The next day, they got to play with grenades. Well, training grenades that made a lot of noise and threw bits of paper all over the place. The three women and each of their swim buddies stood inside a concrete box about neck high and eight feet square. It was the far-left hand of five safety pits in front of a pockmarked strip of dirt about fifty meters, a little over one hundred fifty feet, long.

Griffin put the first training grenade in Sherri’s hand and then stepped behind her, his front plastered against her back. Heat and muscle surrounded her, and all of a sudden she wasn’t breathing quite right.

Was it normal for SEAL instructors to get so up close and personal with the trainees, or was he coming up with excuses to snuggle up to her? Were she not so wildly attracted to him, she might just be bothered by how…physically…he was teaching her. But as it was, her pulse leaped erratically every time he touched her.

She murmured, “We have to stop meeting like this, Mr. Caldwell.”

“Cut it out.”

“Cut out what? Can’t a girl enjoy a big strong man’s arms around her?”

He huffed in her ear, but didn’t sound as convincingly irritated as he should have. She smiled to herself.

Griffin instructed, “Put your left arm straight out and up in front of you like this.” He reached around her with his left hand and guided her left arm into the correct position. His forearm rubbed against her ribs, perilously close to her breast. Yowza.

“Draw your right arm back by your ear like Jojo demonstrated before.”

She turned her head to answer and froze. Her mouth was about three inches from his. Double yowza. She managed to choke out, “The motion Jojo showed us is just like throwing a shot put. Which is one of the heptathlon events I’ve competed in for years.”

“Perfect. You don’t want to throw a grenade like a baseball, or it will roll after it hits the ground, and who knows where it will end up. You want to lob it in a high arc so it’ll drop to the ground and stick where it lands.”

She probably knew more about the math of the perfect trajectory for maximizing travel of a heavy spherical object than he did, but she let him adjust her arms and explain what a good grenade throw looked like because it felt so blessedly fantastic to have his hands on her like this.

He stepped back from her, and she actually felt a little…bereft.

“Okay. Give it a try,” Griffin directed. “Pull the pin, assume the position I showed you, and let ’er rip.”

She went through her highly practiced shot-put motion and heaved as hard as she could. The grenade, substantially lighter than an 8.8 pound shot, sailed downrange.