Once their solid hour of community hell was done, most people staggered off to deal with themselves before the standard nine o’clock briefing. But that was when Bethan took her extra hour to work on her fitness. Sometimes she pushed her cardio. Sometimes she worked on strength training. She liked to push her boundaries and intensity. Today she picked up a 150-pound sandbag and started walking down the beach with it.
Cursing the weight of it and her matching bad attitude with every step.
But she didn’t care what attitude she had as long as she kept going. That was what had gotten her to apply to Ranger School in the first place. And then, far more demanding, to survive it. And graduate.
She was aware almost instantly that someone was behind her as she made her slow way down the stretch of beach with the weight that felt like it was crushing her flat. She assumed it was Isaac. Or Templeton, maybe. Both of whom sometimes stuck around with her after workouts.
When the screaming in her body overwhelmed her, she dropped the sandbag. That was the thing about a sandbag. You always dropped it, eventually. You fought and fought to keep from dropping it, dropped it anyway, and then instantly felt both the delirious relief of not holding it anymore and the kick of panic that you’d have to pick it back up again.
Sandbags were gritty little metaphors, and Bethan loved them in theory. Not so much when she was in the middle of carrying one.
She wheeled around to commiserate and, to her shock, saw that it was Jonas behind her. He did not drop the sandbag he was holding. Bethan forgot to keep her expression appropriately placid, and glared at him. “What are you doing?”
“What does it look like I’m doing? A heavy sandbag carry.”
“Since when do you work out with me alone?” She hated that she felt so raw, and blamed him. He’d ambushed her—and given what he was capable of, she had to think it was deliberate. “Since when do you acknowledge I exist?”
A muscle in his jaw worked, and that was a shock. It suggested this man who was stone straight through had actual human reactions, when Bethan had been reasonably certain he’d left them all behind on that op she knew better than to mention.
“Since today,” Jonas said without inflection. “Before our debrief yesterday, Isaac told me that if we didn’t start getting along, he was going to suggest mediation.”
“Mediation.” Suddenly the sandbag was looking good if her only other option was this maddening conversation with the most irritating man alive. “And why would I be involved in any kind of mediation? I’m not the problem.”
He only stared back at her, those black eyes of his as forbidding and unreadable as ever.
And the truth was, Bethan did not give herself a whole lot of opportunities to stand around staring at Jonas Crow. Because there was no point, and it always felt too much like a Pyrrhic victory, anyway. She certainly never wanted him to catch her doing it. Besides, he was already etched inside of her, as if he’d laser-cut his own image into her bones. She might not like that, and some years she thought the things she carried might choke her from the inside out, but there it was.
But there was no getting away from the fact that the man was . . . an assault.
Jonas was inarguably beautiful in a particularly male way. Since she’d met him, his hair had sometimes been long and sometimes been cut to short military precision. Currently it was somewhere in between, but the deep, silky blackness of it only made the dark of his eyes seem more intense. Sometimes he sported a bit of a beard. Today it looked as if he’d shaved, which only accentuated the perfect brown line of his jaw. The sharp blade of his nose and his high, knife-edged cheekbones stood as a counterpoint to the impossibly sensual mouth he tried his best to keep forever in its stern, unforgiving line. So no one would notice.
But she already had.
Like everyone in Alaska Force, Jonas was in astonishingly good shape. Rumor was that one part of his deeply classified background was that he’d been a Navy SEAL, which would explain why he was never cold. And worked out on blustery mornings like this in athletic shorts and a T-shirt, seemingly unaffected by the March weather.
Which was unfair, because it was very, very hard for Bethan—who was a woman despite all the many ways she tried to pretend otherwise—to keep from staring at his muscled arms. His impossibly well-defined abs. The whole of him that was a finely tuned, masterfully honed weapon of destruction that was also, regrettably, as beautiful as it had been when she’d met him long ago. When they’d both been different people.
Meanwhile, he looked at her with the same disdain he always did.
Well, a voice in her said. Not always.
“I don’t have a problem,” Jonas said, and he actually sounded . . . stiff. “It’s not unreasonable to prefer that the past stay in the past.”
Bethan did not gape at him, because she had control of herself. Barely. “Could you refresh my recollection as to when, exactly, I ever so much as breathed a word of the past to anyone?”
That dark gaze almost made her shiver. “I don’t like knowing that you could.”
Bethan looked past him, back down the beach toward the gym and the lodge beyond, as if the cavalry might ride in to save her from this. But no one else seemed to be around. Because the fact that she’d stayed to work out by herself was completely unremarkable, and it would never occur to her teammates to save her from it.
She jerked her attention back to Jonas because, as usual, she would have to save herself.
“I joined Alaska Force a year and a half ago,” she said, fighting to keep her temper out of her voice, but not entirely sure she’d managed it. Oh well.
He looked like a carving of himself. “I know when you joined, Bethan.”
She would not react to the way he said her name. She pushed on. “Since then, I’ve watched other people come into Alaska Force. So I can compare and contrast the way that you react to new hires. And I can assure you that if anyone has indicated that you and I have any kind of a past, Jonas, it’s you. Because you don’t treat me like anybody else, and you never have.”
Bethan waited for him to reply. He didn’t. Because he might as well have been one of the cold trees, and she knew all too well that he’d convinced everyone around him that how little he chose to speak was some kind of special ops virtue.
When all it really meant, in her view, was that every time he opened his mouth his words were treated like pronouncements from on high.
“Then again, maybe it’s not the past that’s the issue here,” she said after a moment, and for once, did absolutely nothing to curtail the expression on her face. “Maybe you’re just one more boring, run-of-the-mill sexist jerk who had no problem with me when I was in a subordinate, noncombat position, but can’t cope now that we’re on equal footing. You wouldn’t be the first.”