Out Rider. Lindsay McKenna

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      Only she’d traded them for an alcoholic CO, Major Terrence Paddington, who had scared the hell out of her. He didn’t like or trust the women in his company. He didn’t care she was a highly trained dog handler who was good at what she did. He didn’t like women in combat, pure and simple. And he tried to keep her safe so that his blemished record wouldn’t look worse than it already did. No one wanted a woman to die in combat. That was a huge no-no. A black mark on her CO’s personnel jacket. And Dev had felt like she had been in that terrifying closet once again: trapped. Only with Major Paddington, he wanted to keep her imprisoned in that invisible closet for her entire deployment.

      Dev began to see an overall pattern in her life: one of being crammed and hidden away by men. By the time Gordon had come along, she’d simply wanted to be out in nature, enjoying fresh air, the sun on her face, and doing her job tracking. But Gordon... Oh no, she could not cry! Dev’s fingers curved inward into her palm as she sat there, head tilted forward, her mouth compressed to stop the memories.

      The memories came, anyway. But she could feel that invisible blanket sliding across her shoulder, warming her, protecting her, and she knew it came from Sloan. He sat there quietly and she felt no urgency to speak. Her throat tightened. A desperation surged through her like a clenched fist ramming up from her wildly beating heart, into her throat, past the forming lump, and leaping into her mouth. And then...

      “I hated Gordon always watching me,” she began in a desperate tone. Dev kept her eyes shut, not wanting to see what lay in Sloan’s eyes. Just the sensation of that immaterial embrace of his, that sense of utter safety surrounding her, allowed the words to tear out of her, never heard by another human being until now. “I could... I felt...his eyes... His eyes were always on me. I swear to God, I could feel this hot, burning sensation on my back when he came in and found me. I felt his eyes following me and the feeling that came with it...” Dev shuddered, the words jamming up in her aching throat.

      “I—I could feel him wanting me. It was dirty. It was...awful. It was sexual, and he scared me. I tried to deal with it. I told myself it was in my head, that I was imagining things, that is was me, not him. I tried to convince myself that it was me.” Her voice broke.

      Dev felt the beaded coolness of the condensation on the outside of the wineglass beneath her fingertips. She focused on it because the emotions writhing within her threatened to overwhelm the dissolving control she had over them. “But it wasn’t me,” she said. She hung her head, chin against her chest, fingers tightening around the stem. “Three months went by and he would quietly come into a room where I was and come up behind me... God,” Dev whispered unsteadily, wiping her eyes and opening them, staring sightlessly and straight ahead. “He never announced himself. He would always find me when I was alone, in a back room, when no other people were around. He was stalking me. Waiting. I didn’t know why, except I felt so damned scared my brain would freeze.”