His teammates were uneasy. He could see it in their eyes when they thought he wasn’t looking. Even Skull was quiet, his goading gone. Boomer hovered, and Ice eyed him like he wanted to put a boot in his ass and kick it around the compound to knock some sense into him.
By midweek, the restraint had become a physical thing. He could barely breathe around her without his pulse kicking, his body reacting before his mind could shut it down. Desire, frustration, fear, all braided tight enough to punish. He had a perpetual hard on.
So he ran. He hauled hay when it was delivered to the barn, cleaned tack, washed and groomed Talon until he gleamed. Anything to keep his hands busy and off her.
He punished himself in the gym long after dark, chasing exhaustion like it might outrun thought. When that wasn’t enough, he added weight. When weight failed, he added time. When time failed, he pushed until his muscles trembled and his vision tunneled.
If the mission was to keep his mind off her, his hands off her, he was failing…miserably.
Blair had three screens up, satellite overlays layered with route timing and terrain elevation. The low hum of the servers was a familiar, steady presence, a counterpoint to the frantic tap-tap-tap of her stylus as she adjusted a choke point. The air in the command center was cool and sterile, smelling of ozone and stale coffee. She was mid-annotation, a red line slashing through a proposed exfil route?—
Ping. An email notification bloomed on her side monitor, a garish splash of color in the sea of tactical data. She ignored it. Another ping. Then another, a rapid, insistent triad that broke her concentration. She glanced over, irritation already coiling in her gut, and froze.
The subject line alone made her jaw tighten, the muscles in her neck screaming.
RE: My God, look at this man. It wasn’t sent to her. It wasn’t meant for her. But it had been forwarded. Again. And again. Her thumb, hovering over the stylus, felt numb. She opened it. Photos loaded, pixelating for a second before snapping into brutal clarity.
Breakneck. In the gym. Sweat-slicked skin. Nothing on his body except a pair of black compression shorts. Muscles standing out in sharp relief, body folded into a position that had no business being that controlled on a man that big. Someone had zoomed in. Someone had cropped. It wasn’t his body that she focused on…no, it was his face. He looked exhausted, edgy, consumed, and haunted. Her fingers went cold, a phantom chill creeping up her arms despite the climate-controlled room.
How is he even built like this?
I’d climb him like a tree.
Pretty sure that squat is illegal. I think he needs to be cuffed and interrogated with my mouth and tongue.
He's not just carrying gear, he's carrying the entire weight of my fantasies.
I bet he fucks like he fights: dirty, hard, and until you can't stand.
The misuse of access was the violation, and really what should have concerned her the most. But the casual objectification of it hit her hardest, a physical blow to the sternum. They weren’t admiring a body. They were circulating a man. And worse?—
They had no idea what they were actually looking at. They saw a specimen. She saw a man who saved her life several times over, who was now being reduced to a piece of meat in their inbox.
She was aware that she had been affected by him in many ways, and some of them had to do with his body. No red-blooded woman could look at him and not hunger for those big arms, that angelic face, and the gray storm behind those eyes.
Blair pushed back from the table so fast her chair scraped, the sound shockingly loud in the quiet hum of the room.
The corridor’s fluorescent lights buzzed overhead, casting a sterile, unforgiving glare. Two junior analysts were near the water cooler, phones half-hidden, faces flushing a deep, guilty crimson when they saw her coming. Their whispers died on their lips.
24
The Tide & Bean, Downtown Annapolis, Maryland
The Tide & Bean smelled like burned espresso and cinnamon the morning before graduation, the windows fogged from the damp spring air. It was louder than usual, midshipmen stacked two deep at the counter, voices overlapping, laughter too bright. Life insisting on itself.
Maribel looked up and froze.
Than had seen her at the funeral and the gallery memorial, but he hadn’t had a chance to talk to her. Her eyes went to Fly first, then him, and finally to Bridge, and something in her face collapsed. She came out from behind the counter.
“Oh no,” she breathed. “Oh, no…come here.”
She wrapped them both up, arms strong and sure, pulling them in like she could hold the pieces together by force of will. Fly stiffened for half a second, then gave in. Than didn’t move at all. He just let her.
“The brain trust,” she said brokenly, pressing her cheek against Than’s shoulder. “It will always endure.”
Than swallowed. Fly’s hand came up, rested briefly at Maribel’s back, grounding them both.
She cupped Bridge’s face, her hand tightening with a nod. Bridge reached up and covered it, her expression soft with shared grief.
