LITMIR.BIZ

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and onto her feet in a crouching run and headed for the tree. She saw the tango rising out of the bushes at the last possible second and she fired twice, hitting him squarely in the chest. He fell, and only then did she see the man behind him.

      She was dead. She knew in that instant that she was dead. She fired anyway, but her aim was off. His wasn’t.

      The force of the double impact pushed her back, and she tripped and went down. She felt her head crack against something, a rock, the trunk of a tree—she wasn’t sure what, but it was granite hard. Pain exploded, stars sparking behind her tightly closed eyes.

      “Code eighty-six! Eighty-six! Cease and desist!”

      Just like that, the gunfire stopped. Just like that, this particular training exercise was over.

      P.J. felt bright lights going on all over the area, and she struggled to open her eyes, to sit up. The movement made the world lurch unappealingly, and she desperately fought the urge to retch, curling instead into a tight little ball. She prayed she’d somehow find her missing sense of equilibrium before anyone noticed she was temporarily out for the count.

      “We need a hospital corpsman,” the voice over her headset continued. “We’ve got an agent down, possible head injury.”

      P.J. felt hands touching her shoulder, her face, unfastening her goggles. So much for no one noticing.

      “Richards, yo. You still with me, girl?” It was Harvard, and his voice got harsher, louder as he turned away from her. “Where the hell is that corpsman?” Softer again, and sweeter, like honey now. “Richards, can you open your eyes?”

      She opened one eye and saw Harvard’s camouflaged face gazing at her. His chin and cheeks were splattered with yellow from the paint ball that had hit him in the center of his chest.

      “I’m fine,” she whispered. She still hadn’t quite regained her breath from the paint ball that had caught her directly in the midsection.

      “Like hell you’re fine,” he countered. “And I should know. I saw you doing that George of the Jungle imitation. Right into that tree, headfirst…”

      One Harvard became two—and Lord knows one was more than enough to deal with. P.J. had to close her eyes again. “Just give me another minute….”

      “Corpsman’s on the way, Senior Chief.”

      “How bad’s she hurt, H.?” P.J. recognized that voice as belonging to Alpha Squad’s commanding officer, Captain Joe Catalanotto—Joe Cat, as his men irreverently called him.

      “I don’t know, sir. I don’t want to move her, in case she’s got a neck injury. Why the hell didn’t one of us think about the danger of firing a paint ball at someone this girl’s size? What is she? A hundred, hundred and five pounds at the most? How the hell did this get past us?”

      The breathlessness and dizziness were finally fading, leaving a lingering nausea and a throbbing ache in her head. P.J. would have liked a few more minutes to gather her senses, but Harvard had just gone and called her a girl.

      “This is no big deal,” P.J. said, forcing her eyes open and struggling to sit up. “I was moving when the projectile hit me—the force caught me off balance and I tripped. There’s no need to turn this into some kind of a national incident. Besides, I weigh one-fifteen.” On a good day. “I’ve played paint-ball games before with no problem.”

      Harvard was kneeling next to her. He reached out, caught her face between his hands and lightly touched the back of her head with the tips of his fingers. He skimmed an incredibly sore spot, and she couldn’t help but wince.

      He swore softly, as if it hurt him, as well. “Hurts, huh?”

      “I’m—”

      “Fine,” he finished for her. “Yes, ma’am, you’ve made that clear. You’ve also got a bump the size of Mount Saint Helens on the back of your head. Odds are, you’ve got a concussion to go along with that bump.”

      P.J. could see Tim Farber standing in the background, all but taking notes for the report she knew he was going to file with Kevin Laughton. I recommend from now on that Agent Richards’s role in this antiterrorist unit be limited to dealing with administrative issues…. Some men couldn’t abide working in the field alongside a woman. She glanced at Harvard. No doubt he’d be first in line to put his initials right next to Farber’s recommendation.

      She silently composed her own note. Hey, Kev, I fell and I landed wrong—so sue me. And before you pull me off this team, prove that no male FInCOM agent ever made a similar mistake and… Oh, wait, what’s that I’m remembering? A certain high-level AIC who shall remain nameless but whose initials are K.L. doing a rather un-graceful nosedive from a second-story window during a training op back about a year and a half ago?

      P.J. focused on the mental image of Laughton grinning ruefully as he rubbed the newly healed collarbone that still gave him twinges of pain whenever it rained. That picture made Farber’s lofty smirk easier to bear.

      No way was Kevin Laughton pulling her from this assignment. He had been her boss for two years, and he knew she deserved to be right here, right through to the end, come hell or high water or Tim Farber’s male chauvinist whining.

      The corpsman arrived, and after he flashed a light into P.J.’s eyes, he examined the bump on the back of her head a whole lot less gently than Harvard had.

      “I want to take you over to the hospital,” the corpsman told her. “I think you’re probably fine, but I’d feel better if we got an X-ray or two. You’ve got a lot of swelling back there. Any nausea?”

      “I had the wind knocked out of me, so it’s hard to tell,” P.J. said, sidestepping the question. Harvard was shaking his head, watching her closely, and she carefully made a point not to meet his gaze.

      “Can you walk or should we get a stretcher?”

      P.J. was damned if she was going to be carried out of these woods, but truth was, her legs felt like rubber. “I can walk.” Her voice rang with false confidence as she tried to convince herself as well as everyone else.

      She could feel Harvard watching as she pushed herself unsteadily to her feet. He moved closer, still looking to catch her if she fell. It was remarkable, really. Every other woman she knew would’ve been dying for a good-looking man like Senior Chief Daryl Becker to play hero for them.

      But she wasn’t every other woman.

      She’d come this far on her own two feet and she wasn’t about to let some silly bump on the head undermine her tough-as-nails reputation.

      It was hard enough working at FInCOM, where the boys only grudgingly let the girls play, too. But for eight weeks, she was being allowed access to the absolutely-no-women-allowed world of the U.S. Navy SEALs.

      For the next eight weeks, the members of SEAL Team Ten’s invincible Alpha Squad were going to be watching her, waiting for her to screw up so they could say to each other, See, this is precisely why we don’t let women in.

      The SEALs were the U.S. Navy’s special operations units. They were highly trained warriors with well-earned reputations for being the closest things to superheroes this side of a comic book.

      The acronym came from sea, air and land, and SEALs were equally comfortable—and adept—at operating in all of those environments.

      They were smart, they were brave and they were more than a little crazy—they had to be to make it through the grueling sessions known as BUD/S training, which included the legendary Hell Week. From what P.J. had heard, a man who was still in the SEAL program after completing Hell Week had every right to be cocky and arrogant.

      And the men of Alpha Squad at times could be both.

      As P.J. forced herself to walk slowly but steadily away, she could feel all of Alpha Squad’s eyes on her back.

      Especially Senior Chief Harvard Becker’s.

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