Dagger's Shield

She saw him clearly. A player. Not her kind of man.
He’d never told her she was the only woman he actually wanted.
What neither of them knew was how little time they had left to get this right.

DAGGER
Givre has been telling me with her silence for months that I’m not the sort of man she takes seriously. A scoundrel. A dog. A player. And this morning, I stepped out of Magnolia’s room at the exact moment Givre stepped out of hers, and handed her the proof. Fifteen minutes later, I rounded the final curve above the lake, and the Minerva headquarters blew apart in front of me. Givre was inside. And whatever quiet chance I’d been holding out for was buried under four centuries of stone.

GIVRE
Killian Curran, code name Dagger, is everything I’ve spent my career avoiding. English charm, easy smile, a reputation that precedes him into every room. I keep him in the colleagues-zone because I’m not the kind of woman who becomes a story he tells later. This morning proved I was right to. Then the building came down, and I woke up in an ambulance with his face above mine, and I realized the thing I’ve been most afraid of is not that he’ll break my heart. It’s that he’s the only man who ever could.