by Paige Tyler
He gave her a sideways glance as he turned the news van onto the road that led to the SWAT compound. “About what?”
Gage. Or more precisely, the handsome SWAT commander’s promise—the one about the two of them making love all night. But she wasn’t going to tell Zak that.
She’d hardly slept a wink after Gage left. How could any woman expect to fall asleep when they were fantasizing about a man like that? She’d been so turned on she finally pulled out her vibrator for some relief. But unfortunately, the bunny didn’t keep going and going, and she was still unsatisfied. When she finally fell asleep, she’d alternated between dreams of making love with Gage and wondering why the hell she was so crazy for him. She’d never had it this bad for a guy in her life.
“Let me guess,” Zak said when she didn’t answer. “You’re not sure you want to keep investigating Gage and the SWAT team, right?”
Mac didn’t say anything. Besides the fact that investigating SWAT would probably end up being a waste of time, there was the bigger, ethical issue of writing a story about a man while she was desperately trying to get him into her bed.
People in her line of work called that a conflict of interest. She just called it stupid.
“Yeah,” she finally said. “I’ve been thinking that maybe there isn’t as much going on here as I thought.”
She waited for Zak to question where this sudden case of self-doubt was coming from. But he surprised her.
“I know I’m just your photographer, but for what it’s worth, I think you’re right. These guys seem clean to me.”
Mac stared at him. Who was this guy and what had he done with the real Zak? Because the Zak she knew never hesitated to call it like he saw it. Besides, he was more than her photographer.
“O-kay,” she said slowly. “I agree with you, but why do you think so?”
“I spent a lot of time with them yesterday while you were out shooting with Gage. And then I went out to some clubs and stuff with them last night.”
It was her turn to lift a brow. Zak didn’t usually go clubbing. And he especially didn’t go clubbing during Shark Week. “That must have been interesting.”
“Hey, I get out sometimes, you know. But I was just saying, they were really cool to hang with. They didn’t get drunk. Or stupid. We just sat around, had a few beers, and talked.”
“You’re telling me those guys went clubbing and all they did was hang out with you?”
“Well, they danced some, too. Actually, they danced a lot.” He frowned. “Women seem to gravitate to them for some reason. But the important thing is that we talked long enough for me to get a good feel for them. I really think they’re stand-up guys.”
She could have ragged Zak about his legendary instincts when it came to telling the difference between good guys and bad guys. But she didn’t because she knew he was right this time.
“Yeah, I think so, too.”
“So, what are you going to do?” he asked.
That was a damn good question. “I don’t know. I guess I’ll just let the next few days play out. If you’re right and we don’t find anything, I’ll drop the story.”
His mouth edged up into a smile. “I’m guessing the fact that you’re attracted to Dixon sort of makes your decision a bit more complicated than it should be?”
Zak didn’t miss much. “When did you know?”
“The moment you walked out of the operations vehicle on Belmont the other day.”
She laughed. “Now you’re just making crap up. Even I didn’t realize I liked him at that point.”
Zak shook his head with a sigh. “You always were a little slow about that kind of stuff.”
Mac opened her mouth to tell him she wasn’t slow, thank you very much, but the two SUVs heading out the gate just as they were pulling in stopped her. The big operations vehicle was right behind the first two vehicles. Gage leaned out of the window just long enough to tell her he was going on a call at a shopping mall in Arlington.
“Xander’s inside. He’s arranged for you to sit down and talk to some of the other guys.” Gage flashed her a smile. “I figured you’d want to get some background on someone besides me.”
Not really. But he was gone before she could even consider telling him that out loud, or try and invite herself along.
Mac climbed out of the news van and fell into step beside Zak. Maybe it would be a good idea to talk to a few of the other guys. Just to get a different perspective on her theoretical story. God knew she couldn’t focus on anything when Gage was around.
The rest of the team was waiting for her and Zak in the classroom in the training building. While they greeted her warmly—and fist-bumped Zak for bringing more donuts—there seemed to be a weird vibe in the room. Kind of like walking in a friend’s house after she and her husband had a fight. Did it have something to do with the incident Gage had gone on?
Then again, considering that several of the men were going out of their way not to look at her, maybe not. And every time she caught them checking her out, they quickly looked away. All the men except Cooper. He held her gaze for a long time before he finally grabbed a donut at random and walked off without a word. What the hell was that about?
Mac wandered over to the desk at the front of the room to see if there were any donuts with sprinkles left when Xander walked in.
“Ms. Stone.”
“Corporal Riggs.” She smiled. “Donut?”
He shook his head. “I saw you talking to Sergeant Dixon before he left. He asked me to keep you occupied while he was gone.”
What was she, a puppy? “Keep me occupied?”
Xander winced. “Not exactly the way Sergeant Dixon put it. Now you see why he does all the talking when it comes to the press.”
She might have laughed if she thought Xander’d been joking. But he looked even more intense and serious than usual. “Is something wrong?”
Surprise flickered across his face, but it was gone just as quickly, replaced with the same austere expression. He glanced over at the other men. They were leaning back in their chairs, laughing at something Zak had said. The tension she’d picked up earlier seemed to have faded.
She turned her attention back to Xander and found him regarding her with a suspicious look. “What?”
“Nothing,” he said.
There was definitely something going on behind those dark eyes, but damned if she could figure out what it was. “You didn’t answer my question.”
“We just kind of got into it about something before you got here.” His smile didn’t quite reach his eyes. “It wasn’t a big deal. Just guy stuff.”
Uh-huh. “And by something, do you mean me?”
“No, of course not.”
Xander was lying his ass off and not doing a very good job of it. Why had they been arguing about her? She wanted to ask, but Xander probably wouldn’t tell her anyway. Time to change the subject.
“Gage said something about me interviewing the men while I waited for him to come back,” she said.
The muscle in Xander’s jaw jumped. She was going to have to be careful trying to manipulate him. He had a suspicious streak a mile wide, and he definitely didn’t trust her.
“Yeah,” he said. “He mentioned that.”
“Would you like to be first?”
Xander didn’t look any more thrilled about the idea than she was, but he nodded. “We can talk in the weight room.”
The couches out by the television would be more comfortable, but Xander had already headed in that direction, giving her no choice but to follow. The senior corporal was standing in the middle of the room, arms folded across his chest, his expression guarded. Oh yeah, this was going to be fun.
Mac sat down on one of the weight benches and took out her notebook. At least they’d gotten new mirrors put in since the last time she was here.
>
Xander was polite, but evasive. Okay, maybe that wasn’t fair. He answered all her questions. He simply didn’t elaborate on any of his answers. She didn’t get much more than the boring stuff she’d already read in his file. He’d worked for the Kansas City Police Department for several years before Gage recruited him to join the Dallas SWAT team. Yes, he was single. No, he wasn’t seeing anyone.
She spent the next few hours interviewing the rest of the guys on Xander’s squad. Trevino and McCall were reserved like Xander, but Lowry, Delaney, and Becker were more forthcoming. Not only did they have more stories than a boatload of sailors, they were charming as hell and knew how to make a woman laugh. She took a lot of notes. If she ever wrote a human interest piece about the SWAT team, she’d have enough to write a dozen articles.
Mac skimmed her notes while she waited for Cooper to come in and noticed that none of the guys were married. Huh. How was it possible for a group of cops this hunky to all be single? That had to some kind of statistical anomaly.
Something else was odd, too. Most of them had transferred from other police departments around the country. She didn’t know enough about the subject to say for sure, but it was hard to believe no one in the Dallas PD had measured up.
While that was certainly strange, it also indicated Gage and his team were clean. If he’d schemed to fill the unit with his people so they could get away with something dirty, wouldn’t he have gotten other cops from his own department, cops he knew were dirty, too? There was no way Gage could have known officers from other departments well enough to know they were crooked.
She was investigating SWAT because she thought they were dirty, but if anything, Gage had almost gone out of his way to make it the cleanest unit possible.
Mac was scribbling some notes when Cooper walked in. He still wore that half-angry expression he’d had earlier. But then he smiled and she wondered if she hadn’t imagined things.
“I saved a donut for you,” he said as he sat down on the weight bench opposite her. “I noticed you didn’t grab one before you left and figured you’d be starving after listening to all the BS the guys were probably trying to sell you.”
She set down her notebook to take the sprinkle-covered donut he’d wrapped in a napkin. He’d even been thoughtful enough to bring her a cup of coffee with the right amount of cream. She took a sip. Artificial sweeter, too? Damn, he was good.
“Okay, bringing me a donut with sprinkles is impressive enough, but how did you know how I take my coffee?”
He chuckled. “Four years in the Army Bomb Squad, two tours in Afghanistan, one in Iraq. You learn to notice everything or you get blown into a pink mist real quick.”
Something in his tone told her he wasn’t joking. “I see. Well, thanks for thinking about me. I was getting hungry.”
He nodded and crossed his arms over his chest, emphasizing his biceps. His arms weren’t as big as Gage’s, but they were close. The perturbed look was back on his face now. What the hell was going on with him? Just yesterday, this cute guy was staring at her butt like he was in love with it. Today, he looked at her like he wanted her the hell out of here.
“Mind if I ask you a question, Ms. Stone?”
She set her coffee down on the bench and picked up her notepad. “Not at all. And call me Mac.”
“Okay then, Mac. Are you screwing with my boss’s head just to get a story?”
Mac was pretty sure her jaw dropped. And people said she was direct. “I don’t know what you mean.”
God, that sounded horribly lame.
He snorted. “Sure you do. It’s a simple question. Do you honestly care about Gage or are you planning to screw him over to get the story you’re after?”
If anyone else on the team had asked her that question, she probably would have BS’d her way through it. But she didn’t think she could do that with Cooper.
“Does it matter how I answer?” she asked. “You have no reason to believe me even if I tell you the truth.”
“Just answer the question. I’ll know if you’re telling the truth.”
Mac wasn’t sure how he could tell, but she believed him. “Yes, I honestly care about Gage.”
“So, he’s important to you?”
“Yes.”
Why the heck was she answering like she was on a witness stand? She was supposed to be the one asking questions.
“Are you in love with him?”
She didn’t know why she even hesitated. How could you fall in love with any man that you’d just met a few days ago? Even if he was as hunky, sexy, arousing, and tempting as Gage. Hell, she hadn’t even slept with him yet.
She opened her mouth to tell Cooper she wasn’t in love with his boss, not that it was any of his business, but she couldn’t get the words out. She might not know if she loved him—she was a practical woman, and practical women didn’t fall in love in three days—but she felt something for him. Something stronger than she’d ever felt for any other man.
She was still trying to figure out exactly what the hell she felt when Cooper stood. “I think I have the answer I was looking for.”
Mac frowned up at him. “But I didn’t say anything.”
His mouth curved. “You said plenty.”
She watched in confusion as he headed for the door. “Hey. Aren’t you going to let me interview you?”
He stopped in the doorway to look back at her. “I’m boring. Nobody wants to know anything about me.”
Mac gazed down at the blank page on her notepad. If she didn’t know better, she’d think that Cooper had just Dr. Phil’d her butt. Because as crazy as it sounded, things seemed a whole lot clearer than they’d been a little while ago.
* * *
Mac was snooping around the upstairs bedroom a few hours later, and finding nothing, when a pair of strong arms wrapped around her waist. Even though she knew it had to be Gage, she let out a little gasp of surprise anyway. He chuckled softly, his warm breath brushing her ear and making her shiver.
“Sorry. Didn’t mean to scare you,” he said. “I thought you would have left already. Find anything interesting up here?”
She wrapped her arms around him, leaning back against the hard wall of his chest. “I was hoping to find a stash of needles and steroid bottles under the mattress, but no luck.”
Since finishing the one-on-one interviews, she’d spent hours covering just about every inch of the compound—with Xander’s complete knowledge and permission. She’d skimmed through the rest of the files, then pawed through every storage space and equipment room she could find before coming up here to do a detailed search. Nothing. No drugs or anything indicating that anything inappropriate was going on.
“Sorry to disappoint you,” Gage said. “I could go buy some if it’d help. I’ll need a prescription first, though, so it might take a while.”
She turned in his arms, surprised at how relieved she was to see him back safe and sound. She hadn’t even realized she’d been worried. “How’d it go at the mall?”
He stepped back with a heavy sigh, and she immediately missed the warmth of his arms. “Better than I thought it would. There was a teen with a gun holding hostages in a sporting goods store. He was upset that some girl had made fun of him and wanted to kill her and everyone she worked with. It was tense for a while there, but Kendrick finally talked him down. It took almost four hours to convince the kid to walk away.”
Wow. “I’m glad no one got hurt.”
“Me too.”
She followed Gage into the small kitchen, watching as he rifled through the cabinets. He opened just about every one of them, but came up empty-handed.
“Looking for anything in particular?” she asked.
“Not really. Just had an urge for something.”
“Like what?”
The teasing look he gave her made her pulse skip a beat. �
�Now I know what I wanted to eat.” He took her hand and pulled her against him with a low, sexy growl. “You.”
His mouth came down on hers with a possessiveness that made her knees go weak. She clutched his shoulders to keep from melting to the floor. How could she go all gooey from a simple kiss?
Because there wasn’t anything simple about it. The kiss was amazing.
“I’ve been thinking about doing that all day,” he rasped.
She smiled. “Good thing I didn’t leave then.”
He chuckled and bent his head to kiss her again, but a loud cough from the top of the stairs made them both freeze. Damn, she’d completely forgotten where they were. Apparently, so had Gage. He stepped away from her.
“Sorry to interrupt, Sergeant,” Mike said. “But we have another one.”
* * *
Mac sat in the operations vehicle, her eyes glued to the monitors as Gage and the entire SWAT team finished their sweep of the first floor of the fleabag motel and headed up the stairs at both ends of the building. Despite being worried to death about what came next, she was glad they were finally done with the ground floor because what she’d seen there was going to haunt her for a very long time.
From what Mac had been able to piece together, a local gang had been having some kind of initiation party on the first floor when a rival gang had shown up and started shooting. Gang Number One had returned fire and what had started out as a party had quickly turned into a bloodbath.
The cops had gotten there in time to force the gun-wielding survivors of both gangs up to the second floor of the motel, where they’d barricaded themselves in several rooms. Unfortunately, each gang had taken the people staying at the motel hostage, and were ready to kill all of them—if they hadn’t already.
When she, Gage, and the rest of the SWAT team had arrived, the uniformed officers were still trading fire with the gangs on the second floor. It had been like a warzone, with the gangs taking shots at each other as well as the cops and anyone else who came within sight of the motel.