Page 7 of Three Cranky SEALS and a Christmas Menace

Todd Hampstead had been the perfect candidate, given her time constraints. He was three years older than her and managed a family-owned coffee shop that Mercedes only started frequenting two months ago. They struck up a good friendshipimmediately, discovering they had a lot in common. He was nice-looking, had good manners, and had excellent hygiene. When she began her madcap plan to lose her virginity two days before Christmas, the first thing on her list of things to do was find a suitable possessor of a penis.

The thought of hiring an escort for the task, while appropriate, didn’t feel right. And so she asked Todd. He felt like the right choice. She felt safe with him, comfortable. Sure, there weren’t any fireworks between them, and there didn’t have to be because he was just one friend helping another friend out. She also made sure to add she wasn’t looking for a relationship, just a standard deflowering, and she was sure this wouldn’t mess up their friendship. She just wanted experience and first-hand knowledge. He understood the assignment even after she’d listed everything she wanted done. Everything was perfect, until it wasn’t.

Just damn. Todd was her ticket out of virgin-ville, and now he was gone. It was all her brother’s best friends’ fault: Holden, Waylan, and Myles.

Furious now, the wavy curls she’d styled her hair into flattened into damp tresses around her face, and now shivering, she stormed back inside to give them the third degree before she killed them. They may be tough, lethal military guys, but they hadn’t met a twenty-two-year-old with a virginity she no longer wanted.

Chapter Seven

Oh, she was mad. So, so mad. Mercedes slammed the door shut and glared at the men ruining her life.

“Are you three crazy?” She began and realized she desperately wanted to know the answer. How could they be sane and act the way they did?

“You had no right to scare Todd off like that.” She fumed as she searched for her phone. Maybe she could salvage her plans with some damage control. All she had to do was call Todd, tell him to come back, it was a misunderstanding on the part of her brother’s Neanderthal friends, get rid of those three caveman bullies, and resume with the program.

“Did you threaten him? Is that what you did? Why? Why would you do such a thing?” she asked, pulling up Todd on her contacts. Before she could connect the call, Myles snatched it out of her hand with lightning speed, did something, then handed it back to her before she could ask him what he thought he was doing.

Whatever, but rude. Except, when she tried to find Todd’s contact details. The six-foot-four tyrant deleted Todd fromher phone. She hadn’t memorized his number; who did that nowadays anyway?

Okay, this was getting crazier.

“You deleted Todd’s details from my phone,” she said incredulously.

“Yes,” Waylan said. “We don’t want the fucker coming back here thinking he’s saving the damsel from distress.”

“Are you nuts? You had no right to do that.”

“We have every right to do that. Look,Missades, we’re just back from a mission from hell. We’ve been shot at, wrestled with a crocodile, got bitten on the fucking ass by an ant, and ate wild berries for days on end,” Waylan said. “All we want to do is sleep. In peace. In this cabin. Alone. Just the three of us.”

“First of all, and again for the millionth time, my name is Mercedes. Mer. Ced. Es. Not Misshades.”

Come to think of it, they’ve never pronounced her name right, not since she was a little girl, and followed them and her brother around everywhere. She loved her brother, but she utterly and completely adored his friends, clearly not knowing any better at that time.

At a party her mom had thrown for Jeff for his sixteenth, she’d overheard a group of girls in bikinis talking about how they’d like to bang her brother’s friends, over and over again, so she banged them instead. With a stick. Her defense? She’d hurt anyone who wanted to hurt them. In her defense also, she’d only been six years old, and she had no idea what the termbanged meant.

“Second of all—”

Her attention was taken off what she wanted to say next as she now followed their movements.

They moved around the cabin, touching her things.

“What do you think you’re doing? Don’t touch that.”

She snatched her panties from Myles—the one she’d been wearing before she changed into her seductress garb. But then Waylan grabbed her track bottoms, the thermal long-sleeve top, and her hoodie and shoved them into her hands. Holden piled her boots onto the armful of clothes and spun her around in the direction of the bathroom.

“Get dressed. You’re next out the door.”

“Excuse me,” she said, spinning around to face them. What the real heck was wrong with these men?

She knew they were some big shots in the military doing dangerous covert work for the government, but maybe they’d forgotten how civilized people behaved in the rest of the world. Certainly they’d forgotten the simple concept of first come, first served.

“But I was here first. You should be the ones leaving.”

“Does Jeff know you’re here?”

“No, but that doesn’t change anything.”

“It changes everything. Jeff knows we’re here. He was the one who left us a vehicle at the air base with the keys to this cabin. We’re supposed to be here. You? Not.”

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