Conquering Zeus (SEALs On Fire) by Cerise DeLand

Chapter One
    Swimming at night, naked, in a wild ocean was every day duty to a guy who did better time than an Olympic gold medalist. But Zeus wasn’t pounding away at the Atlantic looking for speed or glory. Relief from frustration was his goal and, damn it, jumping into this god-awful warm bath water at midnight was not working! He was supposed to be enjoying the stand-by time and his birthday tomorrow here with his buddies in his SEAL team. Instead, he chewed himself out about women. Correction. One woman.
    He cut through the crests of black ocean and spurred himself on. Faster.
    He was on the home stretch. How far had he swum? Five miles? Six? Hell, he’d done that to qualify for SEAL training.
    This little expedition was not nearly tough enough to change his focus. Remembering a woman he should forget. Keeping in mind the hostage he and his SEAL team had rescued seven months ago. Kim.
    Silently, he cursed and forced himself to concentrate on his breaststroke. What a laugh. The Keep In Mind games they learned in BUD/s training and played now to maintain their edge or prep for a mission was eating up his brain cells. Yeah, he could keep her in mind, all right. Hair like the golden white swirl of sand dunes. Eyes, dangerous and dark green as jungle fronds. That sweet mouth and killer dimple in her cheek.
    “Come back and see me sometime,” she had urged him three weeks ago as he bid her adios after his latest surprise visit to her.
    Yeah, baby. I’ve done that too often already. Do it every time I get stateside and I cost myself sanity, big time. Cost you yours too, judging by the sultry look in your eyes when I arrived at your condo door bearing flowers.
    Hell. Swimming wasn’t working. He lifted his head to grab a breath and caught sight of the lights of the McMansion he and his Arapaho teammates had been given for the weekend. Sure, he’d worked up a sweat. Even an appetite. He’d take out his frustrations by slicing and dicing to rustle up a huge pot of caldo . Make his pals eat it when they stumbled in. If they did, they’d most likely come with a woman attached at the hip. Maybe one on each hip.
    Hell. Why not me?
    Pissed at himself for leaving Coyote and Jagger at the rockin’ Friday night beach bar scene hours earlier at Sunset Pier, he pushed through his temper and used it as fuel. Of all the women in all the joints in the world, the blonde bombshell who doesn’t walk in there tonight is the one I want.
    He pounded through the waves, spotting someone lean and female strolling the beach with a sizable dog.
    They were harmless. He had jumped in naked. No matter. Whoever it was would be long gone by the time he hauled his bare ass up the sands toward the house.
    He angled for the shore, fighting memories of running door-to-door in an Egyptian shantytown to find Kim. His team had landed the night before, marched hours over abandoned desert to the tribesmen’s village, and then fanned out to search for her and two other hostages. Amid machine gun fire, he’d discovered her in a tin-roof lean-to, weary and weak, dehydrated, blindingly beautiful and bravely smiling at him in her filthy rags.
    “Keep your head down,” he had whispered, pushing her to sit beneath the edge of the window in the hovel where the Bedouin tribesman had tied her to the post of an old iron bed frame.
    With a classic profile, Nordic and tall, Kim Stansfield, reporter and hostage, stared at him, sunburned and dazed from hunger and thirst. Despite her dire condition, she smiled, pointing at his face and the green and brown desert camouflage paint that disguised his features. “Are you wearing make-up?”
    “ What? You don’t like a man to wear foundation?” He fluttered his lashes at her, whipped an MRE drink from his vest and shoved it toward her. “Guzzle this.”
    Grasping the pouch with shaking hands, she downed it while he sawed off her chains with his Spyderco blade. She coughed, choked, then hacked some of it back