Special Ops Seduction

by Megan Crane

  Bethan kissed him until the sweet of it shifted into that kick of familiar heat. And they were both alive. They had survived too many wars to name, SuperThrax, and Grand Central. They had more fights in front of them, because that was who they were.

  And still she kissed him as if these were the kind of happy stories someone could tell while raising a glass under a wedding tent someday.

  Jonas couldn’t believe that something in him wanted that. Not the stories, maybe, but the rest of it. The whole wild pageant with Bethan front and center, smiling at him in a pretty white dress.

  He needed to stop being so surprised at the things she brought out in him.

  He pulled away, his eyes tracking over her face, trying to take in every detail. There was color in her cheeks again. That pallor that had terrified him in New York was gone. She looked like his Bethan again. Those serious green eyes, those freckles, and that mouth he couldn’t get enough of whether she was kissing him, fighting him, or smiling at him and making him real at last.

  “I love you,” she said again. And when she smiled this time, it was like summer. “It’s okay. You don’t have to say it. You don’t ever have to say it. I know who you are.”

  And she did. His whole life, Jonas had assumed that all there was to know about him was what he could do. The wars he could wage. The fights he could win.

  He’d been born an afterthought and fashioned into a crude weapon by careless hands. Then the military had gotten to him and made him sleeker. Meaner. Templeton and Isaac had tempered him some, but he’d still gone his own way to that cabin in the Alaskan interior to weigh his options. He’d always thought that someday, he’d end up there again.

  But Bethan had never looked at him like he was broken. She never looked at him like she was trying to figure out how to use what he could do to her advantage.

  She looked at him the way she always had, from the day they’d first met. As if he were nothing more and nothing less than a man.

  Human straight through.

  And if she believed it, he would try.

  For her, there was nothing he wouldn’t do.

  “I love you,” he said, because he did. “I’ve never loved anyone else. Not like this. And Bethan, I never will.”

  She grinned at him then, his sweet, soft soldier, made of steel. “You certainly won’t. Or I’ll kill you myself.”

  Then she took his hand again and pulled him down into the embrace of that couch.

  Where together, they celebrated the fact that they’d survived.

  More than just survived. They lived. Bright and hot, tough and tender, and marvelously alive.

  And more often than Jonas had ever imagined possible, happy.

  * * *

  * * *

  The first time Jonas saw Bethan cry was when he took her to his own cabin.

  And maybe he’d known how she would react, because he could suddenly see this home of his through her eyes.

  Stark. Empty.

  Dark and cold, the way he’d always been.

  “We will never stay here in this horrible crypt,” she said roughly, brushing the moisture from her eyes. “You will never sleep here again.”

  And that was just the beginning.

  Her pretty little pink cabin wasn’t big enough for two, but neither one of them wanted to lose it. Together, they built it out. And over time, though it never became less pink, it became other things as well. More theirs than hers, and never a secret again.

  Until Jonas could hardly remember a time when they hadn’t lived together like that.

  They’d visited her family later that summer, and Jonas had been forced to explain that while most of what he’d told them about himself was true, some of it had been a cover. He’d expected the general and Birdie to freeze him out, but they’d taken it well.

  “Good thing,” the general had said. “I never did trust a man who smiles that much. Good thing.”

  “I like thinking of you doing those dangerous things together,” Birdie had said in apparent agreement. “It feels safer, doesn’t it?”

  Bethan had liked that her parents knew the real Jonas. But she’d been much more concerned, at first, that their teammates wouldn’t like the fact that they had so obviously gotten together. A couple on missions? It wouldn’t be a shock if their colleagues objected.

  “What if it throws everything off?” she’d asked. “What if everything gets reduced to a sexual innuendo and I become nothing more than average after all?”

  “If they treat you differently because you’re sleeping with me,” Jonas had said in that pitiless way he knew she liked best, “then they’d better treat me differently because I’m sleeping with you. I think that’s unlikely.”

  She’d scowled at him. Of course. “I don’t need you to fight my battles.”

  He’d kissed her, there in that cabin that at that point had still been her secret pink refuge. And the happiest place he knew. “It’s not your battle. It’s ours. And you could never be average.”

  But they’d underestimated their friends.

  “About time,” Isaac had said sometime after Jonas had moved in to Bethan’s cabin. He’d grinned. “Guess I’ll cancel that mediation session.”

  And that was all he said.

  Templeton, meanwhile, merely laughed and laughed, then offered to help with the remodel.

  And it wasn’t for months, after too many missions to count, that Jonas and Bethan realized that nothing had changed as far as their teammates were concerned.

  “Nothing’s going to change,” Bethan marveled one night while they were tucked up in their loft bed, just the two of them. Just the way they both liked it most. “I like that. But I’m forced to think it might have something to do with the fact that they all kind of thought we’ve been sleeping together for the past ten years.”

  “I wish,” Jonas said.

  And then he rolled her over and showed her how much he loved her all over again.

  Of all the missions he’d ever had, he took that the most seriously. And planned to keep on taking it seriously, forever.

  Which as far as Jonas was concerned, would be a good start.

  But not nearly enough.

  A hundred forevers would never be enough, but he figured they’d try them all out anyway, just to see.

  Acknowledgments

  To everyone involved in the making of these books, my thanks are never enough—but you have them! I’m so grateful for all you do.

  To my marvelous readers, I can’t thank you enough for joining me on these Alaska Force adventures!

  And most of all, to Jeff, for the world.

  Don’t miss

  DELTA FORCE DEFENDER

  Available now! Continue reading for a special preview.

  BOSTON

  TEN YEARS EARLIER

  Julia had already ignored her father’s summons as many times as she could. It was time to go back home or face the consequences.

  Or, knowing her father, both.

  Twenty-two-year-olds about to graduate from college should assert their independence. Or, anyway, that was the excuse she planned to use when he lit into her about it, assuming he was in a mood to listen to excuses. Because he was going to be furious—there was no getting around that.

  No one was suicidal enough to ignore Mickey Sheeran for too long.

  Julia was one of the few people who dared pretend otherwise, and—filled with bravado while safely on campus and protected by university security—she’d decided to prove it.

  She was already feeling sick with regret about that as she turned onto her parents’ street in their unpretentious neighborhood outside of Boston proper, which was filled with the regular Joes her dad claimed he admired as true American heroes. Julia knew that what he really meant by that was that all their neighbors were as in awe of him as th
ey were afraid of him. Just the way he liked it.

  Most people were just plain old afraid of him, Julia included.

  More so the closer she got to the house she’d grown up in and hadn’t been able to leave fast enough. And never seemed to be able to put behind her, whether she lived there or not.

  There wasn’t a single part of her that wanted to go back. Ever. And particularly not when she’d deliberately provoked him.

  Sure, all she’d actually done was ignore a couple of phone messages ordering her to leave her dormitory and come home. But she knew her father would view the delay between the messages he’d left and her appearance as nothing short of traitorous. She was expected to leap to obey him almost before he issued a command, as she well knew. He didn’t care that she had exams. He probably didn’t know she had exams.

  But Julia knew it was foolish to imagine her father was dumb. He wasn’t. It was far more likely that he knew full well it was her exam period and had waited until this, her final semester of college, to force her to take incompletes and fail to graduate. He was nothing if not a master at revenge served cold.

  Mickey hadn’t been on board with the college thing, something he made perfectly clear every time he sneered about Julia’s “ambitions.” He’d also refused to pay for it and had gone ballistic when Julia had found her own loans and a job in a restaurant to help with costs.

  She still thought it was worth the bruises.

  Her sister, Lindsay, was fifteen months younger and had never made it out from under their father’s thumb. She still lived at home, grimly obeying his every command in the respectful silence he demanded, because females were to be seen, never heard.

  She’d even started dating one of Mickey’s younger associates.

  You know where that’s going to lead, Julia had muttered under her breath when she’d been forced to put in an appearance on Easter Sunday. Straight to an entire life exactly like Mom’s. Is that really what you want?

  You’re the only one who thinks there’s another choice, Lindsay had snapped right back, her gaze dark and her mouth set in a mulish line. There’s not.

  Julia had looked across the crowded church, filled with the people who came to Mass one other time each year, and stared at the back of Lindsay’s boyfriend’s head. She wished her gaze could punch holes in him.

  I don’t accept that, she’d said quietly. I refuse to accept that.

  Next to her, her sister had sighed, something weary and practical on her face. Julia had recognized the look. Their mother wore it often. Soon it would start to fade and crack around it turned into beaten-down resignation.

  He’s not a nice guy, but at least it gets me out of the house and away from Dad every now and again, she’d said. That’s not nothing.

  Their brother Jimmy, the meanest of their three older brothers, had turned around from the pew in front of them. He looked more and more like Dad by the day, and the nasty look he’d thrown the two of them had shut them both up. Instantly.

  Sometimes Julia lay in her narrow cot in the dorm, squeezed her eyes shut so tight she expected all her blood vessels to pop, and wished. For something to save her. For some way out. For the limitless, oversized life her college friends had waiting for them, with no boundaries in sight. No rules. Nothing but their imagination to lead them wherever they wanted to go.

  Maybe she’d always known that she wasn’t going to get any of that.

  And maybe her father had been right to oppose her going off to college, because all it was going to do was break her heart. Worse than if she’d been a good girl like Lindsay and done what was expected of her.

  Hopelessness only hurt if you were dumb enough to hope for something different.

  Julia couldn’t remember, now, when she’d first realized that her father was . . . unusual. That he was the reason the other children kept their distance from the Sheeran family. But she could remember, distinctly, the first time she’d Googled her father’s name and found a wealth of information about him. Just right there, online. For anyone to see.

  She’d always known her father was a bad man.

  Still, it was something else to find all those articles detailing the criminal acts he’d been accused of over the course of his long career. She thought sometimes that a good daughter would have been appalled, disbelieving.

  But she’d looked at her father’s mug shot in an article from the front page of the Boston Globe, and she’d believed. She’d known. He was exactly as bad as they claimed he was, and probably worse, and that likely meant she was bad, too. Deep in her blood and bones, no matter what she did.

  Every year they failed to catch him in the act, the bolder and more vicious he became. And the more she accepted that his DNA lived in her, too.

  Because if Julia were as brave as she pretended she was when she was across town on a pretty campus where she could squint her eyes and imagine she was someone else’s daughter, she would have called the FBI herself.

  But she wasn’t brave. She didn’t point the car in some other direction, drive for days, and disappear. Instead, she was obediently driving home to face her father’s rage. And the back of his hand. And whatever other treats he had in store for her.

  Her throat might be dry with fear and her heart might be pounding, but she was still doing what he wanted. In the end, she always did.

  All things considered, maybe Lindsay’s grim acceptance was the better path. Julia liked to put on a good show, but they were both going to end up in the same place.

  Her stomach was killing her. Knots upon knots.

  She eased her car to the curb and cut the headlights, then forced herself to get out into the cool night air. It was a force of habit to park a ways down the block. There were always flat-eyed men coming and going from the house, and it would go badly for her if she inconvenienced any of them. And Mickey was never satisfied with small displays of strength when bigger ones could cow more people and show off his cruelty to greater effect.

  In his circles, the crueler he was—especially to his own family—the more people feared him. And fear was what made Mickey come alive.

  She leaned against the closed car door and pulled her phone out of her pocket. It was cold enough that she wished she’d worn more than a T-shirt, but there was a part of her that liked the chill that ran along her arms. It would keep her awake. Aware.

  You couldn’t really dodge one of Mickey’s blows, but there were ways of taking it, and falling, that lessened the damage.

  She’d learned that lesson early.

  She pulled up Lindsay’s number and texted her, announcing that she’d parked and was about to walk in to face the music.

  Don’t come in, her sister texted back almost instantly. It’s weird in here.

  A different sort of prickle worked its way down the back of Julia’s neck and started winding down her spine. Her hair felt as if it were standing on end in the breeze, except there wasn’t a breeze.

  I’m coming out, Lindsay texted.

  Julia found herself holding her breath, though she couldn’t have said why. The night felt thick and dark, suddenly, though she could see the streetlights with her own eyes. Something about that caught at her, and she moved away from the nearest pool of light to the shade of a big tree. She stood there, keeping still. She put her back to the trunk, hoping that if anyone were looking, they wouldn’t see her.

  And she tried really hard to convince herself that she was just being paranoid.

  But when her sister appeared out of nowhere and grabbed her arm, she bit her own tongue so hard to keep from screaming that she tasted copper.

  “What are you doing?” she whispered fiercely at Lindsay. “You scared the—”

  “You should go back to your dorm,” Lindsay said, and this time, there was something stark in her gaze. Too much knowledge, maybe. Something unflinching that made the knots inside Julia’
s belly sharpen into spikes. “And stay there.”

  And all the things they never talked about directly seemed to swell in the cool spring night. The truths that no one spoke, for fear of what it might unleash. Not just because they were afraid of Mickey and his friends, whom he often called his brothers but treated with far more respect than he gave the members of his actual family, but because acknowledging a thing made it real.

  It had never occurred to Julia before this very moment how deeply and desperately she’d clung to the tattered shreds of her denial.

  She and her sister stared at each other in the inky black shadows of the ominous night, and she couldn’t tell anymore if it was the dark that threatened her, or if it was the truth.

  Whatever was coming, there was no escaping it. Had she always known that? Whether it was this night or another night or twenty years down a road that ended up with her seeing her mother’s tired, fearful face in the mirror, this life she’d been so determined to imagine as a path she could choose had only ever been a downward spiral. To one single destination.

  Sooner or later, they were all going to hell. Or hell was coming for them. It didn’t matter which. She was going to burn either way.

  Julia wanted to throw up.

  But at the same time, a heady sort of giddiness swept over her, and it took her a second to realize what it was. Freedom, of a sort. Or relief, which amounted to the same thing.

  She reached out and laced her fingers through her sister’s, the way she used to do when they were little. Back when it was easier to pretend.

  “Come with me,” she said fiercely.

  And Lindsay looked as if she wanted to cry.

  “It’s too late,” she replied. Her voice was soft. Painful. “He asked me to marry him.”

  “You don’t have to say yes.”

  “I love that you think it matters what I say.”

  “All the more reason to come with me,” Julia said stoutly. “We can figure it out. We can . . . do something.”