Nick solemnly held up a hand, but Kelly shook his head. “No promises. And don’t leave out the skeevy parts.”

Ty ran a hand over his face. “Oh God.”

Zane tried to keep his laughter quiet. He reached out and slid his fingers into Ty’s hand, squeezing.

“Okay,” Ty said with a deep inhalation. “You asked for it.”

Corporal Tyler Grady sat in his rack, reading the letter for perhaps the tenth time. He had known he’d get news like this one day, but it still hit him hard. His eyes traced over the handwriting again.

David Whitlock had written to congratulate him on making Force Recon. He’d ended the letter by telling Ty that he’d met someone in college. He was happy, and he thought he might be in love. But David was asking Ty’s permission to proceed, saying that he would wait if Ty asked it, just like he’d promised when Ty left.

Ty shook his head as he read it. He wouldn’t stand for that. David deserved so much more than Ty could ever have given him.

He pressed the letter to his bare chest and fell back onto his rack to stare at the canvas top of the tent above his head. After a moment he threw his arm over his eyes. He’d left for this very reason, to give David the freedom to move, to give himself options that didn’t involve sharing his life with someone he couldn’t commit himself to completely.

That didn’t make it feel any less like heartbreak.

The rack beside him creaked as someone sat down. Ty peered out from under his arm to see dark blond hair, compelling eyes that changed from blue to gray and back, and a smirk that always looked like it needed to be slapped.

“Ugh.”

Captain Chas Turner pursed his lips. “Oh, I know, it’s the intelligence officer, bury your head in the sand.”

Ty sat up. “Good afternoon, Captain.”

“Good afternoon, Corporal.” His eyes drifted to the letter Ty held in his hand. “I came to discuss the new policy I’ve instituted with the mail.”

Ty inclined his head as a sinking feeling started in his stomach.

“Every batch, we open a letter or two at random, just to make sure nothing important is being leaked. Yours happened to be that random letter this week.”

Ty held his breath and waited for the other shoe to drop.

Turner clucked his tongue and looked behind him to make sure they were alone in the barracks. The rest of the boys were outside, blowing off steam. When Ty had left them, they’d been creating a scarecrow out of munitions debris and dressing it in someone’s pilfered salty cammies. Ty had received his letters before the real fun could start and chosen to retreat to read them in peace, missing the culmination of the exercise.

“I have a proposition for you,” Turner said when he looked back at Ty.

Ty continued to stare at him, wary of the man no one in the group trusted. He was the very epitome of what they called a Secret Squirrel. Always running dark, always skittering here and there. He ran too many cloak-and-dagger missions, and it was like he’d forgotten how to be straightforward.

“I wish you to meet with me, privately, once or twice a week.”

Ty’s back stiffened. “Is that an order, Captain?”

“Not yet. And I’ll make sure your mail never gets read again. So you can write back to your . . . friend and tell him what’s what.”

“You’re blackmailing me?”

“No. Well, yes. But I’m proposing a mutually beneficial arrangement.”

“Which would be what, exactly?”

Turner leaned forward, propping his elbows on his knees. Ty narrowed his eyes. “I keep your secrets. You keep mine. And we both get to blow off a little steam in a way far more interesting than creating scrap metal targets for the rocket launchers.”

Ty glanced around the racks, feeling himself growing warm. He met Turner’s eyes. “You’re blackmailing me to have sex with you?”

“Well, when you put it that way, it sounds so crass.”

“What exactly would you like me to call it?”

“Crass works, I guess.”

They stared at each other as Ty mulled it over, his stomach tumbling end over end. He really didn’t have much choice if he didn’t want to be exposed. Ty clenched his jaw. “Fuck off, Captain.”

Turner clucked his tongue, then grinned. “I was hoping you might react that way.”

Ty tried not to frown, but his confusion was clear.

“You have backbone, I’ll give you that. Not afraid to tell an officer to go fuck himself. Good. I have a real proposition for you now. One I think you’ll want to give consideration to.”

Ty shook his head and stood, growing angry enough to forget the man’s rank. Turner stood with him, both of them in the tight space between the racks.

“Come with me, Corporal. There are matters we need to discuss.” Turner moved away, but Ty remained rooted to the spot. Turner looked over his shoulder. “That’s not a request.”

Ty stood by his rack for another few seconds, stunned. This would probably end with one of them throwing a punch, or at least filing some sort of complaint, but Ty’s survival instincts told him to follow and see what exactly Turner was up to. He stuffed the letter under his pillow and grabbed his shirt to pull it on as he followed Turner across the camp to the officer’s quarters.

Turner glanced around as he ushered him inside, making sure no one had seen Ty go in, then latched the door behind him. Ty struggled not to fidget, feeling off-balance and a little cornered.

“There are benefits to having a private rack,” Turner murmured as he circled Ty and stood to face him.

Ty’s jaw clenched hard, and he had to fight not to turn around and leave.

Turner snorted. “Don’t be like that. Have a seat.” He went to a trunk in the corner.

Ty finally moved to sit in the field chair Turner had indicated, beside a small table made out of a metal water barrel with a bullet hole in it. The rack on the other side served as a second seat.

Ty watched out of the corner of his eye as Turner muttered to himself and rummaged through the trunk. He pulled out a wooden box and set it on the barrel between them. A fan in the corner chugged as it rotated, working to cool off the quarters. It was the only sound.

Turner sat on the end of his rack and met Ty’s eyes. Ty’s shoulders stiffened.

“You play chess?” Turner asked.

Ty looked down at the box. “No.”

Turner pulled the lid off it, unfolding it to reveal a portable chess set. “Thinking man’s checkers. I’ll teach you.”

“You brought me in here to beat me at chess?”

“No, Ty. But I’m not going to force you to have sex with me, either, if that’s what you came in here thinking.” He looked up and raised an eyebrow, smirking.

Ty glared at him. The man played mind games, and Ty had never been anything but a straight shooter. He didn’t like it.

“You see, by the time I’m done with you, you’re going to be making the first move. And after that, we’ll be looking at quite a few sessions of what is no doubt going to be very athletic, very angry sex.”

Ty gaped, but he couldn’t seem to stop himself.

“You see? You’re already intrigued.”

Ty snorted. “Look, we just got back from a five-day hump in the desert, and all I wanted was a cool drink and an hour in my rack to sleep. If you want to play games, there are other intelligence officers around camp to play with.”

“That’s just the thing, Ty,” Turner whispered. He leaned closer. “You offer far more to me than they do.”

Ty sighed hard and ran his hand over his face.

“Why did you join the Marines and leave this David kid behind? He obviously loved you.”

“None of your business.”

“Sense of duty? Adventure? Fear of commitment? Fear of taking it up the ass?”

“Is your plan to make me beg for sex just to shut you up? Because it’s kind of working.”

Turner laughed and shook his head. “I want you. But not just because I want to see what you look like on top of me.” He paused, obviously knowing that the visual had hit home with Ty. Then he continued. “I’m building a team. And I want you on it.”

That brought Ty up short. He met Turner’s eyes for a long minute. “What kind of team?”

“The kind that doesn’t exist.”

“Right.”

“Look, I’ve seen your scores and I’ve seen your evals. You’re smart, you’re fit, you’re loyal and motivated. You’ve got instincts most kids don’t come out here with, you’re already fluent in Farsi, and I understand you’ve been teaching yourself Dari on the side.”

“How the hell do you know that?”

“Because you interest me, Grady. You’re clever, you’re adaptive. You’ve got balls the size of coconuts. Figuratively speaking, of course. And you’re pretty as hell, which actually gets you farther in these kinds of things than you’d think.”

“You’re talking about–”

“I’m talking about making a difference. I’m talking about files so redacted they print them on black paper. I’m talking about things you could never spill to that Boy Scout O’Flaherty unless he’s in on it.”

“Boy Scout.”

Turner nodded. “You two are joined at the hip. I know he dragged you off the ground when you fell out of a PT run to make Recon, and I know you carried him to the end of a course when he nearly broke his ankle, giving up the course record in the process, all so you could stay together.”

Ty grew warmer, realizing how much homework Turner had done on him. It was flattering, in a way.

“For a while I thought you two were an item, but seeing that letter I realized my mistake.”

“What the hell does any of this have to do with your team?”

“If you say yes, you’ll have to bring him with you.”

“I’m not pulling O’Flaherty into anything unless I vet it first.”

“Of course. Which is why you’re here now and he’s not.”

Ty grunted, growing more frustrated.

“I don’t need an answer right now,” Turner said with a smirk. “To either proposition. And one is not dependent on the other. You should think it over.”

Ty nodded, dazed.

“Think over it hard. Once you go down my road, you don’t go back. You’ll come out the other end someone else. Someone . . . you might not like. Someone this David of yours definitely won’t like.”

Ty looked him up and down. “That what happened to you?”

Turner shrugged.

“You seem pretty okay with yourself.”

“Well, I was an asshole when I started.” He handed Ty a carved white knight. Ty stared at it, spinning it between his fingers. Turner kept talking, his voice low and persuasive. “You could be some anonymous white knight, Grady. If that’s the road you want to take. Loyalty and honor. A drop of decency in a bucket with a hole too large to patch. Or you could be my rook.”

He slid a black playing piece across the board.

Ty looked from the rook to Turner again, fighting the magnetic pull of the man, intrigued by his offer despite the feeling of foreboding growing in the pit of his stomach.

“Say yes, Ty, and I’ll teach you everything I know.”

Ty shielded his eyes from the sun, watching the men load the deuce and a half with unmarked crates.

Turner came up to stand beside him, geared up and ready to go.

“Where’s your detail?” Ty asked.

“We’re going in light on this one.”

“Bullshit.” Ty turned to face Turner, eyes growing wider. “There’s a shit storm ten klicks from here. You can’t head out there without a detail.”

Turner shook his head. “The major disagrees.” He stepped away, heading for the heavy transport vehicle.

“Chas,” Ty hissed as he lunged to grab at his elbow and stop him. They both glanced around to make sure no one was watching. “I’ve got a bad feeling about this. Take my boys with you. Hell, take me with you, someone that isn’t a goddamn paper pusher with a toy gun.”

Turner shook his head and looked away. Ty shoved his arm in frustration.

“Careful, Sergeant,” Turner said in a harsh whisper. “It’s not my call, okay? You’re not ready for this.”

“Why not?”

“I can’t tell you; you haven’t been read in,” Turner said between gritted teeth.

“So read me in and take me with you to watch your back.”

Turner narrowed his eyes. “Rook, just calm down, go inside with your boys. I’ll be back tomorrow and you can take it out of my ass then.”

Ty snorted through his nose like an angry bull. Turner gave him a condescending pat on the cheek before striding off.

“Hey, Captain,” Ty called after him.

Turner stopped and turned, raising an eyebrow.

“Is there a reason you have to be such a dick all the time?”

Turner licked his lips and walked closer, looking all around them to ensure they were having a private discussion. “Because,” he said in a low voice as he drew closer. “Being such a dick all the time lets you know that when I stand here and tell you I love you, I fucking mean it.”

Ty’s mouth dropped open as he stared. Turner put a finger under his chin and pushed his jaw shut.

“Now. You stay here and ponder that, and when I get back we’ll discuss it.”

Ty nodded and watched him walk off. “Watch your damn six,” he said. Turner gave him a cocky wave over his shoulder, but didn’t turn back around.