by Cindy Dees
Vodka. The bathtub. Oh God, the bathtub. And the sex. Memory of last night slammed into her like a tidal wave. Intense desire to do all of it again hit her in the next wave. And then, a distant third, came the undertow of shame. She was supposed to be a professional. Supposed to be proving to herself and her superiors that she could play in the big leagues. That she was just as good as one of the boys. Instead, she’d gotten drunk and fallen in the sack with the first commando she crossed paths with.
But what a hot commando. In her own defense, Mike McCloud was not an average, garden-variety commando. And they had narrowly avoided dying and been riding an adrenaline high. Allowances could be made in such circumstances, right?
Cut the bull, Piper. You screwed up and you know it.
The other side of her brain, the side with the red suit, horns, and a tail sighed happily. Screw, she had. And it had been fantastic.
“’Morning, Piper,” a deep voice rumbled under her ear. “How’re you feeling? Headache? Hangover?”
She propped herself up on an elbow on top of his chest and grinned at Mike, who lounged back against the pillows. “You were trying get me drunk, you bastard.”
He shrugged. “Do I look stupid? The hottest female in all of North Africa comes to my place for the night? Of course, I ply her with liquid panty remover.”
She ought to be appalled, but he was so sexy flashing those dimples of his at her that she couldn’t possibly stay outraged for long. “You are so damned cute,” she groused. “How am I supposed to be mad at you?”
He ran his fingertips lazily down her spine until her breath caught and her body went limpid against his. He cajoled, “Don’t be mad, honey pie. It’s a big compliment. I don’t normally seduce women.”
“What? You seduce goats?” she quipped.
His palm smacked her rear end lightly. She stuck her tongue out at him and he smirked back at her. “But you seduced me,” she commented. “Why? And don’t tell me I look like a goat.”
“Wait. I thought you seduced me.”
“Hah! You definitely did the plying of liquor, tempting with warm bath, and seducing of the naked female in your tub.”
“I guess that makes it your turn to seduce me.”
She had to give the guy credit. He was an equal opportunity hooker-upper. The word hooker-upper made her smile, and she rubbed against him catlike. “Where’s that vodka bottle?” she demanded.
“We’ve both got places to go and things to do today, sweetheart. Or aren’t you up to the challenge of seducing me sober?”
“You did not just say that.”
His eyes glinted in amusement and challenge. “What are you going to do about it, hotshot?”
“Impatient. Men are all so bloody impatient.”
“When it comes to sex, hell yeah,” he declared.
Laughing, she rose up over him and flung her leg across his hips. Her vision was okay, but her head still spun a little after the potent vodka last night. She wouldn’t want to try a long distance, high accuracy shot with her sniper rig right about now. Dammit. She hated not being in complete control of herself. She fought to clear her head, searching frantically for clarity of thought. Logic. Focus.
Crap. The only thing she could focus on right now was Mike’s eyes, clear and green in the filtered morning light. She sank into them unwillingly, but inevitably. To hell with fighting. Later would be soon enough to pick up the burden of her control issues. She tore her gaze away from his mesmerizing eyes and stared down at his washboard abs.
“Nice scar,” she commented, tracing a recently healed knife scar on his stomach.
“Thanks. My about-to-be brother-in-law gave that to me.”
“Sounds like a good story.”
One corner of his mouth turned up sardonically. “If my baby sister didn’t love the bastard so much, I’d gut him. But, he makes her happy.”
“Protective of family, are you?”
He looked a little startled at her observation. She laughed. “Let me guess. You style yourself inscrutable and unreadable to all, especially women.”
“Well…yeah.”
“Hardly, Tonto.” She sensed an argument coming on, and to distract him, drew her fingernails down his chest toward the line of dark hair disappearing between her knees. His mouth, opened to make a snappy comeback, shut abruptly. Mission accomplished. He was officially distracted.
“I like your chest,” she murmured.
“I like yours, too.” He reached for said chest, and she inhaled sharply. The man was not without weapons of his own in their private little war. And speaking of which, at long, belated, last, her survival instinct finally kicked in and her brain started functioning. A little.
What the hell was she doing sitting naked on top of this man? She barely knew him. She would never see him again. He would break her heart and leave her in the dust without a backward glance. But dammit, he was so very addictive. If only he didn’t know it. If only she knew him.
“Tell me something about you,” she gasped. “Something personal.”
“Like what?” Thank God. He sounded a little distracted, too.
“Anything.”
“I have four brothers and a sister. They all work for the government or law enforcement agencies.”
She’d always wanted to be part of a big family. Instead, it had been just her brother and her dad and her. Not that her old man had ever functioned as much of a father. He’d been a drill sergeant before her mother had come along, wrecked his career, and abandoned a toddler and an infant with him. He’d raised his kids like raw recruits.
Mike’s fingers played her body like a freaking violin, stroking her into a quiet frenzy. She was not going to lose control this morning, dammit. He was not playing fair.
Her old man always said the best defense was a good offense. Dammit, she was supposed to be in control of herself this morning! In control of this wild heat that erupted between them every time they got naked together.
Eyes narrowed, she leaned back and reached down for him.
She wrung a groan from him and satisfaction filled her. Better.
One of his powerful arms wrapped around her waist and he neatly reversed their positions without separating their bodies. He was willing to allow her the temporary conceit of thinking she was in charge of their sex, but at the end of the day, he was master of all that took place in his bed. His weight and strength pinned her to the mattress, and reluctantly, she had to admit she liked it better this way.
The corded muscles of his arms, braced on either side of her head, were irresistible. She reached up with both hands to grasp his taut muscles and hung on for dear life. His eyes blazed, silently daring her to look away.
As if. She wanted to hold out, to defy him and all his overwhelming maleness, but all at once she capitulated. Why fight the pleasure? This was fantastic. Best. Sex. Ever.
She gave herself over to this crazy thing that exploded between them every time they spent two minutes alone in the same room.. She shattered without warning into a thousand tiny pieces—sharp, shiny little shards of pleasure that sliced her from head to toe until pleasure bled from every part of her body.
At least Mike had the good grace to look a little stunned, too. She would hate to have had her mind completely blown by what turned out to be, for him, mediocre sex.
“What the hell do you do to me?” he finally muttered.
Huh. She was thinking almost the exact same thing as he pressed up and away from her and rolled out of bed in one quick, muscular move. She felt…bereft.
Mike’s movements were sharp, almost angry, as he jerked on clothes and started throwing gear and supplies into a reinforced nylon duffel bag. She pressed up onto a surprised elbow. He looked like he was packing. In a hurry.
“Going somewhere?” she asked cautiously.
“Getting the hell out of town before one of the many bad guys out there finds me and puts a bullet in my head. If you had the sense of a flea, you’d be doing the same thing.�
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Stung, she sat up and threw her feet over the side of the bed. Quickly, she retrieved her lingerie and yanked it on, followed by her clothes. Damned if she would let him get the last word and accuse her of having no sense. She jammed her slouchy hat over her hair, snatched up her rifle and paused as she reached his door.
As brusquely as she could muster past her hurt at his abrupt attitude shift, she remarked, “It’s been fun, McCloud. Don’t run into a bullet with your name on it.”
She made it downstairs and nearly a full block from his hooch before the tears came. What an ass. He’d loved her into oblivion and then all but thrown her out of his bed. She was no more than a casual lay to him. Well, dammit, he’d been no more than that to her. So there. To hell with him.
She dashed away the tears that would give away her disguise as a man and stormed back to her apartment. She was so done with him. Mike McCloud could rot.
“Missy McCloud?” a scratchy witch’s voice asked.
Piper started. Looked around. And spotted the blind charwoman. “Mala. I’m glad I ran into you. Here is your melaya.” She fished the voluminous garment out of her backpack and hoped the woman had not been cold overnight without it. Surreptitiously, she wrapped a half-dozen of her high-calorie protein bars inside the cloth, along with the handful of local coins that had amassed at the bottom of her bag during her stay in Sudan.
“Fatima. She have message for you.” The woman gestured with her bony, dry hand for Piper to come closer. “She send t’anks fo’ shots and food. She say white men you lookin’ fo’ be goin’ south. Ragala Village.”
“Where’s that?” Piper asked, startled.
“Beyond Talodi. Bad country, ’dat.”
“How so?”
“Peoples die mo’ often ’dan live when ’dey go into ’dat bush. You no follow. You send Mr. Mike. Yah?”
“Yeah, sure. I’ll ask him to go for me.”
“You stay heah’. You be safe ’ere in ’de big city.”
God almighty. If Kahrtoum’s warring slums were safe, she’d hate to see Mala’s idea of dangerous.
“Go on, now. Git off street. Bad men, ’dey lookin’ for you. Stay in house for a few days, yes?”
“Yes, of course” she answered distractedly. “Bad men looking for me? Which ones?”
The charwoman cackled a little crazily, unnerving Piper more than she cared to admit. “All of ’dem, chile. All of ’dem. Dey’s coming for you.”
Seven
Mike slapped at a biting fly and tucked his camo-mosquito netting a little more tightly against the ground. Hard to believe he could prefer sitting on a broiling Khartoum rooftop to anyplace in the world, but sitting in sweltering African bush with no breeze, among the snakes and biting, crawling critters was actually worse.
At least he had the satisfaction of knowing he’d gotten Piper to leave Khartoum before she ran so afoul of the locals that one of them killed her. She was probably stateside by now, eating American fast food and sitting in her air-conditioned home watching pre-season football games. Lucky bitch.
Aww, who was he kidding? He was glad she was safe. He’d worried about her the whole time she was in Khartoum. That town was no place for a lady.
Doing his best to block out the physical misery of this surveillance op, he wiped sweat off the rubber cups of his binoculars for the hundredth time and put them back against his face. The house that came into focus looked wildly misplaced in the middle of the African bush.
A white, two-story, clapboard structure with broad verandas and a bright metal roof could not be more out of place in this sub-Saharan clime. It looked like a Dutch colonial homestead blown in on a wahdi, a great Saharan sandstorm, and dropped in this little clearing by accident.
What the hell it was doing out here in the middle of nowhere was anybody’s guess. Maybe a leftover of the colonial period when these lands were ruled by Europeans.
The temperature had long-since blown past 120 degrees when a cloud of dust rising from the bush obscured the house’s driveway and roused him to full alertness. A visitor, maybe? Strangely, though, no vehicle pulled into view in the opening around the house.
He waited a couple of minutes, but nothing. And no cloud of dust announced that a car had turned around and gone back the other direction. What the hell? He scanned the edges of the clearing carefully. Nada. Intrigued, he reached for his heat-seeking scope and took a look.
Bingo. Warm blobs at eleven o’clock. Human-sized. Two of them. Both squatting, appearing to hunker down to wait for something or someone. He settled in to wait out this new quarry. What were they up to?
He didn’t have long to wait to find out. In about ten minutes, activity erupted at the rear of the house. The back door opened and a man stepped outside. He carried a cooler-sized container of some kind. It looked made of Styrofoam. The man opened the back of a Land Rover and stowed the cooler in the back.
Over the next few minutes, the same guy carried out two more coolers. On his way back inside the third time, he paused on the back porch and made a quick cell phone call. More importantly, he turned so Mike could see his face.
Quickly, Mike snapped pictures of the man. Middle-eastern in coloring and features. Late thirties in age, maybe. Neat. Well-groomed. Was this the Palestinian scientist he’d been tracking? The guy had the look of a scholar about him.
The man started the car. Windows rolled up. So it was air-conditioned. What was in those coolers that he was so concerned about keeping cool?
The target made one more trip inside and back out. Mike stared, shocked. That was a kid. A little girl. No more than seven or eight years old if he had to guess. She was fucking carrying a doll. The man led her to the passenger side of the vehicle and helped her in. Mike photographed the whole thing, but simmering anger smoldered in his gut. It was pretty shitty of a terrorist to use a child as a cover.
Yet again, the man disappeared into the building.
Mike started as activity at the front of the house caught his attention. The blobs from the other side of the house had stepped out of the bush and now approached the front porch. They were both carrying what looked like big gasoline containers. What the hell?
Perhaps two minutes passed.
The terrorist exited the back of the house and climbed into the Land Rover.
Shit. He was going to have to hoof it back to his Jeep to be in time to pick up the guy’s Land Rover when it hit the main road. He would have to trail the guy at a distance because of the dust trails out here on the unpaved roads, but he was no amateur. No way in hell was he losing this bastard now that he finally had contact with the Palestinian.
Mike stood up, careful to keep brush between him and the driveway. He shouldered his backpack and took a step into the bush when yet another movement captured his attention.
Something—someone—was creeping onto the back stoop. Stealthily. And there was something familiar about the silhouette—
Nonononononono. Curses erupted in his skull as he swung the binoculars up to his face. God damn it. What was Piper doing here? His attention swung back to the dust retreating all too quickly down the driveway. He had to go. Now.
She disappeared into the house while he debated with himself. His job was to track the Scientist. But she needed back-up in the worst way. Two men had just snuck into the place! Did he cover her six? Chase the terrorist? No choice in the matter. He had to do his job. He spun for the bush and his vehicle.
But then he heard some sort of scuffle inside the house. He spun back around reflexively.
The front door opened and the two Caucasian men came outside. They moved quickly, but not in alarm. Fuck. Had they spotted Piper? Taken her out? Was that a fight he’d heard? Was she down inside the house?
He swore violently. He had to leave her!
But then something else caught his attention. A tendril of smoke curled out the front door before the men shut it behind them. They chatted casually as they moved down the front steps and toward the driveway
. They weren’t concerned about her, that was for damned sure.
The Palestinian was getting away.
Piper was inside that house.
And if he wasn’t mistaken, those two men had just set the house on fire.
Fuck. Fucking, fuck, fuck.
No good choice. Let a fellow American operative burn to death. Do his duty. Heart versus head. The Special Forces code of “Leave no man behind,” imprinted on his soul in blood, sweat, and tears, burned like acid. The McCloud creed, “We take care of our own,” added its chorus to the urgency screaming in his head.
Swearing in a steady stream, he turned for the house and Piper. She had better be dead because he was going to kill her for making him let the Palestinian get away.
He paused long enough to test the front door knob for heat—cool to the touch. Safe to go in. A small vestibule greeted him, smelling of bleach and antiseptics. A staircase disappeared upstairs to his left. He stepped into the room on his right and saw the source of the smoke. A pile of bedframes and thin mattresses were haphazardly stacked in a bonfire in the middle of the room and flames rose from the pile almost to the ceiling, which was already turning black.
Whoever had set this fire should have opened the windows to provide additional oxygen to the blaze, but far be it from him to tell an arsonist how to do his work. He ran down the central hall to the back of the house and found an empty kitchen. Mike backtracked, checking the other rooms on the first floor quickly. Where in the hell was Piper?
He returned all the way to the front door. The fire was starting to crackle and pop as the wooden beds caught fire. That blaze was going to get hot fast now. And then this old, dry, wood frame house was going to go up all at once.
He raced upstairs, calling Piper’s name. The carpet in the room over the bonfire was smoking and threatening to burst into flames. He went room to room fast but saw no sign of her. Where was she? Had those bastards knocked her out and stowed her body somewhere? He checked the closets and behind the desultory furniture, anywhere she could be lying, unconscious and about to be roasted alive.
