Lily, wedged between Leo and Jojo, laughed and warned Axel, “Don’t try to out-throw the Jo. He wasn’t drafted by the NFL for nothing.”

Axel snorted. “Puny human. I could crush him.”

“Oh yeah, Hulk?” Jojo retorted. “Try me.”

Axel half-rose, and Anna took advantage of the moment to claim a little more of the seat and slide a few inches away from Trevor. He threw her a sardonic, sidelong glance, but she studiously ignored it, picking up her shot glass and holding it out to Jojo. While she was at it, she grabbed one of the full shot glasses and slid it in front of Trevor.

He lifted the scotch, sniffed it appreciatively, and then tasted it. His eyes drifted closed in what looked like pure ecstasy. Wowsers. To make him do that in bed…to feel him lose herself in pleasure inside her—

It had been way too long since she’d had herself a man.

Jojo picked up his own shot glass. “A toast,” he announced. “To Sherry Tate for finishing Phase Two of BUD/S. Here’s to her finishing Phase Three.”

Anna joined in the enthusiastic chorus of hooyahs. She was so damned proud of her sister-in-arms she could bust.

“Better her than me,” Lily commented. “I’ll take being trained by you meatheads over going through the formal BUD/S course any time.”

Anna chimed in, “I’ll drink to that.”

Both of them were being trained extremely off the books, in a classified program called Operation Valkyrie, to be Navy SEALs. Meanwhile, their teammate, Sherri Tate, was being extremely publicly trained to be one.

The idea was for Sherri to be a highly visible, non-operational, poster child, and to draw all of the media attention away from Anna and Lily so the two of them could quietly become operational. They would be deployed without America’s adversaries being any the wiser to the presence of women in the SEAL community.

But in talking with Sherry when she came up for air in the rare breaks in her rigorous schedule, it sounded like the guys at Coronado were training her for real. Instead of getting two actual women SEALs and a fake cover story, it looked like Cal Kettering was going to get three women SEALs out of the Valkyrie Ops program.

Because of their exceptional professionalism and general maturity, the Reapers had been specifically chosen to train and work with the first women SEALs. Which the guys in the platoon seemed to see as both a blessing and a curse. Women, because of their unique skill sets, would open up operational opportunities for the Reapers that no other SEAL team had. But…working with women.

It had been a big adjustment for all of them.