Lit Fuse

by Caisey Quinn

  Damn Luke and his smooth-talking, tell-me-all-your-secrets shit. Chase had spilled his guts to Luke last weekend when he couldn’t sleep. Divulging the truth about what had happened with Viv—Private Brooks—had almost felt good, but then Aiden had walked in, and he’d had to retell the scandalous story, minus the details he would forever keep to himself. It almost felt like he’d betrayed her confidence. But the shit was keeping him up at night and getting it off his chest had provided a modicum of relief.

  “At least give us an update on how it’s going,” Luke prompted. “Have you addressed the issue with her? Or with your CO? I mean, it’s not like you slept with a subordinate intentionally.”

  Too exhausted from a full day on base and his run to argue, Chase dropped into a chair and popped the top from an amber bottle of Yuengling. His favorite beer—another sign they were working him over for info.

  “Every day I spend four hours in a classroom trying not to think of how good she felt, of every sound she made. I try not to fucking inhale near her so I don’t get a whiff of her scent and turn into a goddamn bloodhound. Then I spend another two hours training her in a lab barely as big as this room on how not to blow herself and everyone around her up while my brain calculates the many, many scenarios in which I could carry her off and ravish her caveman-style in every possible location on base.” Chase took a long pull from his bottle while his roommates let that sink in. “So how do you think it’s going?”

  Aiden shook his head. “That’s rough, man.”

  Chase grunted. Bitching about things wouldn’t make the situation any better. He’d learned that lesson long ago. In this case, there was literally no solution that involved him getting what he wanted. All he could do was white-knuckle it through the next nine weeks and pray she got stationed somewhere far, far, from his reach.

  Luke let out a low whistle as he retrieved a grease-covered piece of meat lover’s from the cardboard box. “So she wasn’t just a quick fuck then, right? Tell me you realize this.”

  Chase shrugged. “Does it matter? I’m her CO, Foster. You know what that means.”

  Luke’s brows lowered. “I’m just saying, obviously you’re into her and you already know you’re physically compatible. Clearly you have shared interests, which is why she’s in your unit. So other than obtaining clearance from your CO or having the patience to wait until she’s not under your command, I don’t see what the problem is.”

  “Physically compatible and shared interests? You planning to start a matchmaking website?” He gave Luke a hard time but all of this had already occurred to Chase. On a daily basis. Vivien Brooks was damn near perfect. He knew no one was perfect, but she was perfect for him. He picked at his pizza like a chick on a first date.

  “Just saying,” Luke answered, unfazed.

  “Thanks for the analysis.” Luke wasn’t entirely wrong. But there were plenty of problems. The main one being he had to wrestle with the urge to grab her and demand answers from her pouty pink lips every day. “But you’re forgetting one major element, Foster.”

  Luke tossed him a smug smirk over his beer. “Yeah? What’s that?”

  Chase swallowed his meaty, cheesy bite along with his pride. “She’s not into me, apparently. It was a one and done and she hasn’t so much as looked at me twice since.”

  “I call bullshit,” Luke said on a laugh. “Women are just better at being subtle than men. My money says she’s already imagined fucking you in that classroom half a dozen ways to Sunday but you’re oblivious.”

  “Call it what you want,” Chase said with a shrug. “But she’s either not into me or a fortress of steel, because I’m telling you, she hasn’t batted an eyelash and we spend hours talking about explosives. Detonating, release, and so on. It’s inadvertently sexual enough that I picture her . . . well, none of your fucking business what I picture. But she is the perfect student. She answers every question correctly, follows protocol like a damn robot, and not once has she so much as flinched when I’ve been within touching distance.” He shoved his pizza away, having lost his appetite. “If I didn’t know better, I’d think I imagined the major attraction between us.”

  “Maybe you were a lousy lay,” Aiden offered through a mouthful of pizza.

  Chase slugged him hard in the arm. “I was an amazing lay, motherfucker. She just . . .”

  She’d come. Twice. Said it was the best dream ever. But he’d woken up alone.

  Somehow she’d twisted him into a pretzel and mind-warped him into some role-reversal shit where he was the woman sitting around bitching with his girlfriends about why she never called and she was the dude pretending what had happened hadn’t meant shit.

  Maybe it hadn’t to her. She’d told him it was a one-night fling and she’d more than proved that she’d meant it. It was a depressing thought. With every other woman, he’d hoped for a clean break. No complications. Now, for once in his life, Chase wanted complicated. He wanted to know what kind of music she liked. What her favorite food was. What pissed her off. What made her laugh. What made her her.

  Aiden took a long swallow of his beer. “Annalise is coming for a visit next weekend. Maybe some female perspective would help.”

  Chase raised his eyebrows suggestively at Aiden.

  “On your situation, dickhead. Not on whether or not you’re a lousy lay,” Aiden clarified. “Touch my sister and it’ll be the last thing you do with both hands attached to your body. Might be kind of hard to defuse IEDs without hands.”

  Chase laughed but his eyes met Luke’s across the table. Something akin to worry forced the other man’s gaze away.

  Well, well, Chase thought to himself. Maybe old Silver Tongue has some secrets of his own.

  That night Chase lay awake contemplating his options.

  He needed answers. He had ideas about how to get them. But there were lines and limits and professional protocols he should follow.

  The first two weeks were mostly classroom and lab training. The next six would be in the field in open scenarios. More space to distance himself from Vivien Brooks. Or . . . he tried not to picture it, but it was too late. More space could mean more time alone with her without an audience.

  His dick twitched in response to the suggestive thought.

  Time alone with her was far more dangerous than any combination of explosives.

  7

  Vivien felt like a kid on the first day of school. Well, sort of. Minus the whole accidentally hooking up with a teacher the night before class started thing.

  She shined her boots and ironed her uniform in the barracks, all while contemplating how much she couldn’t wait for Corporal Fisk to see her skills in action. IED defusing skills, that was. She had to remind her brain not to conjure any images of the many other skills she’d yet to show him.

  When she finished this training she’d go from Private First Class to Specialist. From a lowly E-3 grunt to an E-4. Higher pay, more prestige and respect. And yet, none of those things were what had her amped up about training every day.

  How a man she hadn’t even known existed three weeks ago had suddenly planted himself at the center of her universe was beyond her. But she didn’t like it. Thankfully, she was getting out of that godforsaken classroom, where she was suffocating in his sharp, clean male soap and expensive cologne scent, where her eyes involuntarily cataloged his every movement, where memories of how good it had felt when he’d moved inside her plagued her every thought.

  Once she was suited up, she practically skipped to the rally point where the class would meet. It was three miles from her dorm but she didn’t care. Burning off the excess energy was good for her. She still arrived half an hour early for the first demonstration.

  Unsurprisingly, Corporal Fisk was already there, setting up the demonstration stations with two other uniformed men. She gave him the greeting protocol dictated but he only nodded and said, “At ease,” before
returning to his work. She’d beaten him to class a few times in the past two weeks, and she suspected it had become somewhat of a pissing contest for the two of them—seeing who was more efficient, who was the more dedicated soldier. In fact, nearly everything seemed to be a competition. The way he seemed to be purposely asking questions he didn’t think she’d know the answer to, the way she answered with much more detail than was necessary, and the fact that he refused to praise her knowledge the way he did other students. He pushed her harder than the rest of the class, she realized. And she pushed right back.

  One of them would break eventually.

  She just wasn’t sure how long it would take.

  Never in her life did defusing explosives seem safer than dealing with a man or even an ex-lover. Yet now it did. Now she longed to get her hands on the equipment, to find release in neutralizing a threat, to be in familiar territory instead of stumbling around like a lovesick—or maybe it was lust sick—idiot who had to monitor her thoughts every second so they didn’t spill out of her mouth.

  Once the rest of the class had arrived at the training field, Corporal Fisk addressed them formally.

  “Despite what you may have seen on television or at the movies, bomb defusing and detonating is not a one-man show. EOD technicians work in three-man teams, in which he or she who wears the protective suit takes the lead,” Corporal Fisk began. “The suit alone weighs nearly one hundred pounds and you will need help getting it on and off. Each of you will get an opportunity to wear it this week.”

  The entire class stood at attention and Vivien reminded herself that he had a commanding presence because of his position and not because he’d commanded multiple orgasms from her body.

  She clenched her jaw and stared straight ahead while standing in formation as he continued. “Behind me is Private First Class Marcus James and Corporal Andrew Sullivan. If this were a real live threat, we’d have a security team in place as well. Kind of hard to watch your six when you’re taking bombs apart. Today, however, we’re just demonstrating the roles of each team member.”

  He walked back and forth between them, breaking them into groups of three while continuing to list the details of the exercise.

  His voice does not make my ovaries quiver. Ovaries cannot quiver. Focus, Brooks.

  “A couple of key points to keep in mind. One, when the EOD tech arrives, the chain of command changes. It doesn’t matter if there are higher-ranking soldiers present. If there is a threat involving explosives, the EOD tech will be the one giving the orders. Unless someone wants to risk being blown sky fucking high, no one will question that. Two, for those of you who find yourselves in positions where you work with civilians, it’s important to remember that we have no authority over them and must rely on local law enforcement to secure the area in these situations.”

  Corporal Fisk didn’t assign her a three-man team and he didn’t look at her when he passed where she stood. He just continued his lecture as if she were invisible. Vivien’s body heated, and not from the South Carolina sun. Anger proceeded to raise her blood pressure as he steadily ignored her.

  “The suits we have available today are demonstration suits used for training purposes only and don’t include the battery-operated cooling system most of the newer ones have, so I don’t recommend remaining in them for long. Get it on; get a feel for it. Several layers of plastic, Kevlar, and foam are insulating you against potential blast wave damage. Go ahead and choose the team member who will wear it to complete the exercise. Execute your plan and remove the suit as soon as possible.”

  He listed some additional precautions about avoiding heatstroke while wearing the suit in Middle Eastern deserts and so on, but Vivien’s focus was gone. The bastard was intentionally leaving her out of the exercise she’d been looking forward to since the day she enlisted. She narrowed her gaze, glaring at him in an attempt to read his thoughts and understand what the purpose for her intentional exclusion was. Her fellow soldiers already thought she was a know-it-all and as one of only four women in a group of twenty-six, she felt excluded enough as it was.

  She surveyed the open training field. Nine stations were set up several feet apart. So there was no shortage there that would warrant her sitting out. Feeling like the last kid chosen for dodgeball, Vivien raised her hand to shoulder height when her unit began breaking into groups and heading to their stations.

  “Private Brooks?”

  “Sir, I wasn’t assigned to a group, sir.” She snapped her jaw shut to keep from replacing sir with asshole.

  “My apologies, Private Brooks. I should’ve clarified. Corporal Sullivan will be working with another team today. You’re with me.”

  She forced him to meet her stare. He’d done it on purpose, she suspected. Made her sweat. Or maybe he was showing her special treatment due to her previous training and didn’t want to alienate her from the class any further. She wasn’t sure. She wanted to ask. Her ability to keep her mouth shut and follow orders from this particular man was wearing dangerously thin.

  Luckily Private James was part of their three-man team as well, so she kept her professional filter on for the time being.

  She and Corporal Fisk helped Private James into the suit and began analyzing their threat. It was a simple scenario—mysterious package delivered to a government building.

  Vivien referred to textbook procedure. “We should evacuate the building, move the package to a secure location, and use a PAN disrupter to—”

  “And how exactly do we get it to a secure location? What if there is no PAN disrupter available? Resources are limited these days,” Corporal Fisk interrupted.

  “Um, we could send in a robot to—”

  “No robot on hand either.” He folded his arms. “Textbooks don’t help you in the real world, Private Brooks. The knowledge gleaned from them can be a useful tool, but not every situation is going to fit in the A plus B equals C scenario for your convenience.”

  She frowned. Was the antagonistic animosity really necessary? Were the other trainees taking this kind of heat? She scrambled for another solution, gesturing to Private James.

  “We send him in to disarm it, hoping like hell the explosives in the package aren’t powerful enough to reduce that suit to a loincloth?”

  Corporal Fisk frowned in disapproval.

  “Sir,” she added as an afterthought.

  “And the structure? We’re in a government building, Private Brooks.”

  Sweat beaded and rolled down her back. She couldn’t think straight. This man confused her. Chase. Corporal Fisk. The Virgo. The asshole. Whoever he was.

  “We . . . what if we just . . . ?” Fuck. She closed her eyes and tried to think, tried to put herself in the actual scenario in her head. “We could send in an extraction team of three, use the suit to remove the package and walk it to the furthest point, secure a clearance distance and shoot it with—”

  “Better,” he interrupted. “What I’m looking for is a three-point plan and you nailed the gist of it. Evacuation. Extraction. Then defusal or detonation.”

  Vivien opened her mouth to add that if he’d just given her five seconds to think, she would’ve verbalized her plan more efficiently, but he wasn’t finished berating her apparently.

  “But that’s just the basics. You were on the right track. My point is, you don’t always have time to consult the experts or the textbooks. You have to make the call and you have very little time to make it. You need to have these concepts, not just the what but the how—the specifics—ready to go at all times. You also need multiple fail-safes and backup plans in case the ideal isn’t available.”

  She frowned, confused as to whether she’d received an insult or a compliment.

  He didn’t give her time to absorb the emotional impact of their exchange. “Want to wear the suit next?”

  Now he was talking.

  The one aspect of EOD
that Vivien had never had the chance to explore working with her grandfather’s company was wearing the giant suit that made its occupants strongly resemble a badass space solider. Working in the lab hadn’t required such extensive protective gear.

  “Hell yes.” She grinned. “Sir.”

  Corporal Fisk grinned back. “Let’s help Private James out of it first, and then we can get you into it.” After they removed the suit from Private James, Corporal Fisk looked at her expectantly. “You ready?”

  “As I’ll ever be.”

  The truth was, the suit was the one thing that frightened her. Not overwhelmingly so, just enough that her pulse quickened and her palms began to perspire. She took several deep breaths as both men began helping her into it.

  She was good until the helmet.

  Her breathing became labored and a faraway ringing sound started in her ears.

  I’m fine. This is fine. Breathe.

  Corporal Fisk gave her a thumbs-up and she did her best to return it even though she could barely move her arms.

  Christ, this thing was heavy. And hot.

  All she had to do was walk to the package, pick it up, and carry it approximately three hundred feet to the area they’d labeled as secure. She could do this. She had to.

  But each step felt like pushing lead legs through cement while being suffocated. Murmured words she could barely make out penetrated the helmet.

  Private James was going to instruct her on where to go because Corporal Fisk had to go help another group.

  She nodded her understanding, hoping they could see her response, refusing to panic just because Chase was leaving her.

  Not Chase. Corporal Fisk.

  Chase is a hot guy I had a one-night stand with that I will never see again.

  Corporal Fisk is my CO.

  Not the same thing at all.

  Vivien’s vision began to blur as he walked away, and she wished she’d taken the time to eat breakfast instead of worrying so much about shining her boots and arriving early. If she passed out, it wouldn’t matter how shiny her boots were or how early she’d arrived. She’d forever be the chick who couldn’t hack it.