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

  “Grab me a protein bar from the glove compartment,” Beau said after one such near ejection. “Get a couple for yourself, too.”

  She wasn’t particularly hungry after their recent lunch, but she did as he directed. The protein bars turned out to be military issue—2000 calories in a compressed bar she knew from experience tasted like sawdust and lard. She stowed several in her rucksack.

  The road ended without warning at the bank of a body of water, overhung by black-trunked cypresses draped in gray Spanish moss. It was every bit as atmospherically creepy as she could hope for in a bayou. All it lacked was an alligator or two sliding off the bank into the inky black water. Beau turned off the ignition.

  “We’re on foot the rest of the way,” he announced. He shouldered a hefty backpack while she strapped on her rucksack. The thick vegetation here was as unlike the California desert of her youth as it was possible for terrain to be. Comparing it to a sauna didn’t begin to do justice to the cloying mugginess.

  “Don’t run ahead of me out here. You’ll get lost, or you’ll get into trouble.”

  Annoyed that she’d showed him up this morning, huh? She highly doubted if his knee was healthy she’d have been able to keep up with him, let alone outrun him.

  The intent in bringing her out here was obvious. Maximum misery. Test her character. Challenge her will to stay the course and prevail.

  Beau headed out along the edge of the water, following the faintest of trails. There was no path to speak of, just a broken branch or a flattened clump of grass to indicate someone had come this way before. He pointed out the trail signs to her as they moved deeper into the gloom of the bayou. A subtle art, tracking.

  She gathered this was how he planned to teach her—by sharing tidbits as they came up until he’d passed on enough information for her to operate in the field. Her job would be to register every little piece of advice he gave her, learn it and apply it. Fair enough.

  They fell into a rhythm holding branches back for each other, murmuring warnings about footing and pointing out hazards. It felt as if an invisible rope connected them; every movement he made vibrated down its length into her. It was a hyperawareness bordering on psychic.

  Did all operators have this when they worked together, or was this just the simmering attraction between them manifesting itself?

  She hoped it was the former but feared it was the latter. What was she going to do about it if she couldn’t get past her raging attraction to him? More to the point, what would he do about it?

  The earth beneath her feet had a spongy quality that she found vaguely unsettling. After a rainstorm, she suspected this path would be impassible.

  Somebody, Beau probably, had already hacked through the stands of vining kudzu and brambles that occasionally blocked their path. He moved quickly enough that she had to walk fast and breathe hard to keep up with him. Not that he ever looked back at her.

  They race-hiked for a solid hour before he stopped at the end of a spit of land jutting out into a bog. “Waterproof your gear,” he ordered.

  Groaning mentally, she pulled out a large, waterproof bag and zipped her entire rucksack into it while he did the same with his backpack.

  “Not like that. Capture air in the bag so it’ll float. Saves you having to drag it along as dead weight under the water. If we were moving covertly, you’d want to take the air out and add rocks if necessary to sink it. But for today’s purposes, float it.”

  She unzipped her waterproof sack a little, blew air into it like a balloon and resealed the thing. And so it went. Every few minutes he passed along some technique or taught her some new trick. It was a humbling demonstration in how much she had to learn.

  They spotted alligators now and then. Mostly, they looked like bumpy gray logs as they slid silently into the water and disappeared when she and Beau got close. Tessa sincerely hoped they were all swimming in the opposite direction.

  He picked up a makeshift walking stick, and she did the same, unsure why she was going to need it...until he walked out into the bog. Beau used his stick to test each spongy mass of dead grass and debris before he stepped on it.

  She sank nearly to her knees in black, brackish water with each step, and her pants became coated in black muck. Not only did she have no trouble envisioning snakes, alligators and other nasty critters rising up out of the goop, but the water had to be chock-full of nasty parasites and microbes, too. Ick.

  She kept up with Beau until she had one tiny lapse of concentration and failed to test a step. Her right leg sank to midthigh and promptly got stuck.

  “Beau!” she called as he moved ahead of her.

  He turned around and took stock of her predicament. “How are you going to get yourself out?” he asked.

  She swore to herself. Ideally, he would reach a hand out and give her a tug. Barring that, this was going to suck. She tested the hold the muck had on her foot. Her whole boot was pretty securely sucked down into the sludgy sediment. She wedged her walking stick into a bush to one side of her and rested the other end atop a cypress stump jutting up on her other side. She gave an experimental tug on the makeshift pull-up bar. No movement. At all.

  No amount of wiggling, jiggling or pulling loosened up the mud around her boot. She was well and truly stuck. She sighed and looked up at Beau. “I’m going to have to dig myself out by hand, aren’t I?”

  He merely shrugged.

  No help there. It was tempting to call him names for refusing to help her, but she understood what he was doing. He was making her be self-reliant. Solve problems.

  She took a deep breath, screwed her eyes shut and ducked her head under the disgusting water, running her hand down her leg until it encountered the sticky glop trapping her foot. Working fast, she grabbed handfuls of it, digging around the edges of her boot until it came loose all at once and tipped her over on her side, submerging her completely.

  She righted herself, sputtering, and dashed the water and debris away from her eyes before she risked opening them.

  Her entire body looked like she’d gotten wet and rolled around in a bag of black topsoil. Where there wasn’t black muck, there was green pond slime. The foul odor of it nearly gagged her. It was completely disgusting.

  She wiped a string of algae off her face and grinned gamely through her coating of filth at Beau. “Good times,” she declared.

  He nodded back, a look of reluctant approval on his face. Hah. This had been a test, too. Self-reliance, and the ability to find humor in a sucky situation, maybe?

  “You look like a rougarou,” he commented.

  “Rouga who?” she asked.

  “Rougarou. Swamp monster said to inhabit the bayou. Human by day, people-attacking monster by night.”

  “Like a werewolf?”

  “Close enough. Tender, sweet morsel like you will be right up the rougarou’s alley.”

  She rolled her eyes at him. “If you’re trying to scare me, you’ll have to do better than that.”

  She joined him on a patch of relatively dry ground, and he took a hasty step back from her. “Whew. You stink. That a habit with you?”

  Tessa shrugged, unconcerned. “There’s a time to smell good and a time to smell bad. Perfume out here would only draw mosquitoes.”

  “Sensible attitude for a woman.”

  Her gaze narrowed. “That’s the problem with you men. You make the mistake of expecting me to act and think differently than you because I’m a girl. Quit thinking of me as a woman and just think of me as a soldier.”

  His gaze raked down her body and back up to her face. “Kinda hard to forget you’re a woman with curves like that.”

  She made a sound of irritation. “What do you want me to do? Wear a burlap sack in the field? It’s not my problem if men look at me and think of sex.”

  “It is your problem if it affects the functioning of the team
you’re on.”

  “If I’m on the Medusas, it’ll be all women and not a problem,” she shot back.

  “Assuming we can find enough women to field an all-female team. Until then, you’ll have to run with guys.”

  Oh.

  None of her instructors to date had been willing to talk about this 600-pound gorilla lurking in the corner, and she leaped on the opportunity to get inside the head of a male special operator.

  “I always thought the big hang-up was that women aren’t physically strong enough to be on a team. But if I’m hearing you correctly, you think the problem is sex, not strength.”

  He turned and took off walking, but thankfully continued the conversation. “Lack of upper body strength is a real problem. A team is only as strong as its weakest member.”

  “But you think my gender is the bigger problem?”

  “Not your gender. The way you look.”

  She considered herself okay-looking—a six, maybe. She was too unconventional to be considered beautiful. But hey. Give the man points for honesty. “So you think my—” she searched for words “—general hotness...is the problem?”

  “Team dynamics are important in the field. All the power struggles and personality issues have to get worked out in training so that, by the time a team hits an op, no personal crap distracts them.”

  “Isn’t that hard to achieve? You guys are known to have big egos and a lot of testosterone.”

  “Egos are okay in bars when the guys are picking up women. But they have no place on a mission.” He shrugged. “Besides, there’s always somebody more badass than you to keep you humble.”

  She considered his comments as they hiked in silence for a while. If she was not mistaken, he was gradually picking up the pace of their hike. She was having to work even harder to keep up with him now.

  Abruptly, Beau declared, “You think too damned loud.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “I can hear you thinking back there. What’s running through your head?”

  She was startled. Her instructors to date hadn’t had the slightest interest in knowing what she was thinking. They had just wanted to run her into the ground and force her into a physical collapse.

  “Why do you want to know what I’m thinking?”

  “Most civilians think of this kind of training only as physically grueling. But the mental aspects are actually more important. It’s about finding your breaking points and learning how to overcome not only fatigue and physical pain but also fear, stress, anger or any other thought or emotion that could get you killed on an op. I know how guys think. But I’ve got no clue how you think.”

  She frowned at his back and answered slowly, “I’m not afraid of physical pain. I learned a long time ago how to use my mind to overcome it. That part of the game is never going to be a problem for me.”

  He offered up in a reluctant voice, “That was Torsten’s assessment of you.”

  “Really?” she exclaimed. “He noticed?”

  “The guy’s like a spider sitting in the middle of his web. Nothing escapes his notice. He’s freakishly accurate in forecasting who will and won’t make it through Spec Ops training.”

  “What else did he have to say about me?”

  “Do I look stupid?” Beau threw over his shoulder. “I’m not giving up all my secrets to you.”

  She laughed quietly behind him. “I thought that was my line.”

  Beau’s only answer was to pick up the pace. Significantly.

  Cautious after her misstep earlier, she struggled to splash along behind him and keep herself from taking another plunge in the swamp. The afternoon heated up even more, and the air was so thick with humidity and so utterly still it felt as if she was swimming through it. The stench clinging to her hair and clothes reeked powerfully enough to make her feel sick.

  She drank all her bottled water and began to consider where she was going to get more clean drinking water. It was frustrating being surrounded by so much of the stuff and none of it drinkable. The swamp water would need to be filtered, distilled and treated with purification tablets before she would even think about giving it a try. Setting up a distilling rig would take some time and a fire. A fire would take dry kindling to start, and there was precious little of that out here.

  Suspicious of Beau after he’d let her flail in the muck alone, she started collecting dry, dead twigs as she came across them and stuffing them into a pocket of her rucksack. At some point in the miserable race through the bayou, they passed a cedar stump poking above the water line. It was heavily decayed and crumbling. Gleefully, she stashed handfuls of resin-soaked cedar shards in her pack. Even wet, the highly flammable fatwood would light off with a simple match to start it burning.

  She was just zipping the last pocket on her rucksack when Beau startled her, speaking directly in her ear. “What are you doing?”

  She jumped about a foot straight up in the air and whipped around to glare at him. He loomed so close she could see his individual eyelashes, thick and dark and long.

  “Nice startle reflex you’ve got there, Wilkes.”

  “Screw you, Lambo,” she muttered.

  “Seriously. What were you doing?”

  “Gathering fatwood.”

  “Why?”

  “Fire starter. I figure you’re going to make me get my own water, and I plan to distill it before I drink any of that filth.”

  He nodded. “Thinking ahead and contingency planning can save your hide.” He added casually, “Hate me yet?”

  She blinked up at him, surprised at the question. Deliberately, he stripped off his gloves and tucked them in his belt. Then he shocked her by reaching out to tuck a wayward strand of her hair behind her ear. His fingertips traced the rim of her ear lightly, and her gaze snapped up to his. Whoa. His eyes flared as hot as a blast furnace as he stared down at her. An ember of something equally molten ignited low in her belly, incinerating her from the inside out.

  The invisible rope between them tightened, and she swayed toward him. He, too, seemed to feel the pull and he leaned closer, bringing them chest to chest. His lips parted slightly, and darned if hers didn’t do the same. His breath touched her cheek as lightly as his fingers had touched her ear.

  How her right hand came to rest on his chest, she had no idea. But she felt his heart thudding slow and steady beneath her palm. Vital. Masculine. Strong.

  “Man, you’re tempting,” he breathed.

  “Hello, pot. Meet kettle,” she murmured back. He shifted restlessly beneath her palm, and his hands came up to encompass both sides of her head, tilting her face up slightly. At just the right angle for kissing. His heartbeat leaped erratically beneath her hand, and her breath hitched in response.

  She wanted to kiss him so much she could hardly stand it. Did she dare? All she had to do was stand on her tiptoes, lean in a little more, plaster her body against the smoking-hot length of his and touch that sexy mouth with hers. Breathe him in, taste him, take off his shirt, shove her hands down his pants and grasp his throbbing—

  He stepped back sharply.

  Shoot! Was the guy a mind reader or something? Lust raged through her, clawing at her angrily.

  One corner of his mouth quirked up knowingly as if he sensed her sexual frustration. “There’s more than one way to get you to hate me.”

  “Why do you want me to hate you?”

  “You’ll figure it out.” He shrugged. “Guess I’ll have to pick up the pace.”

  Of what? Seducing her? Please God, yes, pick up the pace!

  She thought she heard him swear under his breath. “Let’s go,” he ordered briskly, whirling and striding off into the swamp.

  Mentally, she groaned. Her legs were not in top shape after yesterday’s run and this morning’s, and the boggy terrain was forcing her to lift her feet unnaturally high, often havi
ng to pull her boot free of the clutching muck under the water in the process. It was exhausting going. It made the most sadistic stair-climbing machine look like kid stuff. Not that she would ever voice a complaint aloud to him, of course.

  Good thing his rear end was so nice to look at.

  After announcing his intent to provoke her hatred by speeding up, he kept his word. She had to splash along clumsily, half running, to match his long strides.

  The man was a freaking machine. Marching and running were areas she pretty much always kept up with the boys, but Beau made mincemeat of her out here. Twice he had to stop and wait for her to catch up lest they lose sight of each other entirely in the dense vegetation. He was not happy either time she caught up with him, his lips pressed tightly together and his sapphire eyes glinting in disapproval, but he didn’t say anything. He just turned and pressed on.

  Not that it entered her mind to quit. He would have to kill her to get her to stop trying to keep up.

  Okay, she was starting to hate him a little. It wasn’t fair for any one person to be that strong or have that much stamina. Her mind boggled at the prospect of sex with a man like him. He would wear her out. Imagining it was enough to keep her slogging along after him for at least another hour.

  In spite of the awesome distraction of fantasizing about sleeping with Beau, the afternoon stretched on interminably, a slow roasting oven that cooked her alive. It didn’t help that she had no more water. A dehydration headache pounded at her skull, her thighs screamed in protest, her stomach tried to gnaw a hole through her spine, she was covered in dried, black, swamp gook, she itched, she stunk and she hurt from head to foot. To top it all off, she was horny as heck. In a nutshell, it was awful.

  But hey. She could be sitting in an office pushing paper and pouring coffee. She supposed it was a matter of picking her poison.

  Desire to cry uncle warred with knowing that Beau was trying to get her to do precisely that. No way would she give him the satisfaction. She didn’t like it when anyone got inside her head, particularly her personal, smoking-hot commando.