Beyond the Limit

by Cindy Dees

  No. No! Cancel that thought.

  Grinder PT was not for the weak of heart even if a person had all the fitness in the world. The mental challenge of being surrounded by screaming instructors watching a person’s every move, and pushing for more no matter how much a soul did, was one of the more daunting training evolutions in the first few weeks of BUD/S.

  He and the guys chewed on the girls for nearly an hour before Kettering called for everyone to get in the Jeeps. Two more of the open-topped vehicles had been delivered from Camp Lejeune overnight, and Grif swung into the back of one driven by Sam—a street racer in his free time—landing on the seat plastered from hip to knee against Sherri.

  She was breathing hard, and beads of sweat made her skin glisten. An urge to lean over and lick the perspiration off her neck shocked him into staring down at his clenched hands, sandwiched tightly between his knees. The vehicles lurched into motion, and Sherri’s shoulder bumped against his.

  He restrained a flinch. Dammit, if they were going to be swim buddies, he was going to put his hands all over her before this was said and done. He had to get used to touching her, or at least learn not to get a gigantic hard-on every time he did.

  “Having fun yet?” he asked her as conversationally as he could manage. Part of the game was to give trainees mental whiplash by switching in and out of screaming asshole mode.

  “Hooyah,” she replied sardonically.

  He grinned at her, genuinely enjoying himself. He loved being a SEAL, and he loved training like a SEAL. Besides, he knew what came next. She was about to learn the true meaning of being cold. And he got to sit back and enjoy this particular little show.

  The Jeeps wound through the town of Holly Ridge and crossed the North Topsail Bridge onto Topsail Island, a narrow barrier island fronting the Atlantic Ocean. Sherri leaned her head back, eyes closed, the slender column of her throat exposed and tempting as hell. Everything about the woman was attractive. He had yet to see her from an angle that was anything but camera-ready. Or bedroom-ready.

  His dick stirred, and he frantically turned his thoughts to paperwork. Desk jobs. Regular Navy uniforms. Office politics. He couldn’t come up with any bigger turnoffs on short notice, but thankfully, those did the trick.

  They drove a few more minutes and parked at a government-owned stretch of beach not open to the public.

  Piling out of the Jeeps, they headed down to the water in the predawn darkness. The surf was quiet this morning, the waves no more than knee-high. But it was late October. The Atlantic Ocean would be chilly—around sixty degrees Fahrenheit—cold enough to cause hypothermia in just a few minutes.

  “Shoulder to shoulder, ladies,” Kettering ordered. “Forward march.”

  Grif traded grins with the other guys as Sherri, Anna, and Lily marched out into the edge of the surf, turned around when ordered to face the beach, linked arms, and lay down. A wave lapped over them gently.

  Ahh, surf immersion. It used to be called surf torture before use of the word torture became politically charged. The first time he’d endured it in his BUD/S training, the guys on each side of him had rung out of the course on their very first dunking.

  Griffin strolled over to Kettering, who was staring down at a tablet computer. “Did you give them thermo pills last night?” he asked his boss. The SEALs had used swallowable temperature sensors for some years. It made this kind of training safer, but also guaranteed maximum suffering. A win all the way around. If you weren’t the poor slob dunked in frigid water.

  Cal nodded. “The sensors are reporting their core body temperatures like a charm.”

  “How low are you gonna go with them?” Grif asked.

  His boss shrugged. “Same as BUD/S. Ninety-one degrees.”

  That was class II hypothermia, and Grif knew from experience that it was excruciating. The entire body cramped as muscles tried desperately to create heat and move blood to the core to preserve vital body functions. Shivering became violent, speech became slurred, and brain function became impaired.

  He heard noise over the crash and swish of the surf and moved closer to the water’s edge to hear what Sherri was shouting.

  She was singing. Every time her face emerged from a wave breaking over her, she belted out a line from a classic song about love being like a heat wave. Anna and Lily joined her. They moved on to a song about sweat. Then to the classic Pointer Sisters song about being so excited.

  As the minutes passed and the women’s shivering turned into near-convulsions, their words became unintelligible, tuneless noise. But still the women sang. Their brains too Popsicled to think of complex song lyrics, they resorted to “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.” Reluctantly, Grif had to give them credit for sticking out the cold as their core body temperatures ticked down on Kettering’s tablet.

  Ninety-four.

  Ninety-three.

  Ninety-two.

  “That’s it. Ninety-one degrees,” Kettering announced. “Come ashore, my little singing minnows.”

  Grif actually felt a stab of compassion for Sherri as she crawled out of the water, sodden fatigues sagging, on her hands and knees, too hypothermic for her leg muscles to function. She collapsed in the sand, shivering and twitching as heat slowly returned to her body.

  He squatted in the sand beside her. “While you’re down there, roll around a bit. We like powdered doughnuts on the teams.”

  One blue eye opened to peer up at him, clearly gauging whether or not he was serious. And whether or not she should attempt to kill him.

  “You do want to be a SEAL, don’t you?” he asked lightly.

  She rolled onto her back. Onto her far side. Back to her belly. Caked in white sand, stuck to every bit of exposed skin and wet clothing, she painfully pushed to her feet.

  “I’m feeling like a jog to stretch my legs this morning,” Cal announced. “How about you, gentlemen?”

  Grinning, the other men agreed, and they took off down the beach with the women. They all had to slog through the soft sand, which was work for Griffin, too. But he hadn’t pulled a grinder or gone for a dip in the winter ocean this morning. Of course, a run would have the side benefit of bringing the women’s core body temperatures back up into the normal range.

  Kettering took pity on the women and only ran them two miles—slowly—down the beach before turning them around to head back toward the Jeeps.

  They drove back to Camp Jarvis, and the women headed for the showers. While they cleaned up and finished warming up, Cal took the men into the cinder-block building that housed weapons and munitions to pull equipment for the next training evolution.

  Cal explained, “Not only do we have to get the ladies physically and mentally toughened up for Phase I of BUD/S, but we need to teach them the swimming and diving skills they’ll need for Phase II, and the land warfare skills they’ll need for Phase III.”

  “It takes six months to run all three phases of BUD/S!” Grif protested. “Are you seriously going to sideline all of us for that long to train these wannabes?”

  Kettering rounded on him sharply. “I’m under orders to create a female SEAL, come hell or high water. Do you want her to be a liability to a team and get her fellow SEALs killed, or do you want her to pull her weight and be, if not an asset, at least not a liability?”

  “Jeebus Crispy,” Axel muttered. “Orders? For real?”

  Kettering glared at all of them. “For real. Straight from SECDEF.”

  Trevor whistled under his breath and traded alarmed looks with Griffin. The Secretary of Defense herself was behind this little fiasco? There went any quiet washing out of the female candidates.

  Grif argued, “But if the first woman SEAL is only going to be window dressing, who cares if she can hack the job?”

  Cal started to roll his eyes but stopped himself. “She’ll undoubtedly be sent out on a mission or two with a gaggle of
reporters in tow. She has to at least put on a show of being SEAL material.”

  Griffin suddenly shared Kettering’s urge to roll his eyes.

  Cal sighed. “We can train these women up to some sort of decent standard, or we can throw one of them onto the teams unprepared and untrained with the knowledge that she’ll be a danger to her teammates. Either way, a woman’s going to be wearing a Budweiser by this time next year.”

  “Fuck that shit,” Grif exploded. Their gold pins, nicknamed Budweisers for their resemblance to the beer brand’s logo, were sacred. They were badges of honor earned through literal blood, sweat, and tears. They signified membership in the most exclusive brotherhood on the planet.

  Kettering met his glare of disgust and stared him down so coldly that Griffin fell silent. He didn’t often see the boss man go ice cold like that, but when he did, someone was about to die.

  Grif’s stare faltered. Fell away.

  Well, go suck a duck. Kettering wasn’t going to be talked out of this madness.

  Sherri’s words from last night reverberated through his brain. Where will that leave you? Will you be in or out?

  He exhaled very carefully. Then he said with equal care, “Message received, sir.” When Kettering did not rip his head off with his bare hands, Grif risked adding, “I gather you have a training plan laid out that covers all the skills they’ll need?”

  Kettering’s voice was still stern but had lost that brittle, deadly edge. “I do.”

  Griffin finished exhaling the rest of the breath he’d been holding.

  Cal said calmly, “Speaking of which, let’s get a feel for how well the ladies shoot and start teaching them how to handle a weapon properly.”

  Chapter 4

  Sherri had never been so exhausted in her life. And they’d been training for one day. One. Flipping. Day. She’d been to the Olympic Training Center at six-thousand-foot altitude and never gotten put through the wringer like that.

  She fell into bed the minute she finished eating supper, as did Anna and Lily. Sherri murmured, “Is it just me, or do you feel like you’ve been ground into sausage?”

  “Worse,” Lily responded wearily. “I feel like a bunch of Navy SEALs worked me over with baseball bats.”

  Anna moaned, “How on earth are we supposed to do this for six months?”

  Sherri answered grimly, “One day at a time. That’s how. We survived today. When tomorrow comes, we’ll survive it, too.”

  “I don’t know about that,” Anna confessed. “If you hadn’t started singing when we were lying in the ocean, I might have thrown in the towel right then.”

  “It’s all a big head game,” Sherri responded. “The three of us already meet the minimum physical standards to start BUD/S. And if my guess is correct, we’re going to be significantly more fit before these yahoos are done with us. The challenge, then, is the mental aspect. Can we take being screamed at and hazed all the time? Can we endure what seems unendurable? Can we fail, and then pick ourselves up and start over again?”

  “You make it sound so easy,” Anna replied.

  Sherri laughed. “Oh, it’ll be the hardest thing any one of us ever does. But we just have to decide that, no matter what they throw at us, we’ll die before we give up.”

  Anna said with a little laugh, “Good thing my father always called me the most stubborn female he ever met.”

  Lily added, “When my gymnastic coaches told me to attempt high-level skills for the first time that would get me killed if I screwed them up, I had to take a leap of faith and trust them to know I was ready. This feels a lot like that. We have to trust our instructors. They know how to build a SEAL. We just have to let the process happen and go with the flow.”

  Sherri liked that perspective. But she wasn’t at all sure she could trust Griffin. He seemed dead set against the idea of any woman becoming a SEAL. What if his end goal was to break them, make them all fail? Was she willing to go with that flow…until it killed her?

  She’d learned early in life that getting along with people was a whole lot more productive than clashing with them. Could she find a way to work with Griffin and not against him?

  An image flashed through her mind of him shouting at her while she lay on the ground, her arms as limp as noodles and burning with exhaustion. He’d been pressuring her to win, not just to survive.

  Now that she thought about it, he’d actually imparted an important piece of advice to her. Had he actually been trying to teach her the proper mindset for success? Maybe he wasn’t one hundred percent out to see her fail after all.

  Or maybe in her pain and exhaustion she was just hallucinating that he wasn’t a mean-hearted son of a bitch.

  Well, hell. Now she had no idea what to make of him. She knew he was hotter than should be legal and kissed like nobody’s business. And that he could be a gigantic asshole when he chose to be. But which one was the real man? Or hadn’t she seen that person at all yet?

  The next morning, well before dawn, they went for a long, way-too-fast-for-comfort run and ground out more push-ups, sit-ups, and pull-ups than she’d believed herself capable of two days ago.

  They spent the rest of the morning lying on their bellies in the sand of a firing range, shooting at human-shaped targets mounted in front of a tall dirt berm. Lily was an outstanding shot as it turned out, and Anna was steady as a rock, calm and focused, as Trevor taught her how to shoot some of the larger weapons she’d never handled before.

  Griffin picked at the most nitnoid details of Sherri’s technique, criticizing everything from how she inhaled to where her pinkie finger rested on the gun stock. They started with handguns and worked their way up to M4 carbines.

  With the larger weapon, they started shooting at a range of twenty-five yards and gradually extended their range to a hundred yards. Sherri was delighted to hit her target eight out of ten times at that range.

  “You have to be ten for ten, all in the kill zone, to secure this evolution,” Griffin said shortly.

  Securing an evolution was SEAL talk for passing a training requirement. Heaven forbid that they speak plain English. “Buzzkill,” she muttered.

  He ignored her comment, continuing implacably, “You also have to be effective with this weapon at up to five hundred yards. If you can’t pull your weight in a firefight, you and your teammates will die. When it’s ten of you against a hundred—or several hundred—tangos, and you’re low on ammo, every single shot has to hit.”

  He had a point.

  She lowered her eye to the sight again, and when Commander Kettering cleared the firing line and gave the order to shoot, she imagined herself aiming at enemies trying to run over her SEAL team’s position. It lent a grim seriousness to the training that she’d failed to grasp before.

  She shot eight out of ten again.

  That was when Griffin lay down beside her, his body spooning against her side, big and hard and hot.

  “What are you doing?” she squeaked.

  “Teaching you how not to shoot like a girl,” he ground out. He sounded nearly as uncomfortable as she felt. His arm came across her back and tucked under her right arm, draped across the rifle stock.

  “You’re not settling the rifle against your shoulder closely enough. It has to feel like an extension of your body.”

  Right. Kind of like he felt at the moment.

  “Wiggle it tight against you. Like this. See how snug it feels now?”

  Okay. Was she the only one hearing the double entendre in his words?

  Trevor coughed from her other side, where he stood behind Anna. Nope. Not just her.

  “Shut up, Fog Breather,” Griffin growled.

  Trevor chuckled, apparently enjoying Griffin’s discomfort.

  “You were saying?” she asked blandly. “Tuck it in tight. Nice and snug. Then what?”

  His lips moved against
her ear. “Smart-ass.”

  She smirked, her cheek rubbing against the trigger housing.

  He muttered, “Exhale long and slow as you acquire your target in the sight.”

  “My target’s definitely acquired,” she purred.

  “Stop it.”

  She pulled her eye away from the rubber cup of the gunsight. “Stop what?” she asked innocently.

  “You’re playing with fire, little girl.”

  “Go ahead. Burn me up,” she whispered.

  “Jeez,” he breathed. He shifted uncomfortably against her back.

  She turned back to her gunsight, delighted at having made the big bad SEAL squirm. “I exhale and acquire the target. Then what?”

  She felt his rib cage expand with a long breath in, which he held for several seconds and then let out. His voice was calm, devoid of emotion, when he said, “Draw your trigger finger toward you slowly. Your goal is to touch the trigger guard, not to actually pull the trigger. You want to exert as little pressure on the trigger as you can and still have it shoot. That way you won’t dislodge your aim.”

  She murmured, “I’d hate to dislodge anything, particularly when I already have it lined up right where I want it.”

  “Shoot the damned target already.”

  Laughing a little, she lowered her eye to the sight, breathed out the way he’d shown her, and pulled gently through the target.

  “Bull’s-eye,” Trevor announced, peering downrange through binoculars.

  “See?” Griffin muttered in her ear. “Just do what I tell you, and we’ll both get through this.” He stood abruptly.

  She eyed him, looming above. “I can’t wait to see what else you teach me.”

  “You’re killing me, Tate.”

  “That’s the idea, Caldwell.” Yes, indeed. That was the idea. She sensed that any show of weakness from her would bring out the predator in him, resulting in her being eaten alive. And not in a good way.

  When her shoulder ached from recoils and her toes were cramping from dehydration, Kettering called an end to the morning’s shooting. They went back after lunch, and Sherri didn’t think they were ever going to leave the firing range by the time they were finally released.