Page 11 of I Dream of Danger (Ghost Ops #2)

“Absolutely not.” Christ no. His last op, a three-week training cycle in the Everglades, had been wall-to-wall gummy MREs, where the chicken couldn’t be distinguished from the pork or the beef.

He’d shat hard little rubbery pellets for the duration.

He’d only been back two days when he’d…what?

Heard her call? Dreamed of her? Whatever, he’d had an irresistible urge to check Lawrence online, and had immediately found the judge’s obituary.

“When they feed us hot meals, it’s pretty basic.

Steak and chicken and pork and potatoes. And watery salad no one eats.”

“Speaking of chicken…” Elle poked her pretty nose in another container and breathed in deeply. “Hmmm. Roast rosemary chicken.” She looked up at him. “White meat or dark?”

Your meat . The words were right there on his lips, as a vision blossomed in his head of him eating her . Head between her legs, lapping and nibbling.

Oh ouch. His hard-on just got harder.

Elle stopped, fork in the air, obviously tuned into the sudden change of atmosphere. Nick could swear that the molecules had suddenly become charged.

Dial it down, dickhead.

Elle was probably having her first decent meal in weeks, maybe months. She was smiling and there was color in her face. He was not going to ruin that for her because he had a sudden surge of hormones. That were shaking his body.

Because, fuck, that’s what was happening.

If any of his Ranger teammates realized that he shook when he was next to this girl—now a woman—they’d shit their pants, because a good part of Ranger shooting training was using live bullets, sometimes at very close range.

Nick was known as one of the coolest shooters, almost mechanical in his ability to put the bullet where he wanted it to go, and the way you did that was to be in control of your body.

Not sitting at a table, afraid to get up because you’d hobble with the blue steeler in your pants. Not putting down your fork because your hand was shaking so much it fucking clattered against the plate. Not being unable to look away from a woman’s face.

Any of his teammates seeing him now would report him to the XO.

“Nick, aren’t you eating?” she asked. She’d demolished the carbonara and set the bowl aside, and was now demolishing an entire chicken breast with jacket potato.

A salad of cherry tomatoes and feta cheese was in a crystal bowl next to her.

She’d stopped eating to look at him quizzically. “It’s really good stuff.”

He pasted a smile on his face, kicking himself for being an asshole. Way to go, douchebag, keeping Elle from her food because you can’t keep it in your pants.

“Great stuff,” he agreed, pointing with his fork at her. “Now eat.”

“Yessir,” she said, rolling her eyes, digging in.

Damn straight.

God, it was good to see her, rosy and smiling, so different from the ice-white young woman at the cemetery who’d looked as if a truck had run over her. And, well, it was really good to see her, period.

Had he been planning on staying away forever?

As the years rolled by, maybe his subconscious had been starting to think of coming back.

Briefly. Just a day. He’d stayed away out of respect for the Judge, but she was nearly twenty.

It’s just that he’d been so goddamned busy.

To his surprise, he’d taken to soldiering as if born to it.

He’d been singled out for Ranger training almost right from the start, and had barely been folded into the unit when he’d been called in to ask if he wanted to apply to Delta.

Fucking A, he wanted to try out for Delta. The shooters. Of all the special forces, Deltas were shooters first and foremost, and that was Nick. To his surprise, he’d also had a knack for languages, and he’d been seconded to cross-train with France’s GIGN and Germany’s GSG-9.

He’d been kept busy 34 hours a day, totally focused on the job.

No room for romance with other women, either.

Sex, yeah. There were always woman in the bars around the bases, but he didn’t have time for anything other than sex.

Two fucks in a row was the norm. Three on occasion.

Four was a borderline relationship, and that was off the cards.

It turned out he didn’t have to deal with the Judge after all, and for that he was ashamed of himself. Men didn’t wimp out. He’d had no idea the Judge had been so sick.

Coming home. When he ran through the scenarios in his head, there’d been various outcomes.

The Judge kicking him out on his ass, just like last time, only without the money.

The Judge welcoming him back because, after all, Elle was an adult.

The Judge inviting him in for coffee, letting him know Elle was studying nuclear physics at Harvard or MIT and didn’t have time for a low life like him.

The Judge saying someone had snapped Elle up and she was married with a kid.

That one hurt.

The truth was the one thing he hadn’t planned on—Elle still here and the Judge clocking out mentally before he did physically.

“Stop thinking that, Nick. Right now.” Elle’s voice was low, very serious.

Nick’s fork clattered to the plate. What the fuck? “Are you a mind reader?”

Jesus. Maybe all those weird dreams he’d had of her were real. Maybe Elle could fuck with his head.

“You wouldn’t let me think sad thoughts, so this is payback.

And no, I’m not a mind reader. Don’t worry about that.

” She leaned forward on her elbows, tucking a strand of pale hair behind one small ear.

“You don’t have to be a mind reader to know that you were thinking dark thoughts.

Sad thoughts. This house has known nothing but sadness for years now.

Sadness and darkness and despair. Daddy was frightened to death when they diagnosed him with Alzheimer’s, because he knew exactly what was coming, both for him and for me and it took all my energy, every ounce of it, to keep him cheerful for as long as there was a person inside him that could feel cheer.

Daddy left a long time ago. I did my mourning a long time ago.

I’ve had about as much sadness as a person can bear and I don’t want long sad faces around me.

Now—” She slapped the surface of the table and made the water glass slosh over. “Smile, damn it!”

Nick was so startled he did smile. Showing all his teeth, too.

She smiled back at him, pleased with herself. “That’s right, Nick. I knew you could do it.”

Oh God, just look at her, he thought. Just like his nickname for her when she was a child. Pixie. A beautiful little pixie, slightly careworn, perched on the edge of her chair, surrounded by a cloud of blonde hair, pale eyes like shards of summer sky, smiling at him.

Irresistible. And he didn’t have to resist, did he? Because though, by God, she’d had a worse time of it than him these past five years, his life hadn’t been all shits and giggles, either.

He’d chosen the hardest military training possible, probably the hardest on earth.

These past years had been day after day of grueling physical and intellectual training, the only breaks actual field ops, getting shot at, which was marginally better than the rest of it.

Lying in swamps in Indonesia for days, waiting for a shot at the man who’d planted the Indianapolis bomb.

Indonesia had 450 venomous insect species and he’d been bitten by every single one.

The bare, arid plains of Tibet, helping train local fighters for the successful coup and breakaway from China.

Four months spent fifteen-thousand feet up on the Pakistani side of the Himalayas, with only goats and four other Rangers for company, fires forbidden, trying to contain the situation, then scrambling to get out when Pakistan blew up.

No, like his little Pixie, he felt it was smiling time. Pleasure time. God knows they both deserved it.

Sex. They both deserved it. The best sex he’d ever had, and the best sex she’d ever had too, by definition. They should have some more of it.

Right now.

Elle straightened in her chair and watched warily as he moved toward her. His very best stealth stalk, trademark Ranger move. “Nick?”

“Elle.” The word came up out of his guts, from the very core of him. And he had no further words in him right now, none.

“Nick, what are you do—” He lifted her up out of her chair by her elbows and as soon as she was on her feet, he pulled up her top up over her head and tossed it to the ground. “Oh.” The one word barely had any breath behind it because what he was doing and what he was going to do was real clear.

If his face didn’t tell her, his blue steeler did.

It was a really good thing Elle seemed to be okay with this, because though Nick had self-control up the wazoo—he was nothing but self-control—right now, control was a pretty shaky thing.

But she seemed okay with him pulling her pants down, kicking them away, and laying her down on a clean bit of surface of that mile-long table that he cleared with his arm.

More than okay, actually. He’d barely touched her except to strip her and lay her out like a sacrifice in some weird religion, but she was already with him.

The left pale breast quivered with her heartbeat.

She was breathing heavily, already panting, watching him out of half-closed eyes.

Nick stepped between her legs, reaching out to separate them, but she beat him to it, sliding her legs apart as fast as any soldier responding to a shouted command. He didn’t have to shout it, he didn’t even have to whisper it. She knew what he wanted.

With one hand, Nick unzipped himself, happy he was in the habit of going commando. He placed one hand by her side on the table and grabbed his dick with the other.