Lindsay McKenna - Risk Taker

The morning was cold for June. She pressed the Velcro shut on her tent flaps and turned, appreciating the white clouds over the camp. Sarah hurried down the dusty street, heading for the gym, which was next to the medical dispensary. Her heart turned back to the poem given to her. It soothed the anxiety she always got when going someplace where there were more men than women.

* * *

Ethan was bench-pressing two hundred and fifty pounds at the end of his ten repetitions when he spotted Sarah Benson walking into the gym. He damn near lost his concentration. He’d never seen her in there before.

“Hey,” Tolleson called. He was standing nearby as his spotter.

“I see her,” Ethan breathed through his teeth, slowly lowering the huge barbell back into its metal cradle. Sweat was rolling off his face, his shoulders were strained and the muscles in his upper arms trembled. Ethan watched Sarah move like a shadow along the wall. There were about fifteen other men in the gym.

“Okay, rest,” Tolleson told him, handing him a towel.

Ethan ducked out from beneath the barbell, sat up and wiped his sweaty face. He rested his elbows on his hard thighs. Like most of the men working out, they were naked except for a pair of gym shorts. There was a lot of grunting and straining going on. The gym smelled of male sweat and testosterone.

His heart beat a little faster as he saw Sarah walk over to the other side of the room, where dumbbells and the lighter weights were kept along the wall. Something a woman would probably want to work out with, he supposed. Damn, she was so graceful. He noticed the purple-and-blue bruises around her wrists. Anger stirred in him.

A number of the other men watched her, too. She probably felt like a piece of meat, all those eyes on her. He wouldn’t like it, either.

“I’m taking five,” Ethan told his LPO, wiping his face again, then throwing the towel over his shoulder.

Sarah felt Ethan’s presence even though she never heard him approach. She’d just sat down on a bench with a ten-pound weight when Ethan appeared before her. He gave her a slight smile of hello and crouched down a few feet in front of her.

“Hey, how are you feeling today?”

Sarah felt heat race up her throat and into her face. The man had hardly any clothes on. Her eyes widened momentarily. “I didn’t see you when I came in,” she said, stiff and on guard. He was incredibly well built with powerful shoulders, dark hair across his chest and a line going down across his hard abs and disappearing beneath the waist of his dark blue gym shorts. Lean. He was built like a swimmer, and then she realized he was a frogman. So, yes, he did indeed have a swimmer’s amazing body. Finding her voice, she said, “I woke up this morning stiff and figured an hour of working out will help me loosen up.”

Ethan nodded, his heart contracting. “You have a helluva bruise on your temple. That’s enough to give me a headache just looking at it.” One corner of his mouth lifted. Her right eye was bruised and slightly swollen from the strike the bastard had given her. The bridge of her nose was also swollen. She had pulled her shining black hair into a ponytail, and he appreciated the clean, classic lines of her face, still beautiful even with her injuries.

“I took some aspirin and I’ve only got a mild headache now.” She started repetitions with the weights, counting how many times for each arm. Panic seized her. He was a man. And he was so masculine that it triggered old memories. She almost asked him about the poem. If he had written it.

“What did the doc have to say? Are you all right?”

Sarah heard the care in his low, husky tone. She swore those gray eyes were looking straight through her. She felt off balance with him, yet she felt his protection, too. It was a crazy feeling, not one she had ever experienced before. Maybe SEALs exuded that kind of protectiveness toward others? She’d never met a SEAL before except to pick up wounded ones on the battlefield. Black ops tended to keep to themselves. It left her confused and wary.

“Just a lot of pretty bruises.” She pointed to her wrist. “And my nose isn’t broken, thank God. The doctor forced me off the flight roster for four days.”

“Mmm,” Ethan said, nodding. Sarah rarely met his eyes. She seemed shy, unlike the tigerlike demeanor he’d seen in action yesterday. He could see only fear in her eyes. Why? Ethan also wondered how she’d become a medevac pilot. They took risks every day out in the field and were considered aggressive pilots. “Did she think you might have a concussion?”

Sarah sat on the anxiety that bubbled just beneath the surface and started counting again as she lifted the weight in her other hand. “Yes.” She tilted her head and met his warm gray eyes. “How did you know? Are you a combat medic?”

Shaking his head, Ethan murmured, “This is my fourth rotation out here and you get used to seeing certain kinds of injuries. My specialty is comms—communication—not medicine.” He hooked a thumb over his shoulder toward Tolleson, who was doing some bench-pressing in his absence. “He’s my LPO. Tolleson is one of the combat medics in our platoon.”

“I see.” Sarah watched him for a moment. “I’m really ignorant about SEALs,” she confided. Ethan was easy to talk to, and she didn’t see lust in his eyes as he observed her. For whatever reason, she found herself tense, unused to a man treating her like this.

“How long you been here at Bravo?”

“Three months. Got six more to go before I get rotated stateside.” Sarah wrinkled her nose. “I’ll probably get four to six months home and then they’re going to send me right back over here.”

“How long you been flying?”

She frowned. “Joined the Army at twenty. I had two years of college under my belt and they wanted me to shoot for warrant officer status. My foster father, Hank, was an Army Black Hawk pilot during the Gulf War. I was lucky and got into their family when I was twelve years old. He’d take me flying in his helicopter duster. By the time I went into the Army, I had about five hundred hours of flight time, so the Army pushed me in that direction. I chose to become a medevac pilot.”

“The Army doesn’t like to waste talent,” Ethan agreed. He had a tough time seeing her in the cockpit of a medevac. Those pilots were ballsy risk takers. Why was she looking at him like he was going to hit her? “You seem pretty laid-back for a medevac pilot.”

Sarah shrugged and switched hands with the dumbbell. “I think the word you’re looking for is shy. I’m a terrified introvert living in a world of in-your-face extroverts.”

He chuckled, liking her dry sense of humor. “Nothing wrong with being an introvert.” He shrugged. “I’m one, too.”

“Could have fooled me.” Sarah wiped the gathering perspiration off her brow with her towel. “You were the first guy to stand up to stop those three Delta dudes from coming over to my table. The look on your face scared the hell out of me.”

Ethan absorbed her praise. He wanted to know what she thought of the poem he’d slipped beneath the flap of her tent that morning. The expression on her face kept him from asking. “No one said an introvert can’t be a mean mother when they need to be,” he said in defense, liking her hesitant smile. That mouth of hers was sending his body a damned heated message.

“That’s true.” Sarah rolled her eyes. “Every time we get a new copilot in our squadron, the major sends him to be trained by me. I think he does it just to screw around with the newbie. They take one look at my face and I guess I don’t look like a warrior. Then they get hyper because I don’t fit their idea of a medevac pilot. I’m a woman and—” she sighed “—I have to prove my abilities every day in the right seat. It takes a new copilot a couple of weeks to settle down in the left-hand seat with me at the helm. Like a woman can’t fly a damned helo? Give me a break.”