by Paige Tyler
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.
After making her promise to stay in the operations vehicle parked four blocks away, Gage and the rest of the SWAT team immediately headed into the fray—not to take out the thugs, but to try to rescue any of the hotel guests still inside. She’d almost turned off the monitors when she’d seen all the carnage there. Any remaining thought that the SWAT team was crooked, dirty, or anything other than the biggest bunch of heroic, dedicated cops she’d ever seen in her life was gone now. Gage and his men had gone into the motel over and over, carrying out the wounded while being shot at the whole time.
Mac held her breath as Gage reached the second floor. The two gangs had knocked out windows and piled up furniture to barricade themselves behind while they used up what seemed like an unlimited supply of ammunition. She knew Gage and his team were good at their jobs, but she didn’t see how this was going to end well.
Her hands were freaking shaking, she was so scared. Gage was going in there, and she suddenly realized she didn’t want him to.
The audio system in the operations vehicle was tied into the headsets every SWAT officer wore, so why the hell couldn’t she hear anything? She darted from one monitor to the next, but the men moved so fast it was making her dizzy. She wasn’t even sure where everyone was. A minute ago, Gage had been on the stairwell, but now he looked as if he was on some kind of gravel surface. Where the hell was he, on the ground behind the building? That made no sense at all.
Several men suddenly kneeled down in front of Gage’s camera, and she had only a second to identify one of them as Cooper before they scattered again. She almost screamed in frustration.
Gage’s voice came over the speaker. “Three…two…one…go!”
There was a thunderous boom and a flash of light, then…chaos.
Mac’s heart pounded harder, almost drowning out the sound coming over the speakers. What the hell good were cameras if everything on the monitors was too fast and jarring to comprehend? There were bright flashes of light, then the pop of gunshots followed by the ear-shattering cacophony of automatic weapons being fired. Screams and shouts turned into cries of pain, but they were barely audible over the low, angry growls the SWAT team made. She’d heard the same thing when Mike and Xander had led their squads into the pitch-black office building that first day. Only this time, it was much louder.
She closed her eyes, unable to look at the monitors any longer. Why the hell was she so terrified? She’d been in situations like this before. Heck she’d been shot at half a dozen times in the course of her career and even been nea
r an explosion once. But she’d never been this scared.
Because she wasn’t the one in danger. The man she cared about was. And that made it worse. She prayed Gage and his men made it through this safely.
Mac didn’t know how long she sat there with her eyes closed. But when she opened them again, an eerie kind of quiet had descended upon the motel. She could still hear moans, whimpers, and the occasional sob, but no gunfire.
Then Mike’s voice came over the speaker. “One clear.”
“Two clear,” said Xander.
“Three clear,” reported Cooper.
The SWAT team was calling in by some kind of number pattern, letting Gage and everyone else know they were alive and that their area of responsibility had been cleared. She held her breath as fifteen numbers were announced.
“All clear,” Gage said. “Get the EMTs in here.”
Mac slumped down in the seat, more exhausted than if she’d run a marathon.
Behind her, the doors of the operations vehicle opened. She jerked around to see Zak stick in his head.
“Everyone’s running inside. What happened?”
Mac had completely forgotten Zak had been outside taking pictures of the scene. “I’m not sure, but I think everyone’s okay,” she said. “I heard all of them over the radio at least, and they sounded okay. I don’t have a clue what happened, though.”
Zak climbed in the truck and shut the door. “I think they blew their way in through the roof, both ends of the building at exactly the same time. There was gravel and flaming tar flying everywhere.”
That explained the gravel she’d seen. They’d been on the roof.
She and Zak sat in silence, watching the monitors and trying to figure out what was going on, but it was too dark and chaotic. A lot of people had gotten hurt in the little gang war, so the monitors were filled with EMTs, uniformed officers, and SWAT team members rendering first aid. The motel looked like a scene out of a M*A*S*H episode as an endless stream of ambulance gurneys rolled in and right back out.
She was going to get sick if she kept trying to watch the crazy scene. But she couldn’t tear herself away until she knew Gage was okay. When she finally caught a quick flash of his tall, broad-shouldered form in one of the other men’s cameras, she let out the breath she didn’t even realize she’d been holding. He was safe. She could breathe again.
