Page 19 of Special Ops Seduction

But though she didn’t scowl, Caradine did step out of range of Everly’s elbow, restoring Bethan’s faith in her famously bad temper.

“We’reall,” Caradine echoed, her eyes gleaming with what looked a lot like said temper. “We’re a bigwenow. A group. What fun.”

“She loves it,” Everly told Bethan.

“Does she?” Bethan wasn’t convinced.

“That’s how she shows affection,” Everly said with a grin. “The more outraged she pretends she is, the more filled with love she actually is.”

“Or dead inside,” Caradine countered, though she didn’t walk any farther away. “And praying daily for deliverance.”

Everly only laughed, her gaze on Bethan. “Come get a beer. Eat a burger. It’s Friday night.”

And that was how Bethan found herself sitting at a table of civilians, listening to Everly, Mariah, and Caradine laugh about what it was like to be in relationships with Alaska Force men.

“Baby. Got to go,” Caradine was saying in a credible impression of Isaac.

“Wheels up in thirty,” Everly said gruffly, as Blue.

“Briefing at oh nine hundred,” Mariah added, sounding remarkably like Griffin.

And that cracked them all up to such an extent that Everly cradled her face in her hands and Mariah wiped at her eyes. Caradine got so carried away she actually smiled.

“All of those are valid statements,” Bethan said into the lull, but that only set them off again.

Bethan was grinning despite herself, but she wishedKate were here. Kate Holiday was an Alaska State Trooper as well as being in a relationship with Templeton. That wasn’t the same as what Bethan did, but it meant she wasn’t a civilian, either. And best of all, she had a certain no-nonsense, refreshing matter-of-factness about her that always made Bethan feel comfortable.

Because it was different when you were a woman doing what was historically a man’s job. That was just a fact.

“I wish I could relate,” she told the group, though she did not, in fact, wish anything of the kind. Sex with a coworker was a risky proposition in any job, but in hers? It had always been catastrophic. Bethan had seen too many good women go down thanks to some guy who never seemed worth the fall, to her mind. She shrugged. “But I only work with them. I don’t date them. Seems like a better plan.”

“Here’s my question,” Everly said. She leaned across the table, shoving her beer out of the way. “Do you actually not notice that they’re all ridiculously gorgeous? Or do you have to accept on some level that yes, they’re remarkable male specimens, but yet somehow remain functional anyway?”

“If it’s the first,” Mariah drawled, “I salute you. But also have follow-up questions.”

“And if it’s the second,” Caradine said, her gaze considering, “you’re even more badass than I thought you were.”

“I can’t possibly answer that question.” Bethan looked around the table. “We have more interesting things to talk about than my job, don’t we?”

“Yes, yes,” Everly said, and patted her hand. “What a trial it is for you to have a job like that, anyway. Constantly in the company of a legion of gloriously good-looking men who can also perform feats of skill and endurance on command, and you get to do it all with them.”

“In fairness,” Caradine said after a moment, “that does sound a lot like hell to me.”

Bethan sat back in her chair and looked around the Fairweather, which she’d first seen almost two years ago whenshe’d come to meet the myth that was Isaac. It looked the same. The rough-looking regulars who were, for the most part, sweethearts beneath all their bluster. The pool table that was always in use. The jukebox that was usually tuned to classic rock or country and was currently blaring out Creedence Clearwater Revival. The neon sign outside that flashed in the window, and the matching ones over the bar.

She’d come here chasing a story people in the service told one another but that she hadn’t really believed was real. Oh, she knew Alaska Force was real. And she’d assumed Isaac was—whateverrealmeant for a man of his skill and background. But the idea that this place could actually be a kind of sanctuary for special ops soldiers? Or that it could be a group of the good guys—instead of some of the individuals she knew from all her years in the service, who she was never surprised to hear went into the kind of private security firms that everyone knew made them straight-up mercenaries.

Because Bethan might have been furious at the army. Or brokenhearted, maybe, and ready to leave. But she was no mercenary. She had always wanted to do good in the world. If she dug down beneath the skin of the eighteen-year-old she’d been, so determined to thumb her nose at her father by joining a different branch than his, that had been at the root of it.

That was still what she wanted.

But she was with civilians tonight. She could worry about doing good in the world tomorrow—with or without the looming complication of Jonas Crow.

“My personal hell is different,” she said. “It involves big family weddings. Ones I have to be in, I mean, as the maid of honor, when my entire life has proven to me and my entire family that given the opportunity, I will shame them all.”

“You’re the maid of honor in a wedding?” Everly asked, as if Bethan had announced she was, in fact, Santa Claus.

“Like a real person,” Bethan said, biting back her grin. “I know. I’m as thrown by it as you are.”

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