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  “Faster,” she urged him. He obliged and drove into her hard over and over again, hitting every pleasurable spot. “Yes, that’s it, I’m there.” She moaned, raising her hips to him. Her body quaked with the force of her orgasm, clenching the hard flesh inside her over and over again until he tightened his hands on her hips and let out a primal growl. He drove in, pulsing inside her, his body shuddering and lurching as his release overtook him.

  They lay together panting, him inside until the tremors stopped. He eased off and went to ditch the condom, leaving her to recover from the mind-altering sex. She heard water running in the shower and smiled when she heard him on the bathroom phone ordering more food. He came to the door.

  “Come on. By the time the hot water runs out the food will be here.”

  She quirked an eyebrow and gave him a look. She was a little sore and not ready for another round.

  He gave her a sexy grin. “Hot soapy shower. No sex. At least not until after refueling.”

  That she was ready for.

  Chapter 6

  They showered, ate, and opened the terrace doors to watch the sun slip away into a brilliant sunset. Afterward they went to bed, bodies joined in an erotic tangle of arms and legs, and slept until dawn, when they engaged in soft, half-awake sex.

  This had started as nothing but a one-off hookup, a sexual romp, but with O’Brien’s body against hers, their arms and legs tangled together, it didn’t feel like that now. She watched the sky go from the dawn plum purple to a brilliant brightness. She moved away and he pulled her back. “Gotta get ready to go.”

  “Okay.” He laid a kiss on her, sighed, and released her.

  O’Brien silently paced the room as she packed her kit bag. She stopped filling the bag and turned to him. Flaming fish balls. “What?” Just fucking say it.

  He stopped pacing and stared at the floor while he rubbed the back of his neck.

  Oh, Gawd. She hoped he didn’t disappoint and take the glow off by launching into a lame, this was great but . . . ya know it was just a one-time thing speech. The past few hours of fan-freaking-tastic sex had been the perfect cure for the chronic lack of sex they’d both suffered from. A, I like you, you like me, let’s get it on, one off. Nothing more. Nothing more. He looked up and a ripple of regret moved through her. She wanted more of this confident, rugged, sexually potent man. She didn’t want it to be a one off. Her assignment would be over in four weeks, and she’d go back to DC for a few weeks after that. If he could get free, it would be no problem for her to get back. She’d never been shy about sex, and now was not the time to begin.

  “I . . .” they both said in unison. O’Brien came to her. He rubbed his chin and shook his head. She decided to let him speak first.

  “I . . . eh.”

  She said nothing.

  “I want to see you again.”

  She said nothing because she couldn’t.

  “I’ll be done with this job in five weeks and be in DC,” he said. “Can you get free and meet me someplace? Anyplace no one knows us in five or six weeks?”

  “Five or six weeks.” She paused thoughtfully and nodded. She wanted to jump in his arms, wrap her legs around him, and do a silly girlie squeal. “I can swing it,” she said in her professional commanding officer voice. “With rules.”

  He gave her a hairy eyeball look. “What kind of rules?”

  “We don’t talk about the job. Where we’ve been. What we’re doing. Nothing. This is sex only.”

  “I can handle that,” he said with one big-assed smile on his face.

  “Good,” she said with one big-assed smile on her face.

  Excerpt from Point of No Return

  Keep reading for more of Honey and Jack

  in the thrilling military romance

  Point of No Return,

  available now!

  Chapter 1

  Republic of Georgia

  May

  1600 hours

  The walls of the windowless mud hut radiated heat like an oven. The stench of animal and human waste was so pervasive it crawled over her skin like something alive. Major H. K. Thornton sat on her haunches and thumbed back her helmet. Her gaze flicked between the laminated photo taped to her wrist and the face of the girl cowering on the dirt floor. “I have a visual on the target,” she said into her radio link. “Identity confirmed.” For once, the team had received solid intel. “Extraction’s a go.”

  The target’s glazed blue eyes drifted to the Marine silhouetted in the entry against a clear high desert sky. For a moment, Thornton watched the Marine arc her weapon left, then right, sweeping the landscape for bad guys.

  “It’s okay, Jenna,” she said to the girl in a soft, measured voice. “That’s Staff Sergeant Santiago. I’m Major Thornton. We’re Marines. Your dad, Colonel Ramsey, sent us. We’re taking you home.” The rail-thin girl didn’t react. “Jenna, can you stand?” Thornton cautiously extended a hand and touched the teenager’s arm. Despite the 130-degree temperature, her skin was cold. “Jenna?” The girl’s eyes tracked back. “Can you stand? Can you walk?”

  Jenna shook her head so slightly the motion could have been taken as a shudder. She stretched out a leg from under the ruins of the school uniform she’d been wearing the day she was abducted, exposing a swollen, blood-encrusted foot.

  “I tried . . . to escape. They cut . . . bottom of my feet . . . so I couldn’t run.”

  Santiago hissed in a breath.

  Thornton adjusted the webbing on her M4 and slung the weapon to her side. “Jenna, I’m going to carry you out of here.” Years of intelligence work taught her to conceal every emotion, but right now it was damn difficult to put a cap on her anger. She moved to pick up the girl.

  “What about . . . her?” Jenna touched a mound of rags.

  “Her?” Thornton blinked. A hand, the color of concrete, rose in slow motion from the pile. Thornton watched in stunned silence as bony fingers extended in her direction.

  “Kelly. She’s . . . been here . . . longer than me.” Jenna’s voice cracked. Her chest rose and fell with the effort it took to speak in the blistering heat. “She’s sick. Hasn’t . . . eaten . . . in days.” Jenna pointed to a bowl of gray slop next to the mound, where flies congregated.

  Kelly? Thornton carefully peeled away a layer of filthy rags, sending dark bugs scrambling for new cover, and revealed a . . . creature. A girl, at least she thought it was a girl, lying on her side, knees pulled to her chest, curled into a ball like an animal trying to keep warm. Cloudy brown eyes stared from sunken sockets. Dried vomit caked her gaunt face and hair. Judging from the stench, she was lying in her own excrement. Thornton fanned a hand above the girl’s face to chase away gathering flies. “Are you Kelly Saunders?” she said, holding her breath and waiting for the response. Transparent eyelids fluttered, crusty lips moved. No words came out.

  “That’s who . . . she is,” Jenna wheezed.

  Santiago took a knee beside Thornton. “The general’s daughter who’s been missing a couple of months? Thought she was . . .”

  Thornton elbowed the staff sergeant. The search for Kelly and those who had taken her was ongoing, but all hope of finding her alive had vanished.

  Santiago gagged and clamped a gloved hand over her nose and mouth. “Daa-mn.”

  “Breathe through your mouth.” Thornton slanted a look at her staff sergeant, who glared back over the fingers pinching her nose.

  “You should have told me that before, ma’am,” Santiago said, pulling in hard breaths through her mouth. The staff sergeant tipped her head to the girl, her dark eyes narrowed. “We’re humping out of here now. Not waiting for dark?” Her voice was muffled by her hand.

  Thornton nodded. Kelly was little more than a breathing corpse. Every minute they waited to get her to medical was a minute she was closer to death.

  “We e-vacing now?” Staff Sergeant Buck’s baritone voice came though Thornton’s earpiece.

  “Affirmative,” Thornton said, her pulse jitte
ring in her temple. She looked around. No table, no chair, no place to sleep. The girls had lived this way for weeks, probably imagining they’d been forgotten and giving up hope of any rescue. She swallowed her escalating rage and pushed to her feet. There’d be time for anger and retaliation later. After these girls were safe. In the last few moments their circumstances had changed. She had to adapt and produce a drastically modified extraction plan. The team was prepared to carry one injured hostage over ridges and across the rocky terrain to safety, not two. Carrying both girls would make the ten-klick hike to the Turkish border and safety damn difficult.

  “Buck, we need that truck you saw. Taking two home.”

  “Sweet,” Buck said. “Halfway there.”

  “Buck, hold your position.” Gunny Andrews’s perfectly modulated voice ordered. Hidden in the hills, Andrews, the team’s human surveillance camera, had a commanding view of the village. “Tango moving your direction.”

  “See him.” The tension in Buck’s low whisper climbed through Thornton’s earpiece, crawling down her spine into her legs. Her hand flicked to her Heckler & Koch sidearm, the sheath holding a custom knife, and finally the extra M4 magazines.

  “Major . . . got eyes on two Tango . . . advancing your position,” Andrews said calmly, his words synced with his breath. “How . . . you want it handled?”

  Andrews was asking for a kill order. She envisioned her baby-faced sniper, Sergeant Cooper, stretched out over sharp rocks, his cheek pressed against his rifle, finger resting on the trigger, sights dialed in, ready to fire. Gunny beside him, watching the target through his scope to guide Cooper’s shot. Both still as death, save for slow measured breaths, waiting for her answer.

  Thornton looked at the girls huddled together then around the reeking squalid room. She swiped her face with a sleeve, watched wet streaks blend with dust into the pattern of the desert camos and dry. “Eliminate all Tangos.” It was what the fuckers deserved.

  Buck’s H&K 416 belched a reply first , the sound echoing against the empty shacks.

  “Help us,” Jenna cried out in a terrified plea.

  “Ma’am, need to leave your location now,” Gunny said.

  “Take Jenna,” Thornton snapped.

  Santiago back-stepped to Jenna and crouched. Thornton lifted the girl to her back and Jenna’s thin arms tightened around Santiago’s neck. “You hang on and leave the rest to me,” Santiago said, hooking her free arm around Jenna’s legs as she stood. Santiago had the strongest heart of anyone Thornton knew. If asked, she would run that girl back to the border.

  Thornton turned her attention to Kelly. Instinct told her to snatch the girl and run like hell. Training told her to take it slow, avoid trauma. She squatted and spoke the teenager’s name soft and gently. “Kelly.” The girl’s watery gaze locked on her and Thornton thought she saw a spark of hope. “Kelly, I’m going to lift you. It may hurt, but there isn’t anything I can do until we get out of here.” Thornton shifted some of the sixty pounds of equipment she wore and slipped her arms under the emaciated girl’s shoulders and knees. Kelley didn’t make a sound. Didn’t flinch.

  “Major,” Andrews said, “Tango your location. Go low.”

  Thornton twisted, bending over Kelly as close as possible without laying on her.

  “Head down,” Santiago snapped to her passenger as she flattened against the floor.

  Cooper’s single round entered and exited the frame shack, sending wood shards and dust showering over them. The Tango thudded against the outside wall.

  “Clear, Major. Move. Move!” Gunny said, as excited as he was ever going to get.

  The dit dit dit dit dit of Buck’s H&K was answered by the distinctive thumping of an AK and kept Thornton hunched over Kelly. Santiago slithered back from the door.

  “I’m leaking,” Buck groaned. “Leg.”

  Santiago stole a sideways glance at her and snaked closer.

  Thornton tucked Kelly into a corner and lifted a quivering Jenna from Santiago’s back, setting her next to the expressionless, doll-like Kelly.

  “I have something to take care of.” She touched Jenna’s cheek and nodded in Santiago’s direction. “This Marine will protect you.”

  “Ladies”—Santiago scrambled to a crouch in front of the girls—“I’m Staff Sergeant Gloria Santiago, United States Marine Corps, and I’m not gonna let anything happen to you.”

  Thornton slapped her staff sergeant’s helmet and went to get them a ride home.

  The village, long abandoned after some clan turf war, consisted of twelve bullet-riddled structures scattered along fifty yards of dusty, desolate landscape. Barren hills on one side, a fast-moving river down a rocky embankment on the other. Getting to the truck meant she’d have to cross open spaces between each building. The familiar tingle of fear tried to crowd in on her and she willed it away.

  “Gunny, where’s Buck?”

  “To your right. Three doorways,” Cooper said from his grunt’s-eye-view position.

  Thornton took a quick three count, white-knuckled her weapon, darted into the open and skidded to a stop against the wall of the next shack in a clump of dry knee-high weeds. She turned an ear to the hot moaning wind swirling between the shacks. Somewhere a door creaked on rusted hinges, metal roofing banged, but there were no human sounds. She took a quick look to the hills where Andrews and Cooper were hidden among the scrub and boulders and then bolted into the next space.

  “Tango headed toward the truck,” Gunny advised.

  “Gunny, do not fire near that truck,” she said, slamming against the next house hard enough to rattle loose boards and send up a cloud of dust.

  “Say again, ma’am.”

  “Do. Not. Fire. At Tango near that vehicle. I don’t want one of those big-assed rounds going through a body into the truck’s engine.”

  “Understood.”

  “Major, your next move you are out of sight and one Tango unaccounted for.”

  Out of sight equaled no protection. She huffed a quick breath and took two careful steps into the next space. Fucking flaming fish balls. It took her brain less than a second to process that the barrel of a Kalashnikov semiautomatic rifle was an inch from her right cheek. Her own weapon pointed over the Tango’s shoulder and provided no kill shot. She took a step back. The man holding the rifle took a step forward, following her. He pressed the AK’s barrel against her cheek. Her eyes fixed on his finger hovering in front of the trigger. He raised the barrel to the edge of her custom Oakley glasses and flicked them away. They clattered on the gravel as she took another step back. He took a step forward and her glasses crunched. He moved his cheek away from the AK’s wood stock then tilted his head slightly. She recognized him in the same moment he recognized her. A nasty grin spread across his pockmarked face. Could Cooper see that grin in the crosshairs of his rifle?

  “Major, break left,” came the instruction she waited for.

  Like an NFL linebacker making an easy tackle, she bent her left knee and dipped her shoulder. She pushed hard with her right leg, forcing her body left. A pressure wave from the six-inch sniper bullet sliced the space where she’d been a moment ago. She landed on her side, rolled, and scrambled to a half-sitting position against the nearest wall, ready to do a John Wayne and fire from the hip. She lowered her M4, no need. Cooper’s shot had erased the man’s nasty grin. Hell, it had erased his face. Most of his head. Beyond the building she leaned against, a car engine caught and rattled to life. River sounds and her raspy panting made it difficult to judge exactly where, or the distance. “Major?” Andrews’s anxious voice said.

  “Okay,” she whispered. She forced herself to a standing position and spit to rid her mouth of dirt and the taste of fear. She had no spit. Her mouth was as dry as the surrounding landscape. Cautiously she darted her head out and back around the corner of the shack. Cooper and Gunny had saved her ass once, no sense pushing it. No one. She passed under broken-out windows with scraps of cloth and plastic snapping in the wind and enter
ed the next shack, weapon high, ready to fire. Acrid smells of blood, body fluids and cooling brass assailed her nose. The Tango lay to her left just inside the door, a grizzly sucking sound coming from his chest wounds with each tortured breath.

  “He’s done,” Buck said matter-of-factly.

  Buck, blood soaking his camos from the knee down, sat on the floor, taping his shin.

  “You?”

  Instead of one of his usual smart-assed remarks, the big Marine gave her a solid nod and an apologetic look.

  “Broken?”

  He shook his head and went back to taping. “Hurts like a motherfucker though.” His eyes darted to two open packets of heavy-duty pain meds on the floor. “I’ll keep up.”

  “Heads up. Tango headed your way in that pickup,” Gunny’s voice cracked in her earpiece. The warning wasn’t necessary. The rattle and bang of the truck bouncing over rocks and potholes echoed in the small room. Thornton charged out the door into the path of an ancient Toyota. Startled, the driver swerved and braked. In a perfect world, she could have grabbed the door handle, pulled it open and jumped in. This wasn’t a perfect world. The fucking door wouldn’t open.

  The wild-eyed driver stared at her through the dust-coasted and cracked windshield, saw the M4 pointed at his head, regained his wits and floored it. The truck lurched forward and promptly stalled. The man worked frantically with the steering column until the Toyota’s engine ground to life. The rear tires spun, creating clouds of billowing moonscape dust obscuring her vision. The tires gained traction and then the rear fishtailed, narrowly missing her. Flaming fish balls. Enough of this bullshit! Thornton fired a burst into the driver’s side of the cab. A line of red decorated the small back window. The truck spun, clipping the edge of the shack and slowing forward momentum enough for her to throw herself onto the open bed. She caught sight of Buck hobbling out the door as the Toyota swerved, bounced, and righted with direction. The son of a bitch was still alive. Hit, but alive and turning the wheel with force. Each time she got a grip on the side and raised herself up he swerved violently, pitching her back down like she was on a demented amusement park ride. She flattened against the rusting metal bed to gain as much resistance as possible, hands and feet scrabbling for any hold. It wouldn’t have been so bad if the fucking tailgate wasn’t missing.