The SEAL's Secret Lover (Alpha Ops #1)
Anne Calhoun
For Eileen Rothschild, and as always, for Mark.
Chapter One
Rose Powell was going to kill her baby brother. If she could. Like she stood a chance against a battle-hardened Navy SEAL with three deployments behind him. But she knew a trick or two that she could use on Jack, who’d weaseled out of taking their grandmother and her lifelong BFFs on a whirlwind tour of Turkey.
“Does everyone have everything?” Rose asked for what felt like the two hundredth time since she’d met up with the Bucket List Babes at the airport in Lancaster.
“We do, dear,” Grannie said. Florence and Marian nodded as well, although Rose could plainly see Florence’s guide to Turkey peeking out from the seat pocket in front of her.
“Florence,” she said. “Your guidebook.”
“Oh!” Florence reached one liver-spotted hand into the seat pocket and came up with both the guidebook and a pair of earbuds.
As stressed out as she was, Rose had to smile at the image the three of them presented as she followed them down the aisle into the jetway. Her grandmother and her two best friends were dressed in nearly identical travel clothing, with zippered pockets on backsides, replacement hips, and thighs, sturdy walking shoes favored by elderly world travelers everywhere, and half-zip fleece pullovers custom embroidered with BUCKET LIST BABES on the collar. Driving Miss Daisy does Turkey, in L.L. Bean.
For the third time Rose checked her own bag, a sturdy leather tote, ensuring she had her laptop, Bose noise-canceling headphones, cell phone, tablet, adaptors, and everything else she couldn’t afford to lose if their luggage was left behind in Munich, or worse, Lancaster. Phone in hand, she turned it on and watched it search for a connection. Although she was ostensibly on vacation, her meteoric rise to Senior Director—Operations and Logistics for Field Energy Company meant she couldn’t afford to let up for a moment. This was not a good time to revert to the 1990s, technologically speaking. She looked up from her stubbornly silent phone to see three bright-eyed, lined faces looking back at her expectantly.
She wrenched her mind away from her phone. “We need passports and U.S. currency for the visa and immigration channels,” she said, mentally signing Jack up to squire Grannie to every single Garden Club function for the rest of their lives.
The international terminal at Ankara’s Esenbo?a airport hummed with people arriving from all over the globe, in a wild variety of dress from modern Western wear on both men and women to traditional head scarves and long skirts. The flow of language was largely unintelligible to Rose, until the pleasant female voice on the loudspeaker switched to English for a series of announcements about departures, arrivals, smoking, and parking. She shepherded the Babes through immigration to baggage claim, where their guide was supposed to meet them with the Land Rover.
“Rose, dear, can we just…?” Marian said, gesturing at the ladies’ room.
“Go ahead,” Rose said. She’d take advantage of the line to power down her phone. Maybe it just needed to reset itself to some difference in equipment or signal in Turkey.
“We’re old,” Grannie said as she walked away. “We need lots of potty breaks. I hope the guide Jack found for us understands that.”
“I’m sure he will,” Rose said distractedly, watching the wheel spin on her phone. And spin. And spin. Until Grannie came back.
“It’s such a shame Jack was too busy with his coursework to come along,” Grannie said.
The statement triggered Rose’s lifelong emotional barometer for her younger brother: protective love, profound irritation, and profound concern. Jack had told Grannie the technical truth. A former Navy SEAL, her brother was taking classes at Lancaster College, but he’d left out key details—a racing heartbeat, hypersensitivity in his nerves, and a tremor in his right hand—when he told Grannie he was backing out. He wasn’t up to the trip, he told Rose, but he’d arranged for a buddy of his to meet them in Ankara and take over as their driver and guide.
The phone had powered up again, but she still didn’t have a signal. “I can’t get connected. I’ve got WiFi, though.” She started downloading email and watching while her text conversations bounced around, sorting incoming messages to the right conversation. The lack of a carrier signal wasn’t a good sign. Not good at all.