When Jake meets a woman at the Hard Deck, the last thing he expects is for her to be a Navy Seal. And not just any Seal, the Commander of Seal Team 3. She's beautiful, smart, dangerous, and everything about her just makes him want to get close. Her...
Warnings: swearing, it's mostly fluff in this chapter too
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Bear had made herself scarce on the long days aboard the Lincoln. She was finally well enough to busy herself with work, dealing with paperwork and helping Bug work through the massive amounts of evidence they had against Hazard. It had surfaced from the Riyadh Air Base Commander that a few others were likely involved in the scheme and that Hazard had to have had help in orchestrating what he had. Bear knew his work ethic and there was no way that he and Chip were the only ones involved. Hazard could barely complete his paperwork by himself.
So she, Bug, Flare, and Phoenix, who was acting as the Daggers representative, spent hours combing through everything. "So, what I'm hearing," Phoenix began, shuffling through the file in front of her. "Hazard was in contact with this Saif character weeks before the mission..."
"So before or after he planted the keystroke recorder on my laptop?" Bear asked, stretching out lightly, still trying to avoid pulling the few remaining stitches left in her torso. "Because the pieces I have say that he planted this thing after he made contact."
Bug snorted at how Bear was holding the keystroke tracker, dangling it between her fingers and letting it swing in the air. "That was my thought too."
"Wait, you had the wrong documents on the way to Riyadh, right?" Flare spoke up suddenly. She'd been awfully quiet lately, something that was unusual for the young woman. "I spoke with IT when we got to the base, and they told me that they didn't find anything odd in the software, only one strange login that required three different password retries. Maybe that's when he fucked with the email?"
"He fucked with a lot more than just my email," Bear groused. Her pride was still wounded from how easily Hazard had been able to fool her. How his greed had not only nearly destroyed her, but also had resulted in Jake getting caught up in the middle of everything and was nearly killed for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. "He deserves so much worse than what is coming to him."
The other women in the room nodded. Flare biting her lip to stop it from trembling. She had been adopted in a way by Bear, the older woman serving as a mentor to her throughout her journey to becoming a Lieutenant. So when Bear had vanished, been taken, Mei had broken down the minute she saw Bug shake her head sadly. Even just thinking about the events made her heart break. "He does," Flare mumbled in the silence that had befallen the room. "I'd give it to him if that weren't Shrike's job."
"You and me both, Mei," Phoenix replied, her face drawn together in a frown. She had seen first hand how Bear's disappearance had impacted everyone, herself included. Bear had brought them all together, sewn the two teams into one single-handedly, and her absence had hurt every single person who cared for her. Not to mention Jake. The blonde had been practically inconsolable the minute he found out she was gone and had dove head first into helping Bug and Fireball sort out what they knew from what they didn't.
