The Girl Next Door (Shadow Agents 6)

Not what she wanted to hear. “Video equipment? Audio surveillance?” The whole place could be bugged. “Did they see what we did?” Her voice was a horrified whisper.

If he’d let the other agents watch them...she felt her cheeks burn.

Cooper gave a hard shake of his head. “Do you think I would let that happen? That was about me and you, and no one else.”

Her breath rushed out in relief. She turned away.

“Don’t treat me like a stranger.”

Her hands trembled. She rubbed her fingers over her jean-clad thighs. “Isn’t that what you are? I mean, I lay down next to my lover—a living, breathing man I trusted, but then I found out that he was some secret agent, and that he’d supposedly died on a mission in Afghanistan.”

“I should have died. I was shot to hell and back—”

The image of his scars flashed through her mind.

“But somehow Mercer found out about me.”

Mercer. She filed that name into her vault.

“I don’t even know how I showed up on the guy’s radar,” Cooper continued. “He found out about me. He came for me. His Shadow Agents burst onto the scene, they dragged me out of that hell, and they brought me back to life.” His shoulders rolled back as if he were trying to push away the memory. “But by that point, everyone on my original team already thought I was dead. And it wasn’t like I had any family. I never knew my dad. Cancer took my mother when I was a teenager. Hell, I already felt like a ghost, so when Mercer made me an offer, I took it.”

He turned on the lamp near him, and more light spilled across the room.

“I’ve worked with the EOD since then. The agents do their missions, and like Mercer said, we save lives.”

It wasn’t that simple. “One of the agents is taking lives.”

He paced toward her. “And it’s our job to stop him. I didn’t expect you to get involved. You were my neighbor. The sexy girl who slipped into my fantasies. I’d known only blood and death until you.” He swallowed. “Then you were in my world, looking so beautiful and smelling of lilacs.”

She had lilac body lotion. A gift from Penelope.

“But then I found you at Lockwood’s apartment. You were in the wrong place. Hell, you almost walked right in on me.”

Another piece of the puzzle snapped into place. He’d been in Lockwood’s apartment. “That was why the door was open.” He’d been there, first, before her. “You broke in to that apartment.”

He nodded, and kept coming closer to her. “No one had heard from Lockwood in days. I knew something was wrong, and I had to get inside to him.”

“How did you get out—” Gabrielle began, then stopped because she realized what he’d done. “You scaled the building.”

Another nod. “The same way that the killer did.”

Because they were the same—the same training, the same deadly instincts.

“Everything changed when you got involved,” he said again. “Protecting you became a priority for me. I only called the EOD in because I didn’t have a choice. I knew the killer had you in his sights—after that phone call, how could there be any doubt? It was too risky for you to go off alone.”

“You thought I was going to blow your cover. You thought—”

“I thought that if anything happened to you, I’d go crazy.” He was right in front of her. Not touching her, but seeming to surround her.

She shook her head. “You don’t have to paint some fake story about how you feel, okay? You had orders. You had—”

“I’d had you,” he told her bluntly. The burn in her cheeks got even worse. “I’d had you, and there was no going back. It wasn’t about one night—I want more than that from you. I want a hell of a lot more.”

The first time she’d met him, Gabrielle had known that he was out of her league. Too intense. Too fierce.

And, damn him, too sexy.

“I’ll have you again,” Cooper said.