She saw the SEAL team walk in just as she was being served a steak. Yeah, a real steak. It hardly seemed fair when so many of her fellow troops would be dining on barely warmed freeze-dried rations tonight. It was, however, one of the perks of being stationed at a permanent base. Well, semipermanent. She let the politics of it all fly by her.
She was on her second drink and halfway through her steak when one of the SEALs she had rescued pulled out a chair and sat across from her.
“Mind?” he asked.
“We’re not supposed to hang,” she reminded him. Like many of his type, he seemed to be all hard angles and planes encased in muscle. Short dark hair, brown eyes that held flecks of green. Just sitting there, he looked dangerous.
“No one knows you pulled us out today. Besides, if we can’t trust the people in this room, who can we trust?” He stuck out his hand. “Seth Hardin.”
She shook it, taking in the subdued captain’s eagle, which was stitched into the collar of his camouflage uniform. His rank was the naval equivalent of the air force’s colonel. “Edith Clapton.”
“That was some flying job you did out there,” he said.
“Thanks. Your guys okay?”
“One just got winged. We’re still waiting to hear about the other. Your medics probably saved his life.”
That was the other part of the job: she extracted, but in the rear of her helicopter she carried the bare bones of an emergency medical team when it was needed. Today it had been needed. They’d done some stripping in the cabin to make room. “That’s what we do.”
He smiled faintly. “Doesn’t mean I can’t be grateful.”
The waiter, a civilian working for a contractor, came over to take his order. He wanted a steak, too, and a couple of beers.
“Time to forget,” he said.
She couldn’t agree more. There’d be another mission, tomorrow or the next day, but for right now it was time to play the mental game of “everything’s normal and okay.” And maybe it was, as much as it could be in the middle of a war.
“Let me buy you another drink,” he said. “It’s the least I can do.”
“I usually limit myself to two.”
A sparkle came into his green-brown eyes. “Usually. Maybe tonight is different. It’s just one more. I don’t want to give you a hangover.”
She hesitated, then said, “Thanks.” Another whiskey. More wind-down. Just this once. Maybe it would quiet the tingling awareness of Seth’s masculinity. A need, probably adrenaline-fueled, to have wild sex with him and make the world go away.
Damn, she’d avoided that through her entire career. She knew what some of the men whispered behind her back and she didn’t care. She just knew how badly getting involved with a fellow officer could mess up her career, and her career was everything to her. One little misstep and her promotion would never happen. Or she’d be accused of ugly things she never wanted to hear. The other whispers were preferable.
As for getting involved with a civilian? Well, who the hell had time? On her stateside rotations, she was usually buried in training. Either her own or that of others. Catching up, keeping up and honing her skills, not to mention getting the master’s degree the air force had demanded before her promotion to major. And the war college courses. She didn’t have time for much else, and joining her comrades to hang out at a bar looking for quickies didn’t appeal to her at all.
She had a few good friends, people she preferred to get together with for cards or some other pastimes. No men, no sex. It kept things clean.
So why was she sitting here wondering if she’d been making a mistake all this time? Because one handsome dude had sat across from her and bought her a drink?
Damn, she needed to unwind. Her thoughts were a little messed up.
“That was some flying you did,” he repeated. “I can’t imagine maneuvering a bird that big into a keyhole like that and holding it steady, and you did it under some pretty heavy fire. You must have amazing nerves.”
She shrugged her shoulder. “It’s what I do. I’ve done it a lot. The reaction waits for later.”
“Yeah. It does.” His gaze said he knew exactly what she meant. Maybe he did. SEALs had nerves of steel, too, but maybe when they got back from a mission they needed to come down from it. Well, hell, yeah, she thought. She’d heard about more than one brawl involving them. Fighting out the tension probably worked as good as sex. How would she know?
Halfway through the meal, he asked something that nearly sobered her up. “You find it hard to talk to civilians now?”
“Yeah. They don’t know.”
His gaze grew distant. “They can’t know. I don’t want them to know, but even if we try to talk they haven’t been here.” He shook his head and came back to her. “I honestly don’t want them to understand. Why should they? Bad enough we have to.” He looked at his hands, fisting them then unclenching them. “But we know, don’t we, Major? We know what we’re capable of.”
He probably more than she, she thought. Oh, heck. “Call me Edie.”
“Seth,” he responded. Then he shook off the mood and gave her a smile so charming it almost took her breath away. “Birds of a feather and all that. Who else can you talk to?”
“I don’t know where you’ve been,” she reminded him.
“You don’t want to. I don’t want to tell you, either. I just want to have some fun tonight. It was close today. We’re damn lucky you got there when you did. So I’m feeling grateful to you, grateful to be alive and grateful my team is alive. That’s a lot to be happy about.”
He lifted his beer in toast. “To life. Wouldn’t want to be without it.”
She had to laugh, and as the sound escaped her, she felt the last of her tension evaporating. She raised her own glass then sipped the whiskey.
Things seemed to become a blur after that. Later she would think she should never have had that third whiskey, even while she was eating. Or maybe she’d had a fourth?
She vaguely remembered somehow sitting at the bar with Seth as the place started emptying out. Sort of remembered him walking her back to her quarters, nothing but a tiny room, shoddily built. She remembered laughing, remembered him steadying her a bit.
Remembered him apologizing for buying her too many drinks. “I should have been able to say no.” It was true. And she really wasn’t that drunk.
She remembered clearly, though, waking in the wee hours. Finding him lying beside her. A quick panicked check told her she was fully clothed and so was he. They were just sleeping it off.
But as soon as the panic eased, something else surged. Wild after years of self-denial, it rose violently, like an erupting volcano: desire.
God, he was good-looking. She ran her eyes over him in the dim light from the shaded lamp across the room. Not much to see in his BDUs, but she drank him in anyway. Just once she wanted to know, and for some reason she wanted to know with this man.
Stupid, she tried to tell herself, but her body continued to grow heavy with hunger, and a deep throbbing began between her thighs. She could die tomorrow or the next day. Why did she keep putting off something so important? Because of her career?
Reasons that had made sense for a decade now all of a sudden weren’t making any sense. She’d seen men and women die out here, and knew how it could come without warning, despite every sensible precaution. Life was short, and the longer she was out here the more it felt like she was riding the edge of it. How many more missions before she bought it? How many times