Special Ops Seduction

by Megan Crane

  Something shifted in her as she thought that, sitting there next to the brooding man who’d told her that he’d enlisted because he was a nihilist.

  She didn’t believe him.

  “What?” he asked when she looked at him, his dark gaze moving over her face.

  “Dominic Carter,” she replied, because there was no other possible way to answer that question.

  “Oh, I see him,” Jonas replied. “Seems a little over the top.”

  “What fascinates me”—and Bethan leaned in close so it looked like she was whispering little love words into his ear—“is what would make a man like him look so personally outraged at us? If it’s an Alaska Force thing, theoretically he already won. He should be smirking, not glowering.”

  “What else could it be?”

  But Bethan had no answer for that. And there was nothing to be done about it in the middle of Ellen’s wedding reception. There were more speeches, food, and laughter, and then the dancing began.

  “I know we didn’t discuss this,” Bethan said then, leaning closer to Jonas than strictly necessary. “And I don’t know how much attention you were paying at the rehearsal. But you do know that as part of the wedding party, I’m going to have to dance in a minute. And when I finish dancing with Marcus over there, who walked me down the aisle—”

  “Marcus”—and Jonas’s voice was dark—“can’t hold his liquor. Or shoot pool.”

  “When we’re done, you’re going to have to come out onto the dance floor. And then dance.” He was staring back at her, steel and stone, so she smiled wider. “With me.”

  “I understand the responsibilities of my position,” he said. Perhaps a bit grimly.

  “I don’t know what that means, Jonas. Not with you.”

  His grin felt real when she knew better. “I can do anything in character. You should hear me sing.”

  “Just get ready to dance, swabbie,” she told him.

  Bethan suffered through the indignity of best man Marcus’s too-warm hands and propensity to step on her feet. But soon enough the music changed, and Jonas was there.

  And nothing changed. Not the mission, not the party. Not the fact that Dominic Carter was lurking around, doing God only knew what. It was just one song. Three or so short minutes in the grand scheme of things, and nothing more than a performance.

  But Jonas pulled her into his arms so easily, it was as if they’d danced together all their lives. His hands moved to the small of her back. Hers moved over his fine shoulders. Then he swayed with her, holding her close, his black eyes lit up from within.

  “Jonas . . .” she began, because her heart was beating too hard.

  “Just dance,” he rumbled.

  And that was what they did.

  It was like a dream. The music and their bodies swaying together, creating their own melody. There was heat in his eyes, something stark on his face. And her heart kicked her over into the final revelation of the night, but it came in softly. Because she already knew. She’d always known.

  And there was no point in saying things he wouldn’t hear, so Bethan danced with him instead.

  When the music changed yet again, he took her hands from around his neck, lifted them to his mouth, and pressed a kiss there that she told herself was fake.

  But she knew it wasn’t.

  “I’ll go get us some drinks,” he said in that dark way of his she felt all over, inside and out, and melted off into the crowd.

  Bethan had time to take in a single, steadying breath, and then Dominic Carter was there before her.

  “Wonderful speech,” he said, and he was no longer staring at her the way he had been while she’d given it. Now he was grinning, ear to ear, with his hand extended.

  Creepily.

  “Thank you.” Bethan switched roles—realities—in a heartbeat. She took his hand and shook it, the early-warning system in her gut and down her back in a ruckus. There was nothing specifically wrong with his handshake, but she felt what Jonas had the night before. That it was wrong. Off, somehow. Because the man in front of her didn’t look like much, but he was shaking her hand in a way that told her, clearly, that there was far more to him. Everything about him was just slightly off, from the rumpled suit to the scuffs on his shoes. She realized she believed none of it. “I’m sorry, I don’t know everyone here . . . ?”

  “Dominic Carter. I sometimes do business with your father.” He chuckled knowingly as he let go of her hand. “Defense stuff, you know. Too boring for a party.”

  “It’s not a party unless we’re talking business,” Bethan said with a laugh. “At least for me.”

  They were still on the dance floor, but she made the flash decision to simply stay there. If it was uncomfortable, let him fix it. She would act completely at her ease.

  “Oh, right,” Carter said, something about his tone getting to her. “I heard about you. You’re the sister who enlisted. That must’ve been something.”

  Bethan let out a cocktail sort of laugh. “You know basic training.” She felt certain he did not. “It’s always something.”

  They were discussing absolutely nothing of significance, and yet she felt as if they were in a deadly battle. She didn’t waste time scanning the crowd for Jonas. She knew it was impossible he wasn’t aware this was happening.

  “Well,” Dominic said, still holding her gaze in an aggressive manner completely at odds with the grin, the body language. “A pleasure to make your acquaintance, Bethan. Really.”

  “You, too,” she said sweetly. Innocuously.

  They both beamed at each other, fake and weaponized, and Bethan was so tense she was surprised her teeth didn’t shatter in her jaw.

  The lights in the tent changed with the music, sliding through the crowd and backlighting the man before her. He was turning away, then moving around the bodies before him, the light catching him as he went.

  And everything in Bethan screeched to a halt.

  She understood then.

  In a flash, a vicious scrape of terrible understanding, she got it.

  Her heart was pounding. Her breath was coming in short pants that would have scared her, but she couldn’t allow that. Not now. Not when the desert was in her head again. The aftermath of the explosion. Crawling out of the wreck, not sure if she was alive or dead, the world gone to dust and fire.

  She was hardly aware of it when Jonas appeared beside her.

  “What happened?” he demanded.

  But Bethan could hardly manage the riot inside of her. The shock. She’d had that flashback the other day, and it hadn’t been random.

  None of this was random.

  “What did he say to you?” Jonas growled, his voice hard.

  She made herself turn to him. Focus. “It’s him.”

  “I know. I think it’s him, too. He’s the only—”

  Bethan reached over and took his hands. She knew that if she ran her fingers up along his arm, she would feel some of his scars. She knew that there were more down one side of his marvelous chest, marking him forever, badges of honor, and memories he had to wear on his skin.

  But there were bigger scars.

  “Dominic Carter isn’t just any random guy,” she told him, tense and sure. “He’s the individual who blew up our convoy, killed the rest of our squad, and tried to kill you and me, personally. I never saw his face, but I saw him move. Just like tonight. It’s him, Jonas.”

  Sixteen

  Something thudded through Jonas like a grenade, with no hope of avoiding the coming blast. And when it followed, he was surprised he’d stayed on his feet.

  “You killed him,” he told Bethan shortly, in case she might have forgotten the long night he’d been only half-conscious for.

  “I shot him,” she countered. “But I obviously didn’t kill him. Because he’s here.”

  Jonas
stared down at her, too many fires inside him and no possible way of controlling them. Not if their past was coming back at them like this. Not if this had suddenly gotten a whole lot more personal.

  “The other day I was driving back from a lunch with Ellen,” she was saying fiercely, as if maybe she needed to convince both of them. “I saw some guy running in the vineyards, and I was suddenly fighting off a flashback. The first I’ve had in a long time.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  She blinked. “It didn’t occur to me to tell you. I’m not in the habit of showing my weaknesses to anyone. Are you?”

  Jonas acknowledged that with a faint nod of his head.

  “You’ve looked at a million pictures of this guy with no triggers.”

  Bethan swallowed, hard. “I never saw his face that night. He was backlit, though I swear he was grinning. Ear to freaking ear. No one else had gotten out of the vehicle fire. But then he came around the side of the vehicle and saw you lying there, and I didn’t even think. I fired. Then I dragged you to a more defensible position. But I never saw what happened to his body.”

  The following morning air support had arrived and taken them to Germany. Jonas had refused to see Bethan and had been sent to rehabilitate himself. Bethan had been sent stateside, no doubt to spend some time debriefing the powers that be about the losses incurred.

  He’d spent a lot of time and energy since then trying not to remember the parts of that mission he could remember.

  Jonas rubbed a hand over his jaw, realizing while he was doing it that the fact he was making strange little gestures meant he was more shaken up than he wanted to admit. Worse, he was sure Bethan knew it, too. “It’s unlikely, isn’t it? You don’t miss.”

  “I didn’t say I missed,” she retorted. “I said he’s alive. And here at my sister’s wedding, deliberately introducing himself to both of us. Almost like a test to see if we recognize him.”

  He tried to tamp down the raging fire inside him. “You know as well as I do that PTSD can warp things. Any and all things.”

  “I don’t have PTSD,” she snapped at him, and then modified her expression into something more smiley and appropriate when the people nearest them glanced in their direction. Her hands were still on his, and he should stop that, too. But it was like he was in quicksand and, for once, had no idea what to do. “And I don’t regret shooting the man who tried to kill us. What I regret is that he’s alive and well and clearly knows who we are.”

  Everything in Jonas rejected this scenario. Because it wasn’t possible. Because it put Bethan at personal risk, and something in him . . . couldn’t handle that.

  Really couldn’t handle it.

  Day-to-day risk was one thing. They were highly trained. Risk was part of their job. And the job was often intense, but it was never personal. Yet if this was the guy she’d shot in that desert and he had as much of a hard-on for Bethan as he’d seemed to throughout her speech, this was an entirely different level of risk.

  An unacceptable level.

  Bethan moved closer, keeping their hands tucked there between them. “Do you trust me?”

  She asked the question softly, almost carelessly, but he was looking at her. And he could see far too much in those eyes of hers.

  None of this was safe. None of it was smart.

  He wanted to chalk this up to the same nightmares that lived in all of them, and too often snuck their way out into the light of day, no matter how well-adjusted they might have been otherwise. It was one of the burdens they carried. Chose to carry, he liked to tell himself.

  Jonas would have told anyone else to talk to a therapist first. Or, barring that—because he, personally, would rather punch himself in the face than talk about his thoughts and feelings for any reason—to do a few seriously killer workouts to pump up the endorphins and see things a little more clearly.

  But this was Bethan.

  “With my life,” he said gruffly.

  “You trust my instincts in the field, if nothing else, or we wouldn’t be able to work together.”

  “I trust you,” he repeated, more darkly. “Whatever else, that’s always been true.”

  “Then trust me,” she said urgently.

  Something in him seemed to break apart, though he couldn’t have said what it was. More fire. More hand grenades he suspected he was throwing himself. Because like most complicated things, in the end, it was really simple.

  He had trusted her before they’d gone off in that convoy that fateful day. He’d watched her work, able to access certain assets through their women because she was more than happy to sit down, get to know them, and figure out who they were. She’d been good at psyops. She’d been an excellent attachment to special ops forces, which for a long time was as close to a combat role as she’d gotten.

  If he’d had any doubts about her, or her capabilities, she’d cleared them all up that night she’d saved his life. More than once.

  And he might have kept his distance from her since she’d turned up in Alaska, but that had always been about him, not her. He didn’t want any of that intimacy to spill over into his present-day life, maybe, but he certainly trusted her to do her job and have his back in the field.

  Who was he kidding? He’d trusted her all along.

  The person he didn’t trust was himself.

  “I do,” he told her, hardly recognizing his own voice. “I do trust you, Bethan.”

  And he knew—the way he always knew—that the same electricity jolted through her then. It lit him up. Because it felt like far more of a vow than it should have.

  The quicksand kept sucking him in deeper.

  But all she did was nod. “Okay, then. It’s him. You need to call this in. And I need to dance with my sister. Then, Jonas, we need to end this guy. For real this time.”

  She didn’t wait for him to respond to that. She swept up that violet dress of hers and charged back into the thick of the dance floor, where her sister and all the rest of the bridesmaids and assorted other friends were dancing to the band’s medley of ’80s classics, entirely unaware that anything was happening but this.

  It was as it should be. Civilians were supposed to live without the crap he carted around. It was why he carried it.

  But seeing Bethan out there in the middle of a sea of heedless civilians made something in him . . . break open.

  He told himself he had no idea what it was.

  Jonas made his way through the reception tent, pulling himself firmly back into character. He smiled and shook hands. He laughed with the groomsmen, who now considered him a buddy. He played his part to the hilt, even when he saw Dominic Carter chatting with one of the generals.

  Chatting, when some of the blood on his hands was Jonas’s.

  He envisioned about seventeen ways he could take the man out, right now, but he didn’t. Not only because it would ruin the wedding Bethan clearly wanted to go well, but because they still had a scientist to find.

  Once he left the tent, he put significant distance between him and the party, then called into command back in Alaska. And braced himself when Isaac answered.

  “You sound like you’re at quite a party,” his leader and best friend said, clearly enjoying himself. Which he did a lot more lately—something Jonas supported more in theory than when it was aimed at him. “Now I’m trying to imagine you at a party, Jonas. In my head, it’s a lot like when we’re doing mission breakdowns in the lodge and you stand with your back to a wall, staring blankly.”

  Jonas waited.

  Isaac sighed. “Fine. Report.”

  Jonas broke down what Bethan had told him as succinctly as possible. And when he was done, there was a silence.

  If he were the kind of man to close his eyes and sigh deeply, he would have.

  “Tell me that again.” Isaac sounded significantly more intent than he ha
d a moment before, which only boded ill. “You think that Dominic Carter is the individual who blew up your convoy in the desert. Then tried to finish the job, only to be taken out by Bethan, who was not yet an Army Ranger. Is that what you said?”

  Jonas glared at the dark night before him, seeing Isaac’s face entirely too clearly even though he was all the way north in Alaska. “That’s what I said.”

  If he listened carefully, he was sure he could hear his friend’s expression. Of pure and unholy glee.

  “And you were doing what, exactly, while Bethan was having a little firefight with this guy who might or might not currently be the CEO of the sort of so-called defense outfit that fights its own wars when they feel like it?”

  “I remember her shooting him.” Jonas’s voice was tight and telling, but he couldn’t seem to do anything about that. “Or I think I do. I kept going in and out of consciousness.”

  There was another silence. And Jonas waited for it, because he could feel Isaac’s delight from some three thousand miles down the Pacific Coast. As if it were a seismic event.

  “Jonas,” Isaac said very carefully. And without doing much to hide the laughter in his voice. “Did Bethan save your life? Did she . . . rescue you from the bad man?”

  Isaac stopped restraining himself from laughter, assuming he’d even tried to keep it in. Jonas made a few pointed suggestions about both his parentage and potential solitary activities he could enjoy while he laughed it up.

  Isaac declined. “Is this why you’ve been gunning for her since the day she arrived in Alaska? Because she had the bad manners not to leave you to die in your own misery? And then worse, thrived?”

  “It wasn’t misery that was killing me. It was more the C-4 and the secondary explosions.”

  “This is the best story you’ve ever told me. I can’t wait to tell Templeton. He’s going to lose his mind.”

  There was no point asking Isaac to keep this to himself. He wouldn’t have, even if this little slice of history hadn’t turned out to be important to their current mission.