Seduced by the Seal

By Cristina Grenier

He thought it was just hero worship on her part, though he can't deny his own feelings. Can she persuade him to trust hers? Arleen Jackson had gone after the story of a lifetime. Caught in the crossfire between opposing factions on a journalistic run for her news agency, she is captured, held hostage, and may be executed. Until Senior Chief Petty Officer Michael Wolf and his fire team come to the rescue. The escape is fraught with danger, but Arie trusts Mike to get her out alive.

He's intelligent, logical, and a wellspring of calm assurance. They both know that the attraction between them is most likely just the aftermath of their being thrown together under such conditions, and fight valiantly against it, he is at the end of his career in the Navy, and she hopes he will not choose to re-up. She can no longer deny that her feelings for him are anything but hero worship, but can she persuade him of that?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Monster Media LLC
• Release date: Mar 7, 2019
• ISBN: 9781386789031

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Seduced by the Seal

Cristina Grenier

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Prologue: Caught in the Crossfire

The smell of sulfur was everywhere. Smoke blinded her, and the noise of gunfire and men shouting assaulted her ears. It was a deafening roar. Something had hit her, and she had bitten her lip as she fell against the wall. The taste of her own blood was salty on her tongue. She tried to catch her breath, and the smoke choked her. She turned and lay flat on the floor, remembering something she’d seen on a TV show once about fire safety. The freshest air was low to the ground. The loud claps, like thunder, kept booming in the street outside, rattling what was left of the windows, and shaking the foundations of the building. The floor was littered with broken glass, shattered furniture, and rubble from the crumbling walls. She crawled forward just as another blast sounded, this time right outside the door. She gasped as the room shook around her, and something slammed into her head. She screamed and passed out…

Only the week before, Arleen Jackson had been sitting in the briefing room, listening to her boss describe the job he wanted her to be part of. She was a very junior reporter, having only started in this new career two years before. But she had lobbied hard for the chance to work an overseas news gig, and this was her chance. She told herself she wasn’t worried that it was in a region of the world about which people knew very little. She insisted, when her inner voices all piped up to ask her what the hell she thought she was doing, that she was safe enough as long as she stayed out of the crossfire between warring gold and diamond miners. She would follow the lead of the seasoned journalists and all would be well. She had not expected to be caught in the middle of hostilities...none of them had.

The violence had erupted unexpectedly, and despite their best efforts to escape, they had found themselves cut off from any easy escape. With nowhere to go, they had settled in to wait, thinking that things would calm down enough for them to find a way to get out of the line of fire. Four days in, and it was clear they were in far greater danger than they had expected from a trip to document gold and diamond mining in the Amazon jungles of Guyana. Arie tried not to let her imagination run away with her. She watched the news, like everyone else did, and she knew situations like these were unpredictable at best. When the shelling came closer to them, they were escorted to a safer spot by their guide.

The moment the compound was taken over, they knew they would need help to escape. Tourists who had been captured there in the past had been executed. The other woman and the two men whom she had accompanied on this jaunt were taken first, and she didn’t know what had become of them. But she was not about to let herself be killed without putting up a fight. They had foolishly left a way open for her when they took her colleagues, and she waited patiently until she could no longer hear any movement outside before sneaking out and hurrying to the shack that had been used for meals. She managed to get inside before the fighting began again, but there was no safe place to hide and no phone she could use. And then the side of the building where she was hidden began to fall apart around her…

When she came to, Arie did not know where she was. The room was dark, and she could hear nothing around her. Her wrists and ankles were bound, and she was face down on the gritty floor. Her body hurt everywhere and her head was pounding, but she tried to sit up without success. The shuffling stopped as footsteps sounded outside, coming closer. Arie lay still and waited. Light flooded the room as a door opened, and someone stepped in. She closed her eyes against the glare and heard the new arrival speaking. She had no idea what he was saying, but his voice was cold and harsh. She recognized it as the man who seemed to be the leader of the group who had taken them hostage.

Someone picked her up roughly, and slapped her face, presumably to wake her up. She opened her eyes, afraid they would hurt her more than she already was. The light was blinding, and her head pounded furiously. She was going to throw up...she knew it, and she knew she would be hurt worse if she threw up all over her captors. This was not the best time to have a migraine. Tears of frustration, fear, and anger welled up but she swallowed them. She would never let these animals know how they affected her. If she was going to die, she would die with dignity.

Her captor spoke to her, but she had no idea what he was saying. Her Spanish was non-existent, because she had chosen French in high school instead. None of them could speak English, it seemed, and she wondered idly as her legs were unbound and she was pushed out of the room and escorted to another one, how these people expected to be effective terrorists, or whatever the hell they were, if they couldn’t even communicate with their prisoners, let alone the outside world. And why were they speaking Spanish or Portuguese or whatever the language was in an English-speaking country? Clearly they weren’t from Guyana, and it became clear that this was about more than gold and diamonds. She had no information to give them, but how stupid were they to capture people whose language they didn’t speak, so they couldn’t interrogate them? What was the point?

The room they took her to was bare, and ramshackle, like almost every other structure in the compound. Someone held up a camera to her face, and her captor stood next to her, speaking for the camera. She could barely hold her head up, but she understood enough to know that this was her ransom notice. He was probably telling whomever the video would be sent to what he was going to do to her if he didn’t get whatever the hell he wanted. She had no idea what he wanted. She and her fellow journalists had come to interview an outspoken writer who had taken refuge in the area in hopes of being rescued by American forces, as other dissenters before him had been. His life had been forfeit after he had spoken against the Venezuelan drug cartel’s militia that had been slowly advancing into Guyana from the west, wiping out dissent with spilled blood. Maybe these people weren’t miners, after all.

The man at her side shoved her hard as he spoke, and she fell. Pain shot up her arm, and she lost control and cried out. Someone hauled her up and slapped her in the face, and the tears spilled down her cheeks. She was going to die...she could almost taste the knowledge. Her news agency would not be able to give them whatever they wanted, and no one else who could help would care. She thought about her parents, her siblings, her best friend, none of whom she would ever see again. She thought about her dream of a lifetime love with a man worthy of her passion. She would never have any of that now. Maybe it was a good thing, she thought hazily as she fought to stem the tears and avoid throwing up. Better not to have loved at all, than to lose what she knew would have been the greatest thing in her life.

The recording ended, and she was dragged away, back to the hut, and left alone again…

Chapter One: Rescue Mission

Targets coming up on your position.

Roger that. Mike Wolf raised his weapon slowly, knowing he was well hidden, and watched the two men approach, one slightly ahead of the other. They were armed to the teeth, but he knew they posed no threat. He would take them both out before they knew what hit them. Of more concern to him just then was the woman they had taken into the ramshackle wooden building. His team knew she was there, so the demolition would need to be delayed till they had extracted her, which hadn’t been part of the original plan. But he recognized her as the civilian captured in hostilities between the two feuding camps. His fire team had come in to take down this group of smugglers, which would have been an easier job without a hostage. But as they were all well acquainted with Murphy’s Law, they reconfigured their strategy, and here they were doing extraction and take down. Exfil would be delayed by a day, though Mike hoped they could get the hell out of Dodge well before that time.

The two men came closer. Mike curled his finger around the trigger and took down the mark who was behind the leader. He fell without knowing what hit him, and before his comrade had time to register the sound of a falling body, he was falling too. The take-down was quick and surgical, just the way Mike liked it. Picking up his kit, he moved silently down the incline and through the brush, past the inert bodies of his targets, down to where the vehicle they had arrived in was parked. There was no movement inside the low building, but Mike knew the woman was there, and probably scared out of her mind. He spoke quietly into his headset.

Extraction in two. Get ready.

His men all knew what to do. Once they had secured the hostage and assessed her condition, they would move to the pick-up point, timing the explosion of the structure so they were far enough away, in the event that any other smugglers were close by. Their intel had made no mention of others, but you could never be too sure. Moving silently with his team through the open doorway, he looked around the dimly lit room. A table, a chair, and a lot of trash seemed to be all that was there. That, and the hostage, Arleen Jackson. She was curled up on her side on the floor, unmoving. Mike