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Katie McCloud started as the condo’s elaborate electronic locks buzzed to indicate they were disengaging. Her heart leaped in nervous anticipation. Alex was home.

Finally. After a year away.

She’d barely recovered from the trauma of nearly dying overseas and coming home only to be kidnapped when the man who’d kept her safe through it all, Alex Peters, was whisked off into some super-secret CIA training program.

As if he needed to learn how to be a spy. He could already teach the class.

He had just started to let down his emotional walls with her, and she’d finally realized she loved him, when he’d been yanked away from her.

But now he was back, and their life together could start...

…assuming a year of intensive instruction in all the skills he’d been trying so desperately to leave behind—leaning into that whole part of himself he despised so deeply—hadn’t pushed him right back into his emotional shell and turned him back into the silent, dangerous stranger he’d been when they met.

His CIA handler, André Fortinay, had briefed her not to assume anything about her relationship with him when he got home. Was she going to have to start from square one with Alex? Teach him all over again was love was, how to love himself, and how to let her love him?

What if it turns out differently this time? What if I fail?

Fortinay also said to let Alex set the tone and pace of their reunion. Meaning what? She’d gotten the distinct impression André was hinting the CIA had done something terrible to him.

If they’d broken Alex in some way, she was going to have a serious problem with the CIA.

What exactly had they done to him in his “training”?

All of her questions and fears spun around maddeningly in her head as she rose to her feet cautiously. She sent up a quick, fervent prayer that the man she loved and not the stranger she’d feared would walk through that door.

Alex stepped into the living room, and her heart lurched.

God, he was even more beautiful than she remembered. Tall. Dark. And if possible, radiating even more danger than before.

His coffee brown hair was a little lighter, his skin darkly bronzed. He was leaner through the waist and bigger across the shoulders. But those changes weren’t what really arrested her.

Something intangible had changed about him.

His natural confidence had been replaced by something else, something more…

powerful. Now, he quietly exuded utter belief in himself.

He’d always had a lethal quality, but it was sharply focused, now, a cold reserve that oozed don’t-screw-with-me-in-a-dark-alley.

Crud. She’d planned to stay seated, arranged sexily on his white leather sofa when he walked in, not standing here wringing her hands nervously.

Oh, well. So much for pretending to be calm, cool, and sophisticated. She was and would always be a hot mess. To heck with André Fortinay’s dos and don’ts for Alex’s homecoming.

“Alex!” she cried joyfully. She started forward and managed to catch the edge of the area rug with her toe, slam her shin into the edge of the glass coffee table, and pitch headlong into Alex’s arms as he jumped forward to catch her.

“Been working on your coordination in my absence, I see.”

Embarrassed heat bloomed across her face. With her fair skin, she must look like a ripe tomato. “I’m such a clutz?—”

“You’re perfect. Thank God you didn’t change,” he murmured as he drew her up against his body.

His mouth closed on hers and wild magic exploded between them like it always did. His dark desires and her na?ve romanticism collided and melded into something entirely unique, a mix of naughty and sweet, hot and tender, lustful and loving.

His lips slashed across hers as her mouth opened eagerly for him, and he inhaled her like he couldn’t get enough of her. At least that hadn’t changed about him. Relief that he still craved her crept through her nervousness.

Her arms slid around his waist. He was more muscular, harder, than before. But then, so was she. She’d been working out like crazy while he was gone. Some of it had been boredom, and frankly some had been a remedy for horniness.

That, and insecurity over how a small-town girl like her was ever going to hold the attention of a worldly, sophisticated man like him. He was James Bond, and she was the girl next door.

He came up for air long enough to murmur against her lips, “Where’s Dawn?”

“Asleep. Would you like to peek in and see her?”

He smiled and the warmth reached all the way to his eyes. “I’ve missed that little squirt.”

She leaned back in his embrace to gaze up at him fondly. Hah. Alex hadn’t changed a bit. What was Fortinay so worried about? She commented, “She’s not so little anymore. Were you able to see the pictures I sent you of her?”

His gaze went black as a stormy, starless night, and all the warmth melted from him, leaving a furious, sharp-edged stranger tensed in her arms.

Whoa. Note to self: don’t ask Alex about the last year just yet. Don’t even bring it up. She shivered at the icy chill abruptly emanating from him. Should she be afraid of him?

She couldn’t believe that, when they’d first met, she’d been so na?ve she hadn’t clocked just how dangerous a man he was, how deadly his world was, and how much peril she’d strolled right into.

Keeping her plastered almost painfully tight against his side, he strode across the sleek living room of his penthouse and down the hall to the nursery where their adopted daughter, Dawn, recently turned one, slept.

He cracked the door open and a wedge of light lit the crib. “My God, she’s grown so much,” he breathed. “I don’t even recognize the newborn we rescued from Zaghastan.”

“I thought they taught you in medical school that growing is what babies do.”

He snorted without taking his gaze off the sleeping baby. “She’s gorgeous.”

“Did you ever get a good look at her birth mother before she died? The girl was stunning. Our Dawn’s going to keep you hopping in about thirteen years when the boys start sniffing around.”

“There will be no sniffing,” he said firmly.

She laughed under her breath. “Good luck with that.”

He backed out of the doorway and retraced his steps to the bar in the corner of the living room. He poured himself a shot of ridiculously expensive Russian vodka and tossed it down with a groan of appreciation.

“Missed the good stuff?” she asked.

“You have no idea.”

“How bad was it?” she asked softly. In spite of her reservations about making him turn to ice again, Alex would think something weird was up if she didn’t display at least a little curiosity.

His eyes shuttered instantly and completely. “Rough.” And that was obviously all he planned to say about it. Great. He was back to one-word sentences punctuated by long silences.

“Fair enough. Glad to be home?”

He looked around the condo, his sharp gaze probing the corners carefully. “Thanks for house-sitting.”

She laughed. “It was a real hardship, living in all this luxury for free.” She added more seriously, “Actually, it helped me feel closer to you while you were gone. I missed you.”

She waited for him to say he’d missed her…

but nothing. She sighed. “Any chance I could convince you to give me a teensy hint as to how you’re feeling right now?

André said not to ask you any questions and let you dictate the pace of your return to real life.

But I don’t know what to say or do. I can’t read you. ”

He poured himself another shot of vodka but sipped at this one. He grimaced and finally bit out grimly, “I missed you.”

She knew him well enough not to take personally how supremely unhappy he sounded about that development. He’d been raised by his spymaster father to believe all human emotions were weaknesses in need of expunging from his heart and mind.

“André said you might want some time by yourself to decompress after your training. I’ve talked with my parents, and they’ve invited me and Dawn for a visit to give you some space.”

“No,” he replied sharply. “Stay.”

“Are you sure?”

“You’re safest here.”

He wasn’t kidding. She’d spent the much of the past year learning all the many, daunting security features of his fortress- like home. This place was elegant and gorgeous on the inside, hard and impenetrable on the outside. Rather like him.

“You haven’t lived with a toddler before. Dawn will totally destroy your grand solitude. Chaos is the normal state of affairs around here,” she warned him in all seriousness.

Not to mention, she was concerned about his reflexive responses to a baby. Who knew what knee-jerk reactions had been hard-wired into him this year? Were she and Dawn even safe around him? After seeing the hard detachment in his eyes, she wasn’t entirely sure.

“I insist,” he said implacably.

Apparently, his honorable streak was still a mile wide. That, and his protective streak.

Still. He’d been alone basically his entire life, and the transition to having an overnight family had not been easy for him. She suspected it was part of why he’d agreed to leave for special training so quickly after he’d gotten her and Dawn back from their kidnapper.

No way would she even consider staying here with him in this dark, lethal frame of mind were it not for the threat his father still posed to them all.

“I had an intercom system installed while you were away, Alex. I hope you don’t mind. It’s just that the place is so big I can’t hear Dawn if she’s in her room and I’m in—” she broke off.

How to describe the master bedroom? Was it still just his room? Their room? It had been her room for the past year. She slept in it to feel closer to him. To smell his clothes in the closet, hug his pillow at night, and remember the mind-blowing sex they’d had in his bed.

“Good call on the intercom,” he remarked.

“Are you hungry? Tired? It’s late. Have you traveled a long way to get here? Oops. Strike that last one. But you do look tired.”