Free Gone Too Far by Suzanne Brockmann

and looked slept in, and, with his hat off, she could see that his hair really was as long and shaggy as she’d thought. Thick and brown, it was sun streaked and wavy as it touched his shoulders. It was faintly reminiscent of the style so beloved by teeny-boppers in the early 1970s. He looked like he might’ve been trying to pass as David Cassidy’s bigger, meaner, Navy SEAL brother.
    His face—the part that showed above his beard—was tanned.
    Whatever he’d been up to in the months since she’d seen him last, he’d been spending quite a bit of time outdoors. And that beard was another clue as to where he’d been—he was sporting a full one instead of the neatly trimmed goatee and cowboy-style mustache that he usually favored. The beard, along with his non-Navy regs length hair, told Alyssa that he’d probably been spending a great deal of time in a country that started with the letter A and ended in “stan.”
    The fact that he hadn’t shaved upon his return was another hint that he—and probably the rest of Team Sixteen—were intending to go back there in the very near future.
    And yet, despite all that excess hair, he was still striking looking. Tall and muscular, with blue eyes and a killer smile, he was loaded with pure alpha male charisma. It was quite remarkable, actually. Just during his walk from the parking lot into this building, female heads had turned.
    Alyssa had stopped counting at seven.
    And that was without his smile up and operating.
    Alyssa had always thought that Sam Starrett’s built-in drool factor was something of an embarrassment to the human race, in particular to the females of the species. She’d hoped that most women were smarter than that—that most women had learned to avoid men like Starrett, who obviously could kick all of the other men’s butts and look good doing it, but who had little to redeem him when it came to sensitivity or responsibility.
    And then she’d gotten to know Sam.
    No, actually, first she’d slept with him. Which proved that she at least wasn’t smart enough or strong enough to be able to avoid the biologically preprogrammed Darwinian allure of the alpha male, aka Homo jerkus .
    The really stupid thing was, she’d hated Sam Starrett’s guts for years. He was crude, he was rude, and he was so completely full of himself. She’d needed a bottle of ibuprofen and a day off after spending just five minutes in the same room with the man.
    But he was gorgeous.
    And in his own special redneck, Texas cowboy, foulmouthed way, he was quite funny. And unbelievably smart.
    And had she mentioned gorgeous?
    Alyssa had been doing okay keeping her distance from him, though. Until she’d had a family crisis.
    Because her littlest sister had died due to complications surrounding a late-stage miscarriage, Alyssa had been beyond frightened when her other sister, Tyra, had gotten pregnant. Alyssa spent nine nerve-wracking months anticipating another tragedy before Tyra finally went into labor.
    And upon hearing the news that the baby had been born and both mother and daughter were healthy, Alyssa had had something of an emotional meltdown.
    And Sam Starrett had been there.
    He’d been both sweet and kind.
    He’d gotten her drunk, too, the son of a bitch.
    And sleeping with him had suddenly seemed like a really great idea.
    Alyssa still dreamed in vivid detail about that first night they spent together. She’d never had sex like that before in her entire life. The night was a blur and some parts of it she still couldn’t quite remember, but some of it she would never forget if she lived to be two hundred. The intensity of what they’d shared had scared her to death, and in the sane light of morning, she’d made it clear to Sam that their encounter had been a one-time thing. There would be no repeats.
    But then she ran into him again, six months later, in a hellhole of a country where the passengers of a commercial airliner had been taken hostage by terrorists.
    And