by Cindy Dees
She’d had more than enough of that as a child. Her mother’s string of crappy boyfriends had excelled in messing with her, and she’d learned early to throw up emotional walls against their teasing and outright cruelty. Who’d have thought the day would come when she would actually be grateful to the slimy jerks her mother’d had a gift for finding and bringing home?
“You’re thinking loudly again,” Beau announced.
She looked up at him, startled. He shot her a single, cocked eyebrow that demanded to know what was going on in her noggin. “I was thinking about my mother’s boyfriends.”
“Kinky.”
She scowled. “Hardly. I never thought I’d be grateful to them for being jackasses.”
Beau cracked a smile. “That’s more like it.”
“What do you mean?” she challenged.
“I was wondering how long I would have to run you around in circles out here before you’d finally get fed up.”
“We’ve been going in circles?” she exclaimed. Now, that actually did hack her off.
His grin widened. “Round and round.”
“Okay, I hate you now.”
He laughed outright. “Excellent. Let’s head for camp, then.”
Camp? Out here? Oh, joy. She generally loved being outdoors. In fact, she despised being cooped up behind walls as a rule. But this place had an ee-yew factor that was hard to overlook. Beyond the alligators she’d already seen, she knew there were rattlesnakes, cottonmouths, copperheads, scorpions and a host of other venomous critters lurking out here. Ah, well. It wasn’t like special operators got to choose their environments. And at least no one was shooting at her.
Yet.
Chapter 6
The sun had gone down and twilight wreathed the mist starting to rise off the swamp when suddenly, her feet touched solid ground. Thank God.
This never-ending day had all but done her in. Her boots squished with each step and her feet felt totally waterlogged, but she couldn’t care less. She could actually walk without having to lift her feet knee-high.
She stopped and stared as they moved farther ashore. Two arrow-straight, parallel rows of huge, arching live oak trees stretched away into the gathering darkness in shades of gray and black. It was an incongruous sign of human civilization tucked away in the middle of nowhere. The ancient trees were thickly festooned with Spanish moss like twin lines of stooping old women with long, straggly, witch’s hair.
Hints of gravel beneath her feet spoke of a driveway of some kind having once run between the looming trees. Those massive oaks had to be at least a hundred years old. Who on earth could have planted them? And why would anyone settle in this godforsaken spot?
Beau strode confidently between the trees as if he had a destination in mind. She followed along, intrigued in spite of herself. She made out a shape ahead, tucked into the deep shadows of a cluster of giant live oaks.
Square. Man-made.
She squinted into the gloom. Was that a house?
It looked as old as the trees. If the siding had ever seen paint, it was long gone, leaving behind gray, weathered wood that looked older than time. The house, a sprawling, one-story plantation-style home stood unnaturally high off the ground on telephone-pole-sized stilts. Shutters hung at crazy angles, and a wide, covered porch wrapped around the entire thing, supported by gray pillars in desperate need of paint. A set of broad, graceful steps led up to it.
“What is this place?” she asked cautiously as Beau came to a stop in front of the ruin.
“It was a hideout for pirates. Or rather their women. Story has it this place was originally built as a brothel for pirate doxies.”
“Cool! Which pirate?”
“One too smart to let his name get bandied about and get so famous the authorities came after him.”
Awareness of being entirely alone with a man who could easily overpower her and do whatever he wanted to her washed over her. Cold fingers of fear crept up her spine at the notion. She’d been groped by men and been powerless to stop it too many times as a kid to be comfortable now.
At least the motel had offered the illusion of other humans nearby who would hear her screams and call for help. But in this place she would be completely at Beau’s mercy. She’d decided just this morning that she trusted him. Did that still hold true out here?
“Is it safe to go inside?” she asked, testing the first step cautiously with her foot.
“I repaired the steps before you got here. They’re safe. Just don’t explore beneath them. An aggressively unpleasant nest of cottonmouths is living there.”
While her mind wanted to dwell on the mention of snakes, she was more interested in the notion of him preparing for her arrival. “How long have you known I was coming?” she asked sharply.
“You would have to take that up with Torsten.”
“I’m taking it up with you.”
He exhaled hard. “He gave me a heads-up two weeks ago that he wanted me to bring a female candidate here for training.”
“Why did he let me suffer through the past two weeks with the men if he was just going to pull me out and send me here?”
“Probably wanted to see how you dealt with the last set of training exercises. They come pretty close to approximating the physical challenges of actual operations.”
She snorted. “The instructors hounded me day and night. Nothing I did was good enough for them. I have never been screamed at so much in my entire life.”
“Torsten liked what he saw when his guys pushed you, or you wouldn’t be here.”
“Bastard,” she grumbled.
“You have no idea,” Beau bit out. He turned and strode up the long, sweeping staircase.
She followed him, asking curiously, “What did he do to you?”
“He sent me to a freaking swamp to train a girl wannabe.”
“Aww, c’mon. It’s not that bad running around with me, is it?” she joked to disguise the pang of hurt his snapped reply caused her.
He didn’t deign to answer. Instead, he threw open the front door and stood back to let her enter.
A sense of impending doom swept over her. Her old fears kicked up, in spite of her conscious effort to suppress them. Going inside, allowing herself to be trapped behind walls with a man, was madness. She knew better!
But this was Beau. He didn’t count in the grand scheme of men who were not to be trusted. She entered the house. It was a stupid little thing, but she mentally counted it as a private triumph over her rotten past.
No surprise, the architecture of the plantation home was traditional. A wide hallway ran from front to back with rooms opening off each side of it, and the house stretched back much deeper than she’d guessed at first glance. The inside wasn’t anywhere near as decrepit as the outside. What little furniture there was appeared to be in decent condition, if hopelessly dated. It struck her as 1940s-era decor.
She turned right, slid between a mostly closed set of pocket doors and looked around at a parlor, she supposed it would have been called.
Beau filled the doorway behind her as she examined a fireplace mantel carved from green marble and in pristine condition. The stone was cool and smooth and soothing beneath her fingertips. Everything the man behind her was not.
She turned to face him. In the gloom, she could barely make out his features, and what she could see gave nothing away.
“Look, Wilkes. My being here has nothing to do with you.” A pause. “Well, it does to the extent that I’m supposed to train you until you wash out.”
What if she didn’t wash out? Then what? Was he prepared to admit he was wrong and that women—she—could cut it in Spec Ops?
Beau added, “Torsten sent me here for reasons that have nothing to do with you.”
“Care to share?” she asked when he didn’t continue.
“N
ope.”
And the monosyllabic caveman was back. Great.
“Show me around the place?” she asked.
“Parlor,” he commented, gesturing to the room at large. She followed him back out into the main hall. He pointed at a set of closed pocket doors across the hall. “Billiard room.” He strode down the hallway, not checking to see if she followed. Which, of course, she did. He pointed to his right. “Dining room.” He pointed across the hall. “Sitting room. Converted to an office a while back.
“Two bedrooms, one on each side of the hall.” He pointed at twin pairs of doors as he passed them. “Next, bathroom on the left. Toilet flushes if you dump a bucket of water in the tank. None of the other plumbing works. Staircase to the attic on the right. Four more bedrooms and a bathroom upstairs under the rafters. For maids or the new girls.”
Right. Pirate brothel. Many bedrooms. Got it.
“Last two bedrooms in the back of the ground floor were converted to a modern kitchen in the nineteen-twenties. It runs the full width of the house.”
The layout was simple. Efficient. And as she recalled, this shotgun style allowed for maximum breezes to cool a home. “I gather this house is on stilts because of flooding?”
“Hurricane storm surges mostly.”
She wandered into the kitchen, which was a wreck. But she spied something that made her smile. “A still?” she asked. “The pirates did a little moonshining on the side?”
“Squatters brought that in.”
“Where are these squatters now?”
A shrug. “I chased them out. We’re here now.”
“Are we the new squatters in town?”
“I own the place.”
“Not much for upkeep of your stuff, huh?” she commented.
“Haven’t been home in a while. I inherited it a few years back, and it was already decrepit then. Maybe when I get out of the military I’ll restore the place.”
“Assuming anything is left by then to restore.”
“Let’s hope that’s the problem,” he muttered under his breath.
Worried about staying on the teams, was he? Interesting. No wonder he was tense about his knee injury. He thought it was bad enough that it might end his career, apparently. She would be chippy, too, if she thought her whole future was at stake.
Oh, wait. It was.
She moved over to the still to look it over. “Copper tubing looks to be in good shape. With a few small modifications, I should be able to distill water with this.”
“Be my guest.”
That sounded suspiciously like a challenge. Fine. She’d always been mechanical. One of her mother’s less awful boyfriends had taught her how to repair cars, and she was comfortable around tools and tubes and wires.
She spent the next half hour modifying the still and moving it to the backyard, leery of burning the house down if she set a fire on the kitchen floor. Using her bits of fatwood, she started a fire to heat the steel water drum. In the amount of time it took her to gather a good-sized pile of firewood and stack it beside the barrel, distilled water was starting to drip out of a glass tube into a bucket she’d wiped out and placed under the nozzle. It would take a good chunk of the night to distill enough water to sustain them both, but once the setup was running smoothly, they ought to get plenty of drinking water.
She rinsed off as best she could with a bucket of water she scooped out of the surrounding bayou and a bar of soap out of her pack. It wasn’t a great bath, but it was better than nothing. Cleanliness mattered in the field. Jungle rot was a constant threat to armpits, groins and toes, not to mention the risk of bacterial infections to any cuts or scrapes she might have picked up and failed to disinfect.
Beau helped her roll a big log over next to the distiller, and they sat down to dry their feet next to the fire. Trench foot, where the bottom of the foot died and sloughed off, was a real danger when feet spent hours on end soaked in filthy water. They stripped off their boots and socks and stuck their feet as close to the flames as they could stand to warm and thoroughly dry their skin.
Munching energy bars, they watched the flames and listened to the night sounds. Beau kicked back, looking relaxed, but she felt stretched as tight as a wire. He identified what kinds of owls were hooting for her, named the night birds and toads behind various calls and trills and told her which species of insects clicked and whirred beyond the circle of firelight.
But then a deep, roaring sound split the night. Beau grinned broadly.
“What’s that?” she asked sharply.
“Gator. Big bull by the sound of him. Looking for a girlfriend.”
She looked around quickly at the margins of the clearing. “How close is he?”
“A deep sound like that carries a long ways. He might be as much as a half mile away.”
“He sounds closer,” she declared. She pointed her high-intensity flashlight around the edges of the clearing. No eyes glowed back at her out of the night. Thank God.
“Afraid, Wilkes? Ready to quit yet?”
“Not on your life.”
“Why do you want to do this?” he surprised her by asking.
“Why not?”
“I’m serious. Why this?”
She balled up her protein bar’s wrapper and tossed it into the fire. Then she answered honestly, “I hate the idea of being a victim. And I hate being trapped in offices.” She hesitated and then added, “As a kid, I never felt good enough. I wasn’t strong enough, smart enough or tough enough. Over the years I’ve made it my goal to be...enough.”
Beau was silent.
“What about you?” she ventured to ask.
He shrugged. “I like to shoot things and blow stuff up.”
“That’s a cop-out answer,” she muttered.
Beau scowled and silence fell between them.
He surprised her by saying several minutes later, “I wanted to do something for my country. Something that would matter.”
She got that. It was comforting to know their motives for pursuing this extreme career were similar. Maybe just maybe, she and Beau weren’t that different, after all.
When her feet and socks were bone-dry, she picked up the socks and stood up, looking down at Beau. “Now what?”
“Bed.”
And there went her blood pressure the rest of the way to sky-high. Instantly, images of him pinning her down, his eyes glinting with heat above her, flashed through her mind’s eye unbidden.
Thunder rolled ominously in the distance, muted by the heavy vegetation.
“Roof’s sound,” he said into the quiet that followed. “I fixed it while I was waiting for you.”
Waiting for her. God, if only she could interpret that romantically. Instead, the comment made her skin crawl. Which was totally unfair to him. He hadn’t done anything to indicate he was a creepy stalker.
Jerkily, she banked the fire under the distiller. The drum was wide enough that even if it rained hard, the hot coals should stay dry enough to keep the distiller working.
The first cold drops of water hit her face and she raced after Beau into the house. Thunder rolled again, low and deep, vibrating through her being.
“You have a bedroom staked out for yourself?” she asked.
“Ground floor. East side of the hall.”
“Guess I’ll take the one across from that, then.” She stepped into the abandoned room. A wooden chair sat in one corner, and a steel-springed bed frame with no mattress occupied one wall.
She shone her flashlight into the corners, checking carefully for rats and spiders. She batted down a few cobwebs but had the place more or less to herself. Beau must have given the house a thorough cleaning for it to be so free of visitors.
A knock on her door spun her around. She threw it open nervously. Beau stood there with an old-fashioned hurricane lamp glowing s
oftly in his hand. “Thought you might like a little light. I know how you girls are afraid of the dark.”
Her eyes narrowed. “I like it. Easier to sneak around killing people at night.”
He snorted. “You wish.”
Since the only words passing through her mind were too filthy to utter aloud to her instructor, she took the oil lamp in silence and set it on the chair seat. He leaned a shoulder against the doorjamb and crossed his arms.
Irritated, she muttered, “You’re thinking loudly, Lambo. What do you want?”
He shoved off the doorjamb, and her entire body tensed, poised for battle. Long years of ingrained defensiveness were hard to overcome. Gradually, she forced her body to relax. He wouldn’t hurt her. At least not in that way.
“We need to talk,” he announced.
Professional alarm shot through her. “Okay. Talk.”
“Sit.”
Crap. That was how Torsten started his “You’re out” speech. She perched awkwardly on the edge of the bed frame. Beau made a restless lap around the narrow room, stopping to prop his right leg up on the far end of the bed frame. He rubbed his knee absently.
He did that a lot, which led her to believe his knee was hurting him more than he was letting on. She knew exercises to stretch and strengthen the joint, but it wasn’t her place to intrude. Not to mention, she had faith he would not take kindly to her giving him rehab advice.
If she wasn’t mistaken, the joint looked swollen under his pant leg. It was nice to know that today had taken at least a little toll on him, too.
He spoke abruptly. “Torsten’s right. You do have the operator mind-set. You don’t need me to beat physicality into you or push you to prove to you how much you can take. You’ll go until you drop dead if I ask you to.”
“Umm, thanks, I think?”
He continued grimly, “I don’t think running you around a swamp for weeks on end is going to teach you anything you don’t already know about yourself.”
“Thank God,” she breathed.
“Don’t thank me yet. I’m still going to bust your ass. Just in other ways.”
She nodded, pleased.
“After initial training, the guys who pass go through another six months of Qual training. Then they spend as much as a year training with their future team before they go out into the field. I don’t have the facilities or other trainees to do team-building stuff with you, so Torsten instructed me essentially to move on to Qual training with you. It’s still physical and you’ll need to bring up your fitness level even more, but it focuses on the technical skills you’ll need to be a Medusa.”