Page 7 of Special Ops Seduction

Jonas didn’t take the bait. There was no point to it. Because the truth was, he would rather she think he was a sexist idiot. He wished he were a garden-variety Neanderthal, because that would be easier. Also, he wouldn’t care.

What he would give to not care.

Instead, he held her gaze until she dropped hers. A few moments later, Rory came out of the second room with the scientist and a suitcase, and Jonas happily ordered everyone to get moving.

And then he went out of his way to ignore his Bethan problem all the way back to Alaska.

They landed in Juneau on the same day they’d left Lisbon—give or take half the planet and some nine time zones. The team, in various states of sleep or agitation, depending on how each member handled their adrenaline, shuffled from the jet to the seaplane that would carry them back to Alaska Force headquarters, tucked away on theback of a little island that was hardly notable among the more than a thousand others off the coast of Southeast Alaska.

Jonas took a deep breath of the Alaskan air. Clean, cold. It was the end of March, with a temperature hovering somewhere in the midthirties. The sun was still up, though it was a gray, blustery day, which made a nice change from real winter, when the sun barely made itself known. Given that he’d grown up being dragged through the least hospitable parts of South Dakota, Wyoming, and the Alaskan interior, Jonas felt right at home in the relatively balmy Juneau version of March. And he’d lived through enough to take the feeling of home pretty seriously.

And maybe that was why he resented it so deeply when he looked to his side and there was Bethan.

The proverbial thorn.

She’d showered on the flight from Montreal, after they’d delivered the scientist and his sister to the safe house waiting for him near McGill University. Things Jonas did not need to notice included the fact she’d showered at all, when he had yet to note the freshness of, say, Griffin. The subtle scent of her shampoo, like coconuts. The way the brooding Alaskan light shifted over her face, making it impossible not to notice the faint spray of freckles across her nose and cheekbones that made her something perilously close to cute. A word he’d banished from his vocabulary a long time ago. And worst of all, those hints of red in her hair, which reminded him of things he refused to let himself remember.

Of all the ghosts that haunted him regularly, too many to name, Jonas never would have imagined that a woman he’d first known as an intelligence asset under his protection would be the worst. The most insidious. The one he never seemed to get any peace from, no matter what he did.

The one who’d lived.

“After you,” Bethan said, with scrupulous courtesy that wasn’tquitesarcastic, waving him in front of her to head up the stairs onto the seaplane.

A typical challenge. Jonas could have explained to her that it wasn’t that she was a woman that made it hard for him to take the lead the way he would have if she were any other soldier. It was the fact that she was... her.

But he would rather she think the worst of him than know anything about that.

He went up the stairs, then suffered the further indignity of having her right next to him for the entire flight back. It was a short enough hop from Juneau to Fool’s Cove. He knew that rationally, but it still felt to him like an eternity.

When the seaplane finally landed, skipping a few times across the cove, Jonas thought he might actually come out of his skin.

He knew no one could see it. He was far too well trained.

But he could feel it inside himself, that jumping, skittering feeling that brought him back to the worst time of his life. It was that quick and encompassing.

No way was he going back there.

It was one more reminder, not that he needed it, that there was no satisfactory remedy for the problem that was Bethan. He’d thought about quitting Alaska Force. He’d thought about requesting a deep-cover mission somewhere far, far away. He’d rejected both of those options for a variety of reasons, but right now, he would have taken either one. Anything to get away from this... torture.

He’d rather be in the hands of his enemies again than deal with this.

The rest of the team jumped out onto the dock and made their way up the long set of stairs toward the former fishing lodge that had been in Isaac Gentry’s family for generations. Isaac, Templeton, and Jonas had transformed it into their main headquarters. It sprawled there, up above the waterline, its wooden boardwalks connecting the mainlodge building to a number of freestanding cabins. Behind it, the island was a steep hill toward an almost-always-impassable mountain, with more cabins set down here and there, allowing Alaska Force team members more or less solitude, according to their level of general twitchiness.

Fool’s Cove was remote. It had been likened to a fortress, and the description fit. The only way in was by water or air, unless the mountain pass was actually open and nonlethal, for a change. That meant they could always see any intruders coming.

Jonas’s idea of paradise.

“Briefing in two hours,” he called out, and got a variety of head tilts in reply.

Except for Bethan, of course. She actually stopped a few steps up, turned around, and met his gaze. And then nodded.

Jonas told himself that she was simply overzealously responding, the way she did sometimes, which made sense from a woman who’d had to fight to be more correct and more perfect than any man in the service ever had.

But to him, it always felt like she was throwing down.

Maybe you wish she would, something in him suggested. He ignored it.

“Do you have something you need to talk to me about?” he asked coolly as he came to the bottom of the stairs. He hated that blank look. Those cool, assessing, green psyops eyes of hers that, thanks to her years in Army Intelligence, saw too much.

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