Special Forces: The Recruit

“Affirmative.”

“So Torsten’s making a big fuss about tossing out the women and then...what? Bringing them here secretly to train?” she asked curiously.

“He’s legitimately tossing out most of the women. But he saw something in you.” He added reluctantly, the words acid on his tongue to even say aloud, “He thinks you’ve got what it takes to be one of us.”

Silence fell between them as they stared at the sluggish black water below. It lapped around the stilts supporting the building, oily and thick. He could feel the mind of the woman beside him working overtime. One thing Torsten had gotten right: Tessa Wilkes was a sharp cookie. Observant as hell. She would need both to make it through the rest of this hypothetical training of hers. Assuming he didn’t end up just shooting himself, instead.

He caught himself rubbing his thigh, as had become his habit ever since surgery to remove the shrapnel that shredded his knee and quad muscle. He jerked his hand back to the railing. No way was he showing weakness to Tessa, particularly if he was supposed to train her.

“When do we start?” she asked.

“In the morning.”

“Is there a hidden training base around here?”

He envisioned the ruin that would be their base of operations for the next few months. He had already humped in the bare basics they would need to survive, and his knee had thought the hard labor of repairing the old dock behind the house and crawling around repairing the roof were terrible ideas. He answered drily, “I suppose you could call it a base.”

“Will you be training me?”

She sounded so damned enthusiastic. He restrained an urge to roll his eyes. She had no business being here. Women didn’t belong in the Special Forces community. Period. The total loss of the second Medusa team had proven that, hadn’t it?

He had no idea how he was actually going to train Tessa. He had no experience as an instructor, and with just the two of them out here by themselves, he couldn’t rely on the same methods by which he’d been trained. “About training you. Here’s the thing. I’m not an instructor. I’m a field operator. Or I was until I wrecked my knee a while back.”

She looked down in quick sympathy at his leg. Sympathy he neither needed nor wanted. His plan was actually to use her training to get himself back into good enough shape to qualify for field ops again. He would drag her along with him until he was field ready—and until he had run her into the ground and made his point—both to her and to Torsten.

“The first part of the Spec Ops training you went through with the boys was mostly physical conditioning, meant to weed out the faint of heart and the quitters. Torsten feels like he’s seen enough from you to know you would actually make it through the physical demands of full Spec Ops training.” He added wryly, “Torsten says you don’t know the meaning of the word quit.”

“He got that right,” she muttered.

Spoken like a true operator. Beau smiled a little in spite of himself.

Torsten had discussed with him at length where to train her. This project needed a challenging, but secluded, environment. Beau had been the one to suggest reluctantly that his abandoned family homestead fit the bill perfectly. The incredibly difficult bayou environment would force her to battle heat, humidity, muck, critters and general squick factor.

“Will my training be like the men’s course?” she asked.

She sounded entirely too naive and eager. Poor kid had no idea what she was in for. Torsten had been clear. Push her right to the edge of breaking. Find out where her limits lay and take her to them and beyond. And while he was at it, figure out how to work with a woman.

Not. Happening.

“I’ll be a real operator, right?”

“Don’t count on it,” he snapped.

“Then what the hell are we doing out here?” she shot back.

Gun, I’m gonna kill you the next time I see you. He straightened to his full height and a hot knife of pain shot through his knee. He clenched his jaw until the pain subsided to bearable. “Assuming you survive, which is not a given, you would hypothetically be a no-kidding operator when it’s said and done.”

He added direly, “Don’t get your hopes up. The odds of you being able to do everything you’ll have to in order to work on an operational team are pretty much zero.”

For a blink of an eye, trepidation shone in her eyes. But in the very next blink, steely resolve filled them. Unwillingly, he was impressed with her mental toughness. Even if it was useless. No way was he graduating her from this training. He wouldn’t do that to his brothers.

“Why Louisiana?” she asked.

“Secret location. No prying eyes. Challenging environment.” He added warningly, “The ocean may have sharks, but we’ve got gators out here. They’re a whole lot sneakier than sharks, and you can’t punch a gator on the nose and get him to back off. He’ll eat your arm if you try it.”

She turned her head to study him more fully, and her ponytail fell over her shoulder in soft curls that begged his fingers to run through them. Her gaze was intent. Focused on him like a laser. In that moment she looked just like a warrior...but with firm, round breasts filling out her T-shirt, a lush behind filling out her fatigue trousers and muscular legs a mile long.

Crap. Talk about messing with his head. A woman operator. And of course, she had to go and look like a freaking Playboy centerfold.

He had to give her credit: not many women looked this good without a stitch of makeup on, wearing combat boots, no less. Even her muscular shoulders and the pronounced veins in her bare arms were hot. Everything about her spoke of strength, confidence and badassery. But it was all wrapped up in a package so sexy he could devour her like his steak earlier.

He shook his head to clear the thought. It didn’t matter how sexy she was. He wasn’t about to let her become a member of the club.

“Let’s get out of here,” he growled. “I owe you at least one decent night’s sleep before we get this ball rolling.” Down a tall hill into a pile of manure.

She was silent on the ride back to the motel, but her excitement was palpable. He just hoped his knee didn’t give out before it was all said and done. He figured it was a 50/50 proposition. His doctors had argued vehemently against him attempting this comeback. They warned him that, if he overdid it on this op, he would blow his knee out, this time for good. But he refused to sit down and give up. He would go down fighting first.

They got back to the motel, and Tessa bounced out of the Jeep before he could get around to her side of the vehicle to open the door. He had to smile a little at her enthusiasm. He recalled all too well his own elation when he found out he’d been selected for special operations training all those years ago. Almost a decade.

Man, he’d been young and naive back then. He’d seen a whole lifetime’s worth of action since. Would she be as jaded as he was ten years down the road, taciturn and tense, living life balanced on a razor’s edge?

He closed the motel room’s door and turned to face Tessa, who stood in the middle of the room, frowning. “Problem?” he asked.

“Well, yes. There’s only one bed.”

“You afraid to share it with me?” He arched an eyebrow in an open dare. “What are you going to do when you’re bivouacking with a male team and all of you are crammed into a hide like sardines, spooning with each other?”

Her mint-green eyes narrowed. “I’ve got no problem sleeping with you. The question is—are you okay sleeping with me?”

He snorted. “Honey, I’m not sixteen. I’ve got my hormones firmly under control, thank you very much.” Which might not be entirely true where she was concerned. All of the previous Medusas had lived and worked in very close quarters with their male counterparts. She had to learn to do the same. Starting with him. Oh, joy.

“Great,” she said cheerfully. “Then you won’t mind if I take my pants off. They’re still a little wet.”

Well, hell. Give the woman points for calling his bluff.

She kicked off her combat boots and stripped out of her fatigue pants right there in the middle of the room, revealing legs every bit as lean, muscular and wrap-around-his-hips-and-hang-on sexy as he’d thought they would be. His gaze slid down to her ankles and back up to her black bikini underwear, which stopped an inch short of the bottom of her olive green tank top.

Was that sweat popping out on his forehead? That strip of tanned stomach was almost more than he could stand. Her waist nipped in sharply, and then her chest flared in Coke-bottle curves that definitely were making him sweat. His palms itched to trace those curves. Memory of them mashed against his chest sent blood pounding to his groin.

Her chest was high and firm, and her nipples poked at the soft cotton of her shirt, taunting him. Daring him to take them in his mouth. To suck on them till she moaned. His hard-on all but doubled him over with its painful throbbing.

She stood there defiantly, staring back at him, daring him to say or do something about her display of general hotness.

Keep your eyes on her face.

Yeah, right. He could no more stop himself from letting his gaze wander down her body and back up than he could stop his body from leaping to attention at the sight of a woman like her standing half-naked in the middle of his hotel room practically daring him to do something about it.

His traitorous gaze traveled slowly and thoroughly down her body once more, taking in every juicy detail of her. Ho. Lee. Cow.

Okay, then. If that was how she wanted to play it... He reached for the back of the neck of his T-shirt and hauled it off over his head. He unbuckled his belt and shoved his pants down, as well. His Spandex sports briefs didn’t do much to conceal his raging hard-on, but if she was going to play with the boys, she would have to get used to their reaction to her.

“Shall we?” he said casually. It took every last drop of his self-discipline to manage that light tone of voice.

Her bravado seemed knocked back a few notches by his matching strip-down. Good. She might as well learn early on just what a bad idea it was to dare an operator to do anything. Filters were not part of their mentality.

He reached for the light switch, and the room was abruptly swathed in darkness. The warmth and humidity of the night wrapped around him. The hum of the window air-conditioner and the thin stream of cold air coming from it teased his skin. The night was made for heavy breathing, sweaty skin on skin and the mindless plunge into hot, tight, female flesh—

Her silhouette slipped under the covers and the bed springs creaked under her weight, breaking him out of his fantasy. He felt brittle. On the verge of exploding. Cripes. And he hadn’t even touched her yet.

Yet. Which implied intent to go there with her.

No can do, buddy, he told his raging erection. Not only was she off-limits, but he would also be damned if he would let her manipulate him into anything. Even if he wanted that thing worse than he wanted to keep breathing.

He moved over to the bed, lifted the covers and lay down beside her, an image of her body swimming in his mind’s eye. Hell’s bells. Her warmth radiated across the narrow strip of mattress separating them, along with simmering sexual tension that made him want to jump out of his skin.

It was a double bed, and they were not tiny people, which meant it was a tight fit. And he was neither a dead man nor a dummy. No way could he miss the fact that her nostrils flared whenever she looked at him and thought he wasn’t looking. Nor could he miss how her pupils dilated anytime he had leaned close and smiled at her during dinner.

She was as hot for him as he was for her. Which was going to pose a massive problem on this op. Almost as massive as the woody tenting the sheets over his groin.

What would it be like to make love with a woman nearly as strong as he was, with stamina to match? A woman who could absorb everything he had to give and give as good as she got in return? If even half of his imagination was accurate, sex with Tessa would be epic. He was sure of it.

Of course, military fraternization rules prohibited instructors from sleeping with trainees. But he wasn’t officially her instructor yet. Not until tomorrow. Besides, he was going to wash her out at the first opportunity, and they would each get on with their regularly scheduled lives. So there was nothing standing in the way of them scratching the itch between them. Right?

He couldn’t find any flaw in the logic. His body jerked eagerly in response.

Nope. There was no reason at all they couldn’t engage in a little extracurricular hanky-panky.

Other than the fact that she was going to hate his guts within the next twenty-four hours or so. And if he washed her out of the program like he planned to, she would hate his guts even worse. He tended to avoid sleeping with women who were going to become homicidal in the near future.

Disappointment coursed through his entire body.

I know, buddy. I know.

The scent of her shampoo drifted across the narrow space between them. It was sweet and floral and caressed him like a lover’s hand, as seductive as hell. His body begged him to change his mind, and he clenched his teeth against its coaxing.

For her part, Tessa lay stiff and silent beside him. Tense, too, huh? Was she as turned on as he was? He would bet his next paycheck she was. He could practically smell her arousal.

The standoff stretched out between them, and with every passing minute, he became more determined not to be the one who broke first. But he couldn’t remember being this uncomfortable since junior high when a hole in a wall had been enough to turn him on.

Their shoulders bumped every time one of them shifted even the tiniest bit, sending him off into a new round of horny speculation, molar-grinding pain and reluctant refusal to give in.

This bed was entirely too small for the two of them.

Finally, in frustration, he muttered, “Turn on your side facing away from me.”

“Why?” she blurted.

“That was an order. Just do it,” he snapped.

She huffed and the mattress shifted beneath him. He rolled onto his side facing her and scooted forward until her warm, sexy body was tucked against his.

“What the hell are you doing?” she squawked.

“Getting comfortable so we can both sleep. Now you’ll know where I am, and you won’t lay there all night wondering if I’m going to jump your bones.” He tucked his knees against the backs of hers, threw his arm over the inward curve of her waist and pulled her back against his front. Wow, she felt magnificent against him. They fit together like two spoons in the same set of silverware.

Of course they did. The torture wouldn’t be complete if they didn’t.

His male parts bulged against her in no uncertain terms, but there was no help for it. He was not going to have sex with her tonight, but neither was he going to treat her feminine sensibilities with kid gloves. If she planned to live and work with men like him, this was part of the deal.

She felt amazing in his arms. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d done this platonic cuddling thing with a woman. Normally, he didn’t stop to pay much attention to the finer details. The groupies just wanted to be bedded and then go on their merry way.

Maybe not so platonic, truth be told. His hands ached to roam across her satin skin, to test her curves, to make her moan. He needed to lose himself in her body, to plunge into her mindlessly, to find bliss and then oblivion. His jaw clenched. He could do this. He could sleep with her without having sex with her. It was a hell of a fight not to act on his craving, but he corralled his lust.

“Go to sleep,” he told her tightly.

By inches over the next few minutes, she gradually relaxed against him, which added a whole new set of temptations to his misery.

Get a grip, dude. He’d slept in war zones with mortars flying over his head and the deafening reports of shelling exploding around him. He’d slept with enemy forces closing in on him, and when completely surrounded by hostiles. He could bloody well sleep in a dark, quiet motel room in his hometown.

But he followed Tessa into sleep with great difficulty, ultimately having to resort to his sniper training to force his breathing to slow and deepen, to will himself to slide toward unconsciousness. She felt like a slice of heaven in his arms, soft and warm and relaxed. All the things his life was not.

He couldn’t remember the last time he’d slept with a woman—actually slept with one. Most of his interactions involved horny, half-drunk sex and him leaving the woman’s bed immediately after, before anything more could begin to develop. No attachments, no feelings. Just physical release. That was his mantra.

But Tessa Wilkes had already busted through that boundary in a big way. Even if they were mostly negative, he had definite feelings about being here with her.

Torsten owed him huge.

He eventually surprised himself by drifting off to sleep. Maybe it was the companionship, or maybe it was how damned delicious Tessa felt in his arms.

He did wake up a couple of times during the night, tensing in anticipation of flashbacks from the night he should have died—the mission he’d been lucky to be medevaced away from with a destroyed leg and no future on the teams.

Nightmares were standard issue to men in his line of work. The shrinks said dreams were how guys like him worked out their emotional crap over killing people for a living. Whatever. He didn’t run around spilling tears for his victims. They were bad people in need of killing.

But tonight the nightmares never came calling.

Nothing came to him except the sweet smell and quiet breathing of the woman snuggled up against him, filling the darkness with soft curves and comfort that lulled him back to sleep.

Too bad this was a onetime good deal. In the morning, he was going to unleash holy hell on her, and that would be the end of cuddles in the dark with Tessa Wilkes, wannabe Medusa and soon-to-be former trainee.

Chapter 4

Tessa arched her body in a cat stretch, moaning a little in the back of her throat as a confident male hand cupped her breast, thumb stroking lazily across her straining nipple. An arm was heavy across her waist, pinning her in place, and another heavily muscled arm acted as a pillow under her left ear. The smell and feel of man and muscle surrounded her, cocooning her completely in security.

Protection. A completely foreign concept to her, especially coming from a man. Slaps and fists were her childhood fare from most men. Her whole life, she’d been responsible for taking care of herself. Seeing to her own safety. If she didn’t do it, no one else would. And yet, here was Beau, doing it unconsciously. As naturally as breathing.

Or maybe he was just copping a freebie feel.

Either way, she had never spent a full night with a man before, and certainly not in a man’s arms. It was shockingly...nice. The intimacy of it was staggering. It was something she could definitely get used to. Maybe not with this guy, and definitely not at this time in her life. But someday.

Her decision to pursue the Special Forces had pretty much precluded her having long-term relationships, given the time demands of her constant training. She was confident that, as long as she was on the teams, she would have to dedicate every waking minute to it.

The first new Medusa. Her. Who’d have thunk?

Deep satisfaction settled into her gut, along with a big dose of fist-pumping exultation. She’d climbed the impossible mountain and made it to the unattainable peak.

Although truth be told, she hadn’t climbed the real mountain yet. She had no illusions about how hard her upcoming training was going to be. If the past few months had been a taste of things to come, the main meal was going to be a bona fide bitch. Particularly since her teacher didn’t seem the least bit thrilled at the idea of her actually becoming a Medusa.

And as hard as it was going to be, she simply didn’t have time for a personal life, no matter how nice it felt to snuggle with a hot guy. Correction: a smoking-hot guy who clearly was as turned on by her as she was by him. And yes, that made it worse. Eyes on the prize, girlfriend. Eyes on the prize.

Still. A pang of regret coursed through her. She really didn’t need to have glimpsed this other existence she might have had.

Of course, she could have a life like this if she wanted it. A man to sleep with every night and wake up to every morning. All she had to do was quit. Walk away from Beau and the Medusas. She had no doubt his orders were to do everything in his power to make her give up; he wouldn’t stop her if she decided she wanted this more than being a trained killer.

Thing was, she’d made it her life’s work to become exactly what he was. To be stronger, badder and bolder than any jerkwad man she could ever possibly encounter. It was really no choice at all. She had to go for the chance to become a Medusa.

Her gut warned her, however, that she wasn’t likely to feel this safe and protected again until she left the Medusas for good—either by choice or in a body bag.

Was a life of constant danger really what she wanted? It was all she had ever known growing up. But Beau had unwittingly—or maybe wittingly, knowing him—given her a glimpse of another world. Another way of life.

She lay there, caught between sleep and wakefulness, contemplating the choice. All the while, the big, strong warrior claimed his woman—

Whoa. Wait. What? She jolted the rest of the way to full consciousness with a mental lurch. She was nobody’s woman! No matter that Beau was draped all over her and she was practically purring and rubbing herself against him like a cat in heat.

Apparently, their subconscious minds had no qualms about crawling all over each other. No matter that this man was about to be her trainer in a supersecret and superintense program that didn’t officially exist. And no matter that she emphatically didn’t want a long-term relationship with any guy. Ever. Not in this lifetime.

Obviously, there would be no rules during her training out here in the middle of nowhere. No oversight. No limits on what they could and would do. Did that mean there were no sexual boundaries, either?

She knew there would be mind games galore as part of her training. They were part of any special operator’s training. Was this semiseduction part of it?

Would Beau take this further?

More important, would she let him?

Belatedly, reason kicked in. This was Beau Lambert she was talking about. He clearly didn’t like the idea of her becoming a Special Forces operative, but he’d been nothing but polite to her yesterday. He’d caught her when her strength had given out, holding her patiently until she could stand on her own two feet again. He’d fed her and seen to her needs, getting her water and a shower. Hell, he’d put Jimbo Kimball on the floor when the guy had made a rude advance to her.

Her gut told her in no uncertain terms that Beau Lambert was no creep. And she trusted her gut.

Sure, he was a healthy, red-blooded male, and his frequent, umm, male reactions, in her presence were a dead giveaway that he thought she was hot. But he’d spent an entire night in bed with her and not done a single thing about it.

She trusted him. More or less.

His palm cupped the weight of her breast and she gasped in spite of herself. Liquid lust shot straight from his hand to her crotch. She squeezed her thighs together tightly, but it didn’t help. Her core throbbed hungrily, desperate for this man. It had been way too long since she’d had sex. It didn’t help that she had utter faith he would know exactly how to appease that particular aching need.