Power: Special Tactical Units Division (In Wilde Country Book 3) Read Online Free PDF Page A

with animals here, Lieutenant,” Wilde said sharply. “And you want to waste time checking things out?”
    “General. I understand that you’re upset—”
    “Did you see that photo, Akecheta? Her face. The way those men are—are touching her…”
    Point taken, Tanner had to admit. He picked up the photo again. Not the one sent by the kidnappers; the one that showed Alessandra Wilde laughing and happy.
    “What was your daughter doing in San Escobal in the first place? It’s not exactly a tourist attraction. Unless something’s changed that I don’t know about, there are State Department advisory warnings about travel there.”
    Wilde shrugged. “Yes, there are.”
    “Then why did she ignore those warnings? The beaches are as good in Belize or Guatemala, or in half a dozen other safe places… What?”
    “She was there tracking jaguars.”
    Tanner blinked. “Jaguars?”
    “Jaguars, Lieutenant.”
    “She’s a wildlife biologist?” Tanner asked in the same way he’d have asked if Tinker Bell was an astrophysicist.
    “She’s designer. A fur designer.”
    Tanner almost laughed.
    A designer. The title confirmed what he’d already figured.
    What Wilde meant was that his daughter was a rich, spoiled brat.
    When you served in Special Ops, you all but tripped over women like her, hot for guys like SEALs, even hotter for Special Ops guys who belonged to teams and divisions so tightly classified that they were only whispered about. The one thing people always knew were the bars where the teams and units hung out.
    For most STUDs, it was a place in Santa Barbara called The LZ. The Landing Zone. It was where you could chill, down a few beers, rock out to whatever was blasting over the sound system, maybe catch a football game on one of the big screen TVs that hung on the walls.
    It was also a chick magnet. Chay had once joked and said there had to be a sign somewhere that said Only Tens Allowed.
    The LZ drew spectacular looking women.
    The hookups were easy and exciting, but you figured out pretty fast that what really attracted the women wasn’t so much you as it was their image of you.
    What got them turned on was being fucked by a guy who was dangerous, a badass dude who—they hoped—had done a lot of really badass things.
    At first, Tanner laughed at it. It was funny.
    After a while, not so much, especially after he made the dumb mistake of almost falling for a gorgeous green-eyed redhead. Almost falling? Man, he’d been head-over-heels crazy for her. Crazy as in starting to think about their future together.
    She was a jewelry designer. Not that he ever saw anything she’d designed. She said she was waiting for the right time.
    She was also the daughter of an international banker whose family motto might have been Who Needs Morals When You Have Money?
    When she told him she couldn’t spend Thanksgiving or Christmas with him, that she had to be with her family, Tanner had taken a deep breath and said, well, yeah, he understood that…and maybe one of those holidays would be a good time for her to let her family get its first look at him.
    “They don’t know about us yet,” she’d said. “I’m just waiting for the right time.”
    Chay had tried to warn him that he was in over his head. In fact, it had been the first occasion their whole life that he and Chay had almost ended up decking each other.
    Idiot that he was, he’d bought into the rationalization, gone on believing she wanted him for himself, not for the image he represented—until the night he’d been deep inside her and she’d cupped his face between her hands, wrapped her long legs around his hips and whispered, “Sugar? Tell me how many men you’ve killed.”
    Since then, he’d never been foolish enough to forget what women like that wanted from men like him. And, what the hell, why not? It wasn’t as if he was looking to settle down, not with the life he led.
    It was just increasingly difficult to play the game. Not the sex part.