Special Ops Seduction

by Megan Crane

  “Because I like to keep my private life private,” she replied simply.

  But she’d let him in.

  Jonas didn’t have to ask her to clarify what that meant. He knew.

  And for a long while, they simply soaked there together. The hot water was another caress, soothing the body he’d worked so hard to beat into submission earlier. And all around them, the Alaskan spring night was dark, cool, and wet. Like a secret.

  Jonas could hear the water in the distance, waves against the rocky shore. He heard a cabin door slam, somewhere on the hill. There was the sound of Horatio barking, which meant Isaac and Caradine were spending the night here, rather than in their house in Grizzly Harbor. There was the hum of generators. The rush of the wind up above as it tangled with the evergreens.

  The crackle of the fire in the stove heating the water. And each and every breath Bethan took.

  There were so many things he should have said. But he couldn’t begin to imagine how he could go about it. Any of it. He wasn’t built that way.

  So instead, he showed her.

  He shifted her in his arms, tipping her back so he could kiss her the way he wanted to. Hungry and reverent, sweet and wicked.

  And when they started to get hotter than the water, he picked her up again. He carried her out of the tub, grinning when she yelped at the blast of cool air against her warm skin.

  Jonas brought her inside and toweled her off. Then he carried her up the open, wooden stairs to her sleeping loft. He laid her out on her soft bed, flushed and ripe in the middle of what looked to him like approximately ten thousand pillows.

  “What are you doing?” she asked, but she was smiling, stretched out before him like a lazy sort of cat.

  “I’ll show you,” he told her, crawling onto the bed.

  And then he taught them both how to want all over again, as if it were new.

  Nineteen

  Bethan woke the way she always did, happy to be in her bed. Home at last.

  Except today, when she sat up in her bed to start her morning routine, she realized almost instantly that she wasn’t alone.

  And even as her body responded with a kick of alarm, she remembered.

  Jonas.

  My God, something in her sang out, Jonas.

  Jonas, who shifted from what looked like a sound sleep to total alertness by simply opening his eyes.

  Her breath shuddered out of her.

  Because Jonas had always been a beautiful man. Bethan had been known to appreciate that beauty in any number of inappropriate places.

  But today he was in her bed.

  And as it turned out, that was a fantasy she hadn’t known she had.

  Especially today, when she could remember—distinctly— each and every thing they had done together in this bed. Each touch. Each cry. Each long, hot, gorgeous hour.

  She found herself smiling despite herself. Or because of him. Either way, she did nothing to curb the impulse.

  “You looked like you were headed somewhere,” he said after a moment, that dark voice moving over her and in her like a new caress. And her body was so attuned to him now that she felt herself shudder into instant awareness. Ready and greedy, just like that.

  “I have a morning routine,” she managed to say, without letting that greed color her voice. She knew she probably shouldn’t reach over and touch him, but he was in her bed. Right there in front of her. What was she supposed to do? “I’m going to guess you probably have one, too.”

  His dark eyes gleamed. “We are who we are.”

  Her smile widened in delight. “Did you just make a deliberately amusing remark?” She shook her head in mock astonishment. “I really have corrupted you.”

  He sat up then, a swift, efficient movement that made her breath catch. Because he was all smooth muscle and leashed power, and she wanted him like she’d never tasted him at all. Like the hunger for him was in her now, on a cellular level, and would never, ever leave.

  “Come on,” she said briskly, to cover it. “A hundred burpees before coffee.”

  He arched a dark brow. “Is that all? I thought that surely, one of the world’s few female Army Rangers, would do a full Ironman before breakfast.”

  She grinned. “Only on alternate Tuesdays.”

  Bethan thought this should feel weird and awkward, but it didn’t. She’d never allowed anyone inside her cabin, much less let a man spend the night here. Much less Jonas Crow. But it felt . . . perfectly normal. She told herself it was because they’d spent a week pretending this was who they were in California.

  Don’t make this something it’s not, she ordered herself.

  Jonas went downstairs ahead of her to pull on his discarded clothes, and he was already stoking her fire by the time she met him there. As if he knew how she liked to start each day.

  And then, with only a faint curve of that mouth of his, he did her morning burpee routine with her, side by side, with a race to the finish. A cold shower, then coffee.

  As if they’d done all this together a thousand times before.

  As if this were their life.

  It was California. It had to be. It was all those long jogs they’d taken, just the two of them together, that made this all feel so easy and familiar.

  But somehow, she thought it might be a little bit more than that.

  He left her a little bit before the community workout, gruffly telling her that he’d meet her there. And then he shocked her to her toes when he curved a hand over her neck in a hard grip and kissed her.

  Swift and knee weakening, leaving her smiling foolishly after him once he left.

  And for a moment, alone in her cabin again, she could only stare off at nothing in particular, try to catch her breath, and try her best not to read anything into . . . anything.

  She’d made that mistake before.

  And thinking about that night in the desert—and Dominic Carter—was sobering. Like another cold shower. She fought to keep those images out of her head, but they lived in her. The fear and the adrenaline. The grief, the determination, the will to live no matter what. They were all still a part of her.

  Just like he is, she thought, as she made her way down to the beach.

  And she welcomed the opportunity to stop thinking so freaking much for a brutal hour.

  After the workout, when she decided to go on a run in a heavy weighted vest, because that sounded like the kind of awful she needed after glutting herself on Jonas all night long, Jonas went with her.

  He didn’t seem to care that everybody watched him do it.

  Bethan fought her feelings about that for almost the whole of her run down to the far end of the beach and back. Then she remembered the last time the two of them had been on this beach together. The evil sandbags and the fact that he’d come out here against his will because he’d wanted to avoid whatever Isaac’s mediation might look like.

  She stopped running and looked at him, panting, a sudden dark suspicion taking her over. “Is all of this because you don’t want mediation?”

  Jonas gazed back at her, implacable and unreadable as ever. “No.”

  “Because the last time we were out here, that was what you were worried about. And now . . . all this.”

  And ordinarily, she would have wanted the earth to open her up and swallow her whole, because her voice cracked on the last two words. But today she didn’t seem to care about that as much as she should have.

  Jonas’s jaw tensed. “Mediation was one of the things I was thinking about when I volunteered to be your wedding date. But I haven’t thought about it since.”

  A knot throbbed to life beneath her ribs. “Everybody knows this story, Jonas. Dumb girl lets some guy get one over on her to save himself. Loses everything in the process while he’s fine. Is that what’s happening?”

  That muscle
in his lean jaw pulsed. “No.”

  “Because I can’t help noticing that for someone who was deeply concerned with making sure no one knew what had happened between us only days ago, you sure didn’t mind letting everybody see you come out on this run with me. What do you think they’re going to think? Or is that what you want?”

  “Who do you think I am?” he asked her, that dark gaze of his an indictment.

  But she refused to let that get to her, no matter how it made her heart pound.

  “How would I know?” she asked, forcing herself to stay quiet. Calm. Focused. When what she wanted to do was scream. “You could be anyone. Isn’t that your job?”

  “As often as it’s your job.”

  “Don’t think it hasn’t occurred to me that you play a role here the same way you do everywhere else, Jonas. Maybe your biggest role of all.”

  She didn’t realize that she was holding her breath until he slid his hand over the nape of her neck again. And she nearly gasped.

  That impossibly dark gaze moved over her face, and she should have jerked away. She should have tried to hide. She should have done something to keep him from seeing too much . . . but she didn’t.

  He saw everything. She let him. “You let me into your cabin. You feel vulnerable.”

  “Or played,” she countered. “One of the two.”

  “And if I played you, you can lean into the anger here. I get it.”

  She thought he did, and that was . . . worse and better at the same time.

  “You’re right,” Jonas said after a moment. “I play all kinds of roles wherever I go. But not with you, Bethan. Never with you.”

  And he didn’t kiss her. He only gazed down at her, his mouth an unsmiling line and his gaze so intense she felt as if it were carving out her insides as she stood there.

  He didn’t kiss her, but the weight of his hand on her neck felt like some kind of brand, or maybe that was his gaze, and everything inside her seemed to pull too tight even as it broke apart.

  And still, all they did was stand there on a windswept beach, waiting for the morning fog to lift.

  “The briefing’s at nine,” he reminded her after a lifetime or two. And then he broke her heart by dropping his hand and stepping back. Breaking whatever it was that hummed there between them, like their own personal electric charge. “I’ll race you back.”

  * * *

  * * *

  When she walked into the briefing in the lodge at precisely 0900 hours, Bethan had erased any possible trace of the night before and, while she was at it, everything personal that had happened in California.

  Every visible trace, anyway.

  Once inside the big, cheerfully masculine room, she nodded and smiled faintly at her colleagues before taking her preferred place over against one wall, next to Kate Holiday.

  She and the trooper were the only women in the room, which would have made them friendly by default. Good thing Bethan also happened to like her enough to count her as a real friend. That wasn’t always the way it went in primarily male spaces.

  “One of these mornings you need to come to the workout,” Bethan said as she settled into her usual stance.

  Kate smirked. “I keep meaning to. Then I remember that I hate group activities.”

  “Everyone works out alone, Kate. Nobody lifts the weight for you. You have to do it yourself.”

  “And still a hard pass from me on that one,” she replied, the way she always did.

  When Isaac and Oz walked into the room, the whole group fell quiet. They all pulled out their own tablets and paid close attention as Isaac laid out the active missions, the potential missions and clients, the new candidates who’d impressed him—including, Bethan was delighted to see, another woman—and any other orders of business.

  “Let’s circle back to the scientist,” Isaac said then.

  And when he flashed a picture of the Sowandes on the screen, Bethan forgot Jonas, her family, kidding around with Kate, and all the rest of it.

  Because looking at Iyara Sowande made her feel nothing but guilty. She’d made her a promise, and so far, that promise was broken.

  “To bring everyone up to speed,” Isaac was saying, “we all feel pretty sure the person responsible for the disappearance of the Sowandes is this guy. Currently masquerading as a squeaky-clean CEO—”

  “Is there such a thing?” Blue asked.

  “Not in this lifetime,” Templeton replied.

  “—without a single red flag on his record.” Isaac nodded at Blue and Templeton. “This seemed unlikely from the get-go, because nobody collects that many defense contracts without a little mess in there somewhere.”

  “In this case, it’s a very well hidden mess,” Oz added from his spot near the front, his laptop making his face look blue. “I had to do some seriously deep diving to figure out who this guy used to be.”

  “Way back when he was blowing up convoys in a land far, far away,” Bethan added, not doing a great job of keeping the tension out of her voice.

  “About that,” Jonas said from his place across the room, and the way his dark eyes moved to hers made her belly tighten. “Bethan shot that guy once already. And he came back, created a new identity for himself, then acted like he didn’t know who we were at Bethan’s sister’s wedding.”

  “While putting cameras in your room,” Jack added.

  “And going to great lengths to make himself look like some pencil pusher,” Lucas agreed.

  “I don’t like resurrections,” Jonas told the room. “Particularly not secret ones. No one does that for a good reason.”

  “Amen,” Isaac muttered, and he probably wasn’t the only one thinking about the situation Caradine had been in last year. Though Bethan figured he was probably still angrier about it than anyone else in the room. He cleared his throat, a sign of emotion that Bethan absolutely was not comparing to Jonas’s complete lack thereof, because why torture herself when she needed to concentrate?

  Oz kept going. “Pre-resurrection, our friend was better known as Judson Kerrigone. Born in Delaware and raised mostly in New Jersey, with a couple of years in Philadelphia as a kid. Tried to enlist in the army, the navy, and the marines in three consecutive years but was rejected every time. Debt, drugs, and a criminal record. Tried to make a lateral move to the police but failed the psych eval.”

  “He sounds like a real winner,” Templeton drawled.

  “Obviously, the next step was to embrace that mercenary life,” August agreed.

  “One thing I’ll never understand,” Jonas said in that dark way of his that resonated inside Bethan, even from across the room, “is why anyone would think it’s easier to kill for money when it’s hard enough to do it for the right reasons.”

  “Everybody in this room knows how hard it is,” Isaac said, sounding as pissed as Bethan figured they all felt. “Just like we all know what kind of loser prefers to turn it off just to make a dime.”

  “Translation,” Griffin said coolly. “We don’t like this guy.”

  There was a rumble of agreement throughout the room, because everyone here was still a little idealistic, or else they would have quit when they left the service. Even Jonas, Bethan thought, whether he knew it or not.

  “He made my skin crawl,” she said when the rumbling died down. She did her best not to look at Jonas. “And that was before I knew who he was. Before I knew that he’d tried to kill me once already. I couldn’t get my head around the timing. What changed between our arrival and the appearance of those cameras? Then I remembered that I’d had a flashback of what happened to our convoy.” She couldn’t keep herself from looking at Jonas then, which was better than paying too close attention to all the other very serious gazes trained on her. “I thought it was random, but then I remembered there was a man, running away, off in my peripheral vision. The cameras appeared later that
same evening.”

  “You think he saw you doing a drive-by?” Isaac asked.

  Bethan shrugged. “The options are that he already knew who I was, or that he saw me in that car before I saw him. Both are possibilities. Either way, he installed cameras in the room and then, at the reception, went out of his way to come up and get in my face.”

  She let that sink in.

  “Yeah,” Templeton drawled, and let the chair he usually kept tipped back thud to the floor. “Not a fan of this guy.”

  “Judson Kerrigone doesn’t have a lot to recommend him,” Oz agreed. “Probably why he decided that after meeting Bethan in the desert—”

  “Bethan and her gun,” Jonas said, with a lethal satisfaction.

  Everyone else nodded at that, even Griffin, the best sniper Bethan knew.

  “That seems to have been a turning point for our guy,” Isaac said. “Because after somehow surviving Bethan, Judson Kerrigone disappeared. And not long after, Dominic Carter took his place. With a bright-and-shiny interest in the sorts of things that Judson Kerrigone would know all about but could no longer touch, because everybody knew the kind of nasty character he was.”

  “I spent a lot of time digging into the life and times of our boy Judson,” Oz chimed in. “He left a trail of petty destruction behind him, a couple of kids, and overlapping wives. The individual the wives knew was all about the steroids, pumping iron in the gym, and a lot of strutting around, making himself the center of attention.”

  Kate shook her head. “It fascinates me that he made this re-creation of himself so . . .”

  “Soft,” Jonas supplied, his voice like a whip. The word soft sounding like a curse. “He deliberately makes himself seem smaller than he is. He wants to be mistaken for an easily forgotten pencil pusher. But he must have known that a single handshake would blow his cover.”

  “Does that mean he made you, too?” Benedict asked.

  Jonas considered. “Not much to make. I wasn’t pretending I didn’t have a military background. He was.”

  “Whatever he’s doing, he was playing with us,” Bethan added. “I can’t shake my interaction with him. It was too deliberate. And again, the options are that he either suspected I already knew who he was and rolled right up to me like that, or thought it was entertaining to flaunt himself in front of me knowing that he almost killed me. Either way.”