She might have laughed if she thought Xander’d been joking. But he looked even more intense and serious than usual. “Is something wrong?”
Surprise flickered across his face, but it was gone just as quickly, replaced with the same austere expression. He glanced over at the other men. They were leaning back in their chairs, laughing at something Zak had said. The tension she’d picked up earlier seemed to have faded.
She turned her attention back to Xander and found him regarding her with a suspicious look. “What?”
“Nothing,” he said.
There was definitely something going on behind those dark eyes, but damned if she could figure out what it was. “You didn’t answer my question.”
“We just kind of got into it about something before you got here.” His smile didn’t quite reach his eyes. “It wasn’t a big deal. Just guy stuff.”
Uh-huh. “And by something, do you mean me?”
“No, of course not.”
Xander was lying his ass off and not doing a very good job of it. Why had they been arguing about her? She wanted to ask, but Xander probably wouldn’t tell her anyway. Time to change the subject.
“Gage said something about me interviewing the men while I waited for him to come back,” she said.
The muscle in Xander’s jaw jumped. She was going to have to be careful trying to manipulate him. He had a suspicious streak a mile wide, and he definitely didn’t trust her.
“Yeah,” he said. “He mentioned that.”
“Would you like to be first?”
Xander didn’t look any more thrilled about the idea than she was, but he nodded. “We can talk in the weight room.”
The couches out by the television would be more comfortable, but Xander had already headed in that direction, giving her no choice but to follow. The senior corporal was standing in the middle of the room, arms folded across his chest, his expression guarded. Oh yeah, this was going to be fun.
Mac sat down on one of the weight benches and took out her notebook. At least they’d gotten new mirrors put in since the last time she was here.
Xander was polite, but evasive. Okay, maybe that wasn’t fair. He answered all her questions. He simply didn’t elaborate on any of his answers. She didn’t get much more than the boring stuff she’d already read in his file. He’d worked for the Kansas City Police Department for several years before Gage recruited him to join the Dallas SWAT team. Yes, he was single. No, he wasn’t seeing anyone.
She spent the next few hours interviewing the rest of the guys on Xander’s squad. Trevino and McCall were reserved like Xander, but Lowry, Delaney, and Becker were more forthcoming. Not only did they have more stories than a boatload of sailors, they were charming as hell and knew how to make a woman laugh. She took a lot of notes. If she ever wrote a human interest piece about the SWAT team, she’d have enough to write a dozen articles.
Mac skimmed her notes while she waited for Cooper to come in and noticed that none of the guys were married. Huh. How was it possible for a group of cops this hunky to all be single? That had to some kind of statistical anomaly.
Something else was odd, too. Most of them had transferred from other police departments around the country. She didn’t know enough about the subject to say for sure, but it was hard to believe no one in the Dallas PD had measured up.
While that was certainly strange, it also indicated Gage and his team were clean. If he’d schemed to fill the unit with his people so they could get away with something dirty, wouldn’t he have gotten other cops from his own department, cops he knew were dirty, too? There was no way Gage could have known officers from other departments well enough to know they were crooked.
She was investigating SWAT because she thought they were dirty, but if anything, Gage had almost gone out of his way to make it the cleanest unit possible.
Mac was scribbling some notes when Cooper walked in. He still wore that half-angry expression he’d had earlier. But then he smiled and she wondered if she hadn’t imagined things.
“I saved a donut for you,” he said as he sat down on the weight bench opposite her. “I noticed you didn’t grab one before you left and figured you’d be starving after listening to all the BS the guys were probably trying to sell you.”
She set down her notebook to take the sprinkle-covered donut he’d wrapped in a napkin. He’d even been thoughtful enough to bring her a cup of coffee with the right amount of cream. She took a sip. Artificial sweeter, too? Damn, he was good.
“Okay, bringing me a donut with sprinkles is impressive enough, but how did you know how I take my coffee?”