“Ground training sounds good,” Jina said fervently. That meant she’d be on the ground, right? She liked being on the ground.

“Step over here with me,” Levi said shortly, turning and walking a good thirty feet away.

Jina hid her astonishment—and trepidation—and trudged in his wake, trying not to show her reluctance. Whatever induced Levi to break his normal behavior with her, meaning mostly ignoring her, had to be fairly important.

He stopped and turned so he was facing the rest of the team, folding his arms across his chest. His impassive dark gaze fastened on her as she approached, each step slower than the last because she really didn’t want to have a one-on-one conversation with him, given how well the first—and only—one had gone. She stopped a good five feet away, crossed her arms in the same posture he’d taken, and waited. On the theory that she didn’t want to look him in the eye, she stared instead at his nose; it was close enough to his eyes that maybe he wouldn’t notice she wasn’t exactly meeting his gaze.

Her theory didn’t work. She could feel him looking at her, so intensely it was almost like a touch that sent waves of heat washing over her skin. She shifted uneasily, wondering what the odds were that he’d give up and tell her what he wanted. Those odds had to be long, because he simply waited, silently, until she couldn’t stand it any longer and made eye contact. Immediately all her nerve endings jolted, as if she’d grabbed a live wire. His dark gaze bored into her, an invisible force field battering at her, scouring her from the inside out, frying her blood in her veins.

Shit. Silently she acknowledged that she let him get to her way too much, but she didn’t know what she could do about it. He was the team leader, for now the ruler of her universe. She wanted to poke at him until she broke through that iron control of his, see what she could stir up, and dear God she had to be absolutely crazy to even think of such a thing.

“What?” she asked, unable to keep the truculence from her tone. Damn it. She really needed to work on her attitude, she thought, annoyed at herself. Her brothers had always said her mouth would get her in big trouble one day, and she’d spent years proving them right.

His eyes regarded her as remotely as if she weren’t a sentient, carbon-based life-form. The twitch at one corner of his mouth told her she was about an inch from overstepping her bounds; she sucked in a deep breath and braced herself for whatever he was about to unload on her, but a small, deeply buried part of her quivered with excitement that finally, finally, she was getting a reaction from him.

“You just don’t have any stopping sense, do you?” he finally observed.

“Sorry,” she muttered. “And, no.” Like he had to ask. She’d spent the past several months demonstrating to all of them that she and stopping sense had nothing more than a nodding acquaintance.

“One of these days you’re going to push too hard, little girl, and then you’ll be on the road of no return,” he said in an eerie echo of her brothers’ predictions.

Little girl? She swallowed her ire at the dismissive phrase, because she’d pushed and she knew it. Levi was the boss, and they didn’t have to be in the military for his orders to count. The team leaders were the badasses, and what they said went, at least as far as each leader’s own team. Axel MacNamara might run the entire agency on the administration side, but he listened to his team leaders and got them everything they needed. Without them, the GO-Teams were nothing.

Levi waited, giving her a chance to spout off again. Jina pressed her lips together. She could feel words pushing against the back of her throat, but she bore down, called on her seldom-used smart-ass control and kept them there.

After giving her time to verbally hang herself, he gave a brief nod indicating satisfaction that he’d sufficiently slapped her down—for now—and moved on to business. “Here’s what’s going to happen, and why. Your group is the first bunch of trainees who’ve had no prior jump experience, which means we aren’t set up to do training the way you’d get it if you’d been in the military. We’ve had a short tower built, and a swing-landing trainer in a big Quonset hut, but a big tower would call too much attention to us, so your first jump will be an actual jump. Has to be.”

An actual jump. Her stomach didn’t wait, it jumped right then, up into her throat. If she’d needed to answer, tough, because she couldn’t have managed to say a word. And what the heck was a swing-landing trainer? She didn’t want to swing while she was landed. For that matter, “landing” meant she was in the air heading down, and she didn’t want to do that, either.

“Boom is a certified jump instructor,” Levi continued. “He’s going to be in charge of your training, and it’s going to be fast. In the military, jump school takes three weeks. We’re going to have you jumping in less than a week, but it’s individual training instead of instructors handling a whole group, so it’ll work out to about the same. But don’t fucking waste our time—got it? If you can’t do it, walk out now.”

That was what he wanted. She could see it in his eyes, hear it in the gravel of his voice, see it in his body language. He wanted her gone.

Okay, damn it, she hadn’t wanted to be here any more than he’d wanted her here, but she’d committed her time, a lot of energy, and a buttload of pain, to doing this. She’d become provisional friends with most of the guys—provisional because they joked around with her, teased her, sometimes deliberately making themselves targets of her ire because they liked winding her up, but they were all still aware that she hadn’t made the final cut yet. She didn’t want to be provisional, she wanted to do this. She wanted to meet their friends and families, she wanted to be invited to their cookouts, feel as if she belonged.

She straightened her shoulders and squared up with him. Even standing as tall as she could, he was so damn big her head barely reached shoulder level on him, but she refused to show that she was intimidated—just a little—by him. “I want to do it.” Lie. “I don’t like giving up.” Truth. “I’ll do my best.” Maybe. No, she’d try her damnedest, because she didn’t know any other way, so change that last one to truth. Two out of three wasn’t bad.

The corner of his mouth did that twitching thing again. She did a quick mental check to make sure she hadn’t subconsciously crossed her fingers and he’d noticed, but no, her fingers were doing what they were supposed to do, clutching her own biceps to mimic his position. Maybe that was what was annoying him, that she was mimicking him. If so . . . tough.

Typical Levi, he instantly went back to being all about the work. “Today you’ll learn about the different types of parachutes, how and why they’re different, and you’ll get into harness. It’s possible to harness yourself, but mostly buddies or instructors help because it’s awkward. When you’re getting in the harness, Boom will be passing straps between your legs for you to buckle in place. It’s not a big deal and he won’t be copping a feel, so don’t squeal and do something silly.”

“I don’t do silly,” she growled, which might not be completely true in all situations but in this one she was serious. There were a couple of the guys who might let their hands go places where they shouldn’t, but Boom wasn’t one of them. She trusted him, and he wouldn’t do anything to make her uncomfortable.

“Just letting you know what will happen. After you get through ground training, then you’ll do tower training, jumping off a thirty-four-foot tower into different ground conditions like sand or pebbles, learning how to land, how to roll.”

“Won’t jumping from that high break my legs?” Or possibly kill her. She might not live long enough to die in a failed parachute jump. She’d read once that most lethal falls were from something like fifteen feet.

“You’ll be harnessed to a safety line. If we didn’t know what we’re doing,” he said impatiently, “none of us would survive training.”

She had to give him that, so she nodded.

“Then you’ll do the swing landing, learning how to handle the parachute swinging from side to side, prepare for the unexpected. In three days, you’re jumping.”

Three days. Jumping. Her. Out of a plane.

Oh God.

Her lips felt numb, so she didn’t try to talk, just gave another brief nod that she hoped looked curt, instead of simply being as much as she could move because she was mostly frozen stiff.

“Your first jump will be tandem,” Levi continued. “Normally I’d hook a first-timer to a static line and kick his ass out, but he’d have already done tower jumping. Like I said, you aren’t military and that’s getting you a couple of breaks here.”

Lucky me. Your kindness is astounding, she thought sarcastically, but still kept her mouth shut. Now was not the time to get him pissed off, not when he could still hook her to a static line, whatever that was, and kick her ass out of the plane. A tandem jump. Maybe she could handle that. The idea still made her stomach twist, but at least if she died she wouldn’t be alone. Yeah, she could find some comfort in that.

“We’ll need the other guys to pull the ropes on the swing-landing trainer, but until then I’m pulling them off and having them do different stuff. They don’t need to be standing around watching you; they treat you like a spectator sport, anyway, and that shit needs to stop.”

Spectator sport. Jina stiffened. She’d been cold, but now a flash of outrage sparked through her veins. She also found her tongue. “Spectator sport?” she asked carefully. She’d pushed herself so hard she’d been on the verge of collapse more days than not, and they thought of her as entertainment?

“Don’t get your ass on your shoulders,” he advised shortly. “There’s no benefit, and if you blow up at them, you’ll lose their support. Just suck it up, and keep going.”

That was what she’d been doing, and she hadn’t found any fun in it. But he was right; there was no benefit to getting angry. On the final analysis, she’d rather they enjoyed having her around than be actively looking for ways to get rid of her, because that could get ugly, fast.

“Let’s get started,” she said, trying to sound positive, and headed back to the other guys.

Levi watched her walk away from him and allowed himself a brief moment of purely male enjoyment at the view. He missed the softer curves she’d had at the beginning of her training, but there was nothing wrong with the rounded muscles of her ass now. She’d worked hard to get those muscles, so damn straight he was going to admire them. He just had to make sure that she didn’t catch him at it, and that his expression wasn’t as horny as he felt.

He’d hoped that with time he’d get accustomed to having her around, that maybe he’d find something about her that killed or at least muted the attraction he felt. Hadn’t happened. If anything, she appealed to him more every day. How could she not? She had bone-deep grit and determination, way more than he wanted her to have. None of them, from the top down, had thought she’d make it this far, but she’d had the highest score on Mac’s spatial games and they couldn’t exclude her just because she was a woman. He’d waited not so patiently for the day she washed out; no one could say she hadn’t tried, because she’d kept at each phase or exercise way past what they’d thought she could do, and Mac would have put her back in her old job. That was the best-case scenario.

If she’d washed out, then he could have seen about having some personal time with her, find out if she kissed with the same sass and pepper she threw at them every time she opened her mouth, find out if she was half as aware of him as he was of her. He thought she was; no, he was sure she was. Levi was neither naive nor inexperienced, and he knew when a woman was attracted to him. She tried to hide it, but the color in her cheeks deepened whenever he was near. She tried like hell not to look at him, not to speak directly to him, and he knew why: she didn’t want to feed the attraction any more than he did. She wanted to control it, and above all she didn’t want any of the others to know.

They’d both succeeded in keeping the others in the dark, but damn it, with everything else, he felt as if they were sliding down a slope with no brakes, no way to keep them from a hard fall. Just being near her made him feel as if the air between them was arcing with hot electricity; she felt it, too, and betrayed herself by getting as restless as if she had ants in her pants. She fidgeted, she twitched, she shifted back and forth, she’d start nervously feeling her long ponytail. Maybe she hadn’t admitted to herself yet how aware she was of him, but he knew. He was damn good at reading people; he had to be.

This damn jump instruction would likely be the death of him. Boom could handle everything on the ground, but he wasn’t a certified tandem instructor, and Levi was. A tandem jump wasn’t anything to leave to someone inexperienced, no matter how many solo jumps that person had made. Strict professionalism was needed in a tandem jump, because hell, two people were harnessed together in spoon fashion. Given their height difference, she might need to sit on his lap to get her harnessed in the correct position, and the prospect made him feel grim while at the same time he couldn’t help anticipating it. He’d try getting her positioned without doing that, but safety won out over discomfort. She had to be in the right position. If the harness was too long and she was hanging lower instead of snugly against his chest, both steering the parachute and landing were more difficult. She was already so scared about trying, she needed a jump that went as smoothly as possible.

If he was the double-crossing kind, he could scare the shit out of her and force her to quit, clearing the way for them to get up close and personal. That was dirty pool, though. He wouldn’t necessarily go out of his way to help her, but neither would he sabotage her. He’d be pissed as hell if someone did him that way, so he wasn’t going to do it to her. Fail or succeed, she’d do it on her own.

If she succeeded—and she was damn close to finishing training ahead of everyone else—he’d have to tough it out and ignore how attracted he was to her. If she failed, then hallelujah, he was unleashed. Until then he was between a rock and a hard place. The rock was his own ironclad rule that placed her off-limits, and the hard place was in his pants.

He rejoined the group and gave the guys their assignments. Jelly, predictably, groaned. “Ah, Ace, we wanted to watch her.”

Levi saw her give them a quick, sharp glance and knew she hadn’t liked being regarded as their entertainment. He couldn’t help kind of agreeing with the guys, because, damn, there was no telling what might come out of her mouth. Still, no one wanted to be the comic relief.

“We have other things to do,” he replied. “Boom will let us know when he needs our help.”

Boom scowled at them. “Get outta here. Babe and I won’t need any of you until the tower training starts.”

Jina gave the parachutes her undivided attention, because her life was going to depend on these nylon things. Boom had printed matter for her to refer back to, let her take notes, paused occasionally to look things up on his phone for her to watch. The harness was impressive, and far more complicated than she’d expected—not that she’d ever expected anything about parachuting, because she’d never thought she’d be required to do it. She studied the webbing and straps and buckles and rings; at first everything looked like a hopeless tangle, until Boom showed her how to step into it.

“Don’t expect a harness to be comfortable,” he said, “though they’re better now than they used to be. The leg straps are a bitch. Women don’t have the problems there that men do, but when the canopy opens and jerks you back, you feel it. After you’re under canopy, you can adjust the straps across your boobs some, make them more comfortable.”

She didn’t react to the boobs comment, because it hadn’t been made salaciously; he’d been giving her information, nothing more. Besides, her boobs were barely there, so she didn’t expect she’d need much strap adjusting.

But the harness itself . . . damn. Jina saw now what Levi had meant about needing a buddy to get it strapped on. Doing it alone was possible, but she was glad she didn’t have to figure it out by herself.

A question gnawed at her and finally, after looking around to make certain no one was within earshot, she said, “Boom, give me a straight answer on something.”

He was bent over straightening the harness, preparing to guide her again through the process of putting it on. “Maybe,” he said. “I don’t commit to anything without knowing what it is.”

“Fair enough. Do the guys make fun of me when I’m not around?”

He straightened abruptly, giving her a startled look. “Make fun of you? Hell no! What made you think that?”

“Something Levi said.” She quickly amended, “Ace,” because that’s what everyone else called him—except she couldn’t make the nickname stick in her head. She didn’t have that trouble with any of the others; some of them, she didn’t even know their real names. “That they looked at me as their comic relief.”

To her dismay, Boom laughed. “Not in what you do, because you try so hard sometimes you put them to shame. It’s what you say the whole time you’re doing it, cussing under your breath like you think we can’t hear it, yelling that we’re insane morons, little things like that.”

“Oh.” She did tend to mutter to herself, and after that first horrendous day, she might have gotten in the habit of telling them what she thought of them and the ordeals they put her through, but what was the point in saying they were syphilitic sadists if they thought it was funny? “I thought maybe y’all didn’t like me.”

He put his ham-sized hands on his hips and scowled at her. “What makes you say a stupid-ass thing like that?”

Jina sighed. She was beginning to feel like a moron herself. She never should have brought up the subject, because acting needy wasn’t cool. “I don’t get invited to the cookouts,” she mumbled. God, how lame! She might as well be in middle school again.

Boom’s mouth fell open, and he looked thoroughly befuddled.

“The cookouts?”

“Yeah. When y’all hang out together.”

Funny; as she watched, his dark skin took on a sheen as he began to sweat. He rubbed his jaw. He looked left, then right, as if some elusive answer lurked off to the side. “Uh,” he said.

Yeah. Uh.

She sighed. “Never mind. I know I’m not a real part of the team, I’m a tech FNG you’ve been saddled with.”

Boom was beginning to get the panicked, slightly crazed look a lot of men got when confronted with things like female feelings and etiquette. “The wives do it,” he finally blurted.

“You’re blaming it on the wives? The same wives who—I’d like to point out—I’ve never met?” It was probably mean of her, but she was beginning to have fun. Boom looked so totally helpless and at sea, and it was kind of funny because after Levi, he was the one the others on the team looked to for guidance, because he was the oldest and most experienced.

“You haven’t?”

She snorted. “Nice try. You know I haven’t. I’m fairly sure you’d have noticed if I’d been sitting at your dinner table.”

More jaw rubbing. He shifted his feet. “Uh,” he said again. Then he rallied. “The wives plan the barbecues. If any of the single guys are dating anyone regularly, they’re welcome to bring their girlfriends, but most of them don’t unless it’s starting to feel serious. I, uh, I guess we didn’t introduce you, did we?”

“Not that I remember.”

“Hmm. Okay. My wife’s name is Terisa, Snake’s is Ailani. She’s Hawaiian. She does some catering on the side, so when she cooks, we like to be there, because she’s damn good. Terisa’s a nurse. That means she orders a mean pizza.”

“I’m going to tell,” Jina blurted, because for sure he’d get in trouble if his wife knew he’d said that. She relished having something to hold over any of the guys, even the nice ones. Well, they were all nice, except for Voodoo. And Levi.

He glared at her. “You better not. No way in hell am I arranging for you to come hang out with the team if you’re gonna start tattling.”

“Are you? Arranging, I mean.”

“I guess. I’ll tell Terisa you’ve been left out. She’ll get mad at all of us, then she’ll call Ailani, then they’ll get something planned.”

Jina had a second thought. “How about I throw together a taco bar or something like that at my place?”

If she’d taken the time to have a third thought, she’d have kept her mouth shut, because Boom jumped on that like a duck on a june bug. Evidently he’d thought twice about informing his hardworking wife she needed to put together a cookout. A split second after, she remembered how small her place was. If all the guys brought dates, if Boom and Snake both brought their kids, she’d have about twenty people crammed into her little condo. She didn’t even have enough chairs for twenty people to sit down. Oh, what the hell; she could buy some cushions and throw them on the floor. The kids, at least, wouldn’t mind, and she’d make sure she was one of the floor sitters herself.

She forced herself to concentrate on the rest of the parachute lessons, but damn, if anything could distract her from her terror at the idea of jumping out of a plane, throwing a kind-of impromptu party for the guys—and two wives, an unknown number of girlfriends, as well as some little kids—did the job.

Then, the next day, the weather gods smiled on her. Rain didn’t stop them from training, it just made the training more physically miserable. Oddly enough, it gave her the courage to take that first jump off the tower, because she figured the ground was muddy enough to give her some cushion. Looking up, the tower didn’t seem that high; looking down was a whole different perspective. Even in harness, knowing she was hooked to safety ropes, her stomach was knotted up. But this wasn’t much different from zip lining, and she’d done that a bunch of times. Well, the first part, the stepping off into thin air and trusting your harness, that was like zip lining; the landing and learning how to hit and roll was something new. Twice she face-planted in the mud, much to the guys’ amusement; even Voodoo laughed out loud. “So glad I can make y’all happy,” she snarled as she picked herself up the second time.

“We’ve all done exactly the same thing,” Jelly said cheerfully. “You’re doing good.”

The rain was still coming down when she went to the swing-landing training, but at least for that she was under a roof. The concept behind swing landing was that she was pulled from side to side, mimicking wind, and she had to learn how to guide a parachute under those conditions. Zip lining, zip lining, she chanted to herself as they ran her through the exercise again and again. She was safe; her harness was connected to ropes, she wasn’t going to fall; she might land wrong and break a bone, but that was true of zip lining, too, so she handled the swing-landing training just fine.

That left only actually jumping. Out of a plane. From a couple of miles up. Oh shit.

But, thank God, the rain didn’t let up, and the weather system that produced the rain added some healthy wind gusts to the mix. Levi made the call to postpone the last phase of jump training, and Jina lurched from one panic-inducing scenario to another: the taco bar at her place. The food, and the lack of space, were the least of her problems.

A date. She needed a date. She was a woman, she knew the wives would be more friendly to her if she had a man of her own on the scene, so they’d know she wasn’t poaching on husbands. And that wasn’t all; she needed some protection so Levi—

She shut that thought down before it could form. Some paths weren’t meant to be traveled, and some ideas were better left alone. Discretion wasn’t her strongest point, but her survival instinct was nice and healthy.

Date, date . . . who to ask? She hadn’t had a date since—damn, she didn’t remember, but definitely not since she’d started training to join Levi’s team. She and Donnelly had never managed—Donnelly. Of course. How obvious could it be?

Her own guys had so effectively separated her from the herd that she seldom saw any of her fellow trainees these days, outside the computer-training sessions with the drones. For all she knew, Donnelly had landed in a relationship since the last time they’d tried to get together for a movie. As soon as she was headed home, she pulled up his cell number in her contacts list.

“Hey, Babe, what’s up?”

Jina curled her lip at her heartily disliked nickname, but got straight to business. “Hey. Listen, are you seeing anyone now?”

“Not really. Who has the time?”

Amen to that. “Good. If I throw together a taco bar this weekend”—oh shit, the time had slipped away and the weekend was on top of her now—“tomorrow, actually, for my guys and their wives and girlfriends so we can get to know each other, would you be available as my date?”

“Sure. That’s assuming neither of us breaks something between now and then.”

“Always. Okay, that’s set.” She told him the time, gave him the address.

“Got it. By the way, congrats.”

“Yeah? For what?” She couldn’t think of anything she’d done that warranted congratulations.

“Word is you’re starting jump training.”

Just like that, the bottom dropped out of her stomach again. Why would he congratulate her on her impending death? “Oh. That. Yeah, kind of.” Kind of, in that she’d completed two-thirds of it and the only thing left was actually jumping.

“I heard the teams don’t jump in very often.”

Lord, please, let that be true. “I hope not.”

“It’s the last phase of training, right? After that, you’ll be mission active.”

Jina’s eyes widened. “Really?” Mission active. No one had told her that. Maybe they thought she knew, maybe it was common knowledge among the other trainees. Same deal as before, her contact with them was limited, and when they were together, they were all so intensely focused on what they were doing then that there hadn’t been much conversation. Or maybe Levi hadn’t told her because he hoped if she didn’t know she wouldn’t have the motivation to try harder. She couldn’t stop herself from circling back to the truth that no matter how hard she tried or what she accomplished, he still didn’t now, and never would, want her on his team. The knowledge was acid in her veins.

She couldn’t let herself dwell on it, she had to get in the right mind-set, focus on the right outcome. The jump training was do or die. This was it, the last hurdle. No pressure, right?

“I’m not looking forward to it,” Donnelly continued, “but at least I have a couple more weeks before I reach that stage. You’re ahead of the rest of us.”

“I am?”

“Yeah, smart-ass,” he said, and she could hear the smile in his voice. “You’re damn good with computer games and you know it.”

“But so are you, and all of the others, otherwise we wouldn’t have been targeted. Uh—picked.”

He laughed. “I hear you. I signed on for a nice inside, sitting-down job, and instead I got this. But I’m never bored.”

Who had time to be bored? “That’s for sure. Listen, thanks for bailing me out.” She started to say bye and end the call, but a detail popped into her head. “Wait. What’s your first name?” She’d have to know in order to make introductions; how would it look if she was barely acquainted with her own date?

He snorted. “Now I know for certain why we never managed a date.”

She supposed that was true enough. If she’d been truly interested in him, she’d have made time somehow—and she’d have found out his first name.

“It’s Brian,” he said.

“Bye, Brian.”

Throwing together even an informal group thing took a lot of planning. Even with the jump hanging over her head like a sword, she’d made lists: a grocery list, a list of who she was inviting, a list of cleaning chores that needed to be done. She needed extra seating, some music, maybe stream a movie, and something to keep the kids occupied. She put all her lists on a clipboard and carried it around with her, putting check marks beside each item as she took care of it, or each name as she asked each team member.

They all said yes, even Voodoo, which surprised the hell out of her. He barely glanced at her as he muttered a brief, “Sure,” but it wasn’t as if she wanted to have a conversation with him, so she was okay with that. She checked off his name.

“Are you bringing a date?”

“Probably not.”

Big surprise there. She wondered how hard up a woman would have to be to go out with someone that surly. Still, she wasn’t going to play favorites and not invite him. He was part of the team.

She left Levi for last. She hated being a coward about it, but she had to gear herself up for any encounter with him. He was too everything that made her uncomfortable: too grim, too intense, too big, too . . . just too. And he made her feel insignificant, nervous, jumpy, insecure—all the things she wasn’t. No, she had to be honest with herself: he didn’t make her feel that way, it was something in herself that was susceptible to whatever it was about him. Her weakness, her problem.

Finally she ran out of time and couldn’t put it off any longer; everything was set up, the other guys were all coming, so he’d likely already heard about it and might be wondering why she hadn’t invited him, kind of the way she felt about not being included on their social things. Uh-huh, right; the day Levi Butcher worried about his popularity, or lack of it, would be the official end of the world. She was just trying to psyche herself up by imagining him with feelings.

Finding the opportunity was more difficult than she’d thought. She didn’t want to ask him in front of everyone else, because what if he said no? He wouldn’t, of course, but if he did they might all rethink their acceptance of her invitation. Even worse, she might do something embarrassing, like blushing. Maybe she could just text him, because everyone on the team had everyone else’s phone numbers.

Because she really, really wanted to go the text route, she mentally snarled at herself for being a coward. She had to just do it, regardless of the circumstances. The next time she saw him, she’d suck it up and do it.

“The next time” turned out to be as she was leaving a session of drone training. He was coming out of a room that she knew housed the evil demons who devised the training scenarios for the drone operators; Levi had likely been giving them ideas on how to trip her up. Swiftly she ran through this last session, trying to see any mistakes she’d made. The mission had been accomplished and all operators were home safe, but she couldn’t give herself any pats on the back because she could have handled the drone more smoothly. There was always something; no session was ever perfect.

Levi gave her a cursory glance as if registering her existence but nothing more and turned in the opposite direction.

Mentally girding her loins—though what the hell was “girding,” and weren’t there more important body parts that needed protecting?—she called, “Levi, wait up!” Clutching her clipboard with its all-important lists, she trotted down the hallway toward him.

He turned, planted his booted feet part, crossed his arms, and with hooded eyes watched her approach.

Jina clutched her clipboard as if it were a dependable barrier between them. “Ah,” she began, then her mental gears engaged and she looked down at the topmost list as if double-checking something on it. “I’m having a taco bar at my place Saturday night. Would you like to come—”

“No,” he said.

She hadn’t expected that. She’d had the thought, but she hadn’t really expected it. Maybe an excuse, maybe he already had a date and they’d made other plans, but his flat refusal was a slap in the face.

“Okay.” She looked down at the list, trying to keep her expression casual as if she’d asked him nothing more important than if he wanted coffee.

He made a low sound, kind of like a growl, and seized her arm, then immediately released her as if she’d burned his hand. “Let’s go someplace more private,” he muttered, turning and striding off, not once looking back to see if she obeyed.

She thought about not following him, about turning around and marching out of the building. A hard lump in her throat made her think about making a dash to the bathroom, before she did something embarrassing, like cry. She would not cry. No way would she ever let him know that he’d in any way upset her.

But he was the team leader, and she’d spent months doing exactly what he’d said, when he’d said it. Her feet might have dragged as she followed him, but they moved, because Levi had said so.

He looked into a couple of rooms before entering what turned out to be a small office; whoever belonged there had either already gone home or was taking a bathroom break. It didn’t matter; Levi claimed the space. As soon as she entered the room, he closed the door and locked it.

Locked it.

The hair on the back of her neck stood up, and she stopped in her tracks. Her breath seized in her chest, but the alarm she was feeling wasn’t one of fear. She wasn’t afraid of Levi, not like that. She was afraid of him on a much more feminine level, one she didn’t let herself examine because there was no way she was going there; that road was too fraught with emotional land mines, and she was neither crazy nor self-destructive.

He gave her an impatient look and ran his hand over his stubbled jaw, the rasping sound like sandpaper against her nerves. “Shit,” he muttered.

She relaxed a little at his expression of mingled impatience and disgust, but she was alone in a small space with him and her lizard brain was on red alert. Then that dark gaze zeroed in on her and for a split second, before he could control it, she saw a flash of heat as potent as a volcanic cauldron, bubbling and ready to blow. Then he shut it down, leaving nothing in his expression for her to read.

“I don’t shit where I sleep,” he said bluntly. “I know you’ve got the hots for me and it won’t go anywhere. It can’t go anywhere. So, no, I won’t be your date or your fuck buddy or anything else. Got it?”

For a moment Jina was blinded by shock. She could feel herself fumbling with the clipboard, but she didn’t know what she was doing. Her whole body was numb, her lips incapable of moving. He’d slugged her with words, but it felt as if he’d used his fist.

Then rage hit, rage so white and searing she felt incandescent with it. Her mind was blank. She looked down at the clipboard, and the list of names swam into focus.

“Okay, let’s see,” she said as if to herself. “Boom and his family, check. Voodoo, check. Snake and family, Brian, Jelly, Crutch, Trapper—” As she ran through their names she made little check marks beside them. “Looks as if everyone is coming except Asshole.” Vigorously she marked through his name, digging the pen so hard into the paper it tore holes.

“Who’s Brian?” he interrupted in a growl.

“Brian?” She looked up, managed to give him a megawatt smile. “He’s my date.” Clutching the clipboard to her chest, she strolled to the door, flipped the lock, and left. She didn’t know how she managed to put one foot in front of the other. She was reeling from his words, not just the crudeness but the lethal accuracy.

Because he was right. The son of a bitch was right.