Basic Training

The general strode through the doorway. Kyle paced after him, turning toward his desk. But Craddock’s curse stopped him before he reached his chair. “Did Eileen leave already?”

“She was taking those files down to the JAG’s office on her way out.” Kyle reached for the phone on the corner of his desk. “You want me to page her?”

“No, if she just left, I’ll run her down.” The general hesitated at the door. “If my wife calls, tell her…hell, I was supposed to talk to Eileen before she left. Tell her—”

“—You’re heading straight home after you touch base with Mrs. Ward? I’ll call the JAG’s office to detain her, just in case.”

Craddock smiled. Point scored. “You’re a good man, Black. You got plans this weekend?”

Kyle nodded. He always had a date.

“Enjoy it.”

“Thank you, sir.” They traded salutes and the general left. As soon as he finished the call to the JAG office, Kyle was pulling up a duty assignment on his computer.

Kyle scanned the information on the screen, memorizing every detail. Captain Travis McCormick had been assigned a six-week medical leave, following six months in hospital and six months on light duty at Quantico. Six weeks? Medical? Someone was worried. If he knew McCormick, he’d be bustin’ his butt to turn that leave into four weeks, or even two.

“You’re not Superman anymore, are you?” he taunted the computer monitor in lieu of McCormick’s face.

Kyle had plans, all right. But the model he’d been seeing the past two weeks held little interest for him at the moment. He was too busy typing in the necessary info to request a temporary leave himself. Just a few days. The Summer Bay Festival and its draw of military personnel from up and down the East Coast would provide the perfect cover. Once General Craddock returned, Kyle would hit the road for Ashton himself. He could do a few scouting jaunts beforehand, learn McCormick’s routine, devise a plan.

To Kyle’s way of thinking, this wasn’t about striking a man while he was down. It was about locating the enemy’s vulnerability and using that weakness to his advantage to ensure victory.

It was about payback.

4

“A LITTLE HELP?” Tess grabbed Travis’s unshaven jaw and turned his appreciative gaze away from Robin, the brunette ward clerk who’d retrieved his signed consent form with a wink and an encouraging smile. With the door to the otherwise empty PT room closing on the distraction of Robin’s backside, Tess pointed to her own eyes. “Right here, McCormick. Concentrate.”

“Come on, T-bone. I haven’t had a chance to play for twelve months.” He offered up a “poor me” look as he leaned back against the weight machine’s padded seat. “Don’t begrudge a wounded man the chance to get out and see the sights. The hospital’s new PT wing really does have nice scenery.”

“So does the Grand Canyon. Which I’m tempted to shove you into if you don’t start taking this seriously.”

“I had a drill sergeant like you once.”

Tess ignored the teasing gibe. “Screwing around could get you hurt.”

“I think my mother gave me the same advice back in high school.”

“Travis,” she snapped. He could joke around about this all he wanted, but she’d seen his X-rays. She knew how far he’d come and how far he still had to go. It was a precarious balance of strengthening the right muscles while protecting weaker ligaments and knitted bones. Healing was dead serious business, and if he truly wanted to return to hazardous duty as a Marine in just a couple of weeks, then it was her responsibility to keep him from doing any more damage to himself on the homefront. “If we don’t do this right, there’s no sense doing it at all.”

“Yes, sir.” He snapped her a salute. “Doing it right, sir.”

Tess rolled her eyes. “Whatever.”

Securing Travis’s feet beneath the T-bar, she tested the resistance on the machine to make sure the pressure rested on his thighs and calves instead of his rebuilt knee and ankle. She braced her hand against the muscles beneath his nylon workout pants.

“I’m still in pretty good shape, right?” Though couched as a taunt, Tess knew him well enough to hear the underlying need for validation in his tone.

She adjusted the machine, then repositioned his leg and guided him to try the weight. “Robin seemed to think so.”

“Yeah, but she never saw the before picture.”

“Trust me. I knew you before the accident, and you are still…”

Hot got stuck in her throat when she lifted her face and met his gaze. She’d intended to give him a reassuring smile, but snapping shut her mouth, which had fallen open at the look on his face, was all she could manage at the moment. There was nothing teasing in the deep blue eyes that focused on her now. The veil of laughter had disappeared, revealing a raw need in the depths of those cobalt irises. They were as complex and unfamiliar as they’d been yesterday afternoon, ogling her with a hungry intensity that made her hair sweat.

If she’d been another woman, Tess might have interpreted the rare glimpses of serious emotion as some sort of intimate, passionate, man-woman connection.

But she was Tess Bartlett. Trusty sidekick. Go-to woman when a friend needed a favor.

He was Travis McCormick. The Action Man. A nickname that had as much to do with his reputation with the ladies as it did his heroics for his country.

All he’d ever wanted from her was a bud to listen to him, to back him up, to have fun with—someone to give him a boost behind the scenes so he could still face the world with a charming smile whenever things fell apart.

That’s what the searching glance, the glimpse of vulnerability, was all about. It was a silent plea to the friendly ally she’d always been. He needed someone to bolster his ego as he learned to cope with limitations he’d never had to face before.

Tess swallowed hard and looked away to focus her attention on the movement of his leg. She couldn’t keep it casual and supportive when she wanted that look to mean something else.

“You’re lookin’ pretty fine,” she assured him, saying what he needed to hear. It wasn’t a lie. Despite the ribs of scar tissue she felt through his pant leg, the shape and dimension of the muscles underneath were the same grade-A prime that had always set countless female hormones, including her own, into overdrive. Sure, his obvious pain—past and present—triggered her compassion. But there was no reason to feel sorry for this man.

His fingers brushed across the back of her knuckles. Nerves jumped. Muscles tightened. Her mouth went dry. “You’re sure ’bout that? You had to think about it.”

Did she imagine that low-pitched husk in his voice? Or had he always had that sexy rumble?

“I’m positive,” she croaked, then snatched her hand away and cleared her throat. “You are all that, and a bag of chips. And not that cheap store-brand stuff, either. You’re name brand, all the way.”

If her playful comeback sounded forced, Travis didn’t seem to notice. Of course, Tess didn’t really bother to check. She smoothed her damp palms on her khaki shorts and turned away to fiddle with the weights before the static charges zipping from his body to her brain completely short-circuited her ability to perform her professional duty. At least one of them needed to keep track of why they were here. Resolving to ignore both the intensity of those eyes and the seduction of that voice, she patted the top of his thigh. “Let’s try it again, nice and slow this time so I can gauge your range of motion.”

“Yes, sir.” Now that was the smart-ass tone she’d come to expect from him. Still, touching him made it hard to concentrate. His thigh tightened like a rock beneath her palm as he extended his legs. “I noticed Robin wasn’t wearing a wedding ring. Is that a job thing? So she doesn’t catch a finger in one of these machines or scratch a patient?”

“Subtle, McCormick.”

Like the ebb and flow of the tide, the muscle thinned as he relaxed his thigh back into place. He repeated the motion. Flexed. Hard. Filling her hand. Relaxed. She caught her breath, waiting in subconscious anticipation for the hard muscle to swell into her palm again. “So, is she unattached?”

“Travis.” She swatted the provocative flesh and stepped back to prop her hands at her hips. She didn’t need this kind of interrogation to taunt her ego while he tempted her libido. “You’re the one who insisted we start physical therapy this weekend. You know, as impossible as it is for you to believe, I do have a life. I don’t normally give up my Saturday afternoons. Even for a friend.” She flipped her ponytail from inside the collar of her uniform polo shirt, begrudgingly admitting to herself that she didn’t really have that much of a life to back up her argument. Pathetic. “Robin’s not married. And she isn’t seeing anyone exclusively that I know of.”

“Interesting.”

Tess concentrated on her breathing, in and out, so she wouldn’t stand there holding her breath, waiting for Travis to ask her to set him up on a date with Robin. The clerk had certainly sent out signals that she would be interested in getting better acquainted with the captain.

Travis unhooked his feet from the T-bar and dropped them to the floor so he could turn and fiddle with the machinery behind him. “I can handle more weight, you know.”

Tess frowned at the back of his head. She was as perplexed by his abrupt change in subject as she was relieved. The Action Man she knew would never have passed on such an easy opportunity to hook up with an attractive woman.

But then, the flirtatious hero she once knew had been an unpredictable man since coming home from Quantico. This man got angry. This man hesitated. There was a chink in the confidence that had once exuded from every pore. A chink that revealed an edge to Travis she’d never seen before. When she’d sent him off to college, to basic training, to officer candidate school, to assignments across the country and across the world, he’d always been cocky but in control—a man who knew who he was, knew what he wanted, knew what he was capable of. He was a man who delivered each and every time—and took pride in that fact.

Had his brush with death really changed him? Or was this version of Travis merely the golden boy finally growing up and learning that he was human like everybody else?