Free The Stealth Commandos Trilogy by Suzanne Forster Page A

bother, really. I don’t think I could eat another bite. What about you?”
    He grinned ruefully at the empty bowls and tilted back in his chair, his unbuttoned shirt falling open. “I’m watching my figure,” he said, cocking his head in a way that made his powerful neck muscles stand out.
    Annie was riveted by his tone of voice. She didn’t know how to describe it except that there was an undercurrent of sensuality in his cowboy drawl that had her feeling faint all over again. She knew without doubt that if he ever spoke words of love to her in that slow, rusty voice, even if all he said was “Come here, Annie,” she would have no choice but to go. He would own her, body and soul.
    “Your figure looks fine to me,” she said, drawing in a breath as she surveyed the muscular landscape that his open shirt revealed. She supposed she ought to be blushing and fanning herself at the sight of so much naked masculinity. It seemed like a natural enough inclination, and probably what a woman intent upon seduction would do. But now that she’d noticed his body, she simply couldn’t take her eyes off it.
    His upper torso looked as hard and unforgiving as the badlands she’d just crossed. His skin glowed with burnished gold tones that made her think he must have spent some time working without his shirt on. And the lean, aggressive flare of his stomach muscles were something to behold. A swath of chest hair dusted his pectorals and cut a narrow path toward his jeans, streaking like a dark river over sinewy ridges and planes.
    The quickening beat of Annie’s heart confused her. Raised as she had been among the Indians, she’d seen plenty of half-naked male bodies, some of them extremely well developed. And Chase Beaudine, magnificent as he might look at the moment, had basically the same equipment. Pectorals were pectorals, weren’t they? The collarbone was still connected to the shoulder bone, no matter what the body looked like. And yet try as she would to analyze the situation dispassionately, nothing in her parents’ anatomy and physiology texts had prepared her for the collarbones of the man sitting across from her.
    “You sure you got enough to eat?” Chase interrupted her survey with an inquisitive smile. “If I hadn’t seen you finish off two bowls of hash and a loaf of bread, I might think you wanted to start in on me.”
    Annie blinked with surprise, and the blush she hadn’t been able to summon earlier swept her face and throat full force. “Chase Beaudine,” she said softly, “what are you doing? Flirting with me?”
    She did have an interesting way of putting things. Chase pushed back from the table, chair and all. The movement was as slow and deliberate as his feelings were hot and impulsive. There’d been enough “flirting” going on since he met her to make up for the last five years of his life. But he wasn’t lighting the brushfires and sending up the smoke signals. She was. If ever a woman wanted to be taken advantage of, this one did.
    “I think we’re past the flirting stage,” he said, his voice tellingly husky. It was plain where the conversation was headed, and common sense alone told him not to pursue it, but he couldn’t resist. What red-blooded man could resist when the woman sitting across the table from him was wearing his work shirt and nothing else? Besides, he was almost beginning to like the challenge of seeing how far he could go with her and still pull back. There was something irresistibly seductive about walking that close to the edge. Maybe it was a sad comment on his life these days, but very little else made him feel so alive, except possibly staring death in the eyes.
    “Past flirting?” She shifted nervously and tried with no success to smooth back her hair. “What stage are we in then?”
    “I don’t know. The getting-down-to-it stage, maybe?”
    “Getting down to it?” She stared into his eyes for several seconds, and then her shoulders rose as she took a