She did a series of reps, switched position, did more, and then got out of her seat to go to the pull-up bar. I was still watching. Fascinated. Stuck. It wasn’t like I hadn’t worked out with female Navy personnel before, but there was something about Dani―the woman who’d had her legs straddled around me while I’d been inside her―pushing her body to the shaking point that was almost too impossible for me to bear.
“Are you going to stand there staring? Didn’t you come down to workout?” she asked sarcastically.
“I did, but now I’m thinking the time might be better served teaching you some self-defense,” I told her, unsure where those words had come from but realizing the truth of them. If I could give her some moves to match her strength, she’d be a helluva lot safer.
“Again. I’m not the one who needs protection,” she said flippantly.
As she went to pull herself up, I cringed at her form. In an instant, I had my hands on her, pushing in on her stomach, the other on the top of her back, and she dropped down, facing me with a glare and a beautiful flush that had nothing to do with the exercise.
“What the hell?” she demanded.
“Your form is crap. You’ll hurt yourself if you continue doing them that way,” I said. I hadn’t removed my hands even though she’d landed on the ground. The scent of her washed over me. The scent of lemon and grass and the mint of her toothpaste because our faces were a breath away.
“Jump up,” I told her.
She stared at me, and I could see the war going on inside her head. The desire to pull away and run. The desire to stay. The desire to just flip me off and tell me to go to hell.
Finally, her stubbornness won out. She pushed my hands away, grabbed the bar, and waited for me to touch her again. I talked her through the placement of her stomach, back, and shoulders, and then watched as she did ten with barely a tremor.
“Just when I thought Dani Whittaker couldn’t astound me any more, you drop ten pull-ups like they’re nothing,” I told her. The honesty of my admiration hung in the air.
She pulled away. “Please. Like ten is anything big. How many can you do?”
“As many as needed.”
It wasn’t a brag. It was a fact.
“Oooohhkay. How many is that?” she asked.
“’Til I’m told to stop or everyone else has dropped.” She didn’t roll her eyes again, but I was pretty sure she wanted to. I followed her question up with one of my own. “How many push-ups can you do?”
Her lips quirked. “As many as needed.”
That made my lips twitch in response. “Challenge accepted.”
She laughed sarcastically. “Please. I’m not insane enough to think I can surpass a SEAL in the push-up count.”
“You’ve already shocked me. Are you afraid you’ll sully the image with some lame-ass girl push-ups?” I goaded her, knowing she couldn’t resist. I wanted to see her in action more.
“Sure, challenge me after I’ve already done the pull-ups,” she said dryly, but she went to a mat in the corner of the room, and I followed her.
We got down, facing each other, some kind of twisted mirror of each other. Two people who didn’t give in or give up easily.
She smirked at me and said, “I feel the need to set some rules of engagement.”
“This isn’t an operation, Athena,” I said with a full smile hitting my face. “But what did you have in mind?”
“You have to do two for every one of mine,” she said.
“Only two?”
“Don’t get all cocky on me now, Pretty Boy,” she said, and I couldn’t help my eyebrows going up at her word choice that brought us back to the last challenge we’d engaged in.
She did a push-up, and I did two. They were nothing to me. I’d been doing push-ups since starting military school; they were second nature, like taking a step or lifting my arm.
We continued to count off, and her breath got rocky fairly quickly whereas mine felt like I’d barely woken up. She made it to seventy-five before she stopped, rolling over on her back to catch her breath.
But that put her face even closer to mine. Her lips a millimeter away as I continued to do push-ups. If she turned her head, our mouths would merge. It was a beautiful torture as I continued to press. Up and down. Lips close, closer, backing away. So tempting. Taunting me.
I’d stopped counting, mesmerized by her look, and I about broke apart when she put her finger in her mouth as I lowered once more. She pulled it out, moving it slowly toward me while I stared, before suddenly sticking it in my ear.
I collapsed onto the mat with a grunt of surprise and a chuckle in my chest. “Holy shit, did you just give me a Wet Willy?”
She was up off the mat, laughing, allowing the tension which scoured us to drift away momentarily. A break in the campaign of animosity and desire. But there was no way I was letting her get away without retaliating.
I was up and after her before she could get anywhere near the door. I crushed her perfectly defined body up against the wall, gazing into her face as her eyes went wide. I stuck my finger in my mouth and then dragged it along her jaw. She squirmed, but she was laughing at the same time.
She tried, reflexively, to get her hand up to defend herself, but I grabbed both her wrists in one hand while rewetting my finger and outlining her ear and dragging it down to her neck. It was childish. An immature prank. And yet, with her, it felt nothing like a joke. It felt like foreplay I’d never be able to finish. I pressed my thigh against her pelvic bone and was
