by Paige Tyler
He swore as he hacked his way through the dense jungle behind Ivy. After spending the majority of the last ten years in Afghanistan and Iraq, he’d forgotten how tough it was to claw through undergrowth so thick it felt like the damn stuff was physically wrapping its arms around you.
Ivy had saved their asses more than once already with her kitty cat senses and those little “hunches” that told her trouble was just around the next bend in the trail. This part of the border region was crawling with FARC soldiers and guerilla forces. If he’d been with his Special Forces Team, they probably would have been involved in a half dozen firefights already.
In his book, a partner with skills like hers was worth more than a backpack full of C-4 and a thousand extra rounds of ammo.
It got to the point where he trusted those skills so much that his mind wandered and stopped at the mission briefing they’d received yesterday. More precisely, the conversation he had with Kendra before he and Ivy left. Kendra had pulled him aside and told him that some moron in the DCO named Dick Coleman had been the one who’d decided to yank them out of training and put them in the field early. Since Landon was this great Special Forces warrior with tons of training and experience, and Ivy had been through the training twice, Coleman felt they didn’t need any more training. It might have been a compliment, but the truth was that this guy was hoping they’d fail. And if they failed, Landon was going back to Special Forces, Ivy was out of a job, and the DCO was going to have one hell of a black eye.
“Why would this guy want one of his teams to fail?” Landon had asked.
“Because some of the people on the Committee would love to see the EVA program get canned.”
Landon had been trying to figure out what Committee she was talking about when Kendra continued.
“Look, none of that is important. All I’m asking is that you cut Ivy a little slack. She’s had a string of shitty partners, which has led to some trust issues,” Kendra told him, then added, “But you two have what it takes to be an amazing team. She just needs you to trust her.”
He’d wanted to tell Kendra the trust thing was a little difficult. He didn’t know the first thing about Ivy, other than she was a cat shifter and had better hearing, eyesight, and sense of smell than he did. And—as he’d learned a little while ago—she had hunches. He was used to putting his life in other people’s hands—you did that every day in Special Forces. But he didn’t know what kind of training she’d had or what her instincts were like in a gunfight. Putting his life in her hands wasn’t easy.
But he knew what it was like to have people want you to fail. When he’d gone from enlisted to officer, a lot of people had wanted to see him fail out of the program. That was reason enough to help Ivy—even if she didn’t fully trust him yet.
“I’ll try,” he told Kendra.
Ivy motioned and they both slid into the dense jungle alongside the trail. A few seconds later, a troop of twenty-five ragtag soldiers stomped past their hiding place. She was good.
As they knelt there, something else Kendra’d said came back to him—about the difficulty Ivy had with previous partners. Kendra was the third person—fourth if you counted Buchanan—who had mentioned the problems Ivy had with her previous teammates. He’d discounted everything Foley had said, but Kendra got him thinking, especially after the little run-in he’d had with Buchanan as he was leaving the dorms that morning. Ivy had already left for the DC office and he’d been moving fast to catch up. He’d seen Buchanan, but since the shifter had brushed past him without so much as an “excuse me” the first time they’d met, Landon decided to return the favor, ignoring the man as he headed for his truck. But Buchanan grabbed his shoulder.
“Where’s Ivy?”
Landon had the urge to tell him to fuck off, but instead simply told him the truth. “She’s headed to the DC office.”
Buchanan’s eyes narrowed. “You think you’re hot shit, don’t you?”
Landon clenched his jaw. The jerk acted like he was the reason Ivy wasn’t interested in his sorry ass. “What the hell is your problem, Buchanan?”
“You’re my problem.” His lip curled. “You and every other norm. You’re not good enough to pick up her trash from the curb much less be her partner.”
It would have been so easy to introduce Buchanan’s face to his fist. After the visit he’d had with Jayson the night before, he was certainly angry enough. But that’d only be playing into Buchanan’s hands and make the people in charge think he had impulse control problems.
“Yeah. Well, the DCO disagrees.” He grinned. “So does Ivy. In fact, I’m sure we’ll make a damn good team.”
Buchanan took a step closer, a growl low in his throat. “I’m warning you right now, if you ever try and pull the shit her previous partners did, I’ll rip your throat out with my bare hands.”
Snarling, he held up his hand and slowly let his fingernails extend until they were long and ragged—far more dangerous than Ivy’s. Those nails could do some serious damage. But if Buchanan thought that was going to scare him, he could forget about it. Landon refused to even flinch.
“I don’t know what happened with Ivy’s previous partners, and I don’t give a rat’s ass. I take care of my teammates, so back the hell off, shifter.”
Buchanan’s lips curled back to reveal sharp canines. “You’re telling me to back off. That’s funny.”
“I don’t see you laughing.” Landon closed the distance between them until he was inches from the other man. “Just so you know. The fact that you’re Ivy’s friend isn’t going to keep me from kicking your ass if you get in my face again.”
“I’d like to see you try.”
With a growl that turned into a laugh, Buchanan turned and walked off.
Landon ground his jaw at the memory. Before he and Ivy got back on the trail, Landon found some of the plant he’d been looking for all morning. The bugs were really getting to be a nuisance.
“Crush the leaves and smear them on your exposed skin,” he told Ivy. “It’ll keep the bugs away.”
She followed his suggestion without comment. He hadn’t been able to bring up the subject of her former partners at any point during their flight to Colombia, and last night had been out of the question. But maybe it was time to ask Ivy about them. If Kendra had gone out of her way to warn him and Buchanan was willing to kill him over something they did to her, there must be more to the story.
He moved closer to Ivy. “Any bad guys nearby?”
“No. I think we’re clear.”
“Good. Because there are a few things I think we need to get out in the open, and the first among them is what the hell happened with your first partner. A couple people have brought up this Jeff guy, but I’d rather hear the real story from you.”
When she didn’t answer, he figured she wasn’t going to tell him.
“He tried to assault me.”
Landon did a double take. He hadn’t seen that coming.
“The official story according to Jeff’s old friends, like Foley and his camp, is that I’m a cock tease who tried to cover up my incompetence by getting Jeff to sleep with me.” Her voice was unusually soft in the stillness of the jungle, as if she were almost speaking to herself. “When Jeff turned me down, I used my shifter abilities to attack him and leave him for dead. Then I ran back and whined to management that I’d been sexually assaulted. According to their version of the story, the DCO believed me over an honorable and decorated military hero because I was one of their EVA pets.”
“That must make it hard to work in a place when so many people hate you.”
“You get used to it.”
She clearly hadn’t.
“Of course Foley goes out of his way to make sure every new person in the department gets his version of the story before they meet me.” Ivy looked back at Landon. “I have to admit, I was a little worried that firs
t day when I saw him talking to you. I figured you’d buy his crap since you were both in the military and all.”
“And all? What, because I have a penis?” He laughed. “Trust me, Ivy. I smelled shit the second Foley opened his mouth.”
Now that he’d gotten her talking, he wasn’t about to let her stop. “How long did you and Jeff work together before he tried to attack you?”
“A little over a year.” She glanced at him. “It worked out okay at first. I mean we were never a high-speed, well-oiled team by any stretch of the imagination, but at least he didn’t think I was a freak of nature.”
“What was the problem then?”
“He always wanted to do things one way, and I wanted to do them another. One of us had to compromise, and it usually ended up being me. Maybe that’s why he thought I’d give in when he wanted to have sex. Because I gave in on everything else he wanted to do.”
Landon knew where this was going, and he didn’t like it. “Ivy, whatever happened wasn’t your fault.”
“Not directly. But I hung out with him outside of work. I thought it would make us a better team. He thought it should make us bed buddies.” She made a disparaging noise. “I should have known there was a problem when he stopped calling me Ivy and started calling me babe. I mean, I had sexual harassment training for heaven’s sake. But I thought it was completely innocent on his part, so I let him get away with it. Until he copped a feel of my ass.”
“I take it you didn’t report him?”
She stopped long enough to open her canteen of water and take a sip. “No. I thought I could handle it myself. I told him if he did it again, I’d break his hand. Jeff acted like the injured party, saying he’d done it accidentally and that it wouldn’t happen again.”
“What happened from there?” he prompted.
She recapped the canteen and started moving again. “We were on a stakeout on a rooftop in the worst part of town in Mexico City. One minute I was lying flat on my stomach looking through a telescope at a cartel drug dealer meeting with a DEA agent, and the next, Jeff was on top of me trying to rip off my clothes.” She took a deep breath and let it out slowly, as if reliving the nightmare. “I was so shocked it took me a minute to realize what he was trying to do. My first instinct was to scream bloody murder, but I knew if I did I’d give away our position to not only the DEA agent and the drug dealer, but to half the street gangs in the area, too.
“My survival instincts—my animal instincts—took over and I shifted without even realizing it. Probably because I was so terrified. And so damn pissed. I kicked Jeff halfway across the roof, hoping he’d stay down long enough for me to get away, but he immediately got up and came at me again. He must have figured I didn’t need to be conscious for what he had in mind because he hit me hard enough to knock out a normal woman. He forgot I’m a shifter, though. All that punch did was infuriate me more than I already was, and when he tried to pin me to the ground and tear off my clothes a second time, I clawed his face to shreds.”
“If you ask me, he got off easy. What’d you do then?”
“I walked off the roof with the video of the DEA agent taking bribes from the drug dealer, and then I went back to DC and told John that Jeff tried to rape me. I wasn’t sure he’d believe me since one, the bruise on my cheek from where Jeff punched was already gone by the time I left Mexico, and two, Jeff—when he finally had the nerve to show his scratched-up face—claimed I attacked him without provocation.
“Luckily, it didn’t have to come down to he said/she said. The DCO had satellite footage of the whole thing. Turned out Jeff attacked me on top of a building in the middle of one of the most scrutinized cities in North America.” Her lips curved. “Nothing says sexual assault like photos taken from several hundred miles up in space. John fired him on the spot.”
Landon didn’t think too much of Buchanan, but now he understood why the man would be willing to rip apart anyone who did what her previous partner had done.
He glanced at Ivy. He couldn’t fully see her expression, but he knew it had to have been difficult for her to talk about what happened. He felt guilty for bringing it up.
“Hey. I didn’t mean to make you rehash everything like that.”
She shook her head. “It’s okay. It was a long time ago, anyway. Jeff is history, and I’m over what he did to me.”
Was she?
Ivy was trying to act tough and hard, but he could see in her eyes she was bothered by the memories. When she looked like that, he’d never know she wasn’t completely human.
He sounded like that asshole Foley. Landon had never been the type to care whether someone was Native American, Hispanic, Asian, or anything else. He wasn’t going to start now. Ivy wasn’t some kind of nonhuman freak, she was simply different. That was the way he was going to treat her, even if she didn’t think too much of him. Ivy was human. Period.
Time for a change of subject. “How’d everything go last night with Buchanan? He looked pretty pissed off when I left.”
Okay, he was fishing for information, but so what? There was definitely some history between her and Buchanan. Besides, they had to talk about something.
Ivy groaned. “Don’t ask.”
“That bad, huh?”
“Yeah.” She gave him an embarrassed look. “I’m sorry he was rude to you.”
“Don’t be. It’s not your fault.”
“Actually, it kind of is. Clayne is in a bad place right now and I think I did more damage by telling him I didn’t want to be anything more than friends.”
“You can’t control who you’re attracted to.” If he could, Landon wouldn’t be having unprofessional thoughts about Ivy every time she walked in a room.
“I know.” She held up her hand for a second, listening and sniffing the air. Apparently it was nothing, because she started again without comment. “I just hate hurting him like this. He’s one of the few shifter friends I have and I don’t want to lose him.”
“When did Buchanan decide he wanted to go from friend to boyfriend?”
“A little while after his partner quit the DCO.”
He tried to imagine a walking time bomb like Buchanan with a partner. It must have sucked to have been that guy. “Why’d he quit?”
“It was a woman, and I don’t know why she left. Clayne wouldn’t tell me and no one else at the DCO is talking. Not even Kendra, who knows everything about everyone. I got back from a mission, and Danica—his partner—was gone. Clayne won’t admit it, but I got the feeling they were more than just partners. Which is why I think he got so messed up when she left.”
The woman must be a saint to have put up with Buchanan. “Why isn’t he off training with his new partner instead of harassing you?”
“Because they can’t find anyone who can work with him.”
Thank God they didn’t pair him up with Buchanan instead of Ivy. He and the asshole shifter would have killed each other a dozen times over already.
They reached the Orinoco River dividing Colombia and Venezuela an hour before nightfall—way ahead of schedule. The river was fast moving and they had to walk a ways before they found an area below the rapids where they could cross. Once on the other side, they quickly moved into the denser part of the jungle again, checking repeatedly to make sure no one had seen them.
Ivy squeezed the water from her long braid. “That didn’t take as long as we thought. Calballero’s place is only a couple miles from here.”
“That’ll give us a chance to get some shut-eye if you want. I know I’m beat.”
He and Ivy couldn’t break into Calballero’s until midnight at the earliest, and since neither of them had slept in close to thirty hours, they might as well take advantage of the downtime. They found a dense section of jungle well off the beaten path to set up their ponchos, then climbed inside the makeshift tent.
Eager to get out
of his soaking wet clothes, Landon started unbuttoning his uniform overshirt, then hesitated. If he’d been with his Special Forces team, he wouldn’t give stripping down a second thought, but he was in a tiny makeshift tent with a beautiful woman. Did the same rules apply?
Only one way to find out. He looked at Ivy.
“I was going to get out of these wet clothes, but if you’re uncomfortable with me sleeping in my T-shirt and underwear, I’ll keep them on.”
Her eyes glinted green as she blinked at him. “Um, no. I mean, go ahead. There’s no way you’d get any sleep in wet clothes, and it’ll give them a chance to dry. I was going to take off mine, too.”
Landon tried not to look as Ivy got undressed, but as she stripped off her pants to reveal shapely thighs, it was impossible not to take a quick peek. Those were some long, gorgeous legs. He could just imagine them wrapped around him while he drove himself deep inside her until neither one of them could remember their own name.
His cock went hard as a rock in his boxer briefs, and he was glad it was dark so Ivy couldn’t see. Then he remembered her outstanding night vision, and hurriedly rolled over onto his side so he faced away from her.
That was enough of those kinds of thoughts. Workplace romances didn’t work, he reminded himself. Just remember what happened with Erica, he chanted like a mantra. It seemed to work.
Until Ivy lay down beside him and their bodies were touching. Then his mind was once again going to places it shouldn’t. He closed his eyes, trying to think of something—anything—other than his partner’s half-naked body pressed up against his. Field stripping an M4 carbine in his head worked for a while, but then she squirmed—probably to get more comfortable—and her ass brushed his, and he was back in fantasyland, having erotic visions. They played in his head like scenes from a porn movie—her on her hands and knees in front of him, his hand wrapped in her long hair while he took her from behind; her riding cowgirl, his hands cupping that perfect ass; her up against the wall, him pounding into her.
