Page 19 of The Woman Left Behind

“Ground training first,” Levi said. “Then we throw you out.”

There were a few more snorts of laughter, none of which belonged to Jina. She tried to look as stony as he did. “What’s ground training?”

Jelly smiled a big, completely distrustful smile. “It’s where we teach you how not to go splat.”

Seven

“Ground training sounds good,” Jina said fervently. That meant she’d be on the ground, right? She liked being on the ground.

“Step over here with me,” Levi said shortly, turning and walking a good thirty feet away.

Jina hid her astonishment—and trepidation—and trudged in his wake, trying not to show her reluctance. Whatever induced Levi to break his normal behavior with her, meaning mostly ignoring her, had to be fairly important.

He stopped and turned so he was facing the rest of the team, folding his arms across his chest. His impassive dark gaze fastened on her as she approached, each step slower than the last because she really didn’t want to have a one-on-one conversation with him, given how well the first—and only—one had gone. She stopped a good five feet away, crossed her arms in the same posture he’d taken, and waited. On the theory that she didn’t want to look him in the eye, she stared instead at his nose; it was close enough to his eyes that maybe he wouldn’t notice she wasn’t exactly meeting his gaze.

Her theory didn’t work. She couldfeelhim looking at her, so intensely it was almost like a touch that sent waves of heat washing over her skin. She shifted uneasily, wondering what the odds were that he’d give up and tell her what he wanted. Those odds had to be long, because he simply waited, silently, until she couldn’t stand it any longer and made eye contact. Immediately all her nerve endings jolted, as if she’d grabbed a live wire. His dark gaze bored into her, an invisible force field battering at her, scouring her from the inside out, frying her blood in her veins.

Shit.Silently she acknowledged that she let him get to her way too much, but she didn’t know what she could do about it. He was the team leader, for now the ruler of her universe. She wanted to poke at him until she broke through that iron control of his, see what she could stir up, and dear God she had to be absolutely crazy to even think of such a thing.

“What?” she asked, unable to keep the truculence from her tone.Damn it.She really needed to work on her attitude, she thought, annoyed at herself. Her brothers had always said her mouth would get her in big trouble one day, and she’d spent years proving them right.

His eyes regarded her as remotely as if she weren’t a sentient, carbon-based life-form. The twitch at one corner of his mouth told her she was about an inch from overstepping her bounds; she sucked in a deep breath and braced herself for whatever he was about to unload on her, but a small, deeply buried part of her quivered with excitement that finally,finally,she was getting a reaction from him.

“You just don’t have any stopping sense, do you?” he finally observed.

“Sorry,” she muttered. “And, no.” Like he had to ask. She’d spent the past several months demonstrating to all of them that she and stopping sense had nothing more than a nodding acquaintance.

“One of these days you’re going to push too hard, little girl, and then you’ll be on the road of no return,” he said in an eerie echo of her brothers’ predictions.

Little girl? She swallowed her ire at the dismissive phrase, because she’d pushed and she knew it. Levi was the boss, and they didn’t have to be in the military for his orders to count. The team leaders were the badasses, and what they said went, at least as far as each leader’s own team. Axel MacNamara might run the entire agency on the administration side, but he listened to his team leaders and got them everything they needed. Without them, the GO-Teams were nothing.

Levi waited, giving her a chance to spout off again. Jina pressed her lips together. She could feel words pushing against the back of her throat, but she bore down, called on her seldom-used smart-ass control, and kept them there.

After giving her time to verbally hang herself, he gave a brief nod indicating satisfaction that he’d sufficiently slapped her down—for now—and moved on to business. “Here’s what’s going to happen, and why. Your group is the first bunch of trainees who’ve had no prior jump experience, which means we aren’t set up to do training the way you’d get it if you’d been in the military. We’ve had a short tower built, and a swing-landing trainer in a big Quonset hut, but a big tower would call too much attention to us, so your first jump will be an actual jump. Has to be.”

An actual jump.Her stomach didn’t wait, it jumped right then, up into her throat. If she’d needed to answer, tough, because she couldn’t have managed to say a word. And what the heck was a swing-landing trainer? She didn’t want to swing while she was landing. For that matter, “landing” meant she was in the air heading down, and she didn’t want to do that, either.

“Boom is a certified jump instructor,” Levi continued. “He’s going to be in charge of your training, and it’s going to be fast. In the military, jump school takes three weeks. We’re going to have you jumping in less than a week, but it’s individual training instead of instructors handling a whole group, so it’ll work out to about the same. But don’t fucking waste our time—got it? If you can’t do it, walk out now.”

That was what he wanted. She could see it in his eyes, hear it in the gravel of his voice, see it in his body language. He wanted her gone.

Okay, damn it, she hadn’t wanted to be here any more than he’d wanted her here, but she’d committed her time, a lot of energy, and a buttload of pain, to doing this. She’d become provisional friends with most of the guys—provisional because they joked around with her, teased her, sometimes deliberately making themselves targets of her ire because they liked winding her up, but they were all still aware that she hadn’t made the final cut yet. She didn’t want to be provisional, she wanted todo this. She wanted to meet their friends and families, she wanted to be invited to their cookouts, feel as if she belonged.

She straightened her shoulders and squared up with him. Even standing as tall as she could, he was so damn big her head barely reached shoulder level on him, but she refused to show that she was intimidated—just a little—by him. “I want to do it.”Lie.“I don’t like giving up.”Truth.“I’ll do my best.”Maybe.No, she’d try her damnedest, because she didn’t know any other way, so change that last one totruth. Two out of three wasn’t bad.

The corner of his mouth did that twitching thing again. She did a quick mental check to make sure she hadn’t subconsciously crossed her fingers and he’d noticed, but no, her fingers were doing what they were supposed to do, clutching her own biceps to mimic his position. Maybe that was what was annoying him, that she was mimicking him. If so... tough.

Typical Levi, he instantly went back to being all about the work. “Today you’ll learn about the different types of parachutes, how and why they’re different, and you’ll get into harness. It’s possible to harness yourself, but mostly buddies or instructors help because it’s awkward. When you’re getting in the harness, Boom will be passing straps between your legs for you to buckle in place. It’s not a big deal and he won’t be copping a feel, so don’t squeal and do something silly.”

“I don’t do silly,” she growled, which might not be completely true in all situations but in this one she was serious. There were a couple of the guys who might let their hands go places where they shouldn’t, but Boom wasn’t one of them. She trusted him, and he wouldn’t do anything to make her uncomfortable.

“Just letting you know what will happen. After you get through ground training, then you’ll do tower training, jumping off a thirty-four-foot tower into different ground conditions like sand or pebbles, learning how to land, how to roll.”

“Won’t jumping from that high break my legs?” Or possibly kill her. She might not live long enough to die in a failed parachute jump. She’d read once that most lethal falls were from something like fifteen feet.

“You’ll be harnessed to a safety line. If we didn’t know what we’re doing,” he said impatiently, “none of us would survive training.”

She had to give him that, so she nodded.

---