“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 to figure 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.
She felt energized, wide-awake, and gloriously alive when she sat down in her compact kitchen and fixed herself a pot of strong, black coffee and a quick energy-boosting smoothie that was both easy to digest and quickly converted to fuel.
Her cabin was just off the wooden walkways, within walking distance of the lodge, unlike some that were miles into the dense forest. Bethan liked being remote, but not that remote. She preferred easy access to her cabin, because it was her refuge. Inside these walls, she could indulge in all the feminine parts of herself she kept locked up tight when working. Because nobody wanted a cuddly, cute Army Ranger.
Her cabin was soft and cozy, then, because she couldn’t be. Everything in it had been chosen either because it was comfortable or because it made her smile. Her oversized armchair was piled high with the softest throws. Her couch was a soft, pastel nest. Her bed was festooned with approximately a thousand pointless throw pillows. There were bright, happy colors everywhere, scented candles, and thick, deep rugs thrown everywhere because she liked to sink her bare feet into them. Outside, on the private deck to the side of her cabin, sat her major indulgence. The wood-fired hot tub she’d built with her own hands, which was her favorite reward for those hard, often grueling days of pushing herself to her limits and beyond.
Bethan let no one inside her cabin. Ever.
When she was finished with her coffee and smoothie, she dressed in layers for the 0700 community workout and then headed outside, into a typically cloudy Alaskan morning. The woods around her were wet, thick with the scent of woodsmoke, damp pine, and the richness of the sea all around. She ran in place for a moment to encourage her body temperature to rise to meet the relatively warm near-forty-degree morning, then started down the steep hillside toward the beach.
She was at the end of her second winter here, and she liked the dark, barren months more than she’d expected she would. She knew that the Southeast Alaskan islands had it easy, comparatively speaking, to the rest of the hardy Last Frontier. Balmy, people liked to say when it was even marginally above freezing, because thanks to the sea, the islands never quite got the intense snow and blindingly negative temperatures that occurred farther north. She’d been told it was the relentless gray, clouds and fog and rain, that got to people over time, but that really wasn’t a factor for Bethan. She had her bright, happy cabin to keep her spirits high.
And after spending a week in the blinding desert, she found the press of morning fog a relief. She followed the dirt path from her cabin toward the lodge but skirted around it, heading toward the water instead. Because it was down there, set back from the high-tide line, that Isaac had the Alaska Force community gym. They liked to call it their box of pain, and Isaac certainly delivered. He came up with torturous workouts that would make a drill instructor proud.
“Morning,” Isaac said cheerfully when everyone who was off mission and in Fool’s Cove had assembled inside the sprawling, stark cabin. “I sure hope no one had a big breakfast.”
And no one groaned, because that only encouraged him.
Bethan wasn’t particularly surprised when the workout consisted of a truly vile amount of cardio and then some heavy sled pushes down the unforgiving rocky beach to really make everyone feel as gross as possible. But that was the thing about gross workouts. Once you survived them, you felt like a god. She’d been chasing that high for years.