“Okay,” she said and tried to remember the first thing she should do. Was it something with her elbow? She tried to jab it into his stomach, but it lacked strength. His sigh of impatience skittered across her neck and raised goose bumps.
“You’re never going to accomplish anything like that,” Alex said. He kept his hold on her throat “First, squat down and lean forward. Do it now.”
Stacey was unable to move much in Alex’s grip, but she did what she could. She noticed that if not for the padding he wore, her rear would be nestled against his groin. The thought distracted her. She imagined his touch, not at her neck but lower. His body hot and hard against hers. She pretended he wanted her too much to care where they were. Pushing clothes aside, too impatient to strip them off entirely. Needing to get his hands on her bare skin, needing her hands on his body.
“Pay attention,” he barked at her and Stacey almost jumped. Thank God he couldn’t read her mind.
“I am,” she lied.
“No, you’re not,” he said, his voice carrying a note of huskiness. “You’re off on some erotic daydream. Tell me, are we wearing any clothes?”
Stacey stiffened and tried to elbow him again, but he tightened his grip by a fraction and left her unable to do anything but flail about harmlessly.
“If you had taken what I was trying to teach you seriously,” he told her, humor replacing the huskiness in his voice, “you would have been able to escape and get a few hits in.”
“It’s not funny,” Stacey shot at him, twisting uselessly in his arms. It irritated her that she couldn’t get free.
“No, it’s not funny. What if this were real? What if someone really had hold of you like this? You would be helpless.” Alex released her, but before she could react, he turned her so she faced him and grabbed her shoulders. “This isn’t some damn game. We don’t know what situation we’ll be walking into on Jarved Nine. What do you think I’m going to do if someone grabs you and uses you as a shield?”
The way he leaned over her should have intimidated her, but it didn’t. Even as aggravating as the man was, she knew she was safe with him. “Um, you’re going to save me?”
Alex let go of her shoulders and stepped away. “I would try,” he said, his voice less clipped, “but depending on the position of the assailant, I might not be able to get a shot off safely. I’d need you to help, either by freeing yourself or by exposing enough of the attacker to give me a better angle.”
“I really don’t think the situation will come up,” she told him, taking a few steps back. She breathed a sigh of relief when he didn’t close the distance. The man was too potent.
“You still like your fantasy of there being nothing wrong on J Nine that a little radio repair won’t cure.” Alex’s lips quirked up in a sardonic smile. “I wish I could believe that myself.”
“The odds are—”
“The odds are the CAT and Spec Ops teams are in deep shit,” Alex interrupted. “You want to talk odds? What are the odds of all the CAT team’s comm equipment going out? Not just primary, but backup and spares? ”
Stacey gulped and pushed some hair that had escaped her ponytail away from her face. “Slim,” she admitted reluctantly.
“Yeah, now figure in the Spec Ops team. They have comm equipment on their transport plus portable equipment they carry with them. What are the odds of their two systems going out at the exact time the CAT systems went down? ”
“More than slim.”
“Minuscule, I’d say.” Alex began peeling the pads off his body. “And before you can raise some ridiculous argument about subspace interference, we both know that even if it affected the voice systems, the long range emergency beacons were designed to transmit through just about anything.”
Stacey didn’t reply for a moment, taken aback by the fact that the darn man still looked too perfect. He hadn’t even broken a sweat despite the heavy padding he’d been wearing. Her own clothes were damp with perspiration and felt clammy and uncomfortable.
Reluctantly, she admitted Alex was right. The odds were something was wrong on the planet. Seriously wrong. Truthfully, she’d known all along, but she hadn’t wanted to face it. She was closer to Ravyn than to her own sisters and the thought of anything happening to her was unbearable.
“What do you think we’re going to find when we arrive?”
For a moment, Alex looked bleak, but the expression was gone in a flash. “Wounded. Maybe fatalities.”
“But how? What? It doesn’t make sense.”
“That I don’t know,” Alex confessed. “The doctor doesn’t think it’s a virus, but she could be wrong. Maybe there was a fire or the planet has deadly animals the scout teams missed. There are all kinds of possibilities.”
Stacey suddenly felt a hundred years old. Slowly, she moved from the center of the bay. Leaning against a wall, she slid to the padded floor. She closed her eyes and tried not to picture any of the disasters Alex had tossed out. He’d sounded emotionless, but she knew better. Ravyn talked about Alex a lot, and while her view was skewed, one thing was clear. His sister was the only person in the world the man loved. He had to be scared to death she was among the casualties.
Stacey’s eyes popped open as she felt Alex settle beside her. She moved away from him and he raised his eyebrows in question. Ignoring that, she asked, “So is there anything Ravyn doesn’t excel at?” She wanted to change the subject, to get both their minds off whatever horror awaited them on Jarved Nine.
A slow smile spread across his face. It transformed his whole demeanor from harsh and cold to heart-stopping sexy. She lost her breath at the sight. Good thing he didn’t smile often, she thought entranced.
“She can’t shoot worth a damn,” he said.
“What?” Stacey had been so busy enjoying his grin that she’d forgotten what they were talking about.
“Ravyn. She’s scary with a pistol in her hand.”
Alex said it with such indulgence, Stacey couldn’t help smiling. Just when she’d convinced herself he was a nearly heartless son of a gun who wasn’t worth her time, he would say or do something that left her wondering. Stacey shifted position, turning slightly toward Alex. “I didn’t want to like Ravyn when I first met her,” she admitted.
He smiled a shade ruefully, but he didn’t look surprised. She assumed his sister had told him. She and Ravyn laughed over it now. But Stacey still had twinges of guilt over the envy she’d felt. Nothing had been average about her friend. Not her looks, not her intelligence and not her personality. People noticed her, responded to her. Ravyn had worked hard to build a friendship between them, and once Stacey had gotten to know her, once she’d realized the younger woman’s life hadn’t been a walk in the park, she’d let go of her jealousy. And found the sister of her heart.
“I didn’t want to like her either,” Alex confessed, drawing her from her memories. “I think I made it about a day before she had me in the palm of her hand.”
Immediately, Stacey became suspicious. Alex Sullivan was not someone who shared anything personal, not voluntarily. “Why are you telling me this?”
“I need your cooperation. I need you to obey orders when I issue them without hesitating or arguing. Things will be easier if we are on friendly terms.”
Stacey had to admire his honesty, but she wasn’t sure what she thought of his motives. She didn’t know if she could be friendly, not when she was trying so hard to kill her attraction to him. She had daydreamed about Alex Sullivan for years. In her fantasies, he’d treated her like a beloved princess. In the real world, he acted like she was an unwanted obligation.
“What do you think?” he asked. Somehow he’d edged closer without her knowledge. Not close enough to alarm her, but closer than she wanted him to be. “Want to be my friend?”
Cocking her head, she eyed him with mistrust. There was a thread in his voice that had alarm bells shrieking in her mind. He was up to something, she just didn’t know what.
Stacey eased herself back a little more. “Define what you mean by ‘friend.’”
Oh, he was good, she thought. He was careful not to overplay that wounded look, but she knew it lacked sincerity. There were a lot of words she’d use to describe Alex, but vulnerable didn’t make the list. It hurt her in some indefinable way that he thought he could put one over on her. “If you want us to be on friendly terms, you’ll cut the act,” Stacey said.
“Act?” He feigned innocence, exaggerating so much that she knew he did it deliberately. She smiled reluctantly. An hour earlier she would have thought him incapable of this type of humor. It dismayed her to realize it added to his appeal.
“I grew up on a farm,” she said. “I know manure when I see it. Right now it’s at least hip deep.”
“I thought I’d shoveled it deeper than that,” Alex said and gave her a supernova smile.
He was too close again and Stacey put a hand on his chest to ward him off. His heart beat evenly. The warmth of his skin through the T-shirt made her fingers tingle and the urge to stroke his chest overwhelmed her. She might have spent the first twenty-four years of her life in a town of a couple of thousand, but Stacey knew trouble when it sat beside her. Too lethal, she thought, scrambling to her feet.
Alex rose with a feline grace. She watched him approach, his pace unhurried. Maybe that was what kept her lulled until it was nearly too late. He stalked her the way a panther stalked its prey. Temptation gnawed at her. It was the cocksure glow in his eyes that reminded her of his attitude problem.
“Back off, Sullivan,” Stacey ordered. And took a deep breath when he complied. He still stood too close for comfort.
Alex didn’t appear daunted, she decided. In fact, the man had the audacity to crook his finger at her. As if! With a growl of outrage, Stacey rushed him. Without stopping to think, she hooked a foot behind his leg and pushed. She felt justly rewarded when she saw him fall. It gave her even more satisfaction to see the amazement on his face before she stormed out of the bay.
*** *** ***
Alex prowled the ship. To guarantee he didn’t run into anyone, he stayed away from the bridge and the small galley just behind it. He couldn’t keep the scowl from his lips. For a man who prided himself on his poker face, it was one more irritation in a night full of them.
Stacey Johnson had dumped him on his ass.
It still amazed him. He supposed he should be happy she could execute that simple maneuver. Except he knew damn well she wouldn’t have brought him down if he hadn’t been off balance. He’d expected her to throw herself into his arms.
Okay, so maybe he was a little spoiled. Women chased him. Had since he was a teenager. Even Lara had been the one doing the pursuing, at least until she’d found some rich sucker to tie herself to. Stacey couldn’t hide her attraction to him. And when he issued an invitation to a woman who had already shown she wanted his attention, he’d never been turned down. Until today.
He was wound tight with no relief in sight. He couldn’t figure out why he was all hot and bothered. She wasn’t his type, damn it. He liked women who were sophisticated and glamorous. Stacey was wholesome. Everything she felt and thought was right there on her face for the world to see.
If he had any hope of sleeping, he needed to work off some of his frustration. With a grimace, he headed for the equipment bay and the gym set up there. If he had to pound the damn bag for an hour to release this tension, well, so be it.
He snarled quietly when he noticed the door to the bay was jammed open and light spilled out into the hall. Alex hesitated for a moment curiosity warring with his need to be alone right now. Then he heard her voice. “Keep the weight on the front foot,” she muttered loudly enough to drift into the hall. “Okay. Elbows in, fists in front of face.”
Alex eased forward slowly, not wanting Stacey to see him. He needn’t have worried. She had her back to the door and her concentration focused on a piece of paper fastened to the wall. It looked like she had printed out self-defense instructions from the computer. He felt his frustration lessen.
He watched her repeat the same move over and over. Each time she would read the instructions aloud, as if that made them clearer to her, and then try to put words into movement. It was tempting to make his presence known and correct all the mistakes she was making, but he remained silent. The woman was not a natural athlete. It took her nearly half an hour before she could snap kick without losing her balance. But she didn’t give up and Alex admired that. He noted how hard she worked and how her damp T-shirt clung to her breasts.
The first observation pleased him and it meshed with what he’d heard from Ravyn. Until now he’d seen no signs of the determination his sister had mentioned repeatedly in reference to Stacey. The second image raised havoc in his own body once more. He didn’t need to ogle the woman’s breasts, but he couldn’t seem to stop glancing in that direction. The lack of self-control had his temper fraying again.
He should walk away. Alex didn’t know why he couldn’t. Mentally, he took a step back and tried to figure out why Stacey tantalized him. She’d grown up in an area of the country that had been completely untouched by the wars. It had always amazed him how part of the United States had been so greatly affected while the rest of the country wouldn’t have known a war was happening if not for the news. But that kind of ingenuousness left him irritated, not interested. Usually.
War had always been a reality for him. Before his parents’ divorce, he’d lived near the front lines. Even the move to Arizona hadn’t made the fighting more distant for him, not with his father in the thick of it. At fifteen, he’d found himself in California with his dad because his mother’s new husband hadn’t wanted another man’s kid around.
Alex let out a silent sigh. The last of his childhood innocence had been shattered when his mother had chosen money over him. He looked at Stacey trying to coordinate her movements so she could throw a punch while she pushed off on her back heel. Her timing sucked. She was more naive at thirty-two than he’d been as a teenager.
He should just let her be, he thought. God knew what he’d been thinking when he’d issued his invitation earlier this evening. Getting sexually involved on a mission, even if they had nothing to do right now but wait and train, was the pinnacle of stupidity. He couldn’t even lie to himself and pretend he’d done it to bind her to him. He’d wanted her, pure and simple.