Griffin finished exhaling the rest of the breath he’d been holding.

Cal said calmly, “Speaking of which, let’s get a feel for how well the ladies shoot and start teaching them how to handle a weapon properly.”

Chapter 4

Sherri had never been so exhausted in her life. And they’d been training for one day. One. Flipping. Day. She’d been to the Olympic Training Center at six-thousand-foot altitude and never gotten put through the wringer like that.

She fell into bed the minute she finished eating supper, as did Anna and Lily. Sherri murmured, “Is it just me, or do you feel like you’ve been ground into sausage?”

“Worse,” Lily responded wearily. “I feel like a bunch of Navy SEALs worked me over with baseball bats.”

Anna moaned, “How on earth are we supposed to do this for six months?”

Sherri answered grimly, “One day at a time. That’s how. We survived today. When tomorrow comes, we’ll survive it, too.”

“I don’t know about that,” Anna confessed. “If you hadn’t started singing when we were lying in the ocean, I might have thrown in the towel right then.”

“It’s all a big head game,” Sherri responded. “The three of us already meet the minimum physical standards to start BUD/S. And if my guess is correct, we’re going to be significantly more fit before these yahoos are done with us. The challenge, then, is the mental aspect. Can we take being screamed at and hazed all the time? Can we endure what seems unendurable? Can we fail, and then pick ourselves up and start over again?”

“You make it sound so easy,” Anna replied.

Sherri laughed. “Oh, it’ll be the hardest thing any one of us ever does. But we just have to decide that, no matter what they throw at us, we’ll die before we give up.”

Anna said with a little laugh, “Good thing my father always called me the most stubborn female he ever met.”

Lily added, “When my gymnastic coaches told me to attempt high-level skills for the first time that would get me killed if I screwed them up, I had to take a leap of faith and trust them to know I was ready. This feels a lot like that. We have to trust our instructors. They know how to build a SEAL. We just have to let the process happen and go with the flow.”

Sherri liked that perspective. But she wasn’t at all sure she could trust Griffin. He seemed dead set against the idea of any woman becoming a SEAL. What if his end goal was to break them, make them all fail? Was she willing to go with that flow…until it killed her?