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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-boostingsmoothie 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 shewould. 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.

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 strengthtraining. 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. Itsuggested 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.