by Paige Tyler
Landon stifled a groan. He shouldn’t be having thoughts like this about his partner, especially after the grueling hike they’d just had, not to mention the potentially deadly mission in front of them. But he couldn’t help himself. Even after humping through the jungle all day and night, her face smudged with sweat and river mud, Ivy was still the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen. The fact that she was so damn capable at her job made her even more attractive. He’d always found confidence and competence to be very sexy qualities in a woman. Ivy had those—and a lot more.
But no matter how much he wanted her, he was never going to act on it. She’d been burned by previous partners who thought working with her automatically got them a free ticket on the carnival ride. He wasn’t going to be that guy.
***
Ivy wasn’t sure whether to smack the person who’d hired Landon or hug them. No one could have known they’d accidently paired her up with a guy who smelled so delicious it was almost torture to be this close to him. Touching him like this, she could taste him on her tongue—which was why she was lying here in the dark with her mouth hanging open, softly panting.
She squeezed her nails into her palms as she drew in the scent of him. Sweat, river water, mud—none of it masked his pheromones. And she was getting more and more aroused by the second.
She squirmed, trying to ease the ache between her thighs, and ended up rubbing her ass against Landon’s butt. Which only made her more aware of her partner—and her response to him. She froze, forcing herself to stay still. Landon was beat and needed to get some rest before they started the final phase of the operation. He couldn’t do that with her wiggling around.
It would be so easy to roll over and straddle him. First, she’d kiss and nibble her way up his broad chest, then along his chiseled jaw until she came to that sinfully sexy mouth. And while she did that, she’d tease him—and herself—by rubbing against his erection. Then, when neither one of them could take it anymore, she’d slowly sink down on his cock, sheathing him all the way inside her.
It was all she could do not to reach down and slip her fingers under her panties. Where the heck was this coming from? It was like she was in heat. But that wasn’t possible. Was it?
It wasn’t like there was a handbook that came with the shifter gene. The only other shifters in her family were her maternal grandmother, who passed away when Ivy was in high school, and her younger sister, Layla. Her sister had never mentioned reacting to a guy like this. And unfortunately, Ivy couldn’t just pull out the satellite phone to call and ask.
Ivy clenched her jaw to keep from growling. She hoped the hours passed quickly. She needed something to take her mind off her sex drive or she was going to explode.
Chapter 6
Ivy didn’t explode. She controlled herself remarkably well and even managed to get a few hours of sleep. Landon, on the other hand, looked like crap.
“You okay?” she asked.
“Not really. I’m beat.”
“I’m not surprised. An hour or two nap doesn’t make up for days of missed sleep. You looked exhausted yesterday morning at the DCO offices, too. Not much sleep that night either, huh?”
He shook his head.
“Okay, I gotta ask. You just got to DC. How the heck did you meet a woman so fast?”
He looked taken aback. “What?”
“Well, I mean you told me you weren’t from around here, but you go out the very first night in town? I put two and two together and came up with the obvious. What’s the deal? Did you meet her on the plane or something?”
“I didn’t go to see a girl. It was a guy.”
It was Ivy’s turn to be stunned and she stopped hiking to face him. “Oh. Oh! I mean…Right…A…guy…Of course you have every right to…you know…”
She stuttered to a halt. Landon was gay. She was okay with that, really. Even if it was a crime against women everywhere for a guy that hot to be gay.
He chuckled. “If you could see your face right now. Man, I wish I had a camera.”
She flushed. “It’s not that. I mean I have a lot of gay friends.” Okay, a few. “It’s just that you don’t look gay.” She cringed. Had she just said that out loud? “I mean… I’ll stop talking now.”
He laughed again, louder this time. “Ivy, I’m not gay.”
“It’s okay if you are. I understand…”
“Ivy, I’m not gay. Really.”
She studied his face. He didn’t sound like he was lying. “Oh. Where did you disappear to then?” She held up her hand. “I didn’t mean to pry. It’s none of my business. Sorry.”
“It’s okay. You’re not prying.” He nudged her into moving again. “One of my teammates—my assistant A-team commander—got injured in Afghanistan and is now over at the Wounded Warrior Barracks in Bethesda. I like to visit him when I can.”
Now, she felt like even more of an idiot. She’d been jealous about a wounded soldier. One who must have been seriously injured if he was at Walter Reed.
“How badly was your friend hurt?”
“Pretty bad. He got a lot of shrapnel in his back. It really messed him up. He’s not confined to a wheelchair or anything. Not yet, anyway. But he will be if he doesn’t do physical therapy, and right now, he doesn’t see the point since the army is chaptering him out.” He gave her a rueful smile. “There aren’t many jobs in the military for a guy who’ll have to use a cane for the rest of his life.”
“That must be hard.”
“It is.”
It seemed like it was hard on Landon, too. She still had issues with what happened to Dave, and they’d been anything but close. “What happened over there?”
Landon was silent.
“It’s okay if you don’t want to talk about it.”
He hesitated, then cleared his throat. “We got some intel that the Taliban had been strong-arming the local police force in a small town outside of Kabul. The cops were looking for some help, so my team was assigned to go in and spend a couple weeks training them on how to stop the Taliban attacks. It wasn’t supposed to be a direct action operation—we weren’t expected to have to do anything more than advise and assist.”
“I take it things didn’t go as planned?”
He shook his head. “No. A few hours after we arrived, the head of the local police told us they found a cache of weapons in a farmhouse about a mile outside of town. He asked if I could send some of my men out with his officers to confiscate them.”
“And?” she prodded.
“I should have known better. It was just too easy, too smooth. We roll into town and within a couple hours, I’m splitting my team. I should have known it was a trap.”
“How could you have known?” He didn’t answer. “So, you sent Jayson out with the local cops to help confiscate the weapons?”
“Yeah. Him and four other guys.” He shook his head. “I was going to go, but Jayson wanted to handle it. He pulled me aside and told me to stop coddling him all the time, that he was an operator, too.”
“Was he right? Did you coddle him?”
“No. I don’t know. Maybe.” Landon shrugged. “A little, I guess. But he was inexperienced. Hell, he was barely out of West Point. I shouldn’t have let him talk me into sending him.”
“What happened?”
“It was an ambush. One second the cops were guiding them through the makeshift corrals of a goat farm, and the next, they were getting lit up.”
Her eyes went wide. “The police chief set you up?”
Landon nodded. “Yeah. The Taliban had grabbed his wife and daughter, and forced him to betray us. He didn’t have a choice. He screwed us good. We didn’t know anything had even happened until the radio started squawking.”
“What did you do?”
He took a deep breath. “The rest of the team and I hauled ass to the farmhouse. By the
time we got there, Jayson had already taken a load of shrapnel from an RPG round right into his back. Luckily, his flak jacket had absorbed most of the blast and frag or he would have died on the spot. The insurgents probably thought the explosion from the RPG would stun my guys and they’d be easy pickings. But they weren’t. He might have been wounded, but Jayson got the team into a defensive position. He was shouting orders from flat on his stomach when the rest of us got there. He was pretty amazing.”
There was pride in Landon’s voice. And a lot of pain. So much of it that Ivy almost reached out and took his hand. She grabbed her canteen and took a sip of water instead.
“Were any other members of your team injured?” she asked.
“None of them were as bad as Jayson. They were all treated at the hospital at Bagram and back with us within a week. Jayson was so bad we didn’t know if he’d live until the medevac bird got there. Even then, we didn’t exhale until we got word through command channels he’d survived the trip to Germany and was recovering at Landstuhl.”
“Whatever happened to the chief of police? Did you…I don’t know…arrest him?”
“We would have. At first, it took everything I had to keep my team from shooting him where he stood. Hell, I wanted to put a bullet in him. Not that it would have mattered. The Taliban decided he didn’t do a good enough job of luring us in and killed his wife and daughter anyway. He blew out his brains before we ever got around to taking him in.”
She shook her head. So much heartache and death. “Well, at least Jayson made it.”
Landon snorted.
“Hey, he’s alive. That has to mean something.”
“I’m not so sure Jayson would agree with you.” The muscle in his jaw flexed. “It should be me in Walter Reed. It would be if I’d just listened to my gut and gone to confiscate those damn weapons instead of sending him.”
So that’s what this was. Survivor guilt. “And if you had, the insurgents might have ambushed him and the other guys back in town, and Jayson would have been injured anyway.”
“You don’t know that.”
“No, I don’t. And neither do you.” She climbed over a downed tree that blocked their path. “I understand where you’re coming from, I really do. But what happened to Jayson wasn’t your fault, Landon. He was an unfortunate casualty of war.”
Just like Dave’s death. She wasn’t sure if telling Landon the story now would make him feel better or worse. She’d tell Landon about Dave another time.
They arrived at Calballero’s compound a little after midnight. The place looked exactly like the surveillance photos—a huge hacienda-style home surrounded by outbuildings and a high stone wall. Ivy scanned the windows for light as she crouched down in the bushes beside Landon, but the place was dark inside.
“Doesn’t look like Calballero’s home,” she whispered.
“Or he’s asleep.” Landon adjusted his NVGs as he surveyed the compound. “Main guard house, one tower in front, and one in back. Two guards in each tower.”
She gazed over the bottom floor. “All the lower windows have bars on them. We can’t get in that way unless we use the main entrance, which is right beside the guard house.”
“That’s not going to work.” Landon’s NVGs went from one tower to the other. “It looks like the guards in the two towers can’t see each other. The back one is closest to the office. We scale it and get in that way.”
“Sounds like a plan.”
He pulled out one of the blocks of explosives they’d kept. “I’m going to set this up by the main gate in case we need a distraction. I’ll be back.”
Ivy kept an eye on the guards while he was gone, listening for anything that might mean they’d spotted Landon.
Turned out, Landon was as good with a sniper rifle as he was at being stealthy. He loaded the rifle with those fancy DCO tranquilizer bullets and took out all four tower guards before they even knew what happened.
Ivy was impressed. Nice shooting.
He slung the rifle over his shoulder. “Ready to do your thing?”
Ivy didn’t have to ask what he meant. She backed up to get a running start, then raced toward the wall and leaped into the air. Grasping the edge, she pulled herself up onto the top, then turned to give Landon a hand. As soon as he was beside her, she led the way to the guard tower and climbed inside, careful not to step on the unconscious men on the floor.
Landon didn’t waste any time pulling out his M4 and shooting the foam-covered grappling hook over to the roof of the hacienda. Because the tower was higher than the house, the trajectory was trickier, but he nailed it in one shot. She had to admit they worked well together, and it made her forget she normally wasn’t thrilled working with military types. Landon was turning out to be a lot different than she had expected.
He glanced at her as he tied the thin aircraft cable to one of the tower’s support columns. “Can you really get across this?”
She flashed him a smile as she turned on her communications headset. “Do cats like milk?”
He chuckled. “I know one who doesn’t.”
Laughing, she climbed onto the cable and ran down it. When she reached the hacienda, she dropped onto a balcony off a third-floor room.
“So far, so good,” she whispered to Landon.
She tiptoed to the French doors and cautiously peeked inside. The bedroom was empty. “I’m going in.”
She probably didn’t need to tell Landon that since he was already covering her with his night vision scope, but she liked keeping him in the loop.
“Be careful.”
“Always,” she told him.
She stopped to sniff the air when she got inside. No indication of anyone on this floor. While she trusted her nose, she still moved carefully. She didn’t know exactly where the office was, so she had to check each room. Luckily, it was the fourth one on the right, which meant Landon had a clear view of her through a window.
“There’s a computer on the desk,” she told him. “I’m going to check it now.”
She took out the gadget Oliver from the tech division had given her to decode passwords and break through firewalls, and plugged it into the USB port. She browsed through the files, but there was nothing even remotely incriminating.
“Anything?” Landon asked.
“No. I’m going to look through his desk, see if there’s something in there.”
That turned out to be a waste of time. Lots of junk, but nothing tying him or anyone else to drug smuggling.
Ivy looked around the room, searching for someplace Calballero might hide something he didn’t want found. Her gaze locked on a painting. It couldn’t be that simple, could it?
She got to her feet and walked over to it. Sure enough, there was a wall safe behind the painting.
“I’ll be…”
“What is it?” Landon asked.
She quickly told him what she’d found. “The problem is, we don’t have anything to open it. Except explosives.”
“Which we can’t use without risking destroying what’s inside. Not to mention bringing the rest of the guards running.”
Ivy chewed on her lip. “There’s something else I can try, but it might take a little time.”
“As long as you can do it before Calballero gets back, go for it. What are you thinking about doing?”
“I might be able to smell which buttons on the keypad Calballero uses most.”
“No way. You can do that?”
She smiled at his words. There was no animosity there, just amazement. “Yeah. But it’s going to be hard. My sense of smell isn’t my strongest skill.”
“Take all the time you need. I’ve got your back.”
Ivy’s lips curved. That was the first time anyone had ever said that. She leaned close to the keypad. She sniffed each key, trying to pick out which ones had Calballero’s s
cent. This kind of wall safe used either a four- or six-digit combination. Hopefully, Calballero used a four-digit number. If not, she could be screwed.
The number four key was definitely one. And the eight. After that, it got tough. It was almost as if Calballero slid his fingers across some of the other keys as he moved around the pad.
To do this right, she needed to shift completely. She’d never done that on a mission because it was hard to notice what was going on around her when she did. Which meant she was completely vulnerable. And dependent on her partner. She’d never trusted anyone she worked with enough. But Landon said he had her back.
Confident he’d alert her if trouble closed in, Ivy closed her eyes, sinking deeper into her animal self.
***
Landon was so mesmerized by watching Ivy work on the safe, he almost didn’t hear the car drive up to the gate. Calballero was back.
“We’ve got company,” he said into the headset. “Time to go.”
Ivy didn’t answer. Instead, she leaned closer to the safe.
“Ivy, let’s go.”
No answer. What the hell? Frowning, he grabbed his flashlight and pointed it at her, giving it a quick flick on, then off. No response. Like she hadn’t even seen it. Was there some special code word he was supposed to say, like here, kitty, kitty?
Down on the ground, Calballero entered the house, along with several men.
“Ivy, come on.”
She ignored him.
Landon slewed his scope away from her to scan the rest of the house. Calballero and the men looked like they were heading for the stairs.
“Get the hell out of there. Now!”
Still no answer. What the hell was wrong with her? Couldn’t she hear the men coming? Another few minutes and they’d be in the room with her.
Swearing under his breath, Landon slung the barrel of his sniper rifle over the cable. Holding on to both ends of the weapon, he slid down to the balcony directly across from the tower. The friction of the wire against the barrel completely screwed up the rifle, but he didn’t give a damn. Dropping it to the floor, he whipped the M4 off his back and raced into the house.
