Roses are red, violets are blue, she stunk, all right, pee-you! . . .
Camille Dumaine was dragging her feet as she walked from the beach at the Coronado Navy SEAL training compound, her almost-thirty-year-old bones feeling every jarring step of her just completed six-mile jog in heavy boots on wet sand under a bright, ninety-degree California sun. Fun, fun, fun!
Didn’t help that she was sweating like a pig or that one of the swabbies in the newbie class had barfed all over her during “sugar cookies,” an exercise designed to punish. Also didn’t help that she heard a male voice call out, “Yo, Camo! The CO wants to see you.”
It was Trond Sigurdsson, whose Navy SEAL nickname was Easy. All SEALs got appropriate, and not-so-appropriate, nicknames when they first entered BUD/S training, Basic Underwater Demolition SEAL. Goose, Whiz, Stud, Dog, K–4, Geek, Spidey, Zombie, F.U., JAM, Slick. Trond, or Easy, was a mite lazy, known to always look for the easy way.
Same nicknaming was true of the elite WEALS, Women on Earth, Air, Land, and Sea, the sister unit to the SEALs, of which Camille was a charter member, two years of training and five years on duty now. Thus Camille’s nickname of Camo, which wasn’t a play on her name, or not totally, but was based on her ability to camouflage herself, no matter the setting. Being invisible in a crowd could be invaluable for a special forces operative, male or female, she’d learned on more than one occasion. It was one of the prime reasons she’d been recruited to begin with.
A chameleon, that’s what she would put on her résumé, if she had one. Who knew, growing up in New Orleans’s upscale Garden District, that being of average height and weight, with plain brown hair and eyes, and just a touch of Creole coloring in her skin, would be such an asset? Certainly not her, and definitely not her father and mother, Dr. Emile Dumaine and Dr. Jeannette Dumaine, world-renowned professors of Southern studies at Tulane University and authors of numerous books on the subject, or her overachieving brother, Alain Dumaine, who was a NASA rocket scientist—(No kidding! There really are rocket scientists.)—currently teaching at Princeton University. But she had learned early on that, with the aid of makeup, clothing, a wig, even something as simple as posture or hand gestures, she could change herself into whatever she wanted to be. (Honest, Mother, I wasn’t in the French Quarter after midnight. You heard the police description of those underage kids, “drunk as skunks.” And they thought one was me? Blond, six foot tall, boobs out to here. Ha, ha, ha.)
“I need to shower first,” she told Easy.
“I think Mac means now. They’ve been holding off the meeting ’til you got back from your run.” He sniffed the air and took a step back, even as he spoke, and then grinned. Easy knew well and good that SEALs and WEALS had to work just as hard, physically, after they’d earned their trident pins, to keep in shape. Smelling ripe was not so unusual. “The more you sweat in training, the less you bleed in battle” was a familiar mantra. “Just make sure you stand downwind,” Trond suggested.
A meeting? He mentioned a meeting? She went immediately alert. Rumors had been circulating for weeks about a new mission. One that involved taking down those African scumbags who had been kidnapping young girls for sex slaves. Boko Haram, or whatever terrorist-du-jour group felt compelled to perform atrocities for some self-professed higher good. Camille felt passionately about what was being done to these innocent children in the name of religion, and she wanted in on this mission. Partly she was infuriated by a women’s rights issue, but it was also her history as a Creole that fueled her fire. Camille’s great-grandmother many times removed—her namesake, actually—had been “sold” at one of the famous pre–Civil War Quadroon Balls when she was only fifteen.
She watched as another man joined Easy. The similarities, and the differences, between the two men were immediately apparent. Both were very tall, probably six foot four, lean, and well muscled, but whereas Easy’s attire—athletic shorts, drab green SEAL T-shirt, and baseball cap, socks, and boondockers—said military to the bone, this guy wore a golf shirt tucked into khaki pants with a belt sporting an odd buckle in the shape of wings, designer loafers without socks, and a spiffy gold watch. Whereas Easy looked as if he was about to work the O-course, the other man carried an over-the-shoulder, high-end, leather laptop case, more suited to Simi Valley. The most dramatic difference was between Easy’s dark high-and-tight haircut, and the new guy’s light brown hair spritzed into deliberate disarray. The pale blue eyes they both shared were the gravy on this feast for the eyes.
Camille wasn’t drawn to overendowed men, especially ones who were so vain they moussed their hair in the morning, especially since she worked in testosterone central where muscles were the norm, but holy moly! This man, probably no more than thirty, was the epitome of sex on the hoof.
She licked her lips and forced herself to calm down. I look like hell, she reminded herself. On a good day, this superior male specimen wouldn’t give me a passing glance. After three failed near-marriages, I do not need another complication. Wash your mind, girl. While I’m at it, I better check to make sure I’m not drooling. “Your brother, I presume?” she said to Easy.
“How could you tell?” Easy said with a laugh. “Camo, this is my brother Harek Sigurdsson. Harek”—he nodded his head in her direction—“this is Camille Dumaine, the female Navy SEAL I told you about.”
Why would Easy be discussing me with his brother? Definitely not proper protocol for secretive special forces members to be made known to civilians, even a family member. And why do the SEALs continually refer to the WEALS as female SEALs, as if they aren’t a powerful force on their own? So irritating! She frowned at Easy, who just grinned. The idiot! Even if he was married to a fellow WEALS member and a good friend of Camille’s, Nicole Tasso, his charm was wasted on her.
His brother, on the other hand . . . whoo boy!
She took the hand that Harek extended to her as he said, “I’ve heard so much about you that—”
They both froze, extended hands still clasped. A sensation, like an electrical shock, except softer and coming in waves, rippled from his fingers into hers, then rushed to all her extremities. It was like having world-class sex without all the bother.
“What is that odor?” Harek asked, as if stunned.
Talk about an instant lust destroyer! “Vomit,” she disclosed.
He shook his head. “No. Roses.” He closed his eyes, leaned forward slightly, and inhaled deeply. “Hundreds and hundreds of roses.” Turning to his brother, he asked, “Can’t you smell it?”
“Are you demented? She smells like she’s been rolling in . . .” Easy’s voice trailed off as something seemed to occur to him. “The mating scent! Finally! You’ve been bitten! Oh man! Oh man! Mike swore a moratorium on any more human mating. I can’t wait to tell Vikar and the others.”
“No! That’s impossible!” Harek stared at her now like she was some strange, repulsive creature. And what was it with those slightly elongated incisors of his? She hadn’t noticed them at first. Not that they looked bad. It was just that today, with all the modern orthodontics, folks, especially male ones pretentious enough to get designer haircuts (she would bet his cost at least a hundred dollars at some high-priced unisex salon), would have corrected the imperfection.
“What scent? What bite?” Did he say something about mating? Human mating? Huh? As compared to nonhuman mating? And mating crap? Is that code for sex? “Oh hell! I don’t have time for this nonsense. I need to see what the CO wants.” She tugged her hand out of Mr. Sexy’s continued clasp and was about to walk away.
Easy, who had been bent over laughing, raised his head and said, “ ’Tis the musk men and women in my, uh, family give off when they meet their destined life mates.”
Well, that was clear as mud, especially since Harek was muttering, “No, no, no! Not now. Not her! I just got back from Siberia. I haven’t thawed out yet.”
“You come from Siberia? Nobody comes from Siberia.”
“Well, I came from Siberia originally, by way of Pennsylvania, and then Nigeria . . . all those -ia places.”
Is he trying to be funny? Dolt! No, he seems to be serious. Idiot, then.
“Harek is always being sent to Siberia as a punishment,” Trond told her.
“By whom?”
“Our . . . uh, employer.” Trond’s blue eyes darted right and left, as if recognizing he’d revealed something he shouldn’t have.
“Your employer is Uncle Sam,” she pointed out.
“Another, higher authority,” Trond said enigmatically.
“No, I don’t come from Siberia. I come from Transylvania,” Harek replied distractedly, still shaking his head as if to ward off some repulsive thought. Her.
“Romania? You live in Transylvania, Romania?” Why she fixated on this irrelevant fact in the midst of all the other stuff was a puzzle, one she would consider . . . later.
“He means Transylvania, Pennsylvania. Our hometown,” Trond explained, since his brother seemed speechless except for the continual muttering, “Life mate? No way! Not now. Not her.”
“What the hell is a life mate? And why not me? Forget I asked that.” As for thawing out from Siberia, or Transylvania, or the frickin’ moon, if he was any hotter, Harek would combust. She gave the obviously distressed man a glare and turned on Trond. “As for musk and your family, in case you need a reminder, Easy, I am not a member of your family.”
“Yet,” Easy said ominously.
Harek looked as if he was going to throw up.
Welcome to my life, Camille thought.