Armed Response

“Is that going to be a problem?” Derek asked when Lillian didn’t respond. “There’s obviously history between you two.”

Yes, there was history, but she wasn’t going to let that stop her from being as effective as possible. From making the entire team be as effective as possible. They’d need to be as strong as they could for whatever Damien Freihof had planned. Putting ancient history aside would be no problem.

Lillian glanced at Jace again, his blue eyes now piercing hers. She didn’t look away. “No—no problem,” she told Derek. “Our past was a long time ago. It’s over. It was over before it even started.”

* * *

IT WAS OVER before it even started.

Lillian’s quiet words stung even hours later. They shouldn’t; after all, they were only the truth. Their relationship—at least the sexual side of it—had ended almost as soon as it began.

Trying to stick to the letting-bygones-be-bygones promise he made yesterday was proving a little more difficult than he had expected.

Jace pushed the entire conversation from his mind. There was no room for worrying about the distant past out here on the Gauntlet, which was a glorified obstacle course full of real-life dangers—fire, barbed wire and paintball-type ammunition that wouldn’t seriously wound someone, but would hurt like hell if you got hit.

Harsh words were the least of his problems right now.

Evidently there was some sort of multimillion-dollar training simulator nearby, but the way everyone had started crossing themselves and balking when it was mentioned made him think it wasn’t very popular.

So here they were, out in a wooded area, having just crawled 500 yards under barbed wire. He and Lillian were a team, moving together. There were four other two-person teams made up of the various SWAT members he’d met yesterday. This exercise was part race, part team-building.

It wasn’t unlike some of the obstacles and exercises he’d been a part of as an Army Ranger. He understood the importance of pushing the body and the mind, and doing it with the person who was going to have your back when you went into battle. It looked like he and Lillian would be that person for each other.

And she wasn’t too happy about it.

Unhappy because she was being forced to work with an ex? Or unhappy because that ex was a new person on the team who might recognize some suspicious behavior on her part that her other colleagues could miss?

Either way, she was pushing those feelings aside now. She seemed vaguely surprised that he was able to keep up with her rapid crab-crawl pace under the barbed wire, roughly eighteen inches over the ground. Her small stature gave her a decided advantage for an obstacle of this type, and Lily knew how to use it.

But Jace knew how to make his body move quickly also. Even though the wire was sometimes only an inch or two over his shoulders and back, he used his abdominal muscles to keep himself straight and low, speed from his long reach making up for the caution he had to use because of his size.

As they reached the last of the wire and rolled out, they took cover behind some trees.

“You’re fast,” she said.

“Not my first rodeo.”

The rest of the teams were making their way along the ground, Philip Carnell having the most difficult time.

“Do we need to go back in and help Carnell?” he said.

Lillian gave a brief shake of her head. “No. Normally Derek doesn’t even allow him to do this sort of training even though Carnell insists he should be given the chance. But he may be needed to do something besides provide tactical assistance next week in Denver, so today he’s in.”

“Is he going to make it?” Carnell’s partner was Saul Poniard, who might also be new, but was light-years ahead of Carnell when it came to physical abilities.

“Saul will get him through hopefully. And we’ll get Philip out as a team if he needs it. Not that he’ll thank us for it.” Lillian shook her head. “As Alpha team, we’re going to have our own problems. We’ll need to take out the sniper before he picks everyone off.”

“Sniper?”

Lillian grinned. “You didn’t think Derek was going to miss the fun, did you? That man loves his paintball gun. You and I will have to take him out before everyone else gets there. That’s Alpha team’s primary challenge.”

“Then let’s get moving.”

They navigated a series of obstacles, including a fifty-foot rope climb, before coming to a pile of five large, heavy logs.

“Each of these has to be maneuvered through this next section.” Lillian referred to the logs. “Every two-person team is responsible for one log. We choose to make it either hard on us or hard on the other teams coming behind us.”

Jace raised an eyebrow. “So...heaviest?”

Lillian’s smile was huge and he had to fight to keep it from taking his breath away. “I was hoping you’d agree. But it’s not going to be easy.”

“Then I guess you better stop grinning like an idiot and get to it.”

Jace couldn’t stop the grin on his own face, either. Lily wanted to push herself. That was something he understood. He had known it about her even back in the day, and it was one of the reasons he had thought the army would be such a good fit for her also.

He tamped down the spring of bitterness over the way things had turned out. Bygones. Much more important to focus on the problems at hand.

The log was damn heavy. The exercise required them to lift the log over some obstacles, under others, and even carry it over their heads as they crossed a small creek.

Lillian never complained, never slipped in supporting her part of the awkward piece of wood. By the time they threw it down half a mile later, they were both pushing the edges of exhaustion. They slumped together against the back of a tree, shoulder to shoulder, so they could each catch their breath.

“Now we have to take out Derek and his evil paintball gun.” Her eyes were closed as she allowed her body to attempt to recapture some of its strength just as he did.

“How do we do that with no gun of our own?”

“Technically for this exercise, all we have to do to defeat him is for one of us to make it over the finish line without getting hit.” She didn’t sound very enthused about the idea.

“Easier said than done?”

Those brown eyes opened. “Derek is a mastermind at this. Plus, he knows all our strengths. We have about a five-percent success rate when it comes to getting past him.”

“What about splitting up and running from two different directions?”

She shook her head. “We’ve tried. It’s such a narrow strip of land, he can cover it and almost always get both people before they get across. We don’t have very much cover.”

“What are the rules about just one person getting across? If that’s all we need, we should wait for everyone else, protect one person and everyone else can take the hits.”

“First, the hits aren’t gentle. They hurt like hell.” She obviously had firsthand knowledge. “Second, to keep us from always grouping, the rule is, whoever makes it across the finish line unhit has two minutes to get the wounded the fifteen yards across no-man’s-land. Almost impossible if it’s one person trying to get multiple people across. And particularly impossible with the group coming up behind us.”

Jace leaned his head back against the tree. He could hear the frustration in her voice. The Omega SWAT team was not up to the level it usually was. Too many new people. Too many wounded.

“I have a plan,” he said.

Now he had her full attention.

“We’ll use Derek’s assumptions against him, with a little bit of trickery thrown in. But I’ll warn you, this won’t be easy. Particularly on you. We won’t be playing to your strengths. But we will be using your strength.”

She sat up. “Okay. I’m game. What’s your plan?”