Special Forces: The Recruit (Mission Medusa Book 1) Read online

  “I’m absolutely certain I’m not. And someday you’ll come to agree with me,” he retorted.

  Never.

  Tears burned at her eyes and she blinked them back furiously. She would be damned if she cried in front of these jerks. They didn’t deserve her tears. And she didn’t deserve this rude treatment. She was a freaking Army officer with a distinguished career behind her and ahead of her.

  The walk of shame from the Quonset hut to the parking lot with Captain America at her side like a jailer was perhaps the worst hundred yards of her life. She felt the eyes on her. Everyone...everyone...noted her departure. She could physically feel on her skin the satisfaction of the boys’ club as it closed ranks against her. It was all she could do not to vomit up Torsten’s bottle of water in her humiliation as she climbed into a Hummer, her head held high.

  It was a fight, but she wrestled back another bout of threatening tears as Lambert started the Jeep’s engine. She wasn’t going to cry for this jerk, either. A girl had to have a little pride, after all.

  Lambert backed out of the parking spot and headed for the airfield. She commented sourly, “I knew folks around here hated the idea of women special operators, but this dramatic show of expulsion is a little excessive.”

  “Take it up with Torsten. I’m just following orders.”

  Orders he sounded irritated as heck over. What did he have to be mad about? He wasn’t the one being publicly humiliated. She had to get her mind off what was happening or she was going to break down and sob in front of all of them, and she would never give them that satisfaction. Searching desperately for a distraction, she mumbled, “What’s in Phoenix?”

  Her escort merely shrugged. Even that casual gesture of his shoulder, fraught with rippling muscle under smooth, bronzed skin and a tight black T-shirt, was sexy as hell. At least Torsten had given her one last piece of eye candy to enjoy before he dashed her dreams and ended her life.

  Lambo drove her straight to the airfield without saying a word. But disapproval rolled off him in tangible waves. All these guys were flaming jerks. Too bad she was so wasted from the run she couldn’t think up any better epithets to call him in her mind.

  She spied an airplane, apparently waiting for her, and stared. It was a twin turboprop plane that would carry about eight passengers. Except there didn’t appear to be any other passengers milling around waiting to go. Surely, Torsten hadn’t ordered up an entire airplane just to get rid of her.

  Lambert came around to open her door for her as she stared back and forth doubtfully between aircraft and man.

  He smiled wryly at her. All the oxygen in her vicinity disappeared, and she caught herself swaying toward him slightly. Dang, that man was attractive. Like a giant, man-shaped electromagnet. The pull of him crackled through her individual cells, realigning them into his orbit whether she willed it or not.

  Maybe she was reacting to him so strongly because she was frazzled from the run and her abrupt ejection from the Special Forces pipeline. Whatever the reason, being this close to Lambert was throwing her seriously off balance.

  She took a step out of the vehicle—or tried to, at any rate—and pitched forward, straight into her escort.

  Impressions assailed her from every direction. His stomach was as hard and ridged with muscle as it looked. Heat poured off his body. He smelled like a forest on a lazy summer day. And he made her think of hot, sweaty sex.

  He grabbed her by her upper arms and dragged her up his body deliciously. An unmistakably hard, impressively large bulge pressed against her belly. He acted as if he barely noticed her weight. His strength was breathtaking. Literally. She had trouble inhaling properly as her entire body melted in a puddle of unwilling lust. Oh, who was she kidding? It was totally willing lust.

  * * *

  Beau Lambert stared down at the smoking-hot woman plastered against him. Her skin was a totally edible shade of café au lait, her hair wavy and dark, coffee brown. But what really stood out were those eyes of hers, mint green and practically glowing against her darkly tanned skin. She wasn’t model material unless modeling agencies went for exotic types, not quite beautiful but undeniably unforgettable. He would 100 percent buy her a drink if he saw her across a crowded bar.

  At the moment her cheeks were flushed, her eyes wide with surprise. His nostrils flared at the sudden sexual awareness he sensed in her.

  Dammit, this was exactly why he hated the idea of women special operators.

  His stare dropped to the neck of her tank top and the curves of her upper breasts. How was a woman as buff as she was that bountifully endowed? Talk about winning the genetic lottery. This woman had hit the mega millions jackpot in that department.

  Get your head out of your crotch, man. Tessa Wilkes was an Army officer, not a sex object. But he couldn’t resist a last glance at that swelling cleavage. She checked pretty much every box on his hot female checklist. She even had the cocky attitude and sassy mouth he secretly loved.

  He murmured, “If you can’t stand on your own two feet, this little adventure is going to be over before it ever gets rolling.”

  “What adventure? What are your orders?” she demanded. “Let me guess. Put me on that plane and make sure I don’t bolt before it goes airborne.”

  If only. He would love nothing better than to toss her on a plane and send her anywhere far, far from him. He’d argued stridently against the assignment Torsten had given him, but the bastard hadn’t budged. Torsten was convinced that he, Beau Lambert, was the only man for the job.

  Wilkes tried to stand on her own, grimacing in pain, but her legs weren’t cooperating yet. He wasn’t a complete ass, and he held her upright. Which, of course, meant more belly-to-belly, sex-fantasy-conjuring contact.

  She hung in his arms like a rag doll devoid of bones. He remembered that level of exhaustion from his own initial training. A frisson of shared sympathy passed through him. But he shoved it aside. He had no time for sympathy for this woman. Not if he was going to prove Gunnar Torsten wrong.

  She mumbled, “First a public humiliation, and now this. I’m so sorry.”

  She was right about the public part. His orders were to make sure everyone in the program saw him haul Wilkes out. There had to have been at least a hundred witnesses to her departure, all silently gleeful. But she was wrong about the humiliation part. Torsten had other plans for her altogether. If the other trainees and instructors knew what the boss was up to, they wouldn’t be so smug to see Wilkes go.

  He commented, “You’re closer to the truth than you know.”

  She looked up at him quizzically, but he offered no explanation. All would become clear to her soon. And frankly, he was too ticked off at what came next to get all talkative with her about it.

  He shifted his weight onto his bum leg, and a bolt of white-hot agony shot through him. He sucked in a sharp breath and froze, terrified he’d done something to wreck his knee even worse than it already was. He swore colorfully to himself.

  When he’d leaped forward and caught her under the armpits, his right knee had given a mighty shout of protest, shooting daggers up and down his leg in retaliation for the stunt. He tuned in to that pain now, breathing through it until it gradually subsided.

  Wilkes made no move to stand on her own. Probably couldn’t. He knew all too well the agony of the human body transforming into one giant cramp.

  His pain lessened until he was able to register once more the galvanizing sensation of a woman’s body snuggled up close to his. She was curvy. And springy in the right places. Sex in a bottle.

  “Aww, hell,” he muttered. “You really are a girl, aren’t you?”

  She glanced down at her chest mashed against his. The display of cleavage above the neck of her olive drab tank top was impressive, to say the least. “Last time I checked, I’m still a girl,” she declared.

  An unwilling crack of laughter sli
pped out of him before he was able to bite it back.

  She felt soft and feminine in his arms. Which went against everything he knew about her. He’d seen her PFT scores and run times. She was a beast by female standards. Best they’d seen in a long time. All the more reason to ignore the blood surging into his loins. She was a job, not a date. But day-umm, she was hot.

  The light green in her eyes was overtaken by black as her pupils dilated. She must have registered his wholly male reaction to her. Not much he could do about that. But then her gaze, peeking up through long, dark lashes, went a little languorous and a whole lot sensual.

  Uh-oh. One of them had to be responsible here and do the right thing. At the moment it was going to have to be her because his pulse was pounding through an erection hard enough to hammer nails with.

  Instead, she didn’t do a blessed thing to stop every sexual part of her from pressing against every sexually corresponding part of him. Worse, she looked ready to have hot, sweaty sex with him this very second. All he had to do was say the word. And the word was hovering right on the tip of his tongue.

  It took every ounce of discipline he had to force his feet to take a cautious step back. His knee held. Praise the Lord and pass the potatoes.

  He continued to grasp her upper arms until her legs steadied. Or maybe it was his leg he was waiting on to settle down and accept his weight. Or maybe he was waiting for his hard-on to calm down enough that he wasn’t on the verge of doubling over in pain around it. Either way, something primal and hungry roared through him as she stared up at him, her huge, green eyes more huge and more green than usual.

  “You good?” he asked gruffly.

  “I’m great,” she breathed back. Lord, she sounded like Marilyn Monroe singing “Happy Birthday” to JFK.

  He would bet she was great in bed. Out of bed. Against a wall. In a shower. In the back of a car. On the back of a car...

  Stop.

  Reluctantly, he set all of those smoking-hot curves and smooth muscles away from him. He had to get control of himself, and fast, or this assignment was going to go to hell in a handbasket of his own weaving.

  His hands fell away from her, and something possessive inside him growled at the absence of her heated skin. As for her, she abruptly looked too tongue-tied and, truthfully, too obstinate to thank him. He couldn’t help but be amused at her stubbornness. It was a quintessential Special Forces quality. Pigheaded was a term that got applied to him frequently, in fact.

  He reached past her into the back of the vehicle for her pack. He slung it over his shoulder and led her over to the airplane as she stumbled along after him. He trotted up the unfolded steps and turned around, reaching a hand down to her.

  “I can do this myself,” she stated.

  “You didn’t leave everything you had out on the course earlier?” he asked in disappointment. Hell, her run time had been respectable even for a guy. Surely, she hadn’t run that far, that fast, carrying that much weight, casually.

  She stared at his outstretched hand for a long moment. Long enough that he wasn’t sure she would accept help from him. Of course, that had been the big ding against her in her training file. She didn’t trust men. Had trouble working in a group with others. Tended to be a loner.

  But then her palm touched his, and just like that, lightning zinged through his hand and up his arm. It had nothing to do with resentment and everything to do with something else altogether. Man. All she needed was a crack of thunder to go with all that sexual lightning.

  Her gaze lifted to his. They stared at each other for a second that stretched out to infinity. Whoa. The moment snapped back into real time sharply, like a rubber band, with the same painful slap against his skin.

  He tugged and all but launched her airborne into the plane.

  “Crud, you’re strong,” she breathed under her breath.

  He didn’t think she’d meant for him to hear it, but he replied, nonetheless. “All special operators have to be.”

  “I’m the first to admit that no woman will ever be as strong as a guy at the top of his fitness game. Not even someone like me who’s ridiculously strong relative to most other women.”

  “Then why put yourself through the misery?”

  “Just because I won’t ever be as strong as a man doesn’t mean I’m not strong enough to do the job. Strength comes in many forms.”

  She was right, of course, but he wasn’t about to give her the satisfaction of saying so. “Take a seat,” he ordered.

  “No other passengers? This bird is just for me?” she asked.

  He moved forward to a small cabinet behind the copilot’s seat. He dug out several bottles of water and tossed them one by one to Wilkes. She caught each easily. Good reflexes. That was something, at least.

  “Major Torsten is in a hurry to get you out of here,” he replied as he moved back toward her.

  She finished chugging a bottle of water, coming up for air and muttering, “Yeah, I got that memo.”

  She sounded a shade bitter. Like it was dawning on her that she really was not going to be a Special Forces operator. He knew the feeling. And he was definitely bitter about it, too. He wasn’t about to accept the doctor’s final word that his knee would never be strong enough for him to operate on the teams again.

  He’d transformed from a scrawny, picked-on kid into a hard-core warrior, hadn’t he? He could transform one lousy, busted knee into a joint strong enough to do the job. No way was he walking away from his brothers in arms. They were his family. His life. What would he do if he couldn’t be a special operator?

  He dropped into the seat across the aisle from her, and Wilkes stopped slugging the second bottle of water to squeak, “What are you doing?”

  “You heard the major. He told me to see to it you get where you’re going.”

  He realized he was massaging his right leg, just above the knee, and jerked his hand away. No weakness. No pain. His knee was fine.

  She snapped, “I’m not going AWOL just because Torsten tossed me out. I’m going to be pissed off for the next several decades, but I’m not going to throw some giant, career-destroying tantrum over it.”

  He shrugged. “I’ve got my orders.” As the engines cranked up outside, he leaned his seat back, closed his eyes and settled in for a nap. If she knew what was good for her, she would do the same.

  Nope. She was feeling chatty apparently, for she said, “Just how crappy an assignment is Torsten sending me to? Is this punishment for my daring to try for the Special Forces?”

  The plane started to taxi. Without opening he eyes, he said shortly, “Operations 101—eat and sleep whenever you get a chance to do either.” Surely, she’d already learned that one. Didn’t she know anything? God almighty, this mission was going to suck worse than he’d thought. And he already thought it was going to suck pretty damned hard.

  The plane accelerated down the runway, and he caught her surreptitiously wiping tears away from her cheeks as she stared out the window, her face averted from him. Aww, hell. Now he felt bad for her. And that was the one emotion he couldn’t afford where she was concerned.

  Thankfully, she had no more inclination to talk. She reclined her seat and went unconscious in a matter of seconds. She had to be beat. He recalled his training as if it was yesterday, and saying it had been hell on earth would not be an exaggeration.

  Of course, the real misery for her had just begun. Not that it was going to be any better for him. Someday, somehow, he would find a way to get even with Torsten for this.

  Chapter 2

  Tessa jolted awake as the plane bumped onto a runway. It was dark outside the small window at her elbow. She was disoriented. Groggy. Airplane. Kicked out of the Special Forces pipeline. Orders from Torsten. A god sent along to deliver her to Phoenix.

  She peered out the windows and saw the tall, black silhouettes of trees crowdi
ng an unlit runway. Trees? In Phoenix?

  She’d been to Arizona before. It had been a thousand degrees outside, and all that grew in the sandy desert were rocks and cacti. She peered out her window again. Not only were those trees, they also looked like a mix of moisture-loving deciduous species and conifers. Totally not trees that would survive the hellish heat of summer in Arizona. And the air in the plane was muggy. Humidity in Phoenix often ran in the single digits. It was warm wherever they had landed, though. And the air smelled strongly of...plant decay.

  She glanced over at Lambert. “Do you know where we are?”

  “Yup.”

  The man had the conversational skills of a caveman.

  She waited for him to share, but nada. He just stared out his own window, jaw set and a grim expression on his face. “Well?” she demanded. “Where are we? This is obviously not Phoenix.”

  “Are you always this impatient?” he asked laconically.

  “Guess I am. I have this funny thing about liking to know, oh, what state I’m in.” One thing she knew for sure. This was not Arizona.

  His lips twitched, but he didn’t deign to enlighten her. Apparently, he was as stubborn as his boss. Jackasses, both of ’em. Yeah, well, she could play that game, too. She’d be darned if she asked him any more questions.

  The jet came to a full stop. Deep silence fell as the engines shut down. The copilot came back to open the clamshell hatch and lower the steps. She smiled flirtatiously at the young Air Force officer and asked him, “Could you please tell me where we are?”

  He glanced up at her in surprise. “Louisiana.”

  What on earth was there for her?

  At least she’d caught what felt like a couple hours–long nap. If only she felt better after it. Not that anyone in the history of aviation had ever napped comfortably in an airplane seat. She hoisted herself out of the chair, every bit as stiff and agonized as she expected. Bent over in the low-ceilinged cabin, she hobbled to the exit.

  She eyed the stairs warily. There were only four steps, yet that was enough to be problematic in her current state of pain. But no way was she going to ask Lambert, waiting impatiently at the bottom of the steps, for help. She made it down the first couple of steps, but her entire right leg cramped on the third step and collapsed out from under her. She pitched forward, straight into the arms of her SEAL babysitter. Again.