

  Ellen was talking in that particular fast-paced way of hers that she always adopted when she was in work mode, making decisive gestures with her free hand that called attention to the flowy sleeves of the dress she wore. Bethan was wearing an actual sundress, all bright colors and flouncy, which had to be why she was questioning what she was doing here. It was all these clothes. She wasn’t used to wearing dresses, day after day. She didn’t flounce. She didn’t keep her hair out of ponytails or put on eye makeup all the time.

  A week of this would get to anyone.

  She turned onto the long drive toward the house and had to squint against the glare of the sun. She slipped down the visor and as she did, saw a runner out of the corner of her eye. He was off the road, running down along the side of the vineyard, and she got only a quick glimpse of him as he moved, backlit and unidentifiable.

  Her whole body went cold.

  Ellen kept talking and Bethan held on to that, because her mind wanted to drag her back. Far back, to the flash of bright desert skies in the relentless, pitiless sun, and another figure, running toward the vehicle between them despite the flames and fumes—

  She blew out a breath, trying to center herself. To feel her feet, her legs, her butt in the seat of this car. Her hands on the wheel.

  The here and now, not then.

  Everything in her screamed to turn around, off-road this car, and chase the man down, but she didn’t.

  It’s a flashback, she told herself. Something about the sun here, that’s all.

  Besides, she couldn’t imagine explaining it to her sister. One of your wedding guests reminds me of a man who’s supposed to be dead, El. A man I shot. Excuse me while I run him down in Mom and Dad’s pinot noir vines.

  She blew out another breath that was more of a laugh, because that obviously couldn’t happen. And Bethan didn’t have that many flashbacks, generally speaking. But that didn’t mean they couldn’t kick in at any time. Like the nightmares that sometimes claimed her, because like it or not, that was part of the deal.

  She’d seen nothing, she assured herself. She was safe. She was here.

  Bethan kept repeating that to herself as she made it up the drive. She parked the car at the front of the house, where Charlotte was always waiting. Lurking.

  “Hey,” came Ellen’s voice, not sounding quite as staccato as before. It meant she’d finished her call. “Are you okay? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

  A choice of words that had her gut telling her things she didn’t want to hear. But Bethan made herself smile. “The ghost of high school, maybe. It’s been a long time since I came back here. That’s all.”

  Ellen laughed at that as they walked into the house and the cool grip of its air-conditioning. “I went to my last high school reunion, believe it or not. You don’t actually know the ghosts of high school until you’re face-to-face with them, discussing the so-called glory days.”

  “Why on earth would you do that to yourself?”

  Her sister shrugged, still laughing. “We all have our preferred ways of proving that our lives are better. Yours was becoming Wonder Woman. Mine involves staring at the high school boyfriend who cheated on me with the woman he eventually married and reveling in their quiet despair. No one’s perfect.”

  And Bethan found herself grinning all the way back to her suite.

  Where Jonas was waiting, like a thundercloud.

  Bethan eyed him as she walked in, feeling frothy and frilly and instantly safe from whatever ghosts had been haunting her out there. And something about that made her whole body hum as she beheld him. Dark. Grim. Serious.

  It made her want to . . . do something. Not the kind of thing she knew how to do in a professional capacity, or even in some kind of training scenario. But far more intriguing and strange, the kind of thing she never, ever let herself do in a feminine capacity.

  Like dance for him.

  A thought that was so outrageous she couldn’t keep herself from laughing. And when he looked up from the couch where he was sitting with his tablet, the usual query in his dark gaze, that only made it worse. She could dance for him. Or, if she were really his girlfriend, walk over to where he was sitting and slide herself onto his lap, flouncy and flowery, her hair down and her skin bared. She could loop her arms around his neck and make him smile whether he wanted to or not.

  Suddenly, she could not only envision doing that but could feel it.

  In such a tactile way that her inner thighs actually prickled, as if she’d settled herself astride him. But then, if she were astride him, she doubted she would be overly concerned about her thighs. Not when she would be able to rub herself right there, right where she needed him, right where she wanted him—

  But she was not going to do that.

  Just like she was not going to entertain certain dreams she’d had in the light of day.

  “The look on your face,” Jonas said, his voice dark. Clipped. Repressive in every way. Which he probably didn’t know only made everything in her hum. “Rethink it.”

  She wiped her face clear of all expression. Or she hoped she did, anyway. Bethan had considered this suite spacious and over the top wh
en she’d first walked in. But after a few days of carefully sharing the space with Jonas, it felt cramped. Tiny, in fact. Not only because he took up more space than he ought to, with all that brooding intensity of his. But because there was all that . . . stuff between them that neither one of them acknowledged.

  Sometimes it did her head in. Other times her feelings about it seemed to be centered significantly farther south.

  Today she decided she was far too feminine and silly in this dress to risk putting herself too close to him, particularly after that strange flashback on the drive in. Instead of sitting down in the chair she usually took across from him, she walked over to the sliding glass doors and looked out. As if the sea, silently watching in the distance, could keep her safe.

  From herself.

  “Any news?” she asked. “I was trapped with the ladies who lunch.”

  “Oz came back with a detailed account of the movements of two of our three generals,” Jonas said, and she knew from the tone in his voice that whatever information he’d received, it hadn’t been the evidence he wanted. “And your father.”

  “My father.”

  “I thought we should be sure.”

  Bethan was surprised at the pop of something like outrage at that, when she knew that if the situations were reversed, her father would not hesitate to investigate her. How strange that she’d come back here on a mission she was thrilled she could use as a buffer against her family, only to discover she cared a lot more than she thought she did.

  “Not our guys, then?” she asked.

  “Unlikely.”

  She glanced back to see Jonas frowning down at his tablet as he flicked through it. “Blue’s favorite, General McKee, has an empty space in his schedule that can’t be accounted for, but there are a lot of rumors that he’s having an affair with one of his staffers. Oz is pretty sure there will be no love there, either.”

  “I know you wanted it to be one of them,” Bethan said, and again, she was back in that desert. The pounding of her heart the only thing she could hear, and the heat all around. The terrible heat. The dizzying flash of something that made her look off into the distance only seconds before the explosion hit—

  She rubbed her hands along her arms, willing the goose bumps to go away. “I guess I have enough of the army still in me that I’d rather not be forced to believe that they’re all evil. That some of them might be bureaucratic, sure, but do their jobs.”

  “I always forget how idealistic you are.”

  Bethan turned, very slowly. Jonas was sitting back now, as close to lounging as she’d ever seen him, as he was such a precise, contained man. There was a dark, hawkish sort of look on his face that made everything in her freeze.

  That wasn’t quite the right word. She went still, but it was a highly charged stillness. A charge that was sparked straight through with all the things she never let herself feel.

  Or never wanted to let herself feel, anyway.

  “Why, Jonas,” she said softly, taunting him, because the desert was in her head and Santa Barbara was in her throat and if she didn’t hate her family, who was she? “Are you acknowledging that we share a past?”

  His dark eyes gleamed. “I guess we all were idealists, once.”

  “Oh, sure.” She didn’t snort. Exactly. “Your idealism is what people notice first about you. It shines from you, like a beacon.”

  “If the generals aren’t who we’re looking for, that leaves the two CEOs,” Jonas said, all business again, and she knew that she was supposed to see only that coolness. That armor of his that he wore so well.

  But she’d known him for a long time, and more, she’d spent day and night with him here, not embroiled in a conflict with weapons. Or not their usual conflicts with her usual weapons, anyway. She’d seen him acting like one of the boys. She’d felt that hand against her lower back, and more, she’d seen the awareness in that black gaze.

  More than once.

  He wasn’t as cool as he pretended to be.

  And that made her feel something like . . . giddy.

  She schooled herself to keep that giddiness under wraps. “I’m assuming this means you cozied up to Stapleton today, as planned.”

  Pharmaceutical bigwig Lewis Stapleton had arrived the night before. On their run this morning, Jonas had said his plan was to feel the other man out. Over another game of golf, which Jonas talked about as if it were literally torture. This from a man who had likely experienced the real thing.

  “The major takeaway from my afternoon with Lewis Stapleton was that he takes great pleasure in describing himself as the head drug dealer.” Jonas’s voice was not quite disgusted. “I want to find that horrifying, but I’m impressed in spite of myself. He’s got the Texas accent, the big voice, and if I wasn’t looking for a reason to distrust him, I would think he was exactly what he appeared to be on paper. Rich as hell. The CEO of a pharmaceutical company that doesn’t pretend to give a crap about anyone. The head drug dealer, son.”

  “That almost sounds like you admire him.”

  “It’s difficult not to admire, on some level, a person so deeply unconcerned with the opinions of others.”

  Bethan was smiling at him, and they were alone. She shouldn’t let herself do that. “I would have said you didn’t care much for anyone else’s opinion yourself.”

  “We’re all drawn to the monsters we carry around inside, Bethan.” Jonas’s eyes flashed, dark and too watchful. “Aren’t we?”

  This time, her smile hurt. “And here I thought we were the monsters. We just happen to be the ones the bad guys fear.”

  “Every bad guy is the hero in his own story. Remember that.”

  There was a lump in her throat. She swallowed, hard. “I don’t know how concerned I ought to be that playing golf with a man who was probably personally responsible for a wide swath of the opioid crisis has made you philosophical.”

  Jonas moved then, rolling up from a seated position to his feet in one of those impossibly graceful moves of his that were the reason he was half ghost. And the reason she, personally, had felt haunted by him for too long now to count. Too long to believe.

  “I’m always philosophical,” he said, an undercurrent in his voice she didn’t understand. “You don’t know me as well as you think you do.”

  Bethan laughed, more in surprise than in any real amusement. “I wouldn’t dream of suggesting that I know you. Not after the seven hundred other times you schooled me on that topic. I wouldn’t dare.”

  “If you didn’t want friction, you shouldn’t have joined Alaska Force.”

  But she knew all that ice and cold was a mask. Of course she knew. She’d just been thinking about it—but it was something else, she had to acknowledge to herself, to not only know it but to be the subject of all that frigid fire in his dark gaze.

  She was too aware that they were alone here. In this soundproofed suite that no one was likely to enter. In a house that might as well be a hotel.

  Where there was a bed, big and comfortable, right in the other room.

  You need to get a grip before you humiliate yourself, she warned herself. No matter how dark and brooding and not quite . . . chained down as usual Jonas was today.

  “As I told you a year and a half ago, I had no idea you were in Alaska Force when I joined,” she told him, with a calm that felt like more of a disguise than any other one she’d worn. “How would I? The only person anyone in the service talks about in relation to Alaska Force is Isaac. By design. I followed the same rumor everybody else did.”

  “Whether you knew I was in Alaska Force or not before you arrived doesn’t matter. Once you knew I was there—”

  “What?” She jumped on that statement because there was a part of her that had been spoiling for this fight for over a year. If she was honest, for a lot longer than that. “You’re not my ex-boyfriend, Jonas. You
didn’t get Alaska Force in the divorce. I understand that it upsets you that I exist, but I’m not planning to change that. And I don’t know why you would imagine that I would. Because, again”—she waved a hand between the two of them, in case he wasn’t already getting her point—“we have no situation. You do realize that every single person we work with thinks that we’re basically Isaac and Caradine part two, don’t you?”

  He scowled, a tell that he wasn’t in control of himself, but she didn’t care. “Don’t be ridiculous.”

  “Of course it’s harder to imagine you having a secret relationship with anyone, because no one can imagine you having a relationship of any kind. It takes a significant suspension of disbelief to imagine you sneaking around the way Isaac did, for years, but Jonas”—she shook her head at him—“what other explanation could there be for the way you treat me?”

  His scowl deepened, this man who had no tells. “I thought I was sexist.”

  “I almost wish you were. That would make this behavior make some kind of sense.”

  “I don’t care what everybody thinks,” he said, more gruffly than usual. And he lost the scowl, as surely as if he’d dropped a smooth mask onto his face.

  Bethan hated it. “And now this conversation is beginning to feel circular.”

  “Very funny. But while on the topic, I don’t think Stapleton is our man. Not that he wouldn’t happily kidnap a scientist, or order someone to do it for him, but I don’t think stealth is his strong suit.”

  It was an out. And she’d historically always taken the out. She always focused on the job. She always concentrated on what was ahead of her, because what was behind her couldn’t matter.

  But this was different for a thousand reasons, and most of them seemed tangled up in the way her heart couldn’t seem to settle on a reasonable rhythm in her chest.