.

called her Ali. Sarah had written between her tears, the words blurring as she poured out heartfelt words for Ali. She’d included a CD with the letter of all the photos she’d taken of Ted over the past three months they had flown together. Sarah closed her eyes and hoped that Ali would treasure the photos and that her words would help her bear her grief in some small way.

      Making a grumpy sound, Sarah finished off her breakfast. She hated going to the chow hall precisely because she was usually the only female. Ted wasn’t there anymore to escort her and keep the men from hitting on her. And all the Jaguar pilots were done eating and in the air. Sarah tried to eat with the Apache pilots every time she could.

      After she pulled on a pair of tennis shoes, she put a towel and her weight lifting gloves into a small bag and got ready to go work out. It was 0700, and most of the guys would be out of the gym by now. Maybe some of the off-duty Apache women pilots would be over there. It would be nice to have some female company. Sarah worked out with them as often as she could.

      Of late, she’d been pulling eight hours of flight time every day or night, the max any pilot could fly in a given twenty-four-hour period. There had been no downtime since the loss of the two pilots, and she knew she needed to work out. Sarah pulled on a loose T-shirt that had a black dragon snarling on the front of it. She always wore it in the hopes it would scare off any guy who thought about giving her a line and trying to pick her up. She put on her red cotton gym pants, pulled on her green baseball cap with the medevac squadron symbol on it and left her tent.

      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.”