Fever Zone (Danger in Arms, Book 1)

by Cindy Dees

  They were officially working together, now. Which meant that, as of two hours ago, it was not only unethical but also illegal for them to sleep together, and neither of them wanted to ruin their careers by flirting with fraternization charges. Reassured by that thought, she managed to catch her breath. She leaned her forehead against the warm, vibrating dryer and closed her eyes, gathering strength. She could do this. She could work with Mike McCloud and keep it just business.

  Mike horsed Piper’s box springs and mattress back into place on the bedframe. Both were slashed beyond use, but it cleared enough floor space for him to move around the bedroom. The television in here was trashed, too. Along with the lamps, alarm clock, and ceiling fan.

  Why in the hell would someone—a guy, given the strength required to do some of the damage in here—break into Piper’s place and randomly destroy it like this? It didn’t look like a typical B&E. It read more like a hate crime.

  Obvious leap of logic from that—an ex-boyfriend did this. Piper could be pretty infuriating, but what did she do to make someone this enraged? He wrapped a dry towel around his hips with the intent of tracking her down and asking her. She slipped back into the apartment just as he entered the living room, however.

  “Your clothes will be dry in twenty minutes or so,” she announced.

  “Thanks.” He gestured at the wrecked couch. “Have a seat. Let’s talk.”

  Wariness leapt into her sapphire gaze. She perched on the edge of a cushion and looked ready to bolt at a moment’s notice. He supposed she had cause to be jumpy after what she’d just walked in on.

  “Can you think of anyone who has anything against you and might do something like this?”

  Some strong emotion he couldn’t name flashed through her eyes. “Like who?” she said cautiously.

  He shrugged. “An ex, maybe?”

  “No ex’es to speak of.”

  That surprised him. “None?” he blurted. “You’re a good looking woman. Surely, someone like you has a few old boyfriends under your belt.”

  “Not really. I’ve been pretty much focused on my career since I got out of college. And even in school, I kept my head down and studied most of the time.”

  Which might explain some of her prickliness regarding men in general. At least he knew for sure that she actually liked men. A lot. He pushed aside memory and reaction to their epic sex in K-town. Right now they needed to figure out who’d trashed her place and how much danger she was in.

  He said, “Are you sure nothing was taken?”

  “All my electronics are here. What little jewelry I have is still in the remains of my jewelry box. Everything’s just…smashed.”

  “So you think this was a random act of vandalism?” he asked doubtfully.

  “What else could it be?”

  Damn. That was what he’d feared. He heard evasion in her voice. She had a good idea of who’d done this but wasn’t planning to share her suspicions with him. He pressed to test a little bit. “Let’s not touch anything more and call the police. If nothing else, they can lift prints and make a report for your insurance company.”

  A stubborn expression flashed through her eyes and she opened her mouth, obviously to protest. Closed it again. Took a deep breath. And finally, said merely, “Okay.”

  He leaned toward her and placed a light hand on her shoulder. “I can’t help you if you won’t let me, and I can’t protect you if I don’t know who to protect you from.”

  She surged up off the couch. He got the impression she would have paced if she hadn’t been impeded by World War Three all over her floor. “I don’t need your protection!” she burst out.

  “That doesn’t mean I’m not going to offer it to you,” he replied.

  “Gah!”

  What was her problem? He pushed the question aside and fished out his cell phone. He hadn’t seen a land line phone in the place, and even if there was one, the intruder had no doubt ripped her phone out of the wall and smashed it. He searched for and found a non-emergency local police number and called it. Quickly, he reported the break-in and that the place was secure and the occupant safe. The dispatcher said she’d have a unit there in a half-hour.

  Which worked out just about right. His pants and shirt were still warm out of the dryer and back on his body when a cop knocked on her door. The pictures and statement the cop took were routine except for the bit where the guy flirted with Piper the entire damned time. The cop finally left and Mike closed the door after him in relief.

  “Jeez. Ballsy dude to act like that with me here the whole time.”

  Piper waved a breezy hand. “He asked me about ten seconds after I took him into the bedroom if you and I are dating.”

  “And you said no. Which he took for permission to do his damnedest to get into your panties,” Mike replied sourly.

  Now why did that irritate him so damned much? They both were free agents, after all. Khartoum had been…well, Khartoum. Nothing was ops normal in that place. What went on there stayed there as far as he was concerned. They’d both been under huge stress, isolated and alone. Yeah, that was it. Two ships crossing in the night. Nothing more. If she wanted to sleep with some bonehead cop, more power to her.

  “He only wanted my phone number,” Piper commented mildly.

  “Did you give it to him?” Fuck. He had no business asking that. The question had just popped out of his mouth before he could stop it.

  Her right eyebrow arched. “As a matter of fact, I didn’t. I told him I was leaving town for a few weeks, and he told me I could stop by the police department and pick up a copy of my report when I get back. And then he gave me his phone number.”

  Mike clenched his teeth shut and bit back the sarcastic response that jumped to his tongue. Her social life. Her decision. “Let’s get out of here. Is anything left here for you to pack for our op?”

  She sighed. “I doubt it. Let’s just go.”

  He waited for her to close and lock the door on the wreck of her life. They turned to climb the stairs to street level, and he reached out to cup her elbow supportively.

  “I can go up a staircase all by myself,” she snapped.

  He frowned. “I was just being polite. My mother would shoot me if she caught me not exercising the manners she taught all of us boys.”

  “Yeah, well, you can keep your manners to yourself.”

  He shrugged. “You’ve had a rough day. I thought you could use a show of support.”

  “I’ve got things under control,” she declared.

  Right. And that was why she sounded on the verge of angry tears. She reminded him of his baby sister when Katie used to stomp her foot and insist that her big brothers let her go along on their adventures. They never had, of course. She was too little to tag along on their junkets through the woods behind their family home. She’d have gotten lost or hurt—

  His attention lurched back to the present as Piper snapped, “And I can open my own damned car door.”

  “Sheesh.” He threw both his hands up in the air in mock surrender. “Get your own door if it’s that big a deal to you.”

  He went around to his side of his truck as she slammed his truck’s passenger door shut with a resounding crash. “Don’t break the thing,” he commented mildly as he slid in the driver’s seat.

  Piper alternated between radiating anger, upset, and a hint of post-trauma shock during the drive back to his place. Not exactly the best frame of mind in which to launch an important mission. There was no help for it, though. She knew more about the Patrick Henry Patriots than anyone else in the intelligence community, apparently. She had to get her head in the game, like it or not.

  He had to admit, he tensed up a little as he unlocked the door to his place, and he breathed a sigh of relief to see that everything was intact and not trashed. He should cut her a break. It would suck to have all his personal stuff destroyed.

  Piper looked around with undisguised interest. If only she knew how rare an event it was that he brought
a woman here, not only because he wasn’t home often enough to pick up women in D.C., but also because he considered this place his private sanctuary. It was a simple place with all the guy comforts—a big bed, a huge television, the latest game console, and a shower head he could stand under without having to duck his tall frame. Home. And it was all his.

  “I don’t know about you,” he commented as he moved into the kitchen, “but I always crave good, old-fashioned American pizza when I’m overseas.”

  She laughed. “Nobody does pizza like Americans.”

  “What do you like on yours?”

  “Anything but anchovies or pineapple,” she replied.

  He ordered a couple of loaded large pizzas from his favorite delivery place and grabbed a couple of brown longnecks out of the frig. He flopped on the other end of the leather couch Piper had parked herself on. “Beer?” he offered.

  “Umm, okay.”

  “Relax, already. I’m not going to leap on you and ravish you,” he joked.

  Piper tensed, relaxed, tensed again, and finally leaned back as far away from him on the couch as she could go.

  What the hell? He sucked at knowing what was going on in her mind. Not that he had much experience at reading women. He retreated to safe territory. “Have you got any initial ideas on how we ought to track the PHP?”

  “Carefully,” she blurted.

  “They’re dangerous?” he asked around the mouth of his bottle. He was a great deal more interested in her answer than he let on. But given how tight she already was, he made a conscious effort to keep his body relaxed and sprawled on his end of the couch.

  She shrugged. “A year ago, I’d have answered that with a firm no. But now, I don’t know.”

  “Talk to me about them.”

  She winced fractionally, like she’d known the question was coming but still dreaded it. He filed the reaction as interesting and something to analyze later. He also declined to mention to her that he had nearly total audio recall.

  “What do you want to know?” she asked.

  Avoiding the subject, huh? Now why was that? He checked his first impulse, to tell her to start at the beginning and leave out nothing. Instead, he merely asked casually, “How long have they been around?”

  “As an organized group, about twenty years.”

  “That’s longer than I expected,” he replied mildly.

  As he’d hoped, his lack of aggressive interest made her wax a little more talkative. She continued, “They bought their compound in Idaho about fifteen years ago. Started with a half-dozen guys and a few of their families. It has grown slowly but steadily since then. My best estimate is that they’ve got around fifty members in total, now.”

  “Small group to be making so much trouble.”

  Another one of those infinitesimal frowns creased her brow for an instant. What wasn’t she telling him? “Who’s the leader?” he asked, probing carefully.

  “They don’t believe in centralized government. What makes you think they believe in centralized leadership?”

  Huh. Interesting. “Surely, they’ve got a charismatic character or two who acts as de facto leader of the commune.”

  An unwilling grin tugged at her mouth. “I expect they’d take serious umbrage at the word commune. The second P in their name does stand for ‘patriots’ after all.”

  The obvious next question then was why a group of supposed patriots were being investigated for terrorism ties. He avoided something so direct, however. At the moment, he was more interested in figuring out what was making her so jumpy about briefing him in on these guys.

  “Who’s the founder?” he asked.

  Wow. That made her whole body go tense.

  “Guy named Joseph Brothers. Born and raised on a farm in Pennsylvania in the middle of Amish country. He was exposed to a fair number of Amish, so he was familiar with and presumably admired their non-technological way of life.”

  “Why didn’t he just join them, then?”

  She shrugged. “He was more ambitious than that. Thought in larger terms. It wasn’t enough to choose that kind of life for himself and quietly go about it—which would have been the Amish thing to do. Instead, he got the notion that he should share the wisdom of choosing that lifestyle with others.”

  “Does he have a family?”

  “Couple of kids.”

  “Let me guess. He wouldn’t let his wife go to a modern medical facility and she died of some totally preventable complication.”

  “Actually, no,” Piper surprised him by replying. “His wife left him.”

  Mike nodded in comprehension. “Fled to the land of blow dryers and cell phones, huh? That must really toast his muffins.”

  “He was well on his way to rejecting technology before his wife’s…defection. That was just the event that pushed him over the edge into action.”

  Why the hitch in her voice? He opened his mouth to ask, but a knock on his door announced the arrival of the pizza guy. He got up to pay for supper and carry the flat cardboard boxes to his coffee table. In bachelor fashion, he tore the top off the first box and used it as a makeshift plate. He dragged several sloppy slices of pizza onto it. Piper ate more daintily, taking one of the napkins that had come with the boxes and cradling a slice of pizza in that.

  “Okay. So Joseph’s wife leaves. The crazy switch flips on in his head, and he moves out to Idaho to start his little group. Where’d his followers come from?”

  “Not followers. Fellow patriots.”

  Damned if he didn’t hear a hint of bitterness in her voice. What in the hell was going on with her? “Do you not like these guys or something?”

  “No, actually. I don’t. I think they’re the worst kind of ingrates. They’ve got this great country to live in that was built on the blood, sweat, and tears of generations of patriotic Americans like them, and they want to throw all that progress and innovation away. I think that’s insane. I don’t want to go back to one in three women dying in childbirth or from complications of it. And I like having all my teeth. Heck, I like air conditioning and the Internet!”

  He grinned around a slice of pizza. “You don’t have to convince me. I’d be lost without ESPN. And my truck. And a refrigerator for my beer.”

  She smiled reluctantly. He let her eat pizza for a few minutes until her shoulders came down from around her ears and a more open expression filled her face.

  “How much money do these PHP guys have?” he eventually asked. That seemed like an innocuous enough question.

  “Hard to tell. They spend practically nothing on their lifestyle. Some of them came to the compound with some assets that have probably been sitting in banks and multiplying for a while. They also sell a self-published guide on how to live off the grid. For all I know, they could be making pretty good money from that.”

  “Enough money to have purchased a helicopter and paid to train someone to fly it?” he asked lightly.

  “I’ve never seen any evidence that they have that kind of capital.”

  “Let’s assume they don’t have that kind of cash lying around. Where would they get it? They don’t strike me as the types to get a loan from a bank.”

  She snorted. “What bank in its right mind would give them a loan?”

  “Good point.”

  She stared off into space for a while before announcing, “I’m stumped.”

  “Has someone new joined the group? Radicalized it in some way? Brought significant cash resources to the PHP?”

  “Possible,” she answered slowly. “I’d have to get eyes on the compound. See if there are any new faces I don’t recognize.”

  “Let’s do it, then. While we wait for Alex and his cronies to trace the money trail for that helicopter, let’s go to Idaho and check out these guys.”

  “It’ll be dangerous,” she warned.

  He shrugged, unconcerned. “Then we’ll be careful.” After all, how dangerous could Podunksville, Idaho be compared to the Sudan? And it wasn’t like he was an a
mateur at this stuff.

  She nodded, but that shadow was inexplicably back in her eyes. His internal warning antennae wiggled wildly in response. He silently told his instincts that they were duly noted and to pipe down. In the meantime, he suggested, “You ready to turn in? The next few days could be long ones.”

  She looked around the apartment wildly for a second. “Here? You want me to crash here?”

  “Someone broke into your place and trashed it. Whoever did that knows where you live and obviously has some serious beef against you. I’m not letting you out of my sight tonight, and don’t even try to argue with me.”

  “But—”

  He cut her off. “You’re just going to have to deal with my Neanderthal tendencies to protect you, like it or not.”

  Her gaze snapped to his, and all of a sudden, thick sexual tension vibrated tautly in the air between them. “Ahh, darlin’,” he sighed. “you shouldn’t have looked at me like that.”

  He stood up, lifted the empty beer bottle out of her fingers and took her hands, pulling her easily to her feet. He wasn’t used to such conflict raging on the faces of his women, but the sleepy lust hazing over her blue eyes was definitely familiar. That, he knew what to do with.

  “I’ve missed you, too,” he murmured as he took a step closer to her lithe body.

  She made a tiny sound of protest even as her eyelids got heavier and desire poured off her as thick as molasses. “I’m still mad at you for stealing my evidence.”

  His left hand slid up to cup the back of her head under her heavy, silky hair, and his right hand slid around her slender waist. He murmured, “I gave you full credit for having collected it. Everyone was very impressed with the information you brought back.”

  “And I’m still mad at you for leaving me behind in Africa.”

  One of his hands slid lower and settled the on curve of her rear end, which fit perfectly in his big hand. He murmured lower, “You were on a secure American facility, and you’re as smart as hell. I knew you wouldn’t have any trouble getting home. And you seemed interested in demonstrating your independence.”