Free NEXT TO ME (A Love Happens Novel Book 1) by Jodi Watters

I think it’s in the very bottom drawer of the filing cabinet. You know, way in the back. She’s gonna have to bend over real low to reach it.” He winked on his way to the door. “Don’t worry, though. I’ll spot her.”
    “That’s a prime example of an HR violation, Foster,” Sam said, to the empty doorway. There wasn’t any heat in the words. Grady was all talk, anyway. The kind of guy who enjoyed everything about life and never took a whole hell of a lot too seriously, Grady’s mood rarely strayed from good. Hell, downright chipper, some would say. But, he was a stickler for rules and wasn’t one to break them. The former Green Beret was only twenty-seven, but he’d been around the block during his stellar military career. It was a damn wonder the guy managed to be so carefree and fun loving. Both Sam and Asher had seen firsthand what live combat action did to a person—body and mind—and that was why they recruited from a limited pool of retired veterans only. Just like Grady and Beck, Mendoza and Nolan Ellis had spent years carrying out critical and dangerous missions before seeking a place where their special skill set could be utilized after their commitment to Uncle Sam was done. Scorpio was that place. And as their resident Wanda Wonderful, Grady managed to keep things light around the office.
    And damn it, he’d been spot on about Sam’s happy face.
    Swearing under his breath at the rapidly growing number of emails in his inbox, he was hoping like hell to get out of there by six tonight, already thinking about how soon he could see Ali again. Last night had been one of the most memorable of his life, taking him completely by surprise. Only planning to have a few drinks with his intriguing new neighbor, Sam had been shocked as hell at how soon they’d ended up in bed. He certainly wasn’t complaining, but usually if he had a chick horizontal an hour after their first beer, then he had what he’d come for and only wanted the hell out of there pronto. Without strings. He wasn’t proud of the fact, but he wasn’t about to sugarcoat it, either. Which told him one very important thing.
    Ali was different.
    Different and good. Better than anybody else. She was beautiful and sexy, but beyond that, he was drawn to her like no other woman. She had passionately given him open access to her body, but closed the door tightly when it came to what was going on in her mind. Sam had been trained in interrogation tactics and knew without a doubt that Ali was deliberately holding back, rationing what information she fed him. Maybe she was guarding her heart. Maybe not. Years spent looking for things that seemed out of place, no matter how insignificant it might appear, had served him well. And Ali was out of place. As cynical as the world had taught Sam to be, that set off alarm bells in his gut.
    The background check would take only minutes. With a few taps on his laptop, he could access databases that would tell him everything about her, and he wasn’t talking about her credit card balances or family history. He could find out her blood type and the last time she’d had a tetanus shot, or what score she had received on her SAT’s and if she’d cheated to get it. Hell, for that matter, he could put Beck on it and find out exactly what she was doing at this very moment.
    But Sam didn’t do it. He held back. Ali was protective of her privacy and it was his choice whether to respect that or not. Respect won out, effectively silencing his gut feeling. Knowing they were on the precipice of something new and extraordinary, Sam didn’t want raw data on a computer screen to interfere. It wasn’t like him to go out on a limb and trust someone without the benefit of hard information to support his decision, not that he ran a report on every woman he dated. He never intended to keep any of them around long enough that it would matter what secrets their past held. And although he’d never done it a single time for