Guardian Ranger (Shadow Agents 2)

He had not just said that to her.

“You waited,” he continued, voice thickening, “because you wanted to be with the right man.”

“You aren’t the right man.” She could barely force the words past her suddenly desert-dry throat. “What you are... You’re a man who lied to me. From the first moment I saw you in that bar, everything has been a lie.”

“Not everything.” He was less than a foot away from her. Not touching. She didn’t want him to touch her. It was hard enough to keep her wall of ice in place. She didn’t want him touching her again and trying to shatter that wall.

“You’re EOD.” She threw that out at him.

He nodded.

“You think my brother is a killer.”

“I know he is.”

“Just like you are.” Her breath heaved out. “He was following mission orders, saving lives. You said yourself that a soldier—”

“I’m not talking about lives taken during battle. I’m talking about murder. About going right up to a man and slitting his throat or stabbing him in the heart.”

She remembered Reed Montgomery’s body. The brutality. The blood. “Y-you’re wrong.”

“I want to be.”

Her eyes met his in surprise. She held his stare. It was the first time she’d looked deeply into his eyes since realizing the truth.

Jasper shook his head. “I want to be wrong about Cale, but the evidence says I’m not.”

“M-maybe the evidence is wrong.” It had to be wrong.

“There’s a lot of evidence, and every bit of it points to your brother.”

Nails in his coffin. Or hers. She forced her hands to unclench. “Why were you sent in?”

“I belong to a special unit at the EOD, a unit some call the Shadow Agents. When the other EOD agents were murdered, the cases didn’t go public. Our boss wanted us to handle this in-house. He wanted my team to find and apprehend the killer.” Jasper’s hand lifted, as if he’d touch her. But when she tensed, his hand fell back to his side. “When we realized exactly who we were after, it was decided that’d I’d be point on the mission because of my past relationship with Cale.”

“And using me, that was just part of the plan, too, right?”

His green gaze glinted. “I knew Cale. I knew how he felt about you—”

“So you knew you could use me.” She tried to walk around him. He grabbed her shoulders. Spun her back to face him.

The ice began to crack.

“I knew that your brother wasn’t just going to cut and run and leave you behind.” His fingers curled around her shoulders, pulling her closer. “I knew that he’d have to come back for you, sooner or later.”

“So all you had to do was wait. Wait, and he’d be here.” Sooner or later. She swallowed to try to ease that dang dryness in her throat. “Why did you have to go so far?” Her voice came out too soft. “Why did you have to make love to me?”

“Because I wanted you, wanted you more than I wanted anything else.”

She wanted to believe him.

“There’s the mission.” His head lowered toward her. “There’s the job that I have to do and then there’s you and me. There’s what we feel.”

He was going to kiss her. The ice was too weak around her. She couldn’t handle this. Him.

Her hand slammed into his chest. “You lied to me.”

His muscles were rock-hard beneath her hand.