by Cindy Dees
“How about you, Axel?” Sherri asked. “What’s your field handle?”
“Axe.”
Lily piped up, declaring, “That’s totally lame. We definitely need to replace that.”
“Oh yeah?” the big biker demanded. “What would you call me?”
“Teddy Bear,” Lily shot back without hesitation.
That caused a round of laughter and ribbing, with Axel threatening grievous bodily harm to anyone who called him that to his face.
“Jojo?” Sherri asked. “How about you?”
“Joaquin is my real name, but everyone has always called me Jojo. It became my field handle by default.”
“Ladies?” Sherri asked. “Can we come up with something better?”
“Fabio,” Anna replied immediately.
“No!” Jojo yelped.
Sherri bit back a giggle. Jojo’s mane of hair, currently pulled back in a ponytail, was black, not blond, but he was a very pretty man. And big. Not as beefy as Axel, but he still looked like he could pick up a truck.
Griffin commented, “Jojo—correction, Fabio—is from Hawaii and came to us by way of the National Football League.”
“Griffff,” Jojo growled.
Anna giggled. “Well, that explains a lot. All those hits to the head and all…”
“Hey!” Jojo protested. “I opted out after the draft. I was undersized to play in the NFL, and I wanted to do something meaningful with my life.”
Sherri could actually respect that and relate to it. She nodded and murmured, “I know how you felt.”
Again, Griffin glanced over his shoulder, his gaze far too observant for her taste.
“What about you, Sam?” Sherri asked quickly, hoping to distract Griffin from following up on her too-revealing comment.
“I don’t have a field handle—” he started.
The men shouted him down. Kenny reported gleefully, “His field handle is Babycakes.”
Sherri grinned. “Thank God that’s already taken. I shudder to think of being stuck with that.” She glanced back at the last guy on the team. “And you, Ken? What’s your handle?”
“Alpo.”
“Like the dog food?” she blurted out. “How’d you get that?”
“It stands for alcoholic libations procurement officer,” he replied.
“And?” she prompted when he said no more.
“And,” Griffin jumped in, “that man can sniff out booze anytime, anywhere. It’s a gift. We’ll be in a country where liquor is completely forbidden, and he’ll still manage to find a case of beer or a fifth of whiskey.”
Anna laughed. “That sounds like a heck of a useful field skill.”
“You have no idea, darlin’,” Kenny drawled at her. “I’m a man of many talents.”
Anna shot back, “Composing song lyrics not being one of them.”
He crooned, “You’ve done broke my heart with your cruel, cold words. I’m a man on the edge, and I’m sinking fast.”
The guy really did have a good voice, rich and soulful, perfect for country music.
Sherri asked, “Have you ever considered singing professionally, Ken? You have the voice for it.”
He shrugged. “Maybe someday when I’m done with this gig.”
Anna added, “Just promise you’ll hire a songwriter and not try to write your own.”
In a flash, Ken swerved and bumped into Anna, knocking her off balance.
Jojo jumped forward and caught Anna’s elbow, steadying her in a display of reflexes so fast Sherri wasn’t exactly sure what she’d seen. Dang, it was so easy to underestimate these men. They loped along, joking around like a bunch of goofballs, and then in the blink of an eye, they were stronger and faster than she could believe.
The pace Griffin set pushed her very close to her maximum speed. Unfortunately, she got the impression the guys had at least one more gear in them, if not several more. Her running watch said this pace also met the pre-BUD/S qualification time for a fifteen-kilometer run.
But the guys seemed unimpressed and plowed onward like they did this every day. She had a sneaking suspicion she, too, would be expected to do this daily from now on. Yikes.
Finally, a year or so after they left the compound, the white clapboard buildings and rusted Quonset huts came into sight. The men peeled off, running directly into their barracks, and the women jogged into theirs. As soon as their door closed, the women collapsed on their cots, panting.
Sherri didn’t even have the energy to unlace her boots and kick them off.
Anna commented, “Am I the only one who had a hell of a time keeping my mind on running out there? Did you see Trevor’s ass? My God. I have needs, and that man’s accent makes me think dirty thoughts.”
Lily laughed. “I don’t know about an Englishman. I kind of like American guys who are big and cuddly.”
Sherri rolled on her side to stare at the petite woman. “You don’t seriously have a crush on Axel, do you? Or is Jojo the lucky guy?”
Lily answered indignantly, “I don’t chase after men. And certainly not the ones I work with.”
She made an excellent point, of course. It was a lousy idea to date coworkers and doubly fraught with problems in a military hierarchy. Still, Sherri couldn’t help but enjoy the overall eye-candy factor.
Sherri laughed ruefully. “Well, at least now we know how they’re going to get rid of us. They’re going to flaunt their hot bodies and distract us until we can’t function.”
Anna sighed blissfully. “What a way to go.”
Lily looked vaguely scandalized and began stripping off her boots and socks.
Sherri followed suit, commenting, “What do you want to bet they haul us over to the gym after supper just to make the point that they’re bigger and badder than we are?”
The other women groaned.
Frankly, she could stop exercising for today and not be sorry. Her legs were tired, and she would be sore tomorrow after the back-to-back runs today. But she had a sneaking suspicion the pain was just getting started.
What had she gotten herself into? Throwing down against a SEAL platoon was far from the smartest thing she’d ever done.
But it wasn’t as if she could turn down a challenge. Her family used to joke that Competitive was her middle name. What could be more challenging than becoming the one thing no woman on earth had ever managed to be?
Still. Maybe she’d bitten off more than she could chew this time.
Bah. Her mantra had always been No risk, no reward. And the corollary to that theory was Never quit.
She suspected her mantra was going to be put to the test out here. Big time. But she’d be twice damned before she let Griffin Caldwell get the best of her.
* * *
Sure enough, sunset found them sweating in the gym, pumping out push-ups, pull-ups, burpees, and whatever other forms of torture the guys could cook up. At least she was able to take some satisfaction from Griffin’s poorly disguised surprise as she demonstrated upper-body strength most men would envy.
Kenny, Sam, and Jojo kept up a running commentary of double entendres that cracked the three guys up and might have annoyed Sherri had she not fully expected to be harassed for being a woman. She noted that Trevor stood back from the ribbing, preferring to ignore it all. Classy guy.
Jojo called, “Pump it out. Faster. Faster!”
Sam added, “Deeper, ladies. Deeper.” That was in response to four-count lunges, a form of torture Sherri had never encountered before.
Jojo commented, “Man, I love wet T-shirts.”
“Are we making you wet, yet?” Kenny teased the women.
That one got a reaction out of Griffin. He threw a silent, quelling stare at the trio, and they subsided instantly. Sherri would accuse them all of being psychic, but it probably just boiled down to the men know
ing each other that well. Griffin could throw them a look, and the others knew exactly what he meant by it.
As for her, Griffin Caldwell was a mystery. He seemed by turns attracted to her and furious that she lived and breathed. He looked as if he couldn’t make up his mind whether to be intrigued or appalled by her attempting to become a SEAL. She knew the feeling. She couldn’t figure out whether to be attracted to or infuriated by him, or both.
When she caught him staring as she finished knocking out a set of pull-ups, she asked, “What? You didn’t think women could have upper-body strength?”
He shrugged. “I’m not impressed, yet.”
Liar. All three women were world-class athletes. Lily might be tiny, but she’d been a champion gymnast and had a ridiculous strength-to-weight ratio. Anna had been in the top ten female finishers at various international CrossFit games. As for herself, she held one of the top five scores in the world this year for women’s heptathlon—seven track and field events run over two days—which made her a hella good all-around athlete.
She followed Griffin over to the weights, and he started loading metal disks onto a bar. He glanced up at her. “How much do you want to lift?”
“Are we going high rep-low weight, or high weight-low rep?”
He considered, then said, “Show me the max you can dead-lift.”
“Load up three hundred, then.”
“Three hundred pounds?” Griffin blurted out.
“Yes,” she replied a little impatiently. “I didn’t mean three hundred bags of marshmallows.”
“Okay, then.”
She helped him slide the last weights onto the bar and secure them.
Tugging her lifting gloves into place, she addressed the bar, spine straight and shoulder blades squeezed back for optimal leverage. Gathering herself, she gripped the bar and pulled for everything she was worth. Groaning with effort, she stood up straight, bringing the bar to her hips.
She dropped the bar with a clank of steel and a grunt of satisfaction. Choke on that, Caldwell.
She looked up to see all the men staring at her. She huffed. “Seriously? What did you guys expect when you heard women were training to be SEALs? A bunch of Girl Scouts singing ‘Kumbaya’ and doing camping crafts while applying their lipstick?”
“I don’t know what I expected, but it wasn’t that,” Axel answered for all the men, lifting his bushy beard toward the bar at her feet. Lily swatted him on his upper arm, and he squawked in protest. The other pairs went back to working out.
“You wanna lift?” Sherri asked Griffin. “I’ll spot for you.”
“Let’s take a walk.”
She frowned, following him outside in the gathering dusk. The noise of crickets and frogs was deafening, and the last vestiges of color were draining from the sky into the west, leaving a vast, midnight expanse overhead. It reminded her of Griffin’s eyes, deep blue and fathomless.
“What’s up?” she asked as she fell in beside him.
“What are you really doing here?”
“We’ve been over this. I’m training to be a SEAL.” She paused, and then added dryly, “With your help, of course.”
“You do realize the men on the teams will never accept you, right? Even if you were to manage, by some miracle, to meet the physical standards.”
“Why not?” She had a good idea of how he would answer that question if he were completely honest, but she wanted to hear him say it out loud.
He shoved a hand through his dark-brown hair. It was rather longer than Navy regulation, and its soft waves begged a woman to run her fingers through them.
A whole day of looking at him hadn’t diminished the pull she felt toward him. If anything, she was more tempted than ever. He struck her as the kind of man who, if she flirted with him, would jump at an invitation into her bed. Griffin Caldwell in her bed? He’d be tanned and hard—oh my. Now there was a mental picture—
Without warning, he turned to face her, gripped her shoulders, and backed her up against the clapboard wall of the cafeteria. She stared up at him, shocked at how her breathing accelerated and excitement tore through her veins. Griffin was powerful and dangerous, completely unlike any man she’d ever spent time around.
He stared at her, his chest rising and falling every bit as fast and hard as hers. He surprised her by releasing her shoulder to push a strand of hair back from her face, and she froze, fascinated and wary of where this was headed.
“Christ,” he murmured. “I can’t get enough of looking at you.”
Her brow puckered a little. Really? This is about my looks? She sighed. Sometimes she got so sick of how hung up people were about how she looked. She’d won the genetic lottery. Folks could get over that already. She would love, just once, for a man to look at her and see her mind. Or her loyalty. Or her courage.
He muttered, “I want to understand you.”
“What is there to understand?”
“Explain to me what a girl like you wants with becoming a Special Forces operator like me.”
She chose to ignore the “girl like you” part of the question, focusing instead on what motivated her to be here. “I expect I want roughly the same thing you do. To serve my country and do something cool in the process.”
“There’s a hell of a lot more to being a SEAL than that.”
“And that’s what you’re here to teach me.”
“It’s more than a skill set, or even a mindset. It takes…heart.”
“Are you saying women don’t have heart? That we aren’t brave enough? Tough enough? Stubborn enough?”
His face was swathed in shadows, his jaw and nose mere outlines, his eyes unfathomable caverns of black. Still, she couldn’t miss the frustration rolling off him. It was a living thing, twisting around them both, tightening like a noose pulling them together, yet holding them apart.
Their wills clashed as she stared back, challenging him to acknowledge that she had the mental and emotional wherewithal to match him step for step.
No way was she going to be the first to look away. She would stand here until her feet grew roots to make the point. She could, she would, go toe-to-toe with a SEAL…and not flinch.
He clearly was trying to measure her, maybe also to intimidate her.
Hah. As if! She’d stared down plenty of four-star generals and congressmen who thought they could bully her because she looked soft and feminine. Poor bastards had never bothered to see the steel underneath.
She continued to stare at Griffin, trying to make out details in his expression, vividly aware of how attracted she was to his lean cheeks, his strong profile, the absolute self-confidence that was an intrinsic part of him.
His frustration shifted. Changed. Morphed into another kind of frustration altogether. She became even more vividly aware of the rise and fall of his chest, just inches away from hers. He leaned closer and braced his left hand against the wall beside her ear, his right hand moved to cup the back of her head. It was all so aggressively masculine. And sexy as heck.
In slow motion, he drew her face up to his.
And she didn’t protest.
His body was hard and hot, scorching her like freshly forged steel. Her own private furnace.
She ought to complain. Insist that he treat her professionally. Not think of her as a woman at all. She was just another soldier. Another SEAL trainee…
Except she couldn’t remember the last time she’d gotten up close and personal with a man who made her feel this way…
Who cared if it was just lust? It was still fantastic. This man was a fire sizzling through her veins, boiling her blood. She ought to pull away. Or at least look away.
I could lose myself in those eyes of his…
Her gaze dropped to his mouth, where she was immediately fascinated by the generous curve of his lips. His strong, straight teeth shining whi
te in the starlight. The way he caught one side of his lower lip in said teeth. He was fighting a need to kiss her.
I want him to kiss me…
Maybe she should kiss him.
Must. Not.
She arched into him, pressing against him as night settled gently around them.
He started this. Why shouldn’t I finish it?
Her stare locked with his as she lifted her chin the last few millimeters into kissing range. His breath mingled with hers, light and hungry.
This is a terrible, terrible idea.
But she couldn’t think of anything she would rather do in the whole wide world than be right here, right now, surrounded by this man, crushing her breasts against his chest, about to kiss him.
Her mouth opened slightly. She ran the tip of her tongue across her suddenly dry lips. Time stopped for a long moment as she fought a losing battle against the desire raging between them.
He tilted his head down in sudden decision, his mouth capturing hers in no uncertain terms. His dynamic presence exploded around her…or maybe that was erotic attraction exploding inside her.
Their kiss was hot and wet, a carnal thing complete with tongues and sucking and groans from deep in her throat that startled the hell out of her. This was no tentative hello, no cautious introduction. This was lust and raw, raging hunger. Apparently, Griffin was as direct about his desires as he was about his opinions.
It made him even more irresistible. He saw what he wanted and went after it. No hesitation, no doubts. It was so damned alpha of him.
She crawled all over him, turned on like mad, doing her best to suck his tonsils out of his throat. His left hand slid down her spine until he gripped her behind, pulling her snug against his groin, making no secret of how turned on he was by her.
She rubbed the junction of her thighs against that promise of sweet, sweet release, relishing the zinging pleasure ripping through her. She wanted sweat and the slap of thrusting bodies, to be filled by his hot flesh, to drive him out of his mind. She actually purred a little in the back of her throat at the thought of it—