Conquering Zeus (SEALs On Fire)
Thank you for purchasing this Wild Rose Press, Inc. publication.
Conquering Zeus
by
Cerise DeLand
SEALs On Fire
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales, is entirely coincidental.
Conquering Zeus
COPYRIGHT © 2012 by Cerise DeLand
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission of the author or The Wild Rose Press, Inc. except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.
Contact Information: [email protected]
Cover Art by
Diana Carlile
The Wild Rose Press, Inc.
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Adams Basin, NY 14410-0708
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Publishing History
First Scarlet Rose Edition, January 2013
Digital ISBN 978-1-61217-803-5
Published in the United States of America
Dedication
To the staff at Wild Rose Press who are so creative, positive and efficient to work with!
Many thanks for all you do!
PRAISE FOR AUTHOR
Cerise DeLand
AND HER BOOKS
PARIS EXPOSE
“Sinfully hot!”
~Romance Junkies
“Bring a fan, and plenty of ice water, you'll need it!”
~Long and Short Reviews
POWER POSITION
“Prepare yourself for a wild, hot ride. The steaminess never lets up as they rock, glide and slide their way to ecstasy. Amanda and Jack are as opposite as they come but they find a way to make each other vulnerable, needy and sexy all at the same time. Amanda is dealing with a new lover after the death of her husband. Jack is dealing with uncontrollable hunger for his boss. The scenes are well-written and will leave the reader wishing they were one of the characters in the book if only to get some relief.”
~You Gotta Read Reviews.com
Chapter One
Swimming at night, naked, in a wild ocean was every day duty to a guy who did better time than an Olympic gold medalist. But Zeus wasn’t pounding away at the Atlantic looking for speed or glory. Relief from frustration was his goal and, damn it, jumping into this god-awful warm bath water at midnight was not working! He was supposed to be enjoying the stand-by time and his birthday tomorrow here with his buddies in his SEAL team. Instead, he chewed himself out about women. Correction.
One woman.
He cut through the crests of black ocean and spurred himself on.
Faster.
He was on the home stretch. How far had he swum?
Five miles? Six?
Hell, he’d done that to qualify for SEAL training.
This little expedition was not nearly tough enough to change his focus. Remembering a woman he should forget. Keeping in mind the hostage he and his SEAL team had rescued seven months ago. Kim.
Silently, he cursed and forced himself to concentrate on his breaststroke. What a laugh. The Keep In Mind games they learned in BUD/s training and played now to maintain their edge or prep for a mission was eating up his brain cells. Yeah, he could keep her in mind, all right. Hair like the golden white swirl of sand dunes. Eyes, dangerous and dark green as jungle fronds. That sweet mouth and killer dimple in her cheek.
“Come back and see me sometime,” she had urged him three weeks ago as he bid her
adios
after his latest surprise visit to her.
Yeah, baby. I’ve done that too often already. Do it every time I get stateside and I cost myself sanity, big time. Cost you yours too, judging by the sultry look in your eyes when I arrived at your condo door bearing flowers.
Hell. Swimming wasn’t working. He lifted his head to grab a breath and caught sight of the lights of the McMansion he and his Arapaho teammates had been given for the weekend. Sure, he’d worked up a sweat. Even an appetite. He’d take out his frustrations by slicing and dicing to rustle up a huge pot of
caldo
. Make his pals eat it when they stumbled in. If they did, they’d most likely come with a woman attached at the hip. Maybe one on each hip.
Hell.
Why not me?
Pissed at himself for leaving Coyote and Jagger at the rockin’ Friday night beach bar scene hours earlier at Sunset Pier, he pushed through his temper and used it as fuel.
Of all the women in all the joints in the world, the blonde bombshell who doesn’t walk in there tonight is the one I want.
He pounded through the waves, spotting someone lean and female strolling the beach with a sizable dog.
They were harmless. He had jumped in naked. No matter. Whoever it was would be long gone by the time he hauled his bare ass up the sands toward the house.
He angled for the shore, fighting memories of running door-to-door in an Egyptian shantytown to find Kim. His team had landed the night before, marched hours over abandoned desert to the tribesmen’s village, and then fanned out to search for her and two other hostages. Amid machine gun fire, he’d discovered her in a tin-roof lean-to, weary and weak, dehydrated, blindingly beautiful and bravely smiling at him in her filthy rags.
“Keep your head down,” he had whispered, pushing her to sit beneath the edge of the window in the hovel where the Bedouin tribesman had tied her to the post of an old iron bed frame.
With a classic profile, Nordic and tall, Kim Stansfield, reporter and hostage, stared at him, sunburned and dazed from hunger and thirst. Despite her dire condition, she smiled, pointing at his face and the green and brown desert camouflage paint that disguised his features. “Are you wearing make-up?”
“
What?
You don’t like a man to wear foundation?” He fluttered his lashes at her, whipped an MRE drink from his vest and shoved it toward her. “Guzzle this.”
Grasping the pouch with shaking hands, she downed it while he sawed off her chains with his Spyderco blade. She coughed, choked, then hacked some of it back up.
“Cancel the guzzle. Sip it. Let me see if you’re fit to travel.” He ran his hands over her body, checking for sprains or injuries from beatings. God knew what these animals had done to a blonde Western woman who didn’t suit their ideals for dress or habits. After seven days of captivity, her body was still sleek, but limp from lack of nutrition. Outside, the rat-tat-tat of machine gun fire and bursts from his buddies’ Sig Sauers told him his team had run into her captors and it was his job to snatch her and run.
“I can’t go with you,” she rasped, wiping drops of the liquid from the corner of her mouth with the sleeve of her dirty linen
abaya
.
The hell you can’t
. He shot her a look that spoke his thoughts. But hostages, especially women, needed assurances. He knew how to do that. Grandmothers, mothers, sisters, and cousins. He had gentled them all. As the only man in a huge Tex-Mex family since his father had passed away when he was a baby, Jesus “Zeus” Calderon knew how to talk to women. “You’ll be fine. Do as I say.”
This female, he now knew, tended not to follow anyone’s orders. Not her newspaper editor’s. Not the American government’s. He had studied her top-notch professional background and her tough-as-nails character, all as part of his team’s mission prep. She might look like a runway model, but she was an Amazon in spirit and truth. Though she hailed from preppy American and crusty British diplomatic stock, Kimberly Morran Stansfield was a dare devil, thirty-one-year old investigative journalist who spoke fluent Arabic and had used her excellent skills to file stories from Bengazi and Cairo during the Arab Spring. For more than three years in the Middle East, she had strolled through gunfire, air strikes, and riots. Seven days ago, while working an angle on famine in Egypt after the overthrow of Mubarak, she had been abducted and held for ransom by a renegade tribe of Bedouin.
“You don’t understand,” she objected, clutching his shirt in one fist. “They expected you. Planned for this.” She coughed again, and he fretted about how deeply the spasms wracked her body. “They’ll kill my cameramen Johnson and Hassan if you take me. Said they’d torture them first.”
“No, they won’t.”
“But—“
“We’re getting your two guys. No worries. Then we’re putting down your captors.”
“How many are you?” she asked, the reverence in her voice a prayer.
“Enough.” He smiled at her then, and it was as if the sun multiplied into a thousand more when she grinned back at him. “Drink all of that. Fast as you can. It’s got your meds in there.”
She had a chronic condition of high red platelets. That was the reason the SEALs had come for her and her colleagues as quickly as they had. Delay by even two more days and she would have died. Besides, this particular group of Bedouins had shown their hand at violence last year when they had kidnapped a French female television commentator. That woman they had brutally tortured and killed. Without a cause, save their own enrichment, this nomadic group tried to ransom those whom they abducted. And they always abducted women.
“They’re cowards,” he told her as he checked her bare feet, concluding he would simply carry her with him. “And they’re dead meat.”
Laughing hoarsely, she put a hand to her temple and swayed in delight. “Woosy. Think I’ve had too much to drink. Can you do that? Take them all?”
“My only job is you.”
She had laughed then, giddy with the strength of the MRE. Drawing his face down to hers, she planted a big fat kiss on his cheek. “Color me grateful, SEAL of my heart. Your wish is my command.”
“Good. Put your arms around me and don’t let go.”
In those Code Red circumstances under fire from smart-ass terrorists, he had chuckled. Then he’d caught her up in his arms and run out of that squalid village toward his team, just as they’d planned. Then for two days, his only thought had been her safety as their Apache gunship had been crippled by the renegades—and the two of them had sprinted together from one hut to another in the sprawling village. Eating MREs, she drank her special meds and gained strength. Still, by the time they joined his Arapaho team and all of them rendezvoused with another gunship crew and they winged their way to a carrier, she was exhausted—and Zeus cared enough to visit her two or three times a day in sickbay.
He had even sought her out a month later in Washington D.C. where she recuperated at her parent’s home. Then, last month, he’d been eaten up by curiosity to learn if what he’d detected in D.C. in her manner was the lure that had him tossing in his bed at night, waking up with world class hard-ons, wanting only her.
Shit. What a dreamer he could be.
Go have a cold one. Forget her.
He headed for the house, his toes squishing on the murky ocean floor. Scanning the length of the beach, he saw no one. No woman. No dog, either. The solitary stroller could not have disappeared along the dunes in so few minutes. Maybe she had ducked into the house next door while he was otherwise occupied, mooning over Kim. Fine by him. She wouldn’t mess with him. Few men did, let alone women. He hadn’t earned his nickname Zeus because he looked like a pushover.
Swiping water from his pecs, he trudged toward their Spanish hacienda. Moonlight conspired with the big brazier lights burning on their rental’s deck and infinity pool to cast beams along the shore. He raked back his shoulder-length hair along his scalp, ocean water sluicing his chest and groin, the humid air of Key West warming his massive body. Shaking the drops from his arms and fingers, he marched past the pool house. Picked up his pager from the table top. And stopped.
Someone watched him.
He knew it. His night vision was superb. His senses, keen. Humans had a sharp sense of being watched—and a SEAL was trained to find anyone who stalked him. Zeus raised his nose to inhale and listen. Wet dog. Panting. Forty yards to his left.
Zeus turned toward the animal. He narrowed his gaze, noting the size of the canine that pranced toward him. Sixty pounds of fun, the mutt sported a white chest, brown fur, and paws the size of dinner plates.
No. Can’t be. But it is Harry.
Zeus stood still as Harry’s companion rose to her feet, clumsy in her effort, then brushed sand from her hands. His heart, thumping from his midnight swim, did a little cha-cha as he watched her emerge from the shadows of the cabana.
Kim.
“Hi, there,” she said, as if he had known all along she was here in Key West.