She’d learned early in life that getting along with people was a whole lot more productive than clashing with them. Could she find a way to work with Griffin and not against him?

An image flashed through her mind of him shouting at her while she lay on the ground, her arms as limp as noodles and burning with exhaustion. He’d been pressuring her to win, not just to survive.

Now that she thought about it, he’d actually imparted an important piece of advice to her. Had he actually been trying to teach her the proper mindset for success? Maybe he wasn’t one hundred percent out to see her fail after all.

Or maybe in her pain and exhaustion she was just hallucinating that he wasn’t a mean-hearted son of a bitch.

Well, hell. Now she had no idea what to make of him. She knew he was hotter than should be legal and kissed like nobody’s business. And that he could be a gigantic asshole when he chose to be. But which one was the real man? Or hadn’t she seen that person at all yet?

The next morning, well before dawn, they went for a long, way-too-fast-for-comfort run and ground out more push-ups, sit-ups, and pull-ups than she’d believed herself capable of two days ago.

They spent the rest of the morning lying on their bellies in the sand of a firing range, shooting at human-shaped targets mounted in front of a tall dirt berm. Lily was an outstanding shot as it turned out, and Anna was steady as a rock, calm and focused, as Trevor taught her how to shoot some of the larger weapons she’d never handled before.

Griffin picked at the most nitnoid details of Sherri’s technique, criticizing everything from how she inhaled to where her pinkie finger rested on the gun stock. They started with handguns and worked their way up to M4 carbines.

With the larger weapon, they started shooting at a range of twenty-five yards and gradually extended their range to a hundred yards. Sherri was delighted to hit her target eight out of ten times at that range.

“You have to be ten for ten, all in the kill zone, to secure this evolution,” Griffin said shortly.

Securing an evolution was SEAL talk for passing a training requirement. Heaven forbid that they speak plain English. “Buzzkill,” she muttered.

He ignored her comment, continuing implacably, “You also have to be effective with this weapon at up to five hundred yards. If you can’t pull your weight in a firefight, you and your teammates will die. When it’s ten of you against a hundred—or several hundred—tangos, and you’re low on ammo, every single shot has to hit.”

He had a point.