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.
