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Story: Special Ops Seduction

But there were bigger scars.

“Dominic Carter isn’t just any random guy,” she told him, tense and sure. “He’s the individual who blew up our convoy, killed the rest of our squad, and tried to kill you and me, personally. I never saw his face, but I saw him move. Just like tonight. It’shim, Jonas.”

Sixteen

Something thudded through Jonas like a grenade, with no hope of avoiding the coming blast. And when it followed, he was surprised he’d stayed on his feet.

“You killed him,” he told Bethan shortly, in case she might have forgotten the long night he’d been only half-conscious for.

“I shot him,” she countered. “But I obviously didn’t kill him. Because he’s here.”

Jonas stared down at her, too many fires inside him and no possible way of controlling them. Not if their past was coming back at them like this. Not if this had suddenly gotten a whole lot more personal.

“The other day I was driving back from a lunch with Ellen,” she was saying fiercely, as if maybe she needed to convince both of them. “I saw some guy running in the vineyards, and I was suddenly fighting off a flashback. The first I’ve had in a long time.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

She blinked. “It didn’t occur to me to tell you. I’m not in the habit of showing my weaknesses to anyone. Are you?”

Jonas acknowledged that with a faint nod of his head.

“You’ve looked at a million pictures of this guy with no triggers.”

Bethan swallowed, hard. “I never saw his face that night. He was backlit, though I swear he was grinning. Ear to freaking ear. No one else had gotten out of the vehicle fire. But then he came around the side of the vehicle and saw you lying there, and I didn’t even think. I fired. Then I dragged you to a more defensible position. But I never saw what happened to his body.”

The following morning air support had arrived and taken them to Germany. Jonas had refused to see Bethan and had been sent to rehabilitate himself. Bethan had been sent stateside, no doubt to spend some time debriefing the powers that be about the losses incurred.

He’d spent a lot of time and energy since then trying not to remember the parts of that mission hecouldremember.

Jonas rubbed a hand over his jaw, realizing while he was doing it that the fact he was making strange little gestures meant he was more shaken up than he wanted to admit. Worse, he was sure Bethan knew it, too. “It’s unlikely, isn’t it? You don’t miss.”

“I didn’t say I missed,” she retorted. “I said he’s alive. And here at my sister’s wedding, deliberately introducing himself to both of us. Almost like a test to see if we recognize him.”

He tried to tamp down the raging fire inside him. “You know as well as I do that PTSD can warp things. Any and all things.”

“I don’t have PTSD,” she snapped at him, and then modified her expression into something more smiley and appropriate when the people nearest them glanced in their direction. Her hands were still on his, and he should stopthat, too. But it was like he was in quicksand and, for once, had no idea what to do. “And I don’t regret shooting the man who tried to kill us. What I regret is that he’s alive and well and clearly knows who we are.”

Everything in Jonas rejected this scenario. Because it wasn’t possible. Because it put Bethan at personal risk, and something in him... couldn’t handle that.

Reallycouldn’t handle it.

Day-to-day risk was one thing. They were highly trained. Risk was part of their job. And the job was often intense, but it was never personal. Yet if this was the guy she’d shot in that desert and he had as much of a hard-on for Bethan as he’d seemed to throughout her speech, this was an entirely different level of risk.

An unacceptable level.

Bethan moved closer, keeping their hands tucked there between them. “Do you trust me?”

She asked the question softly, almost carelessly, but he was looking at her. And he could see far too much in those eyes of hers.

None of this was safe. None of it was smart.

He wanted to chalk this up to the same nightmares that lived in all of them, and too often snuck their way out into the light of day, no matter how well-adjusted they might have been otherwise. It was one of the burdens they carried.Chose to carry, he liked to tell himself.

Jonas would have told anyone else to talk to a therapist first. Or, barring that—because he, personally, would rather punch himself in the face than talk about his thoughts and feelings for any reason—to do a few seriously killer workouts to pump up the endorphins and see things a little more clearly.

But this was Bethan.

“With my life,” he said gruffly.