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CHAPTER ONE

7:30 pm, a spring evening, The Landing Zone Bar & Grill, Santa Barbara, California

It was Saturday night, and the LZ was jumping.

Every vinyl-covered booth was taken. So were the high-backed stools that lined the long, old-fashioned zinc bar. AC/DC was blasting from what looked like a 1940s jukebox but was really a digital miracle that could belt out early Elvis, up-to-the-minute Foo Fighters and everything in between at the touch of a button. The two pool tables way in the back of the long, narrow room were seeing action. The beer and ale were cold, the burgers were hot…

So were the women.

Some were wives and girlfriends, here with their men, because this was, after all, a Saturday night.

Some were what could most charitably be called groupies.

The thing was, the Landing Zone wasn’t just a bar, it was the bar for the guys based at Camp Condor, on the beach just a handful of miles away. Condor was the home base for the military’s Special Tactical Units Division. STUDs for short, and, yeah, the guys in the units took a lot of grief over that name.

Chayton Olivieri, who had commandeered a booth ten minutes ago, raised his bottle of Stone IPA to his lips and took a long, thirsty swallow.

Truth was, they were proud of it.

Becoming a STUD was hard. Hell, hard didn’t come close to describing it. Most of the men in the units had been recruited as SEALs, as had Chay. And if SEAL training was the toughest in the world, STUD training took that level of difficulty and upped it a notch.

On average, of the twenty guys who entered a STUD class, five or six would be lucky to make it through.

The LZ was almost always packed with guys in training, guys who’d just graduated, guys newly returned from the kinds of missions you didn’t talk about, not only because you were sworn to secrecy but because the last thing you wanted to do now that you were home was relive what had gone down in some shithole of a place with a name most civilians couldn’t pronounce.

The bottom line was that if you filled a bar with hard-bodied military operatives who looked like Special Forces recruitment ads, who had a dangerous edge to them even when they were partying, you had a place that drew women like flies to sugar.

And most of the women were tens.

Nines, anyway.

Like the brunette with the endless legs sitting at the bar right across from Chay.

He’d been watching her for a couple of minutes.

She knew he was watching her. He could read the signs. Like the way she crossed those great legs and swung one back and forth the couple of times she’d glanced at him over her shoulder.

Nice.

She was easy on the eyes, especially to a man who’d spent the past six weeks looking at mountains, valleys, men out to kill him, and women wrapped head to toe in voluminous black.

Pretty face, if a little too heavily made up for his tastes, but his tastes weren’t written in stone. Long straight hair that hung to her ass. She was wearing something red and almost sheer on top—he’d already seen the thrust of her nipples against it—and what he figured was supposed to be a skirt below the sheer red thing.

Actually, below her belly button.

The skirt ended at the tops of her thighs. After that came those long legs. And finally a pair of spike heels.

Chay drank some more ale.

All in all, she looked fine.

She’d look even better once he got her out of that top and that skirt, but he’d tell her to keep the stilettos. And the thong. Experience told him she was sure to be wearing one. It would be lace. Or silk. Black. Or red.

He grinned to himself.

When it came to thongs, he wasn’t a choosy kind of guy.