Page 9 of Special Ops Seduction

But that was an identity crisis for another day.

Isaac was looking into more permanent outposts in the middle of ongoing operations abroad. And while he never recruited for Alaska Force, because it wasn’t a good fit for someone unless they came and found it on their own—and he only took on about one in ten of those who made the trek—he’d found a crop of decent new members over the last six months.

August was one. A few weeks after Isaac had returned from a long few weeks in the Amazon last summer,Benedict Morse had shown up, maybe or maybe not a former member of the highly secret Task Force Black. Two more men had joined that fall: Jack Herriot, former Air Force Weatherman, and Lucas King, former ANGLICO Marine, among other things.

Isaac had a good eye. All the new men were distinguishing themselves on and off the field.

“Everyone is settling in great,” Isaac confirmed. “In fact, Jonas, there’s only one area of tension in the ranks, as far as I can tell.”

He didn’t sigh, because that was a tell. “Don’t.”

But Isaac ignored him. “Are you ever going to sort that out?”

“There’s nothing to sort out.”

“Because if it’s a problem with women in combat, you should know we have an excellent female marine who’s been dancing around coming out to see us for a while now. I have a feeling she’s going to take the plunge in the next few months, and that will make it two.”

“You know I don’t have a problem with women,” Jonas gritted out.

“What I know and what I’ve seen right here in Fool’s Cove are two different things.”

Jonas stared at his friend. “It’s been a year and a half. We just completed a perfectly successful mission. What do you care if it’s not all pop songs and rainbows?”

“I don’t.” Isaac’s gray gaze was intense. And steady. “We might not have ranks here, but you’re a leader. Hard to justify that when you’ve taken an obvious and undying dislike to one of our people.”

“I don’t dislike anyone.”

Isaac almost smiled. “But you don’t like them, either.”

“I liked you until roughly five minutes ago.”

“Good thing I don’t need you to like me.” And the way Isaac grinned, it was clear he wasn’t particularly worried that he’d lost Jonas’s hard-won affection. “You need tofigure it out, whatever it is, because the next time someone asks me about it? I’m going to insist on mediation.”

Jonas didn’t reel around blinking in astonishment, because he had far too much control for that. He reacted only when he wanted to react. But it felt like a close call, when it shouldn’t have been.

“Mediation?” Jonas caught himself the second before he actually scowled at Isaac. Another clear sign he needed to get a handle on himself. “There’s nothing to mediate.”

“Then it shouldn’t be hard to fix it,” Isaac said calmly. He nodded toward the storm gathering force up above them. “I’ll leave you to your brooding.”

But it wasn’t the brooding that got to Jonas, he thought, when Isaac walked away. It was the ghosts.

And Bethan’s ghost was the worst, because he couldn’t snap himself out of it by telling himself that she was dead and gone like all the rest.

Because at any moment he might turn around, and there she’d be. Reminding him of when he was helpless. Vulnerable. That was bad enough.

It hadn’t been the first or the last night he’d fully expected he might die before morning, but because of her, it had been the only night he’d ever been desperate to stay alive instead.

Desperate.

He thought that haunted him as much as she did.

Three

The next morning, Bethan woke up the way she usually did, without any alarm, a good two hours before dawn.

She stretched as she lay there, tucked in beneath the rafters in her cozy loft bedroom that opened up the downstairs into a comfortable studio. She took her time getting out of bed, because that first shock of her cold floor in the morning always made her gasp and remember the California beaches of her youth, more vividly with every step down the open stairs to the ground floor.

But once she was up, her body kicked in and fired up her brain. She threw more logs into her wood-burning stove, so her cabin would be nice and warm when she finished her morning routine of one hundred burpees as fast as possible right here in the center of her living space, followed by a cold shower.

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