by Cindy Dees
Thing was, she’d made it her life’s work to become exactly what he was. To be stronger, badder and bolder than any jerkwad man she could ever possibly encounter. It was really no choice at all. She had to go for the chance to become a Medusa.
Her gut warned her, however, that she wasn’t likely to feel this safe and protected again until she left the Medusas for good—either by choice or in a body bag.
Was a life of constant danger really what she wanted? It was all she had ever known growing up. But Beau had unwittingly—or maybe wittingly, knowing him—given her a glimpse of another world. Another way of life.
She lay there, caught between sleep and wakefulness, contemplating the choice. All the while, the big, strong warrior claimed his woman—
Whoa. Wait. What? She jolted the rest of the way to full consciousness with a mental lurch. She was nobody’s woman! No matter that Beau was draped all over her and she was practically purring and rubbing herself against him like a cat in heat.
Apparently, their subconscious minds had no qualms about crawling all over each other. No matter that this man was about to be her trainer in a supersecret and superintense program that didn’t officially exist. And no matter that she emphatically didn’t want a long-term relationship with any guy. Ever. Not in this lifetime.
Obviously, there would be no rules during her training out here in the middle of nowhere. No oversight. No limits on what they could and would do. Did that mean there were no sexual boundaries, either?
She knew there would be mind games galore as part of her training. They were part of any special operator’s training. Was this semiseduction part of it?
Would Beau take this further?
More important, would she let him?
Belatedly, reason kicked in. This was Beau Lambert she was talking about. He clearly didn’t like the idea of her becoming a Special Forces operative, but he’d been nothing but polite to her yesterday. He’d caught her when her strength had given out, holding her patiently until she could stand on her own two feet again. He’d fed her and seen to her needs, getting her water and a shower. Hell, he’d put Jimbo Kimball on the floor when the guy had made a rude advance to her.
Her gut told her in no uncertain terms that Beau Lambert was no creep. And she trusted her gut.
Sure, he was a healthy, red-blooded male, and his frequent, umm, male reactions, in her presence were a dead giveaway that he thought she was hot. But he’d spent an entire night in bed with her and not done a single thing about it.
She trusted him. More or less.
His palm cupped the weight of her breast and she gasped in spite of herself. Liquid lust shot straight from his hand to her crotch. She squeezed her thighs together tightly, but it didn’t help. Her core throbbed hungrily, desperate for this man. It had been way too long since she’d had sex. It didn’t help that she had utter faith he would know exactly how to appease that particular aching need.
She tried to move away from his hand subtly, without waking him. But the mattress was so narrow she had nowhere to go, and his arm tightened with easy strength, holding her snugly against him. Was he awake? Was this her first test?
Her eyes narrowed. She never had been the type to walk away from a challenge. She rolled over to face Beau and insinuated her thigh between his. The guy had an impressive erection going. Not lacking in that department at all, she noted. She rested her palms on his chest, tracing the gorgeous collection of muscles there and letting her hand drift around his narrow, muscular waist to his back. Her nose nestled against the junction of his neck and shoulder, the heat of the man furnace-like.
Abruptly, he came wide awake. He didn’t move in any way to indicate to her that he’d woken up. One minute he was relaxed against her, and the next she was clinging to a deadly predator thrumming with tension, prepared to pounce at any second and eat her alive.
Beau was so appealing to the eye that it was easy to forget just how dangerous a man he was. His pretty-boy looks lulled a person into a false sense of security. She could see how Jimbo had made the mistake. Memory of that cold, flat, killer’s calm in Beau’s eyes last night in the restaurant flashed into her head. She wasn’t just playing with fire here. She was playing with a lit blowtorch.
“What are you doing, Tessa?” he growled.
“Saying good morning,” she replied brightly.
“You do like to live dangerously, don’t you?”
“Don’t you?” she challenged.
And just like that, she was on her back, her legs pinned beneath his thighs, his body weight smashing her down into the cheap mattress, her hands yanked up over her head, her wrists captured in an iron grip. He stared down at her from a range of about six inches. Their bodies fit together perfectly. “Don’t tease me if you can’t take the heat.”
Gulp. She scraped together all the false bravado she could muster and replied lightly, “I can give back anything you dish out. I’m all the woman you can handle and more. You’ve never met a woman like me.”
She stared up at him bravely, although doubt over the wisdom of engaging in this little game of cat and mouse with a pissed off lion shivered down her spine.
One corner of his mouth turned up. Whether it was in amusement or disbelief, she couldn’t tell. He spoke with quiet certainty. “I guarantee you’ve never met a man like me. I’m going to warn you once, and once only. Don’t play games with me. You will lose.”
Yeah, but losing to him didn’t sound too bad at the moment, not with his arousal pressing at the juncture of her thighs, and his weight and strength making her feel sweetly overpowered.
He pressed up and away from her abruptly, leaving the bed shaking in his absence. A little voice in the back of her head swore angrily at her for letting him go, and she shamelessly watched him retreat into the bathroom. The man had a rear end fully as sculpted and magnificent as the rest of him. Nope, her personal instructor was not hard on the eye. Not at all.
She bounded out of bed, feeling better than she expected. Maybe it was the adrenaline in anticipation of what was to come, or maybe it was last night’s protein bomb of steak and muscle relaxant of whiskey that had helped her recover overnight.
Or maybe, a little voice in the back of her head whispered, it was sleeping in Beau’s arms that had her feeling so fantastic this morning. She told the voice to shut up and reached for her pants and combat boots.
“Hungry?” Beau bit out from the doorway of the bathroom as she finished dressing.
“I know I’m never supposed to turn down an opportunity to eat, but I’m actually not hungry after that huge meal last night.”
“Load up on water, then,” he instructed her tersely.
Oh, God. What did he have planned for her? He wasn’t going to hold it against her that she’d rubbed herself all over him before they’d entirely woken up, was he? It had been his idea in the first place to spoon all blasted night. Irritation at him for doing it and at herself for liking it coursed through her.
She downed a bunch of water, and ominously, he did the same. They got into the Jeep and drove south for about thirty minutes. The morning sun felt good on her skin, and the moist breeze in her face made her feel free and alive.
Beau was silent on the drive, and she followed suit. Major Torsten had reprimanded her training class leader once with a brusque comment that had stuck with her. Try not to ruin a good silence.
“What are you smiling about?” Beau asked.
She repeated Torsten’s pearl of wisdom and Beau replied, “Big talker, your class leader?”
“Obsessively. Couldn’t shut up long enough to let anyone else share a decent idea.”
“Important leadership skill, listening to your guys.”
He turned off the main road and parked just short of a tall sand dune. They slogged over the dune, and the Gulf of Mexico stretched away at their feet. The surf was quiet, swi
shing onto the shore serenely. A few distant figures dotted the beach, but no people were close.
Beau set down a pair of two-liter water bottles and partially buried them in the sand at the base of a wooden sign pointing at the parking lot behind them. He stripped off his T-shirt and tossed it over the bottles.
She gulped at the sight of all that glorious muscle, and her hand remembered the feel of them sliding under her palms. She actually felt her pupils dilating. Dang it. They were a dead giveaway that she was affected by the sight of him shirtless. Sure enough, he smirked at her.
“Let’s go,” Beau said. “Down the beach and back.”
She was tempted to ask how far down the beach, but she knew better. Run distances tended to increase exponentially in the face of whining or complaining about them. The sand was soggy and hard-packed, but hand-sized flakes of it gave way unpredictably under her combat boots, making each step she took unstable. Sand running used an entirely different set of muscles than road running. Stabilizer muscles in the ankles and knees got viciously overused, and fatigue and pain set in fast.
Today was worse than most. Beau really seemed to have it in for her. Maybe he was pissed off, too, that he’d liked spooning last night.
Screw him. It had been his stupid idea.
She didn’t think Beau was ever going to turn around and head back toward the Jeep. Nope, he was all glistening skin, flexing muscle, deep breathing and long stride. His gold-touched brown hair was tousled by the breeze, and his bronzed torso was lightly dusted with sand that her fingers itched to brush off him.
“You think you can seriously become a Medusa?” he grunted.
“Yeah,” she grunted back. She kept her response short so he wouldn’t hear her panting for breath between phrases. This pace was a killer. As if he was trying to run her into the ground. “What’s your problem with women?”
“No problem. I like women. Just don’t like the idea of them on the teams.”
Oh, yeah? Then she would just have to prove him wrong and show him women did belong in the Special Forces.
He picked up the pace, and she stuck to his side like a sandbur, determined to show him she could hack anything he threw at her. A stitch developed in her side, and she focused on breathing more deeply and getting more oxygen to her starved muscles.
He scowled and picked up the pace again.
Jerk.
As her thighs and calves protested more stridently, she searched for something, anything, to distract her from the pain. Unfortunately, her mind latched onto the question of how in the world it was possible for any human being to look so hot while slogging through shifting sand that made every step a person took treacherous as all get out. She would purely hate the guy if she didn’t reluctantly admire anyone who could look so good while sweating profusely.
She estimated they were a solid three miles down the beach before he finally turned around. Crud. She was wiped out now, and they still had the entire run back to do.
Beau glanced over at her. “You good?”
“Yup,” she lied. “Let’s do it.”
She caught a flash of pain on his face as they turned around. A moment’s triumph quickly gave way in her brain to wondering just how screwed up his knee was. Her undergraduate degree had been in kinesiology, and that training kicked in now. This sand running should be good for it—low impact, with lots of strength training for the muscles that would support the joint—if he didn’t take a bad step and blow the whole thing out.
She was starting to labor, her legs and her lungs tiring. But no way was she going to give Beau the satisfaction of stopping. She glanced over at him, and he was scowling. Ticked off that she could hack the pace he’d set, maybe?
As for her own pain, she knew how to deal with it. She settled into the zen state of detachment from body that had gotten her through half a dozen triathlons, a dozen marathons and countless beatings from her mother’s more violent boyfriends. She was a machine. Pain had no meaning, and fatigue was the attempt of a lazy body to get out of doing its job.
The dune with its big wooden sign pointing to the parking lot came into sight in the distance. Almost there. Thank goodness.
She still had a smidgen of energy left, and she used it to deliver a silent screw-you to the chauvinist beside her. Her stride lengthened. She loved running, and the morning was crisp, the breeze in her face just strong enough to cool her without impeding her speed. She left Beau behind and tore along the beach, arms pumping, sand flying.
The dune loomed close, the lettering on the sign becoming legible. Almost there. A hundred yards. Fifty. She put on one last burst of speed and reached deep for everything she had. She blasted past the sign and eased off the accelerator with a huge mental sigh of relief, gratefully letting her speed coast down to a walk. She turned around to grin at Beau.
He looked genuinely ticked off as he caught up with her. Maybe it hadn’t been the smartest thing she ever did to show up her instructor like that. Especially with his messed up leg and all. He caught up with her and—
What the heck? He kept on running. He passed her and drew away steadily.
Son of a—
Swearing mentally, she mustered her physical and mental resources. Gathered herself. And took off running after him. It took her a couple of minutes to catch up with Beau, who did not once look back over his shoulder to check on her. Not that she expected him to.
The second she did pull up by his shoulder, though, he smirked...and sped up. Not to a killer charge, but into a plenty brisk run. Jeez. How much farther was he going to drag her?
Her eyes narrowed. Trying to wear her down, was he? Hoping she would cry uncle and give up? Take her girlie toys and go home? Not freaking likely. She dug deep and plowed on, hell-bent not to give him the satisfaction of winning.
He glanced over at her, determination glinting in his eyes, as well. He was obviously just as hell-bent on breaking her. The silent battle of wills continued as they raced down the beach.
She had stumbled a couple of times and painfully wrenched her ankle on a misstep before it dawned on her that she’d lost mental focus. She was locked into being annoyed that he’d lied about the length of the run and into proving she was as good as he was. She wasn’t paying enough attention to what she was doing right now.
Was there was an actual point to this competition from hell other than proving she wasn’t fast enough to run with the big dogs?
Ahh. The lesson dawned on her. Just because she’d thought the run was over didn’t mean the situation couldn’t change at a moment’s notice. Same deal out in the field. Just because a team thought a mission was over didn’t mean the mission couldn’t change or encounter a last-minute complication that extended it indefinitely. A run—or a mission—wasn’t over until it was over.
She settled down, brought her mind back into focus on the mechanics of her running. She let go of the frustration, calmed her emotions and dropped back into the calm state that would allow her to keep on running as long as necessary or until her body collapsed out from under her.
No sooner had she done that, than Beau turned around and headed back toward the Jeep. This time, when they reached the sign, she didn’t break stride until he did. She was prepared to run all the way back down that damned beach if she had to.
He slowed to a walk, and she did the same beside him. Gratefully. He dug the water bottles out of the sand at the base of the sign and handed one to her. They downed their respective drinks and caught their breath in silence.
“How’s your knee?” she asked.
“Fine,” he snapped.
“I’m not the enemy, Beau. I was an athletic trainer in college. I’m on your side and want to see your knee come back for you.”
He glared at her for a long moment, and then jerked his head in a single, tight nod.
She knew that nod for the concession that it was. I
t had been a silent acknowledgment of alliance in pursuit of a common goal. And it was as good a starting place as any with him.
They climbed in the Jeep, and Beau pointed it back toward Motel MOE. “You passed the training exercise,” he tossed at her.
So. That unexpected bonus run had been the whole point of today’s outing. She’d analyzed it correctly. Leaning back in satisfaction, a horrifying thought occurred to her. It wasn’t even close to noon yet. What if the lessons weren’t over? What if he had some additional massive torture in store for her this afternoon?
As soon as the notion occurred to her, certainty that she was right set in. Better grab whatever rest she could right now. She closed her eyes and consciously relaxed every muscle in her body. It wasn’t sleep, but it was the next best form of rest for recovery purposes.
Chapter 5
Tessa napped in the room while Beau showered. Then, while she washed up, he went out and came back with sandwiches, fruit and drinks. She matched his rapid consumption of the meal, and when he reached for his combat boots she did the same. Suspiciously.
“Blouse your pants,” Beau ordered. “There’ll be snakes and biting insects galore where we’re going.”
Great. Without voicing her distaste for creepy-crawlies, she hooked stretchy elastic bands around the tops of her boots and tucked the bottoms of her pant legs under the elastics, creating a snug seal from boot leather to trouser that would let nothing crawl up inside her pants.
Beau could crawl inside her pants—
Hush up, little voice.
They took off in the Jeep and quickly left the main highway for roads that would be more properly classed as shock-absorber-destroying trails. She had to duck branches, and on more than one occasion, brace herself against the overhead roll bar to avoid being thrown out of the Jeep.