Khaki sighted in on the target and squeezed the trigger slowly, punching a hole through the center of the man-shaped silhouette at fifteen yards. Then she adjusted to the target half-hidden behind a fake door a little closer in and popped that one too. More confident now, she picked up speed, transitioning from target to target rapidly and hitting all of them. At least here was one thing she knew how to do well.
When she’d emptied the magazine, she lowered the gun and threw a glance in Xander’s direction to see him scowling.
“Stop screwing around with all the close targets and pick up the pace,” he growled. “Then give me a couple magazines’ worth of rounds with your left hand.”
Her left hand? She’d done that once, about three years ago. Khaki sighed. Maybe it was going to be even harder to impress her squad leader than she’d thought it would be.
Chapter 4
Xander was dog-tired by the time they finished the last PT drill and headed for the showers. For Khaki’s benefit, Gage had them doing PT every day this week. Xander wanted extra PT time whenever he could fit it in, but the last two days of training with Khaki had gone long, and all the guys on his squad were dragging to some degree.
It probably didn’t help that he hadn’t slept worth a crap the last two nights. But every time he closed his eyes to try, all he saw were images of Khaki running in her form-fitting PT gear, growling sweetly as she hit the obstacle course with wild abandon, or sweating as she climbed up the side of a building, then laughing as she rappelled down the other side way too fast for his liking. Since she’d arrived, Khaki had been bouncing around like a pixie with a caffeine addiction. You’d never know that he was doing his best to push her to within an inch of her life during every training session. She just kept smiling and coming back for more.
As he jogged upstairs, he yawned so hard his jaw cracked. He really needed some sleep. But that wasn’t going to happen, at least not anytime soon. Because Khaki had gone beyond invading his dreams. She’d taken possession of most of his waking thoughts as well. She had climbed into his head and he couldn’t get her out, no matter how hard he tried.
And now he braced himself for the hardest part of the day—walking into the locker room and the adjoining open bay shower after Khaki had been in there.
Xander felt his cock harden the moment he reached the top of the stairs and her scent hit him. God, it literally made him weak in the knees. For the life of him, he couldn’t understand why he was the only one being affected by it. It wasn’t like this was just a passing scent lingering around the locker room either. It permeated every corner of the ten-by-twelve space, and it was overwhelming. Every time he breathed it in, his body responded in a way that was impossible to ignore.
The worst part? Knowing that her scent was so much stronger in the locker room because she’d been prancing around up here naked.
He tried to slam the door on that thought, but it didn’t work. The moment he let his mind wander even a few feet in that direction, his imagination took over and he was bombarded with images of Khaki standing in the shower with warm water streaming down that incredible, fit body of hers.
His cock’s reaction to those images was instantaneous and intense.
“Damn it to hell,” he muttered, checking to make sure none of the guys were around to see him fighting his way out of his own shorts.
Thankfully, the rest of the team had finished cleaning up and were already downstairs. As their voices drifted upstairs, he heard Mike’s guys talking about all the extra ops they’d been running the last few days while his squad had been off rotation getting Khaki up to speed. Hopefully they all stayed down there, at least until he turned on the cold water. Otherwise, he was going to look funny walking into the community shower with his dick leading the way.
Khaki’s scent was even stronger in the tile-enclosed space of the showers, and Xander forced himself to breathe through his mouth instead of his nose as he twisted the cold water on full blast and stepped under the icy spray. The frigid temperature helped a bit, allowing him to think about something else—like what kind of training the squad was going to do with Khaki today.
He’d spent a good portion of last night thinking about it. He sure as hell hadn’t spent it sleeping, so why not? His original plan had been to spend the week going over the basics—shooting, climbing, rappelling, and individual tactics. But Khaki was doing well enough in those areas for them to do team stuff now. It was probably a good idea to see what she could handle anyway. Even though Gage had promised that his squad would be on limited duty until Khaki was ready, they couldn’t depend on that. If something too big for Mike’s squad to handle on its own came up, Gage would be forced to put Xander’s squad back to work. Normally, that wouldn’t be a big deal. Xander could usually find a way to get the job done without putting the newbie in a bad position. But he wasn’t sure he’d be able to do that with Khaki. When she went out on a call with them, everything she did would be put under a microscope. He had to make sure she was ready for the spotlight when the time came.
Unfortunately, that meant pushing her harder than he already was. He didn’t like to do it, but he couldn’t see any other way around it.
He turned the water off and reached for his towel. At least his hard-on had gone down.
In the locker room, he put on his uniform, then sat to lace up his boots. A sweet scent immediately engulfed him. He jerked his head up to see if Khaki had come upstairs without him hearing her, but the room was empty. There was only one way to explain why her scent was so concentrated on this part of the bench. She’d sat in this exact same spot. The fact that she might have been naked at the time wasn’t lost on him. His body’s reaction was immediate and obvious.
“Damn it to hell,” he growled.
How the hell was he supposed to go downstairs like this? Worse, how the hell was he going to focus on training Khaki with his cock doing its best impression of a two-by-four all day?
Xander tugged his boot laces tighter, silently reciting baseball stats and hoping it would be enough to distract him. He spent an extra ten minutes upstairs, just to be on the safe side.
When he got downstairs, Mike and his squad had already taken off on an incident. Khaki was telling the other guys about a domestic violence call she’d gone on in Washington State. Her voice drifted off when she saw him.
“What’s on the agenda today, boss?” Becker asked.
“You’ll find out soon enough,” Xander said. “Follow me.”
He led them outside and down to the training structure closest to the admin building, the one they affectionately called the House of Doors. The windowless concrete block building was nothing more than a maze of rooms, hallways, and stairwells, separated by lots and lots of doors—hence the name. The place was a nightmare to maneuver through and search quickly, so they usually used it for hostage-rescue training. But today, Xander had another use for the haphazard collection of rooms—team movement drills.
Xander stopped at the entrance and flipped on the lights inside. When Khaki was ready, they’d do the exercise in complete darkness.
He turned to her, careful not to let himself focus on her big brown eyes and lush lips. He’d already learned how quickly he could become distracted when he did.
“You’ve done well with the individual skills so far, which means it’s time to move to the next level—small team tactics,” he told her.
