by Cindy Dees
Wow. Just...wow. This was really happening. Elation leaped in her belly.
Beau took a deep breath, and she tuned in past her exultation. Whatever he was about to say next was important to him, and she listened with every ounce of her attention. “Look, Tessa. I’m coming off an injury. Trying to get myself back into fighting shape.”
His injury wasn’t news to her. “I actually have some expertise with rehabbing injuries. If you’d let me help you, I think we can get your knee up to speed.”
“What can you do that the docs haven’t already done?” he asked bitterly.
“I have specialized training in soft tissue rehab. Breaking up scar tissue. And I have a ton of training in functional strength and flexibility. Stuff beyond what most physical therapists study.”
He stared at her a long time and then nodded once.
She knew it for the giant concession that it was and nodded back.
He said, “I’m going to push through my conditioning regimen, and if you can keep up with me, then you’re good enough physically to be a Medusa. Fair?”
“Fair,” she replied, surprised. And more than she’d expected from him, given his obvious distaste for the idea of women operators.
“We’ll have to figure out the rest of it as we go along.”
Her initial gut reaction was to be suspicious. Figure out what?
“Make no mistake, Wilkes. I’m not here to hold your hand. When you can’t hack it, you’re done.”
Was he hinting that he planned to wash her out no matter how she performed? She frowned, alarmed. Surely, he was going to give her a fighting chance to succeed. Wasn’t he?
Something gradually shifted between them as she stared at him and he stared back. It stopped being about her future and started being about the crackling attraction between them. The invisible rope drawing them closer was back, electric and alive, coiling between them. It was fascinating and dangerous.
A huge crash of thunder made her jump, and it effectively broke the intense sexual tension of the moment.
“Right, then. G’night, Tessa.”
“’Night, Beau.”
He retreated, leaving the warm, golden glow of the lamp behind. She stripped off her damp pants and shirt and laid them out carefully to dry overnight. Until she got some more clothes, these were all she had, and it was important to take care of them. She was tempted to jam the chair underneath her doorknob but forcibly restrained herself from doing it. It wasn’t like he was a specialist at breaching locked doors or anything.
She stretched out on the thin foam bedroll that had been strapped to the bottom of her rucksack. Laying it over the bed springs made for a reasonably comfortable bed. She was exhausted but found herself lying awake listening to the rainstorm roll in.
One day down. Who knew how many more to go. Not that it mattered. She would take each one as it came.
* * *
Beau retreated to his bedroom and leaned against the closed door to catch his breath. This was a nightmare. Every minute he was alone with her and not tromping around in a swamp, he was thinking about bedding her.
Too restless to sleep yet, he stepped out into the hallway and stared at Tessa’s door in supreme frustration. It didn’t help matters that he knew she wanted him every bit as much as he wanted her.
But that would ruin everything. His career. His future. The trust Gunnar Torsten had in him.
He grabbed a towel and all but ran down the hall to the back door, bursting outside just as the skies opened up and a torrent of rain poured down. He stripped off his clothes, stepped into the rain, and let it sluice down over his raging body.
He threw his head back and let the rain strike his face. It ran down his body, washing the day’s sweat and grime off of him, and blessedly cooling off his ardor. A little.
He ran up onto the porch, shivering, and grabbed the towel. He rubbed himself dry briskly, and damned if his body wasn’t stirring again already at the mere thought of Tessa, warm and soft inside the house. He seriously didn’t need to spend all night standing out here in the rain, but he might just have no choice if he couldn’t calm his body the hell down.
He sighed and pulled on his pants. There was one surefire cure for this driving need of his. And he’d been avoiding it all day.
He sat down on the porch swing and pulled out his cell phone, a snazzy signal-boosted model that got coverage via satellite anywhere on earth. He dialed Gunnar Torsten’s number and waited grimly for his boss to pick up.
“Hey, Beau. Little late for you to be calling in, isn’t it?” Torsten said.
“I didn’t wake you up, did I?” Beau asked in surprise. It was barely 9:00 p.m. on the West Coast.
“Not even close. How’s your girl?”
Tessa was not his girl! It was on the tip of his tongue to say so—forcefully—but he expected that protesting too hard on the subject would only raise questions he didn’t want to answer.
“How did your first day of training go with Lieutenant Wilkes?” Torsten asked.
“It went.” He added reluctantly, “You weren’t wrong that she’s got no quit in her. I dragged her up and down the beach for nearly two hours, and she barely missed a step. Hell, I was sucking wind. But she didn’t utter a single word of complaint.”
“I told you she was good,” Torsten said archly.
“That doesn’t mean she’ll make it,” Beau snapped back. “Just because she can run doesn’t mean a damned thing.”
“How’s she doing mentally?” Torsten asked.
“She’s thrilled at the idea of becoming a Medusa,” he reported sourly.
“How’s she relating to you?”
“Uhh, we’re getting along okay,” he answered. God, he hoped that didn’t sound evasive.
“Still convinced women can’t be special operators?” Torsten asked.
“More than ever, sir.”
“I thought you said she did fine.”
Beau scowled at the black night beyond the porch. “I did,” he ground out.
“But?” Torsten demanded.
He huffed. “But it’s weird working with a woman.”
“Define weird.”
“I dunno,” he mumbled. “Weird. The whole boy-girl dynamic being inserted into our ops is going to be a problem.”
A long silence greeted his observation.
Then Torsten asked, “You gonna have a problem keeping it professional between you?”
“Of course not!” Beau lied. “I’m just saying that I can see where attraction and sex are potentially going to get in the way of—” he searched for a word “—morale,” he finally came up with.
Torsten sighed. “I was afraid of that.” A pause, then, “You’ve got to find a way to work around it, Lambo. I’m counting on you. You’re going to have to teach all the other instructors who work with the new Medusa team how to work around it, too.”
“Are you kidding me?” Beau demanded. The words were out of his mouth before he could stop them from tumbling out.
Torsten replied, “Men worked successfully with the Medusas for years. We can do it again. You just have to see them as colleagues and not sex objects.”
He sighed. “I’m trying. I’m just new to this coed Special Forces idea.”
“You’ll get the hang of it, Beau,” Torsten said in a placating tone.
“Look, boss. You’re the one who stuck me out here with her in the middle of nowhere. And you know how she looks. You had to know this was going to come up at some point.”
Torsten sighed. “Yes, I did.”
Hah. So he wasn’t a complete schmuck for noticing that Tessa Wilkes was hot!
Torsten asked, “Has Lieutenant Wilkes shown any discomfort at being alone with you?”
Discomfort? That surprised him. “What do you mean?” Beau asked.
�
��Discomfort. Fear. Trepidation. Nervousness.”
“Why?” Beau followed up, not seeing what he was getting at.
Torsten said reluctantly, “Lieutenant Wilkes is known to have a rather negative history with men. Does she seem uncomfortable or afraid of being alone with you?”
He flashed back to her brazenly stripping in front of him in the motel room, and then that sexy as hell wake-up the morning after where she practically crawled all over him. “Nope. No discomfort,” he answered.
“Huh. Interesting.”
Now, why in the hell was that? He half listened as Torsten gave him instructions for the next few days’ worth of training. Beau disconnected the call, still mulling over why Tessa Wilkes, badass extraordinaire, would be afraid of men.
Chapter 7
Tessa woke to a muffled moan that made her blood run cold. She lay perfectly still, assessing and listening. A few raindrops slapped her window. Surely, that wasn’t what had jerked her from a dead sleep so abruptly.
There it was again. A low groan.
Crap. Beau.
She exploded to her feet and was across the hall in a single breath. Crouching low, she eased open his door and spun into his room, ready to hurt whoever was messing with her teammate.
His room was dark, but her night-adjusted vision aggressively probed every shadow for the problem. No visible intruder. A movement, and she lasered in on it. Mattress. In the corner. Thrashing. Another moan.
She exhaled in relief. Beau was having a bad dream. Jeez, he’d scared her there for a minute. She moved over to the mattress on the floor and knelt beside it.
“Beau,” she whispered. “Wake up.”
She expected him to jolt awake as sharply as she had, but he didn’t. He flung an arm toward her and then rolled onto his back, his hands twitching. “Oh, my God,” he groaned. “No.”
He sounded like he’d just watched his best friend die horribly. Her heart ached for his pain. She reached out to touch his shoulder.
Beau’s hands whipped out, grabbing her around the neck and throwing her down with shocking violence. He was on top of her, strangling her, so fast she hardly knew what had happened. Terror exploded in a red mist behind her eyeballs.
“Beau,” she rasped, barely able to make a sound past the vise around her neck. Instinct warned her against fighting back. He would meet aggression with even more aggression. But she couldn’t help herself. She panicked. No matter how hard she thrashed or kicked or swung her fists at him, his hands tightened more and more around her neck.
His heavy body pinned hers down. She was ten years old again, and he was a full-grown man. Spots danced before her eyes and her vision narrowed down to an even darker tunnel within the shadows of his room. Must. Break. Free.
Desperate and near passing out, she went entirely limp in his grasp. Maybe if his dreaming mind thought he’d killed her he would let go of her neck so she could breathe.
His fingers loosened and she sucked in a gasping breath.
Black eyes glared down at her grimly. Beau was awake.
Now he woke up...after he’d half killed her!
She glared back at him, throat aching, still gasping for oxygen. Eventually, it dawned on her that he was straddling her hips. And sheesh, it was suggestive. His thighs were powerful against hers, his bare chest impossibly broad and muscular.
Her panting began to take on a faint sexual undertone.
The expression in his eyes changed, shifting from angry, to wry, to more thoughtful than could possibly be good for her. Darned if that man didn’t seem to have a gift for peering straight into her soul.
He had no business poking in her private thoughts and fears. Her personal stuff was, well, personal. It had nothing to do with her becoming a Medusa—
Fine. It did to the extent that it had motivated her to become the powerful, self-reliant woman she was today. But that was it.
He knew. Somehow, Beau knew about her childhood fear of being molested. Anger abruptly supplanted her residual terror at nearly being strangled.
Surely, he hadn’t attacked her intentionally. He’d been asleep for crying out loud. Belligerence flared in her gut. His attack had better not have been intentional. She was going to have a serious problem with him if that nightmare had been a ruse so he could assault her.
“What the hell are you doing in my room?” Beau growled.
She thrashed, trying to throw him off and free herself, but he grabbed her shoulders and forcibly held her down. The ease with which he did it threatened to overwhelm her aggravation and turn it back into abject fear.
She ground out, “I was trying to wake you up from a nightmare, you butthead. But then you attacked me.”
“You know better than to grab a sleeping Spec Ops guy.”
“I only touched your shoulder.”
“You should’ve put your hand over my mouth. I’d have known it was a teammate. Or you could’ve touched me on the foot and stood back.”
She nodded. Next time she wouldn’t forget.
Her gaze dropped to his glorious, shirtless chest. The sprinkling of hair was just right, not too much and not too little. It was tempting to offer to help him forget his nightmare, but she wasn’t that cheesy, and he was her instructor. Not to mention, the military took a dim view of superiors sleeping with their subordinates under any circumstances.
Anyway, it wasn’t her job to fix his nightmares.
“You’re thinking hella loud, Wilkes.”
Drat. She was back to being Wilkes. “Sometimes I think too much,” she mumbled. “It would be nice if there was an off switch for my brain.”
“Ain’t that the truth,” he agreed wryly.
Her gaze kept sliding down his torso, taking in his rock-solid body and sharply cut muscles. It was a fight not to put her hands on him.
“You’re gonna have to quit looking at me like that,” he said grimly.
“Sorry. It has been a while since I’ve been around a shirtless guy.”
“What the hell are you talking about? Didn’t Torsten put you in the same dorm with your male classmates? You were there for months.”
“Yes, he did. But those were my classmates, and we were so miserable and focused on surviving from one minute to the next that I had no time to register them as male, let alone as sexy males.”
“A) Thank you for thinking I’m sexy. B) We’re going to have to figure out this male-female thing if you expect to go operational. One of my taskings was to figure out how to work with women so I can teach other guys how to do it. Clearly, this is going to be an issue.”
It was easy to forget how smart special operators were. After a day like today, the tendency was to focus on what a physical beast Beau was and to discount the keen observational skills and insightful analytical processes he also possessed.
His gaze had wandered downward, taking in her braless state and her skimpy tank top. The man had to be getting a heck of a view. But with her arms pinned at her sides, it wasn’t like she could cover herself. Not that she would, anyway. If he wanted to look, who was she to stop him? She wasn’t going to cut off her breasts like Viking warrior women had supposedly done. She was beginning to understand why they’d done it, though.
Abruptly, Beau pushed up and away from her, rising to his feet. He flexed his right knee and winced. If rising from a crouch to his feet hurt, that meant he had a hamstring issue on top of his knee problems. Probably wasn’t stretching his hammies enough.
She stood up, as well. And suddenly, they were chest to chest in the dark. Rain pattered against the window, and thunder rumbled low in the distance. It was a night made for sex. Slow and sensual, to the sound of the rain. And they were here. Alone. In the dark. In the middle of the night. Scantily clad. Standing so close she could feel his body heat against her skin. Just the two of them and the rain.
“Jeez, Wilkes
,” he muttered, taking a quick step back. “Sit over there.” He pointed at the chair in the far corner.
She watched him light a hurricane lamp on the tiny table in the corner. His back muscles flexed in an anatomy chart display that was mesmerizing. Only when he started to turn around to face her did she move over to the chair he’d indicated.
He wanted her out of arm’s—and temptation’s—reach, did he? It was gratifying to know he wasn’t the only one struggling with this thing between them.
He slid down the wall to his mattress on the floor, his good leg bent at the knee, an elbow propped casually on it. Now that the room was lit, she noticed the titanium brace encasing his bad knee, stretched out straight in front of him. Thank God today hadn’t been a walk in the park for him, either.
She sank gingerly onto the rickety chair.
“So what are you going to do in the future when you’re attracted to a guy your team is working with?” he asked her baldly.
She shrugged. “I’ll do what everyone in the workplace does about it. I’ll follow regulations and keep things professional.”
“Military men and women date off duty all the time,” he replied. “What if you want to be with a teammate off the clock?”
Her pulse just jumped by about fifty beats per minute. Was he suggesting that they should date off the clock? Hoo baby. Sign her up! Aloud, she asked cautiously, “Are you suggesting the Medusas create a flat no-military-dating policy?” she responded.
Talk about thinking loudly. She could hear his mental wheels spinning at near supersonic speed in response to her question.
At length, he replied heavily, “I don’t see how to handle it any other way.”
