Below the Belt(22)

“Yeah, well, you should hear her when she does the laundry. Watching her pick up sweaty towels with two fingers while gagging is pretty entertaining.” She pointed to the mat and gave him her best stern face. “Now go stretch, Marine. I don’t want to see you in my . . . um, see you wherever I’m camped out later because you’ve got muscle cramps.”

He raised a brow, but didn’t fight her on it. He tossed his bag to the side, into the same pile as the rest of the duffels, and jogged over to the mat, where his potential teammates were stretching and jumping rope.

With another heavy sigh, she walked back to the open door of the training room. Nikki was still there, still as a statue, one hand draped in a practiced pose over her chest.

“What happened? Who would do this?”

At that moment, Levi ambled up, earbuds in, head nodding along with the music. He pulled up to a halt when he saw them at the doorway, then glanced in. With a low whistle, he pushed a hunk of hair out of one eye and leaned over Nikki’s shoulder to survey the damage further.

“Damn, what happened?”

“I don’t know,” Marianne said quietly. She grabbed both their arms and pulled them away from the stench. “But let’s get to work.”





CHAPTER


7


“Day three, and who’s ready to go home?” Coach Ace barked as Brad and his potential teammates held their plank positions over the mat. A drop of sweat rolled down Brad’s forehead, caught momentarily in the lines etched between his brows.

Please don’t run into my eye. Please, for the love of all that’s holy . . .

He nearly breathed a sigh of relief—if he hadn’t been focused on steady breathing already—when it rolled down his nose instead and splashed harmlessly to the mat beneath his face.

“Nobody wants to go home?” Coach Ace walked through the rows, pausing to step over one man’s legs, weaving back around to nudge another’s ass down with the toe of his shoe back to proper plank position. “Sure is hot in here, boys. I’d like to go home myself, I think.”

The Marine next to Brad moaned, and Brad risked a quick glance over. The kid’s face was red as a third degree sunburn, and his arms were shaking like a sapling in a hailstorm.

Hell, Brad’s arms were quivering themselves, but he wasn’t three seconds away from knocking a tooth out like his neighbor.

“Breathe,” he whispered harshly.

The kid blinked furiously as sweat ran down his temples and shot Brad a nervous look.

“Breathe,” he said more forcefully. “Now. In. Out.”

The kid did as Brad commanded, and some of the redness faded out, revealing the freckled skin of his cheeks. So at least he wouldn’t pass out.

“Flex your arms,” he demanded, and the kid did immediately. His entire body focused to a sharpened point, and while he still vibrated with concentration, Brad noted with some satisfaction he’d stopped shaking hard enough to shift the mat. Which was good, because Brad was done helping. He had to focus on his own performance. Head down, eyes forward, push through the pain that was radiating from his knee up to his hip.

Coach Ace’s black gym shoes came to a halt just inside his line of vision. Brad didn’t move a muscle. Another drop of sweat rolled off his forehead and landed on the toe of the coach’s shoes. Neither man moved.

“You looking to take my job, Marine?” came the man’s growly, low voice.

“No, sir,” he said through gritted teeth.

A whimper came from behind him. They were all dying.

“You think you can coach these youngins better than I can?”

“No, sir.”

There was a long pause, then a quiet “Release.”

As one, they collapsed to the mat like two dozen puppets who’d all had their strings cut simultaneously. Most of them sprawled like broken dolls. A few tried to regain their dignity by crawling up to sit half-flopped-over. None of them were looking all that hot at the moment.

Brad leaned over and wiped his face clean with the bottom of his shorts.

“You’re dismissed for the night,” Coach Ace said. “If we called your name earlier, you need to see Coach Cartwright for your additional strengthening exercises. He’s got your sheets. You’ll have nobody to blame but yourselves if you get cut.”

They crawled, rolled and dragged themselves over to the area where they’d dumped their bags. Most were shaking their limbs out, trying to regain feeling. A few looked as though, if they tried to stand, they’d vomit.

Brad stood slowly, rolling up like a ninety-two-year-old man coming out of his favorite recliner. Creaky bones and all. Twenty-nine, and already too old for this shit. But he’d held his own.

“Hey.” The red-faced freckled wonder bounced over to him. Brad mentally cursed the recoverability of the young. “Thanks for earlier.”

Brad grunted and rolled his left shoulder, shaking out his right leg at the same time. He hissed in a pained breath when his knee throbbed and made the same grinding feeling it had been doing all through evening practice. He covered the hiss with a cough, reaching for his water. Right. Like dry mouth was the problem.

“You really pulled my ass out of the fire,” the kid went on, hovering while Brad debated the merits of putting his shirt back on or digging through his bag for a clean one. The old one was gross, but putting on a new one meant doing laundry that much faster.