Target Engaged

Chapter 10

10

If someone made Kyle choose between the Delta Selection psychological evaluation and a CIA debriefing, he’d be hard pressed to decide which was more irritating.

There were always two analysts in the small steel room they’d stuck him in within minutes of boarding the Littoral Combat Ship USS Freedom. Though not always the same two. As if they were kaleidoscopically interchangeable.

He’d tell them his actions on the mission, such as he sprinted from the cliff to the hacienda.

One would ask for clarification.

He’d been focused on live and mobile targets, of which he hadn’t seen anyone closer than fifty meters.

The other one would start to argue that Kyle hadn’t said that to begin with and then proceed to totally misconstrue his words.

Don’t you mean fifteen meters? Because fifty meters is a long way, way bigger than fifteen.

This would escalate as if he wasn’t actually in the room, until half the time he didn’t know where reality had actually been, and then they’d ask him to repeat what he’d done.

Kyle could see the method to their madness—ferreting out only the consistently repeatable facts—but he didn’t like it one bit more for understanding the tactic. And then somewhere in hour three, while describing the money in Major Gonzalez’s safe for the fourth time, he finally remembered the two USB drives he’d slipped into a shirt pocket.

They went ballistic. It was another hour, dragging him back through the whole operation step by individual step, to make sure he hadn’t forgotten anything else.

When he finally remembered all of the cash tucked in a different pocket, he kept his mouth shut to avoid going through it for another hour. He’d turn it in when he didn’t have to punch out a CIA agent to do so.

By the time they were done with him and let him escape into the hall, he couldn’t remember his own name. The debrief had lasted as long as the operation, from HALO jump to SPIES extraction, and been far more exhausting.

He’d graduated from OTC thirty-six hours ago in a different country on a different continent. He’d participated in a highly successful operation. Major Gonzalez was way high on the CIA’s kill list, and they’d brought him out as well. And Kyle was so wiped, whipped, and—

His Spider-Man senses went off and slapped him most of the way back to consciousness.

Not ten feet down the hall, Carla staggered out of a doorway that looked suspiciously like the one he’d escaped. Why they were released at the same moment, he didn’t have a clue, but he wouldn’t be turning back to ask those jokers. It would probably cost him another hour, and he’d never get the answer anyway.

She walked across the narrow width of the corridor, rested her forehead on the opposite wall, and let out a sound somewhere between a snarl, a scream of frustration, and a whimper.

He scooped an arm around her waist before she sagged to the floor. A frantic look around and he spotted a midshipman. “Do you know where our berths are?”

“Sorry, sirs.” He looked at them uncertainly. “No one told us that you weren’t both male. All I have allocated for your use is a two-berth bunk room.”

That Carla didn’t reply told him how tired she was.

“That’ll be fine. Lead the way.”

The room was classic Navy ship: two-tier bunk, hanging closet exactly four uniforms wide, and enough room to dump your gear and change your clothes, provided you did it one at a time. At least it wasn’t open berthing space. Oddly, it had that rarest of luxuries: a private bathroom. A meter and a half square, it boasted a sink and toilet, and if you closed the door, the whole thing turned into a steel-lined shower.

He stripped Carla down, which wasn’t as much fun as usual because of her near-somnambulant state, and shoved her in. When he didn’t hear the water start, he stripped and followed her in.

She sat on the closed toilet, leaning against the wall, on the verge of sleep.

He turned on the overhead shower that flashed cold, then hot as the pipes cleared.

She squawked and sputtered, sitting up but not rising. So, once they were wet, he slapped off the water and shampooed and soaped them both.

He dragged her to her feet and hit the water again. She hung against him as he sluiced them off. Rubbing Sergeant Carla Anderson down with a towel, though it was an undersized, low-pile Navy one, was a worthwhile experience. Her skin glowed, her muscles shifted beneath the surface in enticing glides that he did his best to ignore. He was exhausted as well, but his body clearly had other ideas. The confined space was not conducive to keeping his distance.

He ached with need as he lay her down on the lower bunk, and not only his body. He was…happier for simply being near her. But it wouldn’t be fair to go sharing his happiness, or his body’s raging lust, not in her current state.

She stopped his escape to the upper bunk with a light hold on his hand. Carla shifted on the narrow mattress and tugged lightly until he lay down against her. There was no way in hell he was going to get any sleep with his body pressed up against hers.

She brushed her lips over his, a tickling sensation that ran right up his spine.

“Thanks.” Barely a mumble. “You’re welcome.”

“You smell good.” Her voice was thick and sleepy as she nuzzled against his neck. “You feel good too.” She snuggled up against him.

Okay. He might be a decent kind of guy, but there were goddamn limits to that code of gentlemanly conduct, weren’t there?

He nuzzled her back.

And the damn woman purred. Carla was not the sort of woman who purred. She snarled and wrestled and laughed at the strangest moments, but she didn’t go languid and feline and make low sounds in her throat that forced a man to try to cause more of them.

Kyle continued his efforts with surprising success. In place of pushing him away or ramping it up, she brushed her hands lightly over his shoulders and slid them into his hair, guiding him to breast, belly, and beyond.

Sex with Carla was invariably an aerobic sport, but she didn’t rise into one of her wild climbs.

Not this time.

Instead of s*x, Kyle felt as if he was making love to her. Perhaps for the first time in the six months they’d been together. He evoked small murmurs and gentle pressures as she leaned in for more, not driving against him.

He took his time, investigating the terrain she offered for his study, a terrain he both did and didn’t know. They had certainly used each other thoroughly at every opportunity, but the heat always exploded forth, never allowing the time to appreciate more.

The skin at the side of her breast was as soft as her inner thigh. When she opened to him, she was warm, deep, and soft. When at long last he found protection and slid into her, she welcomed him with a kiss as gentle as a breeze and as deep as forever.

This time her peaks weren’t shuddering mountains that slammed through her frame causing an avalanche in his, but ocean waves that rose, then rose again until they both finished on a sigh. For all the skin contact she so readily offered, her hugs were typically hard and brief.

This time she held him to her and wouldn’t let go. She kept her face buried in the crook of his neck, her arms and legs wrapped around him. It wasn’t as if she was clinging to him, but rather as if she’d simply never let go because they fit so well together.

He’d had his fair share of s*x, maybe more, starting with a blonde and flexible red belt upon his father’s dojo’s padded floor on their shared sixteenth birthdays. Sally Ann McKay threw one hell of a fine party. And he’d made love to several of the fine women who had consented to share his bed.

Never before had he been in love when he did it. But there was no question, he was that far gone on Carla Anderson.

This wasn’t a post-action f**k. That would have been wild and perhaps dangerous, considering how he was still feeling about the poor girl he’d had to kill. But Carla had let it not be about that. This had been only about them, as if they hadn’t finished the busiest forty-eight hours of their military careers.

They shifted into a position so familiar now that it was hard to sleep any other way. He flat on his back, she curled against his shoulder with an arm and a leg flung across him. He brushed her hair back behind her ear, but knew it would shortly slide across her face as if she always slept safe behind its liquid brown shield.

He kissed her on the top of her head and lay back. He’d never had to explain to his dad about Sally Ann; his father had simply known. He’d waited until the next weekend when they were standing thigh deep in a nut-freezing cold stream trying to tease breakfast onto their lures. Mom was sleeping in.

Then Dad had simply asked if the s*x had been safe. It had.

“You’ll know when it’s the right one, Ky. Until then, you treat them as nice as you know how and you’ll be well rewarded.” Like most of his dad’s lessons, it had been a good one.

That had ended The Talk, though not the lessons that Sally Ann had offered in exchange for extra sparring practice. They’d lasted two years, until the night before she went to college and he went Green Beret, one heck of a fine send-off.

And now Dad was right again. Kyle simply knew.

It was crazy, ridiculous, and stupid. Carla was a teammate. If they were anywhere other than Delta, they’d probably have had both their asses booted by now. They’d certainly have been assigned to different units. She was wild, chaotic, and shared nothing about herself or what was going on inside that beautiful head of hers.

Didn’t matter. Kyle knew.

Carla Anderson was the only one for him, which would only piss her off if he was dumb enough to tell her. So he’d keep his own counsel for now.

He kissed her once more atop her hair and let the stresses of the last couple days wash out of him.

Carla lay on Kyle’s shoulder wishing she could cut out her brain and drop it into the closest garbage chute. It was so screwed up that she couldn’t imagine it would make worthwhile compost.

Her body was asleep, passed out, gone beyond the pale, and humming contentedly to itself about what Kyle had done to it. She couldn’t move a muscle—not for a full hull breach; instead she’d slide contentedly into the depths. Between exhaustion and the positively magnetic attraction of her body to Kyle’s, she might as well be riveted into place.

What he’d done to her was impossible. She’d never let someone else take control before. She always had tabs on exactly what she was doing and what she wanted.

Blaming what had happened on the mission, on exhaustion, on finally being mission-qualified for the Combat Applications Group…wasn’t exactly working right now.

The raw heat that always drove them together was somehow as still as when Carla had perched on the top of the cliff with her shirt open.

She might have been working it to distract the other soldiers, but she’d only been thinking of one man as she flaunted her distractions. She could still feel the spike of heat that had soared through her as Kyle grabbed her hard and rough with his worn-soft leather climbing gloves and slammed her back against that tree.

But that ravenous woman still lingered back in the Venezuelan jungle. On this bunk in the heart of this ship of war lay another woman.

There had been a release she’d never known. Kyle hadn’t only satisfied them both; he’d worshipped her body. And he’d done it with a tenderness that she didn’t know what to do with.

Tenderness was not in the experience of one Carla Anderson.

And she’d let him do it to her. Worse, she’d encouraged him. She didn’t want to lose control and let a man make her feel like…

No, that wasn’t quite it.

Kyle Reeves didn’t make her feel like anything. He made her feel.

And that was the worst of all.