by Cindy Dees
She reached the group, a preponderance of blondes. One of them snapped, “Go find your own guy. This one’s taken.”
“Yeah. I know,” she replied flatly. The complete lack of emotion in her voice apparently gave the woman pause. Or maybe the cold promise of bodily harm in Anna’s eyes penetrated her alcohol induced fog. Either way, the woman fell back as Anna moved forward. Splash one.
The hovering women dispersed for the most part as she scowled her way through them. The next woman who put up resistance—a redhead—required a pretend-accidental hip check to move her aside.
“Hey!” she complained stubbornly.
When Anna gestured with her head for the woman to scram, the redhead grabbed her beer and beat a hasty retreat.
Trevor’s head turned slowly, just far enough for one baleful golden eye to glare at her.
Grinning unrepentantly, Anna slid onto the stool next to him, vividly aware of how he towered over her. And she was no delicate flower, herself. “I cleared out the groupies, didn’t I?”
“Thanks for nothing.”
She waved an airy hand. “No thanks needed. I’m happy to run off the local talent. What are teammates for, after all?”
“You do realize I was going to get laid, tonight.”
“Laid? With that bunch, you could’ve had a full-on Roman orgy.”
He groaned. “Even more the opposite of thank you.”
“You sound like you’ve never had an orgy. I thought you Brits were all super repressed in public but completely off the chain in private.”
He glared into his beer glass, which was mostly full. Some of the Reapers drank more when they were upset, but Trevor went the other way. He tended to get quiet and withdraw into his own head when he was chewing on a problem.
What on earth was up with him? She’d heard him and Cal Kettering, the Reapers’ commander, shouting in Cal’s office earlier. What those two peas in a pod could be arguing about, she had no idea. But Trevor was her swim buddy, which, as she saw it, gave her every right to stick her nosy nose into his personal affairs.
“Wanna talk?” she asked over the din of country music twanging across the dance floor.
“About what?” he asked cautiously.
“Hey. It’s me you’re talking to. No need to be cagey about whatever’s got you messed up enough to hang out at Mabel’s.”
He shrugged. “Can’t talk here. Too many wagging ears. And besides, I’d much rather watch the wagging ass—”
Anna slapped a hand over his mouth. “Don’t say it. I’d hate to have to kill you on behalf of my #metoo sisters.”
“You’re a me-too-er? Who was dumb enough to try assaulting you?” Trevor blurted.
She lied, “Are you kidding? I’d break any guy in half who messed with me.” That might be true now, compliments of him and the other guys who’d trained her in unarmed combat. But it hadn’t always been that way. As a girl, she’d gotten pretty before she got tough.
“By the way, you look…like a girl…rather…you look nice. Like, really nice.”
He’d noticed? Suddenly, she was glad she’d taken time to put on mascara and a little lip gloss and to wear her hair down for once. Abashed, she mumbled, “Good recovery, there, Slick.”
“May I buy you a drink?” he asked gallantly.
There he was. The for-public-consumption version of the urbane, sophisticated, British gentleman who never missed an etiquette beat. She answered politely, “I’ll take whatever you’re having.”
“I’m drinking this piss water you Yanks call beer.”
“Don’t be dragging American beer, now,” she retorted.
He lifted his glass to let the light behind the bar shine through the amber liquid. “It’s not even the right color.”
“It’s better than that sludge you Brits call beer.”
He snorted. “Lightweight.”
“Call me that on the wrestling mat where you can put your money where your mouth is,” she challenged.
His mouth quirked at one corner. “Big words, little girl. You prepared to back those up?”
She wasn’t that little. And she was a world-class Crossfit™ athlete who’d spent a year training all day, every day, with Navy SEALs. Not too many women on earth could claim to be stronger than her.
“Any time, big guy,” she shot back.
They fell silent while the bartender plunked a foam-topped glass of beer in front of her. She took a sip of the yeasty brew. Personally, she preferred whiskey, but Trev was buying, and she wasn’t going to quibble over it.
“So, swim buddy of mine. You wanna tell me what you and Cal were yelling about earlier? He’s mighty ticked off about it, whatever it was. He’s been stomping around camp, muttering under his breath, ever since you left.”
Trevor’s entire face went tight and tense, which constituted a violent reaction from Mr. Always-in-Control. The orange and yellow light from a beer sign overhead flickered across his face, licking his skin with neon flames and painting crimson highlights in his brown hair.
What in the heck had happened between him and Cal?
Both were career spec ops types, both had led their own squads, both were consummate professionals. After Griffin Caldwell had left to instruct out at BUD/S while Sherry Tate attended official SEAL training, Trevor had more or less stepped into the role of Cal’s second-in-command...even though the Reapers were pretty casual about command structure in general.
With a definite note of desperation in his voice he pleaded, “Leave it alone. Please.”
She snorted. “Have you met me?”
“Unfortunately, yes. I have.”
“Ouch.” She said it playfully, but his blunt retort hurt more than she wanted to let on.
“It’s nothing personal, Anna. But you don’t want to know what Cal and I talked about, today.”
“You call what you two did talking? I could hear you from the barracks across the street.”
He opened his mouth to answer, but a voice boomed behind her, making her jump.
“Yo, Trev!” their huge teammate, Axel “Axe” Adams, bellowed from a range of approximately two feet. Axel sported his usual biker garb—a sleeveless leather vest over a sweat-stained, heavy metal T-shirt, a thick, chrome chain hooked to his belt and disappearing into his front jeans pocket. He continued, bellowing, “Why aren’t you out there dancing and scoping out chicks? It’s a target rich environment, bro.”
From behind Axel, Joaquin “Jojo” Romero piped up. “Cal told us specifically to blow off some steam, tonight. Have some fun. Loosen up a little. Does Trev look loose to you, Axe?”
“Naw, man. He looks some-kind-a tight to me.”
“How tight would that be?” Jojo asked drolly.
The big man tilted his head, considering Trevor. “He’s so tight I’d need a sledgehammer to drive a toothpick up his ass.”
Trevor rolled his eyes as Jojo laughed and waved the bartender over. Leaning across the bar, Jojo shouted over the noise, “Have you got a half-decent single malt scotch back there?”
The bartender nodded.
“We’ll need the bottle and a half-dozen shot glasses, then,” Jojo shouted back.
A half-dozen? Anna’s heart dropped. The whole team must be here. There went her intimate conversation with Trevor to convince him to open up to her. Dammit.
Trevor might be a natural extrovert, but he preferred to have serious conversations one-on-one. If the Reapers started drinking together, she would never get him to tell her what had gone down between him and Cal.
“C’mon, you two,” Jojo shouted in her direction. “We’ve got a booth.”
“You all go have fun!” Trevor shouted back. “I’m good here.”
Well, hell. Now she would have to choose between hanging out with the team or staying here with Trevor, which would be a blatant i
nvitation for the entire Scooby gang to harass them both about hooking up. And that would be a sure recipe for Trevor never to speak to her alone again.
She stood up reluctantly. To Trevor, she suggested lightly, “Come over and be social with the team. Maybe do like Jojo suggested and let your hair down a little. He is right; you do seem tense.”
He opened his mouth, clearly intending to say no. Her heart dropped all the way to her feet in disappointment, and she mentally drop-kicked her stupid feelings as far away as she could punt them.
A little voice in the back of her head whispered that she was an idiot for harboring a secret crush on him. It was hopeless. He would never see her as anything other than one of the guys. At best, he might one day see her as a little sister. But nothing more.
Axel stepped around her and threw one of his massively muscled arms across Trevor’s shoulders, dragging him off his bar stool by brute force and rumbling, “Nobody likes a party pooper, man.”
Sympathy for Trevor stabbed her. It wasn’t like anybody ever successfully said no to Axe. He would just pick you up and make you do what he wanted you to. She followed the two men as Axel cheerfully marched Trevor toward the opposite side of the saloon and the big booth Leo Lipinski and Lily Van Dyke were already sitting in.
Leo was the only married guy on the team, although his wife was still living in California and showed no signs of moving across the country to join him any time soon, here in North Carolina.
Lily was the other woman on the team and a great kid. An ex-gymnast, Lily was the smallest, quickest, and most agile of the three women Cal had chosen to be the first female SEALs. She came across as a sweet little thing, but she had steel in her.
Axel shoved Trevor at one of the bench seats, and the Brit staggered forward before regaining his balance. Anna shook her head. Trevor was six-feet of pure muscle, and Axe tossed him around like a rag doll. That guy was an ox. But he was their ox.
Axel gestured at her to slide into the banquette seat after Trevor, and she gulped.
They were colleagues. Just friends. She could do this. Keep it casual. Professional. Do not notice Trevor’s muscular thigh only inches from hers or the way heat poured off of him to envelop her in the tight quarters of the booth.
Axel sat down, casually knocking her across the sticky vinyl and mashing her entire left side against the furnace that was Trevor. Hello, sailor.
“Sorry,” she muttered in his general direction.
“No help for it,” he replied dryly. “Axel’s a mastiff who thinks he’s a Chihuahua.”
Jojo barked at Axel in a high-pitched yap from across the table. Axel wadded a napkin and threw it at Jojo, who snagged the paper missile neatly out of mid-air and sent it back at the bigger man.
Lily, wedged between Leo and Jojo, laughed and warned Axel, “Don’t try to out-throw the Jo. He wasn’t drafted by the NFL for nothing.”
Axel snorted. “Puny human. I could crush him.”
“Oh yeah, Hulk?” Jojo retorted. “Try me.”
Axel half-rose, and Anna took advantage of the moment to claim a little more of the seat and slide a few inches away from Trevor. He threw her a sardonic, sidelong glance, but she studiously ignored it, picking up her shot glass and holding it out to Jojo. While she was at it, she grabbed one of the full shot glasses and slid it in front of Trevor.
He lifted the scotch, sniffed it appreciatively, and then tasted it. His eyes drifted closed in what looked like pure ecstasy. Wowsers. To make him do that in bed…to feel him lose herself in pleasure inside her—
It had been way too long since she’d had herself a man.
Jojo picked up his own shot glass. “A toast,” he announced. “To Sherry Tate for finishing Phase Two of BUD/S. Here’s to her finishing Phase Three.”
Anna joined in the enthusiastic chorus of hooyahs. She was so damned proud of her sister-in-arms she could bust.
“Better her than me,” Lily commented. “I’ll take being trained by you meatheads over going through the formal BUD/S course any time.”
Anna chimed in, “I’ll drink to that.”
Both of them were being trained extremely off the books, in a classified program called Operation Valkyrie, to be Navy SEALs. Meanwhile, their teammate, Sherri Tate, was being extremely publicly trained to be one.
The idea was for Sherri to be a highly visible, non-operational, poster child, and to draw all of the media attention away from Anna and Lily so the two of them could quietly become operational. They would be deployed without America’s adversaries being any the wiser to the presence of women in the SEAL community.
But in talking with Sherry when she came up for air in the rare breaks in her rigorous schedule, it sounded like the guys at Coronado were training her for real. Instead of getting two actual women SEALs and a fake cover story, it looked like Cal Kettering was going to get three women SEALs out of the Valkyrie Ops program.
Because of their exceptional professionalism and general maturity, the Reapers had been specifically chosen to train and work with the first women SEALs. Which the guys in the platoon seemed to see as both a blessing and a curse. Women, because of their unique skill sets, would open up operational opportunities for the Reapers that no other SEAL team had. But…working with women.
It had been a big adjustment for all of them.
Trevor had been outspoken in favor of women Special Forces operators, particularly when they’d first arrived and the other guys had been skeptical. He’d argued that women would be a hell of a force multiplier and able to infiltrate areas of operation unavailable to male soldiers. Not to mention nobody, nowhere, knew to look for women operators. The ladies could slip under the radar in ways men couldn’t.
Thankfully, Anna and the other women had proven him right so far. As they’d started running full combat simulations, the ladies were surprising everyone.
Jojo refilled everyone’s glasses, and Lily lifted hers, saying, “To Sam and Kenny.”
Trevor froze beside Anna. A wave of pain rolled off him so hard it slammed into her like a physical blow and was so intense it stole her breath away. Under the table, she touched his leg just above the knee, lightly, silently questioning if he was all right.
Sam Dorsey and Ken Singleton had been lost on a mission in a Pakistani hellhole called the Swat Valley. They’d been set up. Ambushed by a terrorist named Abu Haddad. Sam had died, and Kenny had been injured. When reinforcements arrived, Kenny had disappeared without a trace. Nobody knew what had happened to him. Which was almost worse than knowing he was dead.
Trevor and Kenny had been close friends. The way she heard it, Ken had adopted the British exchange officer when he’d first arrived and shown the new guy the ropes.
Below the table, warm, strong fingers gave her hand a quick, hard squeeze. Trevor’s hand withdrew, coming up above the table to reach for his shot glass.
A somber mood enveloped everyone in the booth as they raised their glasses and clinked them together. Anna murmured, “To Sam’s puppy dog smile and Ken’s terrible country music lyrics.”
Trevor added, “As my Irish grannie used to say, ‘May they have been an hour in Heaven before the Devil knew they were dead’.” The words were spoken lightly, but she heard the underlying grief. It was rare that he let out his real feelings, let alone ones as raw and painful as these. An urge to throw her arms around him and hug him nearly overcame her.
Leo leaned forward, his face grim. “To revenge.” He’d also been on the disastrous mission where their brothers had been lost. And, he’d been a changed man since he came home, silent and angry.
Anna echoed Leo’s toast along with the others. To revenge, indeed. Every one of them carried a mental bullet with Abu Haddad’s name on it.
Trevor tossed back his scotch, and she caught the odd expression that crossed his face. Over the past year, she’d made a private hobby of studying hi
m when he wasn’t looking at her, or she probably wouldn’t have noticed the faint flicker of…something.
Did it have to do with the shouting match earlier? She hadn’t told any of the Reapers about Trevor and Cal’s argument. Today was a liberty day, and she’d been the only team member on base this afternoon to hear it. She briefly debated bringing it up now, confident the rest of the team would bully him into fessing up to what had gone on in Cal’s office.
But Trevor would not appreciate her airing his personal laundry in front of the others. Even if it was a known fact that SEAL teams had no secrets—both by operational necessity and by the stubborn, unrelenting meddling in one anothers’ lives.
As the level in the bottle of scotch dropped, the joviality and insults around the table increased. Trevor faked enjoying himself beside her, laughing at the jokes and throwing out a few token insults of his own. But she definitely sensed his mood darkening as the evening progressed.
Weird. Trevor wasn’t a mean drunk. He was the guy who always remained smoothly in control, charming and funny right up until the moment he passed out.
She finally leaned close enough to him to smell the expensive cologne he wore when off duty. His tanned neck was right there, all powerful muscles and tendons, ripe for the nibbling. His hair was short for a field operator at the moment, but still longer than military regulation length. Dark waves of it lay soft on his neck, tempting her to run her fingers through it.
She murmured in his ear, “What are you scowling so hard at your scotch for? What did it ever do to you?”
He jumped like she’d hit him with a taser. “Uhh, nothing,” he mumbled. “I’m good.”
“Well, I know you’re good. But that doesn’t answer my question. What’s wrong?”
“Really. I’m fine.”
“Really. That’s bullshit,” she retorted.
He exhaled in annoyance. “Fine. It’s bullshit. I don’t want to talk about it here.”
“Fair enough. Let’s go somewhere else where we can talk.”
