by Cindy Dees
He went very still beneath her. Crap, crap, crap. Had she overstepped her bounds with him? Was she doomed always to stick her foot in her mouth with him? She hated this uncertainty. A little voice in the back of her head warned her she couldn’t hope to sustain a long-term relationship with him if she always had to guard her words and measure what she was going to say before she said it.
Whoa there. Rewind. They’d already agreed there would be no feelings out of this. No relationship.
“Been thinking about my future, have you?” he asked.
What I wouldn’t give to think about our future. Together. “Maybe,” she replied cautiously. “Could you use a spotter?” Or a friend with benefits? A lover? An actual girlfriend, maybe?
He pressed up on an elbow, dumping her on her side and bringing them eye to eye. “You volunteering for the job?”
If only. “Somebody’s got to spot for you.”
“It wouldn’t be a bad idea for you to get sniper training yourself,” he said slowly.
Is there a chance for us, after all? Elation leaped in her gut.
“How are you at mental math?” he asked.
“Fantastic. I won every multiplication bee in the fourth grade.”
He grinned and leaned forward to kiss her fast and hard before pressing to his feet and holding a hand down to her. She took it and he lifted her up into his arms and a long, lingering kiss.
Ohmigod, ohmigod, ohmigod. He wanted more of what they’d just shared. She was sure of it!
“Just promise me one thing, Tessa.”
“What’s that?”
“Don’t fall for me.”
“Why not?” she exclaimed.
“A future together for you and me is not in the cards. We’ll have no control over where we’re sent or how long we’ll be apart. And if we do end up together on a team, we both know this can’t ever happen between us again. I don’t want to see you get hurt. Keep your heart out of this.”
Crushing disappointment slammed into her, so heavy she was having trouble breathing. He was right, of course. But his warning had come too late.
Her heart was already totally involved.
Chapter 11
Beau followed Tessa into the house, admiring the way her tush twitched as she jogged up the steps. One thing he could say about recreating the Medusas—the scenery would be a whole lot better with them around.
But the other complications...not so much. He knew better than to have sex with her. Mistake. Mistake. Mistake!
But what an incredible mistake. Sex with her had been every bit as great as he’d imagined, and he had a terrific imagination.
He should have expected the adrenaline high to hit them both after the fight with the Kimballs. But it had totally broadsided him. It hadn’t dawned on him that Tessa would experience the same rush of driving lust and need for release after the fight. Sure, after a dicey patrol, all the guys wanted to find the first willing female and get laid. But who knew a woman would react the exact same way?
He wouldn’t be reporting that little detail to Torsten.
The sex was all his fault. He should have seen it coming and headed it off. But he’d been completely unable and unwilling to corral his lust and resist her. Not that he was having any success working up even a smidgeon of real regret for having had that outrageous sex with her.
But therein lay the problem. It hadn’t been just sex for him. No matter how vehemently he swore that it was just physical, that there would be no emotional involvement, and that it meant nothing, his gut warned him it wasn’t that simple. Not for him, and not for Tessa.
He was neither stupid nor unobservant. They had more simmering between them than just smoking-hot sex. They connected. Hell, they fit each other. Not just physically. She got him. Knew how he thought. Understood his world better than any woman he’d even been around. And that was only going to intensify as she continued her training.
Grimly, he helped her unpack the groceries and stack cans in the cupboards. He caught Tessa studying him thoughtfully, and an urge to kiss her until she couldn’t think straight enough to psychoanalyze him came over him.
Irritated with himself, he went outside, picked up a paint scraper, climbed a ladder and vented his frustration on the wood siding of the house. He might as well keep doing repairs on the place while he was here. Get a head start on your retirement, a voice in his head commented bitterly.
Tessa came outside wearing that sexy little muscle shirt she’d had on the day he brought her here. Without speaking to him, she picked up the other paint scraper, and silently got to work below him. The view down the front of her tank top was spectacular. Her breasts were round and full, and he knew now exactly how those berry-ripe nipples pressing against the thin cotton tasted.
Aww, hell. The whole point of coming out here to work was to distract himself from having more sex with her. Now he wasn’t going to get any relief from his fixation on that.
What was she doing out here? Was this a demonstration that she could separate work and play as well as the next guy? Or was it a blatant reminder to him of how irresistible she was? Surely, she wasn’t trying to get inside his head and mess with him...or was she? If so, it was damned well working.
He thought about her every waking second. If he wasn’t thinking about the many ways he’d like to have sex with her, he was thinking about her training. The multiple trains of thought in his head—what she would need to know to survive and not mess up a Special Forces team, how to find a way to wash her out of training, and how to talk her out of being a Medusa were mentally exhausting to juggle. The end result was that his whole world revolved around her.
He understood that her whole world had to revolve around him. He was the final arbiter of whether or not she got to pursue her most cherished dream. He knew now just how bad she wanted to be a Medusa—as much or more than any man he’d ever seen come through the pipeline, in fact. His resolve to rip her dream away from her actually wavered now and then in the face of her desperate desire to succeed.
Worse, he was reluctantly forced to agree with Gunnar Torsten. She’d been born to be a Medusa. If any woman on earth existed who was more suited to it than she was, he had a hard time believing it.
Of course they’d eventually given in and had sex with each other. The intensity of what they were doing out here combined with being in close quarters with each other 24/7 had made it pretty much inevitable. It was no use beating himself up over it. The sex had happened. It had been freaking awesome. And now it was over. Itch scratched. Box checked. Case closed.
He glanced down at Tessa, scraping the siding vigorously below him, and the sight of her breasts jiggling with her effort all but knocked him off the ladder.
Who was he kidding? He wanted to have sex with her again. And next time they would do it right. In a bed. Naked. Take their time—
Negative. Not happening. Nope, nope, nope.
What did she think about all of this, anyway? He would be interested to know.
Which was weird as all get-out for him. He’d never paid attention to what any woman thought before. Sure, he picked them up in bars on the rare Saturday night he had off, and he liked sex as much as the next guy, but he’d never had any reason to care seriously what was going on inside one’s head or heart.
Tessa worked hard on the siding with him. Whether she was working off stress of her own or engaging in her usual feminist competition to keep up with him, he couldn’t say. But they finished scraping the entire house before the light began to fail.
Plenty of time for him to come to the reluctant conclusion that his original plan of action was still the right one. Today’s encounter with Tessa on the dock had cemented his certainty that he was terrified of her becoming a Medusa, in spite of the fact that she actually could do the job.
He had to convince Tessa to quit. Now, before she went and go
t herself killed. Because like it or not, the idea of her going out in the field and dying was completely unacceptable to him.
Grimly, he formulated a plan. He would put it into motion at supper.
Forcing his mind away from kissing her—which was no easy feat—he sat down across from her at the kitchen table. “Talk to me about today’s incident,” he said.
She glanced at him sidelong, and his groin stirred hopefully. Down, boy.
“Well,” she said lightly, “the sex was a bit slow to get going, but once you figured out which widget went where, you were a reasonably quick learner—”
He cut her off. “Very funny. Talk to me about the Kimball fight.”
“What do you want to know?”
He studied her closely. “How did you drop those guys? I was tied up with the two who jumped me and didn’t see what you did.”
She shrugged, a quick flex of leaned, sharply defined shoulder muscles, and even that casual movement was sexy.
She explained, “I shoved the cart into one’s gut so I only had to fight one on one. Then I kicked Jimbo in the knee and followed up with a punch to the solar plexus. When he doubled over, I broke his nose.”
“You dropped Jimbo Kimball just like that? The dude’s twice your size and tough as nails.”
“I tried to tell you I had martial arts training, but you wouldn’t listen. You were busy going all caveman, protect-the-little-woman on me.”
Chagrin coursed through him. She was, of course, correct. “We may have a bit of a problem with the Kimball boys going forward. People who cross them have a history of going missing or turning up dead.”
“I have heard that tends to happen around meth dealers,” she commented drily.
“What makes you think they’re dealing meth?” he asked curiously. The Kimballs had been hard drinkers and pot smokers in high school, but they hadn’t messed with the hard stuff.
“Did you see their mouths?” Tessa retorted. “Meth rots teeth. Not to mention I smelled lye on their clothes. Sodium hydroxide is one of the main ingredients in production of methamphetamine. Trust me. They’re cooking meth.”
“And you know the smell of a meth lab how?”
Her gaze slid away from his. “Let’s just say my mom didn’t have the greatest taste in guys.”
Ahh. The crappy boyfriends who’d made her so hinky about men. Anger seethed in his gut on behalf of the scared, victimized little girl she must have been. A need to track down those old boyfriends of her mom’s and beat the snot out of them made his fists clench.
Although, had it not been for those jerks, Tessa probably wouldn’t be sitting here beside him today. He supposed that, in point of fact, he owed them a thank-you...and then he would beat the snot out of them.
“How do you know the Kimball boys?” Tessa asked, startling him out of his violent thoughts.
“Went to school with a couple of them.”
“Hah. So this is your hometown!” she exclaimed.
“I grew up in this house. My grandparents raised me here. How else do you think I knew of its existence, way out here in the middle of the swamp?”
It was the one place on earth he’d been loved and happy and safe. Not that he was going to share something personal like that with her. She was already way too far inside his head. He was not letting her in any further.
“Problem is, the Kimball boys also know where this place is,” he explained.
Tessa leaped to the obvious conclusion. “Which means we should be expecting them to show up and try to finish the fight from the grocery store.”
He shrugged. “They don’t take kindly to losing nor to being made to look foolish. We handed them both today. It’s not going to sit well with them that we kicked their asses so publicly.”
“Still. That was fun. Admit it.” Tessa grinned over at him, and he couldn’t help grinning back. Hell, yeah, it had been fun.
“What’s the plan?” she asked. “We gonna set up a watch rotation?”
“Yup. Do you want the first watch?” he asked Tessa as the deep dark of night settled around them.
“I don’t care.”
“Always take first watch if you have a choice,” he instructed. “It allows you to get a longer block of uninterrupted sleep later during the hours of the night when your Circadian rhythms think you should be sleeping.”
“Okay, then. First watch it is for me.”
* * *
A hand over his mouth yanked him to full consciousness and battle alert sometime later. He heard immediately what had caused Tessa to wake him. A boat motor was approaching. Even as he listened, it cut off. But too late. The Kimball boys had made their first tactical mistake.
Second mistake: they appeared to be headed for the dock. He’d told Tessa the Kimballs would be that obvious in their approach, and she had argued that they wouldn’t be that arrogant or ignorant. He glanced over at her in triumph now, and she just shook her head in disgust.
Mistake number two meant the Kimball boys were about to make mistake number three: walking right into the thick of the traps he and Tessa had laid for them. This should be fun.
Tessa crawled over to the smaller of the two sniper rigs with a rubber round already chambered in the weapon. Rubber bullets would stop a target and cause a fair amount of blunt impact trauma, but they weren’t made to kill a person.
He picked up the shotgun lying at the ready and chambered a beanbag round quietly. Then he picked up a spotter’s scope and dialed in the distance to the south end of the peninsula where the Kimballs were about to get several nasty shocks.
The first tripwire beyond the dock was simple. Each end of it was attached to a big cluster of stinging nettles that would be dragged in on the members of party behind the first guy whose boot caught the wire.
Sure enough, in a few seconds, sounds of thrashing drifted on the still night air to the hide. Tessa grinned beside him.
Next up was a pile of rolling logs in the path. Another simple trap, but effective, particularly for half-drunk bubbas stumbling around in the dark without night vision equipment. The trap sprung, several logs rolled into the path and muffled swearing erupted this time. It sounded like all of the Kimball boys were here. No one had stayed behind with the boat. Mistake number four.
A voice complained clearly in the darkness, “Jeebus, Jimbo. Git off me.”
“If you see the bastard, shoot ’im. Hurt ’im but don’t kill ’im. We’s gonna have ourselves some fun first.”
Beau’s humor evaporated. So. That was how they wanted to play it, huh? The older Kimball, Travis, came into view in his scope. Range: sixty yards. Zero windage. Elevation: effectively nil. He flashed the numbers to Tessa by way of hand signals, and she flashed them back in confirmation. He nodded and she dialed in her sight. She could take this shot blindfolded, but treating easy shots the exact same way as hard shots helped build good shooting habits.
The Kimballs staggered clear of the logs a little farther to the right than he and Tessa had planned for. She corrected her aim slightly, and he signaled her to take the shot. The report of her weapon rang out, followed by a yelp from Virgil, one of the middle brothers.
“I’m freaking shot!” Virgil cried.
“Very funny, Lambert!” Jimbo shouted. “I’m gonna break yer damned kneecaps, and then let your girlfriend seduce me instead.”
Beau’s jaw hardened. Jimbo was going to regret that comment.
Tessa chambered another round, sliding the bolt closed quietly. Beau held up a hand, signaling her to wait. She nodded and settled into the motionless waiting state of a sniper.
The boys took a half dozen steps, right into the sweet spot of the log that was going to swing down out of the tree tops and slam them all into the swamp right...about...now.
The crash was spectacular as all four Kimball boys were swept off their feet and into
the swamp. They came up sputtering and cursing, and handguns glinted dully in the scant moonlight.
“Weapons,” he breathed into his throat microphone.
“Roger,” she replied in a bare whisper.
Okay, fun and games over. Beau picked up his shotgun and sighted in on the first Kimball splashing ashore. He murmured low to Tessa, “Fire at will.”
She pegged Virgil again, but this time the guy fell to his knees, clutching at his throat. Ouch. Tessa was not playing nice anymore. For his part, he aimed at Jimbo’s crotch and nailed the eldest Kimball in the junk with a beanbag round. It would hit with the force of a prize fighter burying a fist with all his might into the guy’s crotch. Jimbo doubled over gasping like a chicken with its neck half wrung. Beau reloaded quickly, and Tessa did the same beside him.
They peppered the Kimballs for about the next sixty chaotic seconds as it slowly dawned on the Kimballs that they were under actual attack. The brothers clustered together back to back, peering into the darkness without the benefit of night vision devices.
His and Tessa’s superior technology, training and teamwork spelled big trouble for the Kimball boys. Tough. They were thugs and bullies. High time someone gave them a little taste of their own medicine.
Beau jumped to his feet and ran to the second firing position as a gunshot rang out over his head. He was reluctant to fire live rounds because, unlike the Kimball boys, neither he nor Tessa would miss.
“I’m running low on rubber ammo,” she transmitted under a round of noisy gunfire from the Kimballs.
“Go long for the pass,” Beau murmured.
He lay down, covering fire of fast, continuous shots from the second sniper rig and glimpsed the lime-green blob of Tessa running low to the right as she left the primary hide and headed for her secondary firing position.
As she reached an opening in the trees, he lobbed a spare mag of rubber rounds her way. “Ammo incoming,” he announced.
