Read Fatal Heat: A Navy SEAL Novella for Free Online

tedious and boring. In the research lab we spend all our time peering into microscopes, checking cultures in petri dishes, and meticulously recording minute changes—punctuated by days in the field, checking crop rows, measuring growth by millimeters. Not exciting in any way unless you’re a botany nerd. I imagine your job is hard to describe too. If you could tell me without having to kill me afterwards.”
    She smiled and Max tensed.
    Here it was. The SEAL thing.
    Women just couldn’t get past it. Some women treated SEALs like action figures with guns, men able to leap tall buildings in a single bound. The thing was, SEALs weren’t supermen. They weren’t a special breed of man with superhuman abilities. They were just determined, relentless men who developed specialized skills by working like fiends. What they could do they learned to do the hard way. They worked hard, fought hard, often bled and died.
    They were warriors, but they also learned languages and orienteering and history, and had to know how to dig a well, apply a splint, and engineer a road.
    Most people couldn’t get past the fighting thing.
    He couldn’t count the women who’d watched his face avidly as they asked him how many men he’d killed. Sometimes they looked at him in disgust as they asked it, as if he were some hired gun. A barely domesticated animal.
    Sometimes the avid curiosity morphed into a desire that had a sick taste to it, and that turned his stomach. Because clearly they liked the idea of fucking a killer.
    Either way, there could be no explaining what he did.
    “I wouldn’t kill you,” he said softly. “No matter what you’ve been told. It’s a myth.”
    Oh man. He couldn’t kill her, he couldn’t hurt her in any way. Seeing Paige sitting next to him, with that soft, lightly-tanned, smooth skin, pretty face open and smiling, friendly and kind… she was everything he’d ever fought for. The idea of hurting a woman or a child had always made him physically sick. Paige, hurt… God .
    Paige looked him straight in the eyes, watched him openly. He had no idea what she was seeing, but she suddenly nodded her head, as if confirming something. “No,” she said. “You wouldn’t hurt me.”
    “Damn straight,” he answered.
    There was an electric moment of silence. Max let out his breath in a slow exhale. There was a lot of meaning behind her words. At one level, of course he wasn’t going to hurt her, kill her. But the deeper meaning was she felt he wasn’t a man to be feared.
    Max could hardly remember not being big and strong. By the time he was twelve, he’d shot to six feet and looked sixteen. No one messed with him, and if they did, they were sorry.
    The life he lived, particularly after joining the navy and passing BUD/S, had made him even bigger and stronger and meaner-looking. He was mean. Fuck with him and you’d regret it. But he chose his battles. He was not out of control and he resented it when a woman treated him like someone in an action movie or a violence addict.
    “So,” Paige said softly. “Why don’t we not talk about our work and talk about something else? Like Max here.”
    At her feet, Max’s tail thumped. There was something about the way the dog was sitting next to her, totally focussed…
    Max shifted the tablecloth, and—yup. The dog had his head on Paige’s thigh. Something he could identify with. He’d like to have his head on Paige’s thigh, too.
    He frowned at Paige. “Are you feeding him under the table?”
    She winced. “Busted.”
    “That’s not good,” he said primly, taking the moral high gizemoral hround, trying hard to keep a straight face as he watched her reaction.
    Her skin was fascinating, it signalled every emotion. Right now she was slightly flushed with embarrassment as if she’d been caught with her hand in the cookie jar.
    “I know,” she said earnestly. “Don’t think I don’t know it’s wrong, I do. After I got Max at the pound, I read up. I’m a