Page 7 of The Woman Left Behind

“Some of the places we go, you’ll need to wear dark contacts. Your eye color is too light. Get some, and get used to them. Also, if you aren’t already on long-term birth control, take care of that too.”

She firmly kept her mouth closed. This was one of the times when no comment was the best response. Whether or not she was on birth control, and what type, was none of his business. Besides, she could see his point, and he didn’t need to belabor it. They would be in some dangerous places; if she was captured, her treatment would be rough, rape a given. Her stomach knotted at the dangerous turn her life was taking, and whether or not she could go through with this. Maybe she should walk away now, given that her heart wasn’t in this. She could walk into Axel MacNamara’s office and tell him she couldn’t do it, let him fire her, and collect unemployment while she looked for another job.

She didn’t have to stay in the D.C. area. She could always go home, to south Georgia. Her family was there, she’d have support, and she could slip back into the lazy stream of life there as if she’d never hit the banks running in her haste to establish herself as an independent adult.

But she’d left because she wanted to test herself, and she’d stumbled into a damn interesting job. She was well paid, and even more, she looked forward to going in to work every day. That was worth a lot.

Quit?

How could she make herself quit? How could she stop trying?

A sane person would quit. A sane person wouldn’t sit there listening to her boss telling her that everyone else on his team was worth more than she was.

This was proof positive that she wasn’t sane, because instead of telling him she quit, she said, “Do you have a tracker on my car, or do you need to know where we met the van this morning?” Because he hadn’t asked, and if he was taking her to the office building he was wrong; this morning they’d been directed to meet up at a different parking lot some distance away.

“I put the tracker on last night,” he said tersely.

To her silent astonishment and fury, he wasn’t lying.

Three

She was the most stubborn little shit he’d ever seen, Levi thought dispassionately as he silently watched her almost fall out of his truck, then limp over to her car. He had to fight for the dispassion, which irritated him to hell and back. Everything about this situation irritated him to hell and back.

If it worked, Mac’s idea was a damn good one—ifit worked. Taking raw amateurs and training them to the point where they wouldn’t be a liability was a tall order but not an impossible one. Taking a raw amateur woman who obviously didn’t want to be there and bringing her up to snuff verged on the damn near impossible, so of course Mac had given her tohim.

He and the guys had talked it over last night, decided then that if they were going to be saddled with her, they needed to be the ones overseeing her training and the sooner the better, and he’d cleared it with Mac. Then they’d watched her for a while, before approaching, to get an idea of what they were dealing with. Some guy had shoved her, causing her to lose ground in the run, but she’d caught up with him and tripped him. “Good,” Boom had grunted. “Saves me from kicking his ass at the end of the day.”

Levi grunted in return. He wouldn’t have kicked the guy’s ass, but he was glad she’d taken up for herself. The team couldn’t function if they had to deal with a crybaby. But Boom was married and had a couple of kids, the youngest a three-year-old little girl. As the father of a daughter he’d since gone bat-shit crazy, swearing he was going to lock her in a convent when she was six, and he’d geld any dick swinger who got anywhere near her.

“We can’t protect her,” Levi said evenly. “She has to pull her own weight, or this won’t work.”

“I know, damn it, but—”

“No buts. No taking up for her. We have to see what she’s made of.”

And they had. What she was made of was bullheaded stubbornness, mixed with cussedness and a total inability to keep her mouth shut. She’d glared at them, cursed all their villages, called down the ten plagues of Egypt on them—and tried her damnedest to do everything they’d told her to do. She’d gone splat more times than he could count, eaten dirt, plowed headfirst into a mud puddle, blistered her hands and probably her feet, and not once had she asked for help.

Several times today he’d had to stop himself from catching her when he saw she was going to fall, even if “catching her” would have meant grabbing her by the ponytail. Instead he’d let her splat, hoping she’d say, “I quit,” but she never had. She’d muttered, she’d cussed both under and over her breath, she’d called them sadists and told them numerous times how much she hated them all, but each and every time she’d gotten to her feet and kept at it.

How in hell was she still moving? She wasn’t anywhere near being in shape. But she’d set her jaw in an obstinate look he and his guys had quickly become familiar with and kept on plugging. Jelly had made a comment about maybe trying his luck with her, and Levi had had to shut him down fast.

“You don’t fuck with teammates,” he’d said flatly. “That’s the best way I know of to mess up the team. She’s off-limits to all of us. If you’re thinking about her that way, shut it down now.”

Too damn bad he had to include himself in that order. But he, more than any of the others, had to stick to that rule. Doing anything else would tear the team apart and considering their lives all depended on teamwork, he’d do what he had to do.

All the single guys had looked disappointed, except for Voodoo, who hadn’t warmed to her at all, but he was such a surly bastard he didn’t like himself most of the time so he didn’t count.

Levi felt surly about the situation himself, above and beyond having an amateur inserted into their tight-knit group. All of the GO-Teams were tight-knit; they had to be, to get the job done and survive. It was too damn bad she appealed to him, not so much in how she looked—though she was pretty enough, not flashy except for maybe her eyes, which were really blue but with a yellow ring around the pupil. She had boobs and a butt, but not much of them. She had a lot of dark brown hair, shiny like a little kid’s until she got coated in dust. What appealed to him most was that attitude and mouthiness, when common sense should have told her to button her lip. She hadn’t, and he liked that.

Didn’t matter. She was off-limits. He’d cut her no more slack than he did the others, and if she couldn’t do the job... well, then, that changed the rules of the game.

He knew where she’d left her car because the bus always picked up the newbies at the same place. He gave a quick grin at how she’d fallen for that bullshit about putting a GPS on her car; sooner or later she’d find out he’d lied, and the team would get a kick out of listening to her bitch at him. He had a thick skin; he could take it. In fact, he looked forward to it.

“Soak in a hot tub,” was Levi’s last bit of imparted wisdom just before he’d let her out beside her Corolla. “And drink a lot of water.”

Jina had muttered a reply that was a sound, not a real word. She knew how to deal with sore muscles. Her only doubt was whether or not she’d be able to climb into the tub—and whether or not she’d drown once she was in there because she was too exhausted to sit upright.

Her muscles had stiffened enough during the drive that she didn’t “get out” of the truck so much as she fell out and had to grab the door to keep from face-planting on the concrete parking lot. Without looking at him she closed the door—firmly, but not indulging herself by slamming it—and shuffled around to the driver’s side of the Corolla. Because she wasn’t stupid, she hadn’t taken a purse that day; her remote was on a sturdy chain around her neck, and the remote itself tucked snugly into her sports bra. She clumsily fished it out and unlocked the door, opened it.

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