It probably didn’t hurt that he was so damn attractive. In a room full of Adonis-class hunks, Xander Riggs stood head and shoulders above the rest. He wasn’t necessarily taller or better built. And it wasn’t that he was more handsome than the other guys. It was simply that the combination of dark hair, chocolate-brown eyes, and kissable lips really did something for her.
Then there was his scent.
The moment she’d set foot in the compound, she realized that the unique scent she’d picked up from Dixon back in Lakefront wasn’t actually that unique. It turned out that what she’d smelled was werewolf scent. She confirmed that when she walked into the training room and was assaulted with sixteen different versions of that same smell. Each one was subtly different, which meant she’d be able to identify each man on the team easily from now on, but in general, all of them smelled like a werewolf.
But then Riggs had walked into the training room, and snap! The scent coming off him was so tantalizing she’d almost leaned forward to get a better sniff. She controlled herself—barely. Shoving your nose into your new supervisor’s neck and snuffling at him like a pig probably wasn’t the kind of first impression she wanted to make.
She’d still been appreciating every subtle nuance of her squad leader’s scent when they’d shaken hands. And when he’d smiled…she’d gotten all warm and fuzzy fast.
She was just thinking her biggest problem was going to be not crushing on her new squad leader—a problem she was more than ready to live with—when she’d heard Riggs say she wouldn’t work on his team.
Worse, everybody else in the room heard it too. Most of them tried to hide it, but she saw the surprise on their faces as they heard Riggs saying anything and everything to get out of having her on his squad. Becker looked pissed when Riggs tried to pin the blame on him, saying he would be so distracted by her presence that he’d get himself killed.
She turned back to the guys, wishing she could crawl off somewhere to hide. This introduction had gone from perfect to craptastic in less than five minutes, and she didn’t have a clue why. But she knew what would happen next. She could already see it in her new teammates’ eyes. They were wondering what Riggs knew about her that they didn’t. Was she some kind of screwup? A troublemaker? She’d seen those same looks before, and she knew she was going to come out on the short end of the stick. Nobody was going to give her the benefit of the doubt over a senior cop like Riggs.
Why had she come here? The cops back in Lakefront might have disliked her, but at least she’d been able to do her job, even if she had to do it without backup. That wasn’t going to work here. You couldn’t be a loner on a SWAT team. She was wondering if she should leave when the team’s resident explosives expert, Cooper, and the hugely intimidating mountain of a man, Brooks, each took up a position on either side of her and casually leaned back against the table while Becker spun a chair around backward in front of her and straddled it.
She tensed, bracing herself for whatever they were going to throw her way.
“So,” Cooper said conversationally. “You got hit with a shotgun blast. What’s that like?”
Khaki stared at him, not sure she’d heard right. Then she looked around the room. The other guys were either sprawled in their chairs or leaning back against tables, regarding her thoughtfully.
She turned back to Cooper. “Well…um…it hurt. Like really big bee stings on crack.”
Cooper laughed. “Bee stings, huh? Well, then you don’t ever want to get hit with a MAC-10 at close range because that hurts a hell of a lot more than bee stings.”
Pushing away from the table, Cooper pulled off his T-shirt, showing off an impressive amount of muscles and almost a dozen well-healed scars along his chest and left shoulder.
“Nine .45 caliber rounds at less than twenty feet,” he said, motioning at his scars.
Brooks snorted. “You call those scars? And here I thought they were mosquito bites. Now this is a scar.”
Giving Khaki a grin, Brooks pulled up his T-shirt to show a long, thin scar that ran all the way across his chocolate-brown abs and around his side to the middle of his back. “This was from a coked-up junkie with a machete. He thought I was trying to steal his stash.”
She winced. The long, faint scar must have come from one hell of a wound. Although the scar was impressive, it wasn’t nearly as impressive as those spectacular abs of his.
“Notice how most of that scar is on Jayden’s back,” Mike quietly pointed out from across the room. “That’s because he was running away at the time.”
The other guys laughed. Khaki laughed too. The next thing she knew, the men were flashing all kinds of skin, showing off their scars and telling outrageous lies about how they’d gotten them. At least she was pretty sure they were lies. Khaki laughed so hard, she thought she was going to cry. But she didn’t. She didn’t want anything blurring the mind-boggling view of the perfectly chiseled bodies on display in front of her. If someone from HR walked in, they probably would have lost their minds, but as far as Khaki was concerned, this was the team’s way of telling her they wanted her in SWAT, regardless of what Riggs said.
“What about you?” Becker asked her. “Don’t you have any scars you want to show off?”
She almost shook her head no, but then stopped. As odd as it sounded, showing off scars and swapping stories was their way of bonding as teammates. If she didn’t do the same, she knew they wouldn’t pressure her, but it would be silly of her not to show them the one on her stomach. Unlike them, though, she wasn’t going to take off her T-shirt.
She pulled her shirt out of her pants and lifted it up enough to show them the long scar three inches above and to the left of her belly button. “A suspect knifed me last week.”
“Shit,” Alex breathed. “Was that a serrated blade?”
He got up and moved closer, leaning in to get a better look at the puckered skin. As one of the team’s medics, he was probably used to seeing a lot of really nasty wounds, but he seemed particularly impressed with hers.
“Yeah,” she answered. “The knife hurt worse coming out than going in.”
“I bet.” Becker flashed her a boyish grin. “That’s going to be a cool scar in another week or two.”
Khaki wouldn’t normally take that as a compliment, but from these guys, it was.
“I have a scar on my thigh from a bullet too, but it happened the night I…”WhathadDixonsaiditwascalled?“Changed,” she finished.
