Bear Claw Conspiracy by Jessica Andersen Page B

She was a Lynd, she could handle anything.
    Besides, maybe she would get lucky. Maybe he’d be such a jerk that her blossoming crush would wither and die.
    “Here. Catch.” Tucker tossed her a badge like the one Blackthorn wore on his belt: a Bear Claw P.D. shield with the serial number blank.
    She snagged it on the fly, and took a deep breath to settle the sudden churn of excitement in her belly as Tucker led her through an abbreviated swearing-in and ran through what she could and couldn’t do out in the field. “As for the rest of it,” he finished, “just ask Captain Blackthorn here, former leader of SWAT Team Four out of East L.A.” Gigi’s heart thudda-thudded and the bottom dropped out of her stomach, as though she had suddenly jumped onto an elevator headed straight up into the stratosphere. She stared at Blackthorn as a whole lot of clues suddenly lined up.
    Blackthorn was SWAT, or had been. Not only that, he had been a team leader. The best of the best.
    His face darkened. “Seriously, McDermott, don’t call me that. And if you value your face, you won’t get anyone else doing it, either.” He glanced over at Gigi, though she couldn’t read much in his expression.
    She sucked in a shaky breath. “Blackthorn, I—”
    “Call me Matt already,” he interrupted. “Not Blackthorn. Not ranger. And not captain anything. Just Matt. Got it?”
    She nodded, but wasn’t capable of coherent speech as her brain finally assembled the four critical new facts and entered them into evidence:
    Fact one: Blackthorn—or, rather, Matt—was a former über-cop.
    Fact two: he outranked her. Even if she aced the accelerated program, it would be years before she could shoot for captain. And although logic said his old rank shouldn’t matter here and now, it did.
    Fact three: he looked incredible in street clothes, and he wore his gun and badge like they were a part of him that had been missing.
    Fact four: she was in serious trouble. Because if there was one thing a Lynd woman liked better than being the best at what she did, it was meeting a man who was even better.

Chapter Seven
    Within about a minute of walking into the lab, Matt had decided that if Gigi at full throttle had put a serious scare in him, she was even more terrifying when shocked into silence. Worse, she was staring at him like he’d just grown a second head…or thrown a cape over his shoulders and whipped off his shirt again, this time to reveal superhero spandex.
    Ah, crap. He hadn’t seen this one coming. Maybe he should have, but he was seriously rusty on the man-woman stuff. And Gigi was…well, she wasn’t like anyone else he’d ever met. Or kissed.
    And, yeah, the kiss was going to be a problem; it had been since the moment he’d moved in, his body overriding his usual survival instincts. He didn’t know how much further it would have gone if Tucker hadn’t shown up, but the simple kiss had made him all too aware of how damn long it had been for him. She was hot—if unconventional—and he was horny, and he had decided that was a bad combination even before Tucker called to float the idea of them working together.
    His first response had been a flat-out “No way in hell!” But Tucker had promised him that Gigi would be gone in thirteen days. The word from her home base was that they would need her one way or the other: either she would be heading for the academy or she would be covering for someone who was.
    That was why sometime during the long hours Matt had spent staring at the ceiling of his bedroom, far too aware of Bert tossing and turning on the couch in the main room of his quarters, he had talked himself into going along with Tucker’s plan. He had told himself that being deputized would get him smack in the loop, and it would mean he’d be stepping on fewer toes.
    Really, though, there was only one real reason he was doing it: to keep Gigi from getting herself killed.
    He had sworn off trying to fix people’s lives, it was