Page 22 of Stand Fast

To buy her a few moments to work up her courage, she fiddled with some paperwork spread out on the long table beneath the board. Zaid stepped closer, standing near enough that she could feel his body heat licking along her side.

Without looking at him she opened a drawer and pulled out a stack of files she had to go through, all too aware of the way he watched her. “You’re distracting me,” she muttered and glanced up at him, annoyed that she couldn’t concentrate with him around.

A slow grin spread across his lips. “Am I?”

“Very much so.” And that was a first.

“I’d say I’m sorry, but then I’d be lying.”

Fighting a smile, she picked up another file from the desk and attempted to kick her brain back into gear. If her team truly had been the intended target today, it meant someone knew not only about their movements, but their involvement with The Jackal investigation as well. And every time they left the relative safety of Bagram, they did so with targets painted on their backs. They couldn’t afford to waste any time in finding the man responsible.

Zaid took another step closer, stopping mere inches from her back. Jaliya’s spine snapped taut, every nerve ending in her body going haywire at his nearness. He was so close she could hear the slow, steady breaths he took. And when she inhaled, she got a breath of his clean, slightly spicy, masculine scent.

“What are you doing?” she managed without turning around, her voice a little breathless.Besides crowding me and ruining my concentration.If he thought they could pick up where they’d left off in the hotel, he was dead wrong.

“Reading over your shoulder,” he answered softly, his breath caressing the sensitive skin of her cheek with every word.

Her nipples went rock hard and the muscles low in her belly clenched.Time to go.But first, she really had to make things clear. “About the other day,” she began, unable to look at him. Four days ago, to be exact.

“I can’t stop thinking about it.”

At his low, impassioned words, her brain hit delete on the speech she’d been about to give him. The one about how things couldn’t progress between them, for various reasons, blah, blah. Gone. She had nothing. Could only gape at him as every detail of the kiss came back to her in vivid color.

He laughed softly at her. “Okay, guess you weren’t expecting me to say that.”

“Um, no,” she mumbled, scrambling to get her thoughts together. Reasons. She had reasons why they couldn’t get involved. “Just to be clear, I won’t sleep with you.”

He jerked his head back slightly in surprise and raised his eyebrows. “I don’t remember asking you to.”

Bollocks. She was making a total ass of herself. “I just…” She cleared her throat again, her cheeks burning. “I thought I should tell you that up front. In case you thought otherwise.” Because,reasons. Reasons that were hard to think of when he was standing right here in front of her, all hard-bodied, alpha male sex appeal.

He watched her closely for a long moment, a slight frown pulling the dark slashes of his eyebrows together. “Is there someone else?”

It took her a moment to understand what he was asking. Did she already have a guy. For a second she thought about lying, to make it easier to put distance between them. But she couldn’t do it. “No. You?”

He shook his head. “No.”

Why the hell did that make her so happy? “Do you date much?” It was embarrassing, how few words she could string together into a coherent sentence at the moment. She was totally fishing, wanting to find out more about him and maybe see if she could discern whether he was online Zaid.

He lifted a shoulder. “Haven’t for a while. I even tried the whole online dating thing for a bit.”

Her heart drummed fast against her ribs. This was the perfect opening for her to dig a little. “But it never worked out?”

“No.” His gaze dropped to her mouth before coming back to her eyes, making her lips tingle. “There was someone I thought I had a real connection with a few months back, and then she disappeared.”

She hid a wince, feeling half-naked under that stare. “Why, what happened?”

He gave her a funny look. “You really want to know about this?”

“Yes.”

He relented and shrugged. “I dunno. She was overseas all the time on business, so we’d never met in person. We set up a meeting for when she came into town and then she cancelled on me the night before.”

Oh, shit, he was talking abouther. He was online Zaid. The blood drained from her face.

He cocked his head, his frown deepening as he watched her. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing.” Whirling around, she frantically fiddled with the files, trying to look like she was busy organizing them when in fact her brain was in full panic mode. What now? “Were you upset?”

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