by Cindy Dees
Whoa. When did she turn into a cat in heat?
Apparently, when Griffin Caldwell kissed her.
Yeah, but what a kiss.
It was sexual and frank, and frankly fantastic.
And then, just like that, he tore his mouth away from hers. Stumbled back. He jammed his hands in his pockets, and she saw through the fabric they were balled in fists. His face abruptly looked carved from stone, his eyes glacially cold.
The cool night air swirled around her, damp and misty, chilling her to the bone.
“That’s why women can’t be in the SEALs,” he rasped.
She registered shock first.
Then disappointment.
Dismay.
Rejection.
And then came outrage, flowing fast and hot through her veins.
Had that kiss been all about humiliating her? She’d been ready to leap into bed with him, damn him!
She glared furiously at his shadowed face and ground out, “You think because you deign to bestow a kiss upon me, I’m going to collapse at your feet, swooning? You think because I have sexual desires I can’t be a soldier? You think because I find you moderately attractive I can’t keep my mind on the job?” Her voice rose with each question. “Just how freaking shallow do you think I am?”
His mouth clamped shut, and she caught the ripple of muscles along his jaw.
“You’re the one who kissed me,” she flung at him. “How shallow does that make you?” As her fury gathered steam, she stepped forward and poked him in the chest. “I don’t think women in the SEALs are the problem, Caldwell. I think misogynistic male chauvinist pigs in the SEALs are the problem.”
“Sherri. Calm down.”
“Don’t tell me to calm down! You keep your hands, and your mouth, and…and”—she fluttered her hands at him—“all those muscles…to yourself, mister. I’m a professional soldier, and I’m here to do a job. You either get on board this train or stay out of my way. Got it?”
“No,” he ground out. “I don’t.”
She glared at him, speechless with anger.
“No matter how fancy you slice it, Sherri, no woman has what it takes to be a SEAL. You’ll never have what it takes. You have no place on the teams and never will.”
There it was. The truth had finally been spoken aloud. The SEALs didn’t want women and would do everything in their power to keep women out. And on a more personal note, he didn’t want her.
Her anger drained away as quickly as it had flared, leaving behind only a dagger of hurt buried to the hilt in her heart.
She said soberly, “What are you going to do when I prove you wrong, Griffin?”
Frustration gleamed in his gaze as clear and bright as Venus hanging low on the horizon.
She continued implacably. “The day of the female SEAL is coming—soon. If not me, then some woman a lot like me is going to make it past all the obstacles you throw in her path. Where will that leave you? Will you be in…or out?”
He threw up his hands and turned away from her, but she continued battering at his ramrod-stiff back. “Where will that leave you, Griffin? Will you be part of the SEALs, or will you be obsolete? Are you going to let your prejudice and archaic attitude drive you off the teams?”
He whirled around so fast she lurched back from him reflexively. “My team is my family. My life, dammit.”
He brushed past her, striding away into the darkness. She called after him as he practically ran from her. “Then you’d better get used to the idea of women. We’re coming for you. I’m coming for you, Griffin Caldwell.”
Chapter 3
Griffin was shaken like he hadn’t been shaken in years. Rattled as hell.
He veered away from the instructors’ bunkhouse and kept walking, following the dirt road into the trees. The night and the forest closed in around him, calming him enough that he could breathe semi-normally. This was his native environment where he felt most at home, most in control. Night was the time of the SEAL. They owned the darkness.
Was Sherri right? Were women SEALs inevitable? Worse, was he obsolete?
All SEALs came with an expiration date. Some of those dates were set by bad knees or a bum back or, for some unlucky bastards, by a bullet with their name on it. He generally avoided thinking about the end of his career, not only out of superstition, but also because he couldn’t imagine not being on the teams. What would he do with himself if he wasn’t running ops with his brothers, his hair on fire and balls to the wall?
An empty void was all that came to mind.
Normalcy.
Slow death by boredom.
His stride lengthened as sudden fury ripped through him. No woman, not even one who kissed like Sherri Tate, was chasing him off his team.
He broke into a run, speeding up until he was pumping along in a full-out sprint. Sky-blue eyes chased him. A mysterious, sexy smile taunted him. Even Sherri’s scent, soft and sweet, hounded him.
He ran until his lungs burned and his legs were on fire.
Finally, as the panic receded, his pace slowed. He fell into a walk, winded as hell. Weary, body and soul, he turned around to head back to camp.
A sick feeling in his gut told him Sherri was right about the future of the teams. He either accepted women into his band of brothers, or he was out. Finished.
SEALs were famous for their ability to adapt to any situation…but could he adapt to this? He truly didn’t know if he could or not.
Only one way to find out.
Dammit.
He made it back to the barracks at about the same time the other guys piled into the Quonset hut after their workouts. Kenny opened a cooler where, for the past few hours, a case of beer had been icing.
“Beer?” Ken asked him, holding up a brown longneck.
“Nah.” Griffin’s hangover still clung to the edges of his brain, and a headache jackhammered at his eyeballs. It would have sidelined anyone with a lower pain tolerance than he had. He stretched out on his bed, arms folded behind his head, staring at the ceiling.
Trevor, who bunked beside him, sat down and asked quietly, “You okay?”
Sometimes it sucked having teammates who were so blasted perceptive. At least Trevor had cracked thirty years of age and achieved a modicum of wisdom in a decade of special operations for Great Britain. Griffin muttered for Trevor’s ears alone, “These women. They’re knocking me off my game.”
“No kidding. I never thought I’d see the day when women could meet Special Forces standards. But here we are.”
“What do you think of it?” Griffin asked him. “Would female operators fly in Europe?”
Trevor’s intelligent gaze was troubled. “I honestly don’t know. Politically, Europe is pretty liberal. But women in hard-core combat? That’s a stretch. I’m going to take a wait-and-see attitude.”
A smart approach. Too bad he, as the platoon leader, didn’t have that luxury.
Trevor added, “If you want to talk it over or just vent, I won’t carry any tales back to Kettering. I’ve got your back.”
“Thanks, brother.”
Trevor met his gaze candidly. His eyes telegraphed that times were changing around them both, and he, too, understood the stakes. Adapt or get out.
“Yeah. That.” Griffin sighed in response to his teammate’s silent message.
Axel declared loudly from across the room, “Never thought I’d see chicks do stuff like that. Did you see Lily banging out those pull-ups? Hell, she can do more than I can!”
Trevor laughed. “Yes, but you’re a giant lump of meat. She’s a tiny little thing with no weight to move.”
Axel grunted. “I didn’t see you beating Anna at push-ups. How many did she do? Six hundred, all told?”
Trev shrugged. “Something like that.”
Griffin eyed the Brit closely. Trevor lo
oked about evenly split between dismay and being wildly impressed by Anna’s mad skills.
Kenny passed the Brit another beer. “You need this, bro. That Anna girl is totally into you.”
Griffin was interested to see a certain desperation flash across Trev’s face. Was the guy panicked at being pursued? Or maybe panicked at what he might do about being pursued? A person never could tell with those Brits. They held their emotions close to the vest. Either way, Griffin felt Trev’s pain. What was a guy supposed to do when completely attracted to one’s female future teammate?
Sam, usually slow to speak, weighed in. “Didn’t think I’d ever see women that strong or that fast. I’m thinking these ladies may just have what it takes to make the teams.”
“It takes more than strength or speed,” Griffin snapped. “It takes courage. Smarts. Guts. Aggression. It takes… Hell, I don’t know what it takes. More. It takes more.”
Trevor replied thoughtfully, “Who’s to say women—not all women, but some women—don’t have that ‘more’ factor?”
“Have you ever met a woman who made you think, ‘Damn, she’d make a great SEAL’?” Griffin snapped back.
Trevor grinned. “I’ve never met one who was allowed to try. Maybe if we let them give it a go, they’ll prove themselves to us.”
Griffin swore luridly. They were talking about women. Running on SEAL teams. In desperation, he tossed out, “Think about the missions we do. The conditions we live in. Do you guys seriously want women out there with us?”
Axel spoke slowly. “I wouldn’t mind it if they could pull their weight. And it sure as hell would beat looking at your ugly mug all the time, Grif. That Sherri girl—she looks like a princess. Or a movie star.”
Kenny emerged from his beer to comment, “Cal says Tate was a no-shit beauty queen. Finalist at the Miss America pageant a few years back.”
Somehow, Griffin was not surprised. He’d seen some gorgeous women in his day, but Sherri Tate was a rare beauty.
Jojo spoke up. “Speaking of beauty queens, where’d you disappear to with Sherri, Grif? Is she as hot a lay as she looks like she’d be?”
Griffin jerked upright, his head pounding violently at the sudden movement. “She’s a freaking naval officer. Watch your mouth, Jojo.”
The room fell dead silent.
God damn it. The last thing he wanted to do was alienate his teammates over a woman. He sighed. “I’m sorry, man. I don’t know what to make of these women. I tried to talk with Tate about why ladies want to be SEALs.”
“And?” Trevor asked expectantly.
“She said she wants to serve her country and do cool stuff.”
Axel responded, “Well, yeah. Isn’t that why we all do this?”
Griffin’s brows twitched together. Of all the guys, Axel was the one he would’ve least expected to be okay with women SEALs. Axe was a good ol’ boy and prone to calling women things like li’l ladies and fillies.
Kenny shrugged. “This is all a waste of time. As soon as we push women to our fitness standards, they’ll fold up and go home.”
Trevor shot him another of those troubled looks that communicated louder than words: Yes, but what if the women made the standards and didn’t go home? Then what? Grif had no blasted idea.
Sam, the newest to the team, commented, “I don’t care if women make it as long as they can do the job. They sure as shootin’ improve the scenery.”
The kid was missing the point. Women might look good—hell, look great. But they would degrade the performance of the teams. Any unit was only as strong as its weakest member.
Sherri unsettled him like no person—male or female—had ever unsettled him. It wasn’t just about how she looked. Or that he thought about hot, sweaty sex every time he got within eyeball distance of her. She had an elusive…something about her. Secrets. What were they? Where did they come from? It made him want to dig down in her psyche until he uncovered all of her darkest mysteries.
For surely a woman who had the motivation to try for the impossible was carrying around some deep emotional shit.
More irritated than he’d been in a long time, Griffin made an early night of it. Not only did he have a hangover to shake, but tomorrow would be an early morning. He planned to show Sherri Tate a thing or two about what it took to be a real SEAL.
He should have known it would happen.
She came to him in his dreams, a ghostly siren, so seductive and enthralling that he gladly gave himself over to her spell. Her slender, strong arms drew him against her full breasts, her kiss drew the breath from his lungs, and her white-hot desire drew the will to resist clean out of him.
He smelled her lust, sweet and musky, felt it in the way she surged against him. As much as she wanted him, he wanted her even more. His erection was painfully hard, sending driving need pounding through his belly, blanking all thought except burying himself inside her heat and sex until they both exploded in soul-rending orgasms.
Griffin woke with a lurch, drenched in sweat, as his watch vibrated. He fell back against the mattress, swearing silently.
Far more slowly than he willed it to, the dream retreated. Sherri’s imaginary arms disengaged from around his body, and his brain only gradually came on line.
Four a.m. Time to go teach a princess a thing or two about what SEALs are made of. Except the bedsheet tented over his erection, and he rolled onto his side rather than advertise his predicament to his brothers.
The other guys were starting to rouse, and he lay there listening to them move around, reliving that vivid dream in his mind. Damn, that woman was stuck there but good. One thing he knew for sure: he had to get himself squared away with Sherri—and fast. Distractions of any kind—be they problems with wives or girlfriends, money woes, or anything that took a guy’s mind off the job—were trouble.
He rolled out of the rack, pulled on pants, and tucked his problem child painfully behind his zipper. Yanking a black T-shirt down over his head, he stepped into boots and strapped on the worst attitude he could summon. At oh-dark-thirty and with him horny as hell, it was a freaking snotty attitude. Good. Now, he was ready to face Sherri.
At 4:05 a.m. sharp, he and the other SEALs barged into the girls’ dorm, shouting, banging on trash cans, and tipping over furniture.
Sherri was first to catch the hint and leap out of bed, scrambling for clothes. Grif averted his gaze from those mile-long legs with sharply cut quads and well-defined calves. The dark-haired one, Anna, wasn’t so spry and got dumped out of her cot onto the floor in an unceremonious heap.
By 4:10, Grinder PT was well underway, the ladies on the road in front of their hooch, knocking out burpees and sit-ups, doing wind sprints over to the pull-up bar beside the gym, and sprinting back to the Quonset huts to drop and give ’em twenty. Push-ups, that was.
All the while, the men hovered over them, shouting insults and criticizing everything from their technique to their hair color. This morning, the Reapers had shifted into full-on BUD/S mode. The sexual interplay from last night was gone, replaced by flat-out mental warfare aimed at shredding the trainees’ confidence and determination.
Sherri ran over to Griffin’s push-up station for the fifth time, looking ragged around the edges. She was sucking wind and looked to be in pain. Welcome to the jungle, baby.
“Drop and start pumping ’em out, Tate,” he snapped. “Don’t waste my time. I’ve got places to go and things to do.”
She assumed a front leaning rest position, and he started the stopwatch on his wrist. “Count aloud,” he ordered as he dropped into a front leaning rest beside her.
As she popped out the first twenty push-ups quickly, he matched her in silence. But as she started to slow down, he ragged on her. Hard.
“What’s the matter? Arms tired? Or are you just weak, Tate? C’mon. Don’t wimp out on me, now. Surely you’ve got more than this. We’
re not even to the pre-BUD/S minimum yet.”
She finished another twenty push-ups—as did he—and paused in a front leaning rest to catch her breath.
He, however, lay down on the ground beside Sherri so he could talk right up into her red face. “You can always quit, Tate. There’s no shame in not being able to hack this. Go back to your nice clean comfortable life where no one yells at you and you don’t have to be in pain. You know you want to.”
She made it halfway up through a push-up, and her arms trembled, protesting against finishing the movement. Just to make his point, he paused halfway up through his matching push-up as well. He waited patiently while she gathered the strength to finish. She threw him a baleful look, obviously not appreciative of his demonstration of casual strength.
He smirked back at her. “You’re not to the minimum yet, Tate.”
She took a deep breath, exhaled hard and finished the push-up. Reluctantly, he was impressed. Too bad she wasn’t cheating on the push-ups, or he could’ve yelled at her about that, too.
Watching out of the corner of his eye as her chest brushed the ground, he almost wanted to be that strip of gravel beneath her, getting caressed by those lush globes.
“Forty-three!” she grunted in triumph as she finished one more push-up. She collapsed on the ground, breathing hard, with about twenty seconds to go in the timed rotation.
Clearly, she knew forty-two was the minimum number of push-ups required of a BUD/S candidate in two minutes. Parked in a plank beside her to press home his point, he demanded, “You think you can make it in BUD/S if all you do is reach the minimums? You think just surviving is enough? SEALs don’t survive, Tate. They win. If you’re going make it through BUD/s you have to strive to win every single training evolution. Where’s your desire? Show me some goddamned guts!”
Clenching her teeth, she resumed doing push-ups, straining through a half dozen more before he called, “Time. Two minutes. Get off my road, Tate. Move, move, move!”
She crawled to her feet and stumbled off toward Trevor at the pull-up bars. Truth be told, he was stunned that she’d found the will to do more push-ups after she’d clearly exhausted herself. It was the sort of thing a SEAL might do—
