didn’t subconsciously sniff the air to catch her scent the minute he drove onto the DCO complex. He’d even dated a few women he’d thought might have had long-term potential. There might not have been that same animal attraction he felt with Kendra, and he’d have to hide his shifter side, but that wasn’t too high a price to pay to be normal, right?
Before today he thought he’d been well on his way to forgetting about Kendra and getting on with his so-called life. Then John had decided to send her on this mission and everything Declan thought was in the past came right back and smacked him in the face.
For the first time in forever, he wanted to put his fist through a wall. But as he felt his anger rise again, he realized he wasn’t angry at John or Tate or even Kendra. He was mad at himself for being so screwed up that the mere thought of being in the same jungle as the blond-haired, blue-eyed beauty could get him so twisted up in knots.
Damn, he really was pathetic.
Chapter 2
Kendra was ready to admit this field thing hadn’t been one of her brightest ideas. So far, all she’d officially observed was the color green—as in the endless jungle that threatened to grow over anything that stopped moving for more than five minutes—and that this whole thing was stupid—as in stomping through the undergrowth, scouting objectives and choke points, setting up landing sites for helicopters that were never going to be coming, and generally wasting their time.
Of course, maybe she wouldn’t have felt nearly as foolish stumbling around in the jungle if she were carrying a weapon. But Tate had pointed out that her official task for this exercise was to observe—and that didn’t require a weapon. At least he’d given her one of the GPS units and a map, so she could track their movement through the jungle. If not for that, she would have lost her mind already.
It wasn’t long after they’d arrived at the airport outside San Jose that she’d thought maybe the rest of the mission wasn’t going to be as thrilling as the covert flight down. First, she and the guys had been herded directly from the aircraft into the back of a covered cargo truck. Then they’d driven south for the next seven hours, stopping only once to get gas. When she’d wondered out loud if the truck was going to drive them all the way to Panama, Tate told her that Costa Rica didn’t have a military of their own, so having heavily armed Americans close to the cities was bad for public relations.
“The government prefers to keep us out of sight as much as possible,” Tate added.
“I thought we were invited down here,” she’d said.
He shrugged. “Invited is a relative term. They want the U.S. here to help train the police, but they don’t want to be too obvious about it.”
From the reading she’d done on the local politics, Kendra understood that, but it posed an even bigger question. “If they want to keep this as a small operation, why is the DCO sending people?”
Tate let out a short laugh. “They don’t know we’re DCO, remember? To them, we’re Homeland Security down here teaching their law enforcement how to protect the country from terrorist organizations and internal threats.”
“If that’s the case, why isn’t there a real team of experts from Homeland Security down here instead of us?”
“Rumors are that the first DCO team sent down here used the exercise as a cover to get into the country to rescue some congressman’s son from a group of rebels who’d kidnapped him for ransom,” Tate explained. “Since then, I think it was just a case of us getting stuck with the job because Homeland doesn’t want it.”
When they’d reached the base camp deep in the mountainous jungles of the huge La Amistad National Reserve and met the other people they’d be working with, Kendra had immediately understood why John and some of the Committee members wanted this exercise reevaluated. It wasn’t exactly a well-run operation. In fact, it seemed sort of like a hot mess.
There were twenty of them in all—eight local cops, eight marines, and four drug enforcement agents. It was obvious from the get-go that nobody trusted or liked anyone else, and most of them didn’t want to be there. The DEA agents in charge of the training exercise didn’t appreciate the marines encroaching on their territory. The marines, who