Special Ops Seduction

by Megan Crane

  He’d rather be in the hands of his enemies again than deal with this.

  The rest of the team jumped out onto the dock and made their way up the long set of stairs toward the former fishing lodge that had been in Isaac Gentry’s family for generations. Isaac, Templeton, and Jonas had transformed it into their main headquarters. It sprawled there, up above the waterline, its wooden boardwalks connecting the main lodge building to a number of freestanding cabins. Behind it, the island was a steep hill toward an almost-always-impassable mountain, with more cabins set down here and there, allowing Alaska Force team members more or less solitude, according to their level of general twitchiness.

  Fool’s Cove was remote. It had been likened to a fortress, and the description fit. The only way in was by water or air, unless the mountain pass was actually open and nonlethal, for a change. That meant they could always see any intruders coming.

  Jonas’s idea of paradise.

  “Briefing in two hours,” he called out, and got a variety of head tilts in reply.

  Except for Bethan, of course. She actually stopped a few steps up, turned around, and met his gaze. And then nodded.

  Jonas told himself that she was simply overzealously responding, the way she did sometimes, which made sense from a woman who’d had to fight to be more correct and more perfect than any man in the service ever had.

  But to him, it always felt like she was throwing down.

  Maybe you wish she would, something in him suggested. He ignored it.

  “Do you have something you need to talk to me about?” he asked coolly as he came to the bottom of the stairs. He hated that blank look. Those cool, assessing, green psyops eyes of hers that, thanks to her years in Army Intelligence, saw too much.

  That always had.

  Her chin lifted a fraction. Just a fraction, but he saw it.

  “No,” she said quietly. “I don’t.”

  And again, there was a moment, just a moment. The same rabbit hole. The same memories.

  The same problem he didn’t know how to fix, when it was his life’s work to get out there and turn problems into solutions.

  He hated it.

  She did something with her mouth, maybe bit her tongue, and then she turned around again. Then ran up the long staircase a lot quicker than necessary.

  Jonas took his time following.

  And when he made it to the top, he took another moment to look around. To remind himself that he was not only glad to be alive, he was glad to be here. Right here in Fool’s Cove, doing things that mattered. Better still, knowing that on this side of his murky, highly classified years in the service, he was on the right side. Always.

  The only quagmires he faced these days were in his own head.

  He’d met Isaac when they were both in what was called Delta Force by some. They’d found themselves on a mission together in a city dancing its way toward a crisis. And while they’d waited for the inevitable crisis to happen, they’d had all kinds of discussions. Nothing like a shared foxhole to inspire a lot of gallows humor. But the usual talk about nothing in particular had shifted into more personal territory, which was how they’d found out that they’d both spent time in Alaska. Isaac had grown up here. Not in the family lodge but in Grizzly Harbor, the fishing village on the other side of the island. He even had an uncle here, living off the grid in the woods.

  Jonas’s family hadn’t been quite so settled, to put it mildly. They’d spent a winter in Ketchikan, then a much colder summer out toward Nome. Then a couple of years north of the Arctic Circle in Fort Yukon. All of which paled in comparison to the time he’d spent in the Alaskan interior, after that final, terrible mission. After the Washington, D.C., nonsense was finished and the threat of court-martials had flipped to employment offers and commendations, Jonas had needed to go sit with himself. Alone.

  Alone except for his gun, that was.

  He hadn’t quite gotten there, despite more than a few nights that skated pretty close to that permanent eject button. But Isaac and Templeton had come and found him, then knocked some sense into him. Or tried. They’d convinced him that Alaska Force wouldn’t simply be an opportunity to keep doing the things they were trained to do. It would be more than that, Isaac had said. It would be an opportunity to heal. To be their own masters, for one thing.

  And most important to Jonas, to make absolutely sure they never found themselves fighting on the wrong side.

  All things considered, this iteration of Alaska was a lot better.

  He had his own place in the dark forest on the hill. Unless Jonas was inside the lodge, actively involved in mission prep or monitoring, he could simply melt off into the woods. Sit in his own cabin, where he had a generator and access to electricity, though he rarely used it.

  He knew the rest of the Alaska Force team liked to call him hard-core. He wasn’t. He’d been in a battle for survival for the whole of his life. Now he was safe, physically. But that only gave the ghosts inside him more opportunity to make their move—and if he yielded to any softness, he knew that was when they’d win.

  Jonas couldn’t let that happen.

  “I thought the mission was a success,” came a voice from behind him, but Jonas didn’t flinch or jump. He’d heard the exact moment his friend and leader Isaac had come out of the main part of the lodge and headed in his direction.

  “Objectives were accomplished.”

  Isaac came to stand next to him at the rail, looking out over the cove as the blustery March wind slapped at them both. There was a storm coming in, currently hunkered down over the mountain, so it smelled like rain and the deep tang of low tide.

  Sometimes, if Jonas stood right here and breathed deep enough, he felt clean.

  “How did August do?” Isaac asked.

  “Excellent. As expected.”

  “No concerns about performance? Or team integration?”

  “He performed well. I almost forgot he was new.” Jonas looked at Isaac. “How are the others doing?”

  Things were changing in Alaska Force. Isaac was settling down. He now split his time between Fool’s Cove and the house he kept in Grizzly Harbor that was more convenient for his woman, Caradine Scott. She ran the only decent restaurant in town, and therefore on the island: the Water’s Edge Café. Templeton was going back and forth between Fool’s Cove and Anchorage with the Alaska State Trooper’s special attachment to Alaska Force, his woman, Kate Holiday. Even ice-cold Griffin was domesticated these days, over in Grizzly Harbor with his no longer on the run Southern steel magnolia of a woman, Mariah McKenna. Blue Hendricks, former Navy SEAL and all-around badass, had gotten married in September. He and Everly, his wife, lived here in Fool’s Cove, but the balance had shifted.

  All four of them had more reason to go home than to go out on an op these days. Unlike Jonas, who had spent years on certain missions in his time and sometimes thought that was the only time he was really, truly himself.

  When he was playing someone else.

  But that was an identity crisis for another day.

  Isaac was looking into more permanent outposts in the middle of ongoing operations abroad. And while he never recruited for Alaska Force, because it wasn’t a good fit for someone unless they came and found it on their own—and he only took on about one in ten of those who made the trek—he’d found a crop of decent new members over the last six months.

  August was one. A few weeks after Isaac had returned from a long few weeks in the Amazon last summer, Benedict Morse had shown up, maybe or maybe not a former member of the highly secret Task Force Black. Two more men had joined that fall: Jack Herriot, former Air Force Weatherman, and Lucas King, former ANGLICO Marine, among other things.

  Isaac had a good eye. All the new men were distinguishing themselves on and off the field.

  “Everyone is settling in great,” Isaac confirmed. “In fact, Jonas, t
here’s only one area of tension in the ranks, as far as I can tell.”

  He didn’t sigh, because that was a tell. “Don’t.”

  But Isaac ignored him. “Are you ever going to sort that out?”

  “There’s nothing to sort out.”

  “Because if it’s a problem with women in combat, you should know we have an excellent female marine who’s been dancing around coming out to see us for a while now. I have a feeling she’s going to take the plunge in the next few months, and that will make it two.”

  “You know I don’t have a problem with women,” Jonas gritted out.

  “What I know and what I’ve seen right here in Fool’s Cove are two different things.”

  Jonas stared at his friend. “It’s been a year and a half. We just completed a perfectly successful mission. What do you care if it’s not all pop songs and rainbows?”

  “I don’t.” Isaac’s gray gaze was intense. And steady. “We might not have ranks here, but you’re a leader. Hard to justify that when you’ve taken an obvious and undying dislike to one of our people.”

  “I don’t dislike anyone.”

  Isaac almost smiled. “But you don’t like them, either.”

  “I liked you until roughly five minutes ago.”

  “Good thing I don’t need you to like me.” And the way Isaac grinned, it was clear he wasn’t particularly worried that he’d lost Jonas’s hard-won affection. “You need to figure it out, whatever it is, because the next time someone asks me about it? I’m going to insist on mediation.”

  Jonas didn’t reel around blinking in astonishment, because he had far too much control for that. He reacted only when he wanted to react. But it felt like a close call, when it shouldn’t have been.

  “Mediation?” Jonas caught himself the second before he actually scowled at Isaac. Another clear sign he needed to get a handle on himself. “There’s nothing to mediate.”

  “Then it shouldn’t be hard to fix it,” Isaac said calmly. He nodded toward the storm gathering force up above them. “I’ll leave you to your brooding.”

  But it wasn’t the brooding that got to Jonas, he thought, when Isaac walked away. It was the ghosts.

  And Bethan’s ghost was the worst, because he couldn’t snap himself out of it by telling himself that she was dead and gone like all the rest.

  Because at any moment he might turn around, and there she’d be. Reminding him of when he was helpless. Vulnerable. That was bad enough.

  It hadn’t been the first or the last night he’d fully expected he might die before morning, but because of her, it had been the only night he’d ever been desperate to stay alive instead.

  Desperate.

  He thought that haunted him as much as she did.

  Three

  The next morning, Bethan woke up the way she usually did, without any alarm, a good two hours before dawn.

  She stretched as she lay there, tucked in beneath the rafters in her cozy loft bedroom that opened up the downstairs into a comfortable studio. She took her time getting out of bed, because that first shock of her cold floor in the morning always made her gasp and remember the California beaches of her youth, more vividly with every step down the open stairs to the ground floor.

  But once she was up, her body kicked in and fired up her brain. She threw more logs into her wood-burning stove, so her cabin would be nice and warm when she finished her morning routine of one hundred burpees as fast as possible right here in the center of her living space, followed by a cold shower.

  She felt energized, wide-awake, and gloriously alive when she sat down in her compact kitchen and fixed herself a pot of strong, black coffee and a quick energy-boosting smoothie that was both easy to digest and quickly converted to fuel.

  Her cabin was just off the wooden walkways, within walking distance of the lodge, unlike some that were miles into the dense forest. Bethan liked being remote, but not that remote. She preferred easy access to her cabin, because it was her refuge. Inside these walls, she could indulge in all the feminine parts of herself she kept locked up tight when working. Because nobody wanted a cuddly, cute Army Ranger.

  Her cabin was soft and cozy, then, because she couldn’t be. Everything in it had been chosen either because it was comfortable or because it made her smile. Her oversized armchair was piled high with the softest throws. Her couch was a soft, pastel nest. Her bed was festooned with approximately a thousand pointless throw pillows. There were bright, happy colors everywhere, scented candles, and thick, deep rugs thrown everywhere because she liked to sink her bare feet into them. Outside, on the private deck to the side of her cabin, sat her major indulgence. The wood-fired hot tub she’d built with her own hands, which was her favorite reward for those hard, often grueling days of pushing herself to her limits and beyond.

  Bethan let no one inside her cabin. Ever.

  When she was finished with her coffee and smoothie, she dressed in layers for the 0700 community workout and then headed outside, into a typically cloudy Alaskan morning. The woods around her were wet, thick with the scent of woodsmoke, damp pine, and the richness of the sea all around. She ran in place for a moment to encourage her body temperature to rise to meet the relatively warm near-forty-degree morning, then started down the steep hillside toward the beach.

  She was at the end of her second winter here, and she liked the dark, barren months more than she’d expected she would. She knew that the Southeast Alaskan islands had it easy, comparatively speaking, to the rest of the hardy Last Frontier. Balmy, people liked to say when it was even marginally above freezing, because thanks to the sea, the islands never quite got the intense snow and blindingly negative temperatures that occurred farther north. She’d been told it was the relentless gray, clouds and fog and rain, that got to people over time, but that really wasn’t a factor for Bethan. She had her bright, happy cabin to keep her spirits high.

  And after spending a week in the blinding desert, she found the press of morning fog a relief. She followed the dirt path from her cabin toward the lodge but skirted around it, heading toward the water instead. Because it was down there, set back from the high-tide line, that Isaac had the Alaska Force community gym. They liked to call it their box of pain, and Isaac certainly delivered. He came up with torturous workouts that would make a drill instructor proud.

  “Morning,” Isaac said cheerfully when everyone who was off mission and in Fool’s Cove had assembled inside the sprawling, stark cabin. “I sure hope no one had a big breakfast.”

  And no one groaned, because that only encouraged him.

  Bethan wasn’t particularly surprised when the workout consisted of a truly vile amount of cardio and then some heavy sled pushes down the unforgiving rocky beach to really make everyone feel as gross as possible. But that was the thing about gross workouts. Once you survived them, you felt like a god. She’d been chasing that high for years.

  Once their solid hour of community hell was done, most people staggered off to deal with themselves before the standard nine o’clock briefing. But that was when Bethan took her extra hour to work on her fitness. Sometimes she pushed her cardio. Sometimes she worked on strength training. She liked to push her boundaries and intensity. Today she picked up a 150-pound sandbag and started walking down the beach with it.

  Cursing the weight of it and her matching bad attitude with every step.

  But she didn’t care what attitude she had as long as she kept going. That was what had gotten her to apply to Ranger School in the first place. And then, far more demanding, to survive it. And graduate.

  She was aware almost instantly that someone was behind her as she made her slow way down the stretch of beach with the weight that felt like it was crushing her flat. She assumed it was Isaac. Or Templeton, maybe. Both of whom sometimes stuck around with her after workouts.

  When the screaming in her body overwhelmed her, she
dropped the sandbag. That was the thing about a sandbag. You always dropped it, eventually. You fought and fought to keep from dropping it, dropped it anyway, and then instantly felt both the delirious relief of not holding it anymore and the kick of panic that you’d have to pick it back up again.

  Sandbags were gritty little metaphors, and Bethan loved them in theory. Not so much when she was in the middle of carrying one.

  She wheeled around to commiserate and, to her shock, saw that it was Jonas behind her. He did not drop the sandbag he was holding. Bethan forgot to keep her expression appropriately placid, and glared at him. “What are you doing?”

  “What does it look like I’m doing? A heavy sandbag carry.”

  “Since when do you work out with me alone?” She hated that she felt so raw, and blamed him. He’d ambushed her—and given what he was capable of, she had to think it was deliberate. “Since when do you acknowledge I exist?”

  A muscle in his jaw worked, and that was a shock. It suggested this man who was stone straight through had actual human reactions, when Bethan had been reasonably certain he’d left them all behind on that op she knew better than to mention.

  “Since today,” Jonas said without inflection. “Before our debrief yesterday, Isaac told me that if we didn’t start getting along, he was going to suggest mediation.”

  “Mediation.” Suddenly the sandbag was looking good if her only other option was this maddening conversation with the most irritating man alive. “And why would I be involved in any kind of mediation? I’m not the problem.”

  He only stared back at her, those black eyes of his as forbidding and unreadable as ever.

  And the truth was, Bethan did not give herself a whole lot of opportunities to stand around staring at Jonas Crow. Because there was no point, and it always felt too much like a Pyrrhic victory, anyway. She certainly never wanted him to catch her doing it. Besides, he was already etched inside of her, as if he’d laser-cut his own image into her bones. She might not like that, and some years she thought the things she carried might choke her from the inside out, but there it was.