“Look, I know you don’t want to be around Kendra,” Tate said, his mouth tightening under his mustache. “I’m not thrilled at the idea of her tagging along with us either, but John wants her to get some field time on a low-risk mission—sort of a reward for all the hard work she’s been doing.”
Declan swore. “You know that’s crazy, right? There’s no such thing as a low-risk mission, not when every third person in the place we’re going carries a weapon. Is John willing to let her—or one of us—get killed just so he can give her a freakingreward?”
“No one’s going to get killed,” Tate shot back. “And unless you want to quit the DCO in protest, there’s only one option—shut up and soldier on.”
“I was a forest ranger, not a soldier.”
“Yeah? Well, go over there and take a look in your rucksack. I’m pretty sure forest rangers don’t carry the amount of weaponry you have shoved in that bag.”
Tate was right, but Declan still growled in frustration.
His friend sighed. “I know the situation sucks, but it is what it is. You have to get your head right or somebody is going to get hurt. But it won’t be because of Kendra; it’ll be because of you.”
That had pretty much been the end of the conversation. Tate had left Declan there, staring at the cracked asphalt of the runway, wondering how he was going to handle two weeks in the same jungle as Kendra.
But no answer had been forthcoming then, and now, as he sat wedged into a seat that was way too small for him, he still didn’t have one.
Being so close to her shouldn’t bother him. He’d gotten over his crush on her and moved on. As he stole occasional glances at her, he knew that was a crock of shit. He’d tried; he really had. But since deciding four months ago that enough was enough and it was past time he stop pining for a woman who refused to even acknowledge his existence, he’d been miserable as hell.
He bit back a growl. Damn, he was pathetic. But there was something about Kendra that attracted him like a bear to honey. He might have chuckled at the analogy if it wasn’t so damn fitting.
Kendra had already been firmly established with the DCO when he’d shown up seven years ago. Back then, she’d mostly shadowed the training officers and watched—taking notes, making her quiet observations and recommendations directly to the trainers. At the time, Declan had been coming off the disaster that was his relationship with Marissa, so he hadn’t been interested in getting involved with any woman. Plus, he’d been consumed with trying to fit in with his team and learn everything they had to teach him. He had no military training to fall back on, so there’d been a lot to learn. By the time he’d gotten his head above water, he already had it bad for the behavioral scientist.
Unfortunately, he couldn’t string together two sentences whenever he was around her. He wasn’t a Romeo with the ladies by any stretch of the imagination, but he’d never gotten tongue-tied around women—not even his former fiancée. But it wasn’t hard to see why Kendra had that effect on him. She was beautiful and smart, made him smile like no other woman ever had, made the camouflage uniform she was wearing look way sexier than it should, and she smelled delicious as hell.
His nose usually wasn’t that good—mostly because he never used it—except when it came to Kendra. Then it worked just fine. Sometimes he could pick up her scent from the far side of the DCO training complex. Sitting this close to her now, it was the only thing he could smell, and it was overwhelming. He closed his eyes, hoping to block out her scent, but it was useless. Her pheromones surrounded him, holding him prisoner and refusing to let go.
He’d tried to catch Kendra’s eye for years and fallen flat on his face every time—because she was too busy obsessing over that jerk Clayne Buchanan. It had taken Declan a while, but he finally realized he was wasting his time—and his life—waiting for her and had decided to move on.
And it had been working. He’d gotten to the point where he didn’t think about her 24/7, didn’t subconsciously sniff the air to catch her scent the minute he drove onto the DCO complex. He’d even dated a few women he’d thought might have had long-term potential. There might not have been that same animal attraction he felt with Kendra, and he’d have to hide his shifter side, but that wasn’t too high a price to pay to be normal, right?
Before today he thought he’d been well on his way to forgetting about Kendra and getting on with his so-called life. Then John had decided to send her on this mission and everything Declan thought was in the past came right back and smacked him in the face.
For the first time in forever, he wanted to put his fist through a wall. But as he felt his anger rise again, he realized he wasn’t angry at John or Tate or even Kendra. He was mad at himself for being so screwed up that the mere thought of being in the same jungle as the blond-haired, blue-eyed beauty could get him so twisted up in knots.
Damn, he really was pathetic.
Chapter 2
Kendra was ready to admit this field thing hadn’t been one of her brightest ideas. So far, all she’d officially observed was the color green—as in the endless jungle that threatened to grow over anything that stopped moving for more than five minutes—and that this whole thing was stupid—as in stomping through the undergrowth, scouting objectives and choke points, setting up landing sites for helicopters that were never going to be coming, and generally wasting their time.
Of course, maybe she wouldn’t have felt nearly as foolish stumbling around in the jungle if she were carrying a weapon. But Tate had pointed out that her official task for this exercise was to observe—and that didn’t require a weapon. At least he’d given her one of the GPS units and a map, so she could track their movement through the jungle. If not for that, she would have lost her mind already.
It wasn’t long after they’d arrived at the airport outside San Jose that she’d thought maybe the rest of the mission wasn’t going to be as thrilling as the covert flight down. First, she and the guys had been herded directly from the aircraft into the back of a covered cargo truck. Then they’d driven south for the next seven hours, stopping only once to get gas. When she’d wondered out loud if the truck was going to drive them all the way to Panama, Tate told her that Costa Rica didn’t have a military of their own, so having heavily armed Americans close to the cities was bad for public relations.
“The government prefers to keep us out of sight as much as possible,” Tate added.
“I thought we were invited down here,” she’d said.
He shrugged. “Invited is a relative term. They want the U.S. here to help train the police, but they don’t want to be too obvious about it.”
From the reading she’d done on the local politics, Kendra understood that, but it posed an even bigger question. “If they want to keep this as a small operation, why is the DCO sending people?”
Tate let out a short laugh. “They don’t know we’re DCO, remember? To them, we’re Homeland Security down here teaching their law enforcement how to protect the country from terrorist organizations and internal threats.”
“If that’s the case, why isn’t there a real team of experts from Homeland Security down here instead of us?”
“Rumors are that the first DCO team sent down here used the exercise as a cover to get into the country to rescue some congressman’s son from a group of rebels who’d kidnapped him for ransom,” Tate explained. “Since then, I think it was just a case of us getting stuck with the job because Homeland doesn’t want it.”
