Chapter 2
Five minutes earlier...
Standing next to Jake at the front of the conference room, Trace did his best to forget about the cute-as-fuck blonde he’d seen at the coffee shop, and then again in R.I.S.C.’s reception area.
It was a hard task to accomplish.
That’s not the only thing that’s hard.
Shifting his weight, Trace made sure to keep his crossed hands placed casually in front of his zipper. The last thing he wanted was for these guys to notice the half-hard bulge pressing against his denim crotch.
Jesus. You’d think he was sixteen, rather than thirty-eight.
Sure, he was a healthy and single grown male. His eyes worked just fine, which meant he had no problem recognizing an attractive member of the opposite sex when he saw one. Hell, he even took one to bed every now and again, but that was as far as it went.
And they sure as shit never affected him this way.
There was just something about Emma Cooper. She was different, somehow. And it wasn’t just one or two things, either. It was...
Everything.
Trace had spotted her the second he’d walked into the coffee shop across the street. With his sunglasses on, she had no way of knowing he was looking at her, too.
So he’d stood in line, watching her watching him.
He could still picture the look on her face when she had. The heat boiling behind those gorgeous, hazel eyes of hers.
It was almost as if she’d been thinking about jumping him, right there in the middle of the busy shop. And Trace, well...for a second there, he’d found himself thinking he just might let her.
The thing was, he wasn’t sure why.
He was always in control.Always.But this tiny bit of a woman had taken him completely off guard.
The most frustrating part was, he couldn’t pinpoint exactly what it was that had drawn him to her in the first place. Hell, she wasn’t even his usual type.
When he actually took the time to date—if you could even call it that—Trace typically chose women who were taller. Had long hair and perfectly manicured nails.
Women who ran in the same type of circles as his uppity parents and their friends.
Admittedly, he’d chosen the women from his past on purpose. They helped him fill the time between ops, and he filled their fantasy of bedding a special ops boot kicker.