At 4:05 a.m. sharp, he and the other SEALs barged into the girls’ dorm, shouting, banging on trash cans, and tipping over furniture.

Sherri was first to catch the hint and leap out of bed, scrambling for clothes. Grif averted his gaze from those mile-long legs with sharply cut quads and well-defined calves. The dark-haired one, Anna, wasn’t so spry and got dumped out of her cot onto the floor in an unceremonious heap.

By 4:10, Grinder PT was well underway, the ladies on the road in front of their hooch, knocking out burpees and sit-ups, doing wind sprints over to the pull-up bar beside the gym, and sprinting back to the Quonset huts to drop and give ’em twenty. Push-ups, that was.

All the while, the men hovered over them, shouting insults and criticizing everything from their technique to their hair color. This morning, the Reapers had shifted into full-on BUD/S mode. The sexual interplay from last night was gone, replaced by flat-out mental warfare aimed at shredding the trainees’ confidence and determination.

Sherri ran over to Griffin’s push-up station for the fifth time, looking ragged around the edges. She was sucking wind and looked to be in pain. Welcome to the jungle, baby.

“Drop and start pumping ’em out, Tate,” he snapped. “Don’t waste my time. I’ve got places to go and things to do.”

She assumed a front leaning rest position, and he started the stopwatch on his wrist. “Count aloud,” he ordered as he dropped into a front leaning rest beside her.

As she popped out the first twenty push-ups quickly, he matched her in silence. But as she started to slow down, he ragged on her. Hard.

“What’s the matter? Arms tired? Or are you just weak, Tate? C’mon. Don’t wimp out on me, now. Surely you’ve got more than this. We’re not even to the pre-BUD/S minimum yet.”

She finished another twenty push-ups—as did he—and paused in a front leaning rest to catch her breath.

He, however, lay down on the ground beside Sherri so he could talk right up into her red face. “You can always quit, Tate. There’s no shame in not being able to hack this. Go back to your nice clean comfortable life where no one yells at you and you don’t have to be in pain. You know you want to.”

She made it halfway up through a push-up, and her arms trembled, protesting against finishing the movement. Just to make his point, he paused halfway up through his matching push-up as well. He waited patiently while she gathered the strength to finish. She threw him a baleful look, obviously not appreciative of his demonstration of casual strength.

He smirked back at her. “You’re not to the minimum yet, Tate.”