Again.
Dad gum it.
He growled in her ear, low and sexy, “Do you always throw yourself at men like this?”
His low voice sent a thrill rippling down her spine and vibrating deliciously through her lower abdomen before she remembered he was a jerk and she hated his guts.
His chest was hard, slabbed in resilient bulges of muscle, warm under the soft cotton of his black T-shirt. And he still smelled good. Which ticked her off to no end. She smelled like a landfill on a hot day, but there wasn’t a thing she could do about it until she crossed paths with water and a bar of soap.
It never failed. She always ran into the sexy guys when she was a total mess or being a complete dork. She was not one of those girls who managed to be pulled together, poised and make positive first impressions on men. Ever.
“Are you done trying to face-plant?” he asked.
Crud. She was still plastered against him. She yanked free of his strong, supporting arms and forced her legs to bear her weight no matter how much they protested. The copilot passed her rucksack down to Lambert, and she didn’t have the strength or give-a-crap factor to take it from him. She was already kicked out of training. She didn’t have to try to impress anyone with how tough and self-sufficient she was anymore.
Which scared the bejeebers out of her. Her entire life had been devoted to convincing herself and everyone around her that she was the real deal. That she could hang with the big boys. That she was tough. Invulnerable. Safe from harm or abuse.
What was she supposed to do now? Trade in her combat boots for flowered dresses and aprons? Who was she supposed to be? She had no idea how to be a regular woman. Knowing Major Torsten, he’d seen to it she would be stuck in some secretarial job fit only for a June Cleaver wannabe, in his misogynistic estimation.
If she had to make coffee for anyone, she swore she was going to poison the stuff.
Waterworks threatened again, and she breathed deeply, repeating over and over to herself, I will not cry. I will not cry. But hopelessness washed over her, anyway. What had all the years of work and sacrifice been for in the end? God, the time she’d wasted on a hopeless dream.
Lambert took off, striding toward an open-topped Jeep parked at the edge of the tarmac. He limped the tiniest bit on his right leg. Had he not been moving directly away from her like that, she probably wouldn’t have spotted the subtle anomaly in his motion. Not that the knee brace showing under his camo fatigue pants made him any less lethal.
She looked around the airfield, and the place was deserted. It was just a strip of asphalt in a clearing among the towering trees, not even a real airport. There were no buildings, no other vehicles, no people. If this guy was an ax murderer, he was totally going to get away with his crime.
“You comin’? Or are you just gonna stand there countin’ mosquitoes?” he tossed over his shoulder. If she was not mistaken, his voice had taken on a distinctly more Southern drawl.
She hurried after him, sucking in a sharp breath as a thousand hot knives stabbed her body from every direction. One thing the past few months of training with the big boys had taught her. There was sore, and then there was sore.
Lambert tossed her pack in the back of the Jeep and swung easily into the driver’s seat, waiting impatiently for her to catch up and climb in. She couldn’t help groaning a little as she levered her body into the vehicle, using the roll bar to help lift herself. She felt like death warmed over, for real.
“You always this creaky?” he asked.
“Not usually. Training was a little rougher than usual the past few days. No downtime to rest and recover. Nothing’s wrong with me that a hot shower and a decent night’s sleep won’t fix.”
A single chin lift was all the acknowledgment she got. At least he didn’t feel obliged to comment that if she thought initial Spec Ops training was bad, she should try the real deal. Whether he was showing sensitivity to her having just been thrown out of the program or he figured it went without saying that real operations were worse, she was glad for his forbearance. Her patience was way too thin right now to deal with man-snark.
He turned on the headlights and she squinted into the illuminated swath, making out only a thicket of vines, brambles and more trees. “Where in Louisiana are we?”
“Southern Louisiana. Not close to anyplace you’ve ever heard of.”
“What’s here?”
“The next step in your career.”
“What career?” she asked sourly.
He glanced over at her, his expression inscrutable. They bumped across a sandy field and turned onto an asphalt road crowded by towering trees. Cypress, mostly. The night was noisy. Crickets and frogs and God knew what else were audible over the Jeep’s engine.
“Why’d Torsten tell me I was going to Phoenix if your orders were to bring me to Louisiana?”
“Not the city of Phoenix. Operation Phoenix,” was her escort’s only, and cryptic, answer.
Huh? She leaned back to wait and see where he took her.
Lambert drove confidently, his hands moving on the steering wheel and gearshift with the ease and precision of a race-car driver. Bulging biceps flexed under the sleeve of his T-shirt, a sight she never got tired of. It had been one of the best perks of the training she’d just left. The man-candy factor had been through the roof.
Special operators weren’t generally men who packed on weightlifter’s muscle. They focused on stamina and high-repetition calisthenics that moved their own body weight. Their muscle was lean and hard as steel. And hawt as heck.
She’d put on some hard, lean muscle of her own over the past few months of training. But not enough, apparently. Lost in silently delivering the rant inside her head to the icy major who’d thrown her out for no good reason, she wasn’t inclined to engage her taciturn babysitter in conversation.
After about a half hour, lights appeared ahead, and a sad-looking strip of ramshackle buildings that might once have been a reasonably prosperous little road stop came into sight. Lambert turned into the potholed parking lot of a one-story motel that had seen much better days.
He parked at the end farthest from the office and swung out of the Jeep, and she spied him using his hand to give his right leg a little boost. He snagged her pack before she could reach for it, and she was forced to follow him and her gear to a door whose paint was peeling back to expose rusting metal. The night air smelled of brine and rotting grass as Lambert fished a key attached to a plastic paddle out of his pocket. He opened the door and stepped back to allow her to enter first.
How in the hell did he already have a key to a room in this dive? Her hackles leaped to suspicious attention along the back of her neck. “What is this?” she asked, not moving forward.
“A motel room.”
“You’re hilarious.” She rolled her eyes.
“You wanted a hot shower, right?”
Man, that was tempting. But in some guy’s cheap motel room? Even if he was possibly the hottest guy she’d
