by Dees, Cindy
The shithead continued, “She has already been debriefed in house and as soon as her report is compiled, we’ll share it with all of you.”
Which would be when, exactly? Now was not the moment for a turf war. A serious terrorist threat was in the offing. Even assuming Piper’s PHP guys and his Scientist were working together, nobody had any idea where to find any of them.
Mike looked over at the general. “Have you got marching orders for me, sir?”
“We’d like you to continue working on the Scientist. You’ve gotten closer to him than anyone else. Seen him for yourself. The CIA would like to put a contractor on it with you. The two of you will work as a team.”
He frowned. Not a full-blown agent? This seemed like too important a mission to entrust to a civilian contractor. Ever since the massive information leaks by civilians a few years previously, contractors had been heavily looked down upon in the intelligence community. It wasn’t unheard of for the various agencies within intelligence family to run joint ops—after 9/11, everyone had learned to share their toys and play nicely with the other children in the U.S. counter-terrorism sandbox—but to bring in a civilian?
He looked over at his boss questioningly, and that entire end of the table rolled its collective eyes. The score became clear. A civilian contractor was being forced upon the military intelligence establishment for some political reason or another. Maybe a turf war in Congress, or someone insisting on a pet Congressional aide getting to play spy for a few weeks.
This was going to be a goat rope, in other words. He was stuck escorting around the amateur and praying like hell the guy didn’t screw up a vitally important investigation. He appreciated the silent nod to his skill that his bosses thought he could still do the job with a civilian in tow. But Christ, this was way too important an op to turn into a show-and-tell mission.
“Is there any way we can dodge this civilian adjunct?” he asked in resignation. “Classify the mission at a higher level or deem it too time critical to take the time to bring a contractor up to speed or something?”
“Sorry, Mike,” the admiral rumbled. “You’re stuck with a partner.”
A partner? “I’ll be in charge, right?” he asked in alarm.
“Yeah, sure. No problem,” the admiral replied soothingly. Too goddamned soothingly. What the hell was going on? “If one of you could fetch the contractor?” the admiral murmured to the phalanx of flunkies lining the sides of the room.
A door opened and he looked up curiously to see who they’d stuck him with. He stared. And swore.
Piper Roth.
No. No way. He was not working with her on a mission he now knew to be of vital national security import. He’d already been forced to let a potentially deadly international terrorist slip through his grasp because she was too stupid to stay out of a burning building.
“I’m not working with her!” he blurted at the exact same moment she blurted, “I’m not working with him!”
“What seems to be the problem?” The admiral asked. He and his boss, the general, were looking back and forth between the two of them warningly.
Mike closed his eyes for a long moment. He damn well couldn’t tell them the truth—that he couldn’t keep his hands off her and his mind on work with her anywhere close to him.
He sighed. Took a deep breath, and said heavily, “There’s no problem. I know her from…a previous field encounter. I didn’t expect to see her here. She just surprised me. That’s all.”
“Uhh, yes. That’s all,” Piper chimed in. “It’s just a shock to see Agent McCloud here.”
None of the people in the conference room had gotten there by being dimwitted. The collective group looked back and forth between him and Piper suspiciously. He pasted a fake smile on his face and pointed it in her general direction. Thankfully, she caught the hint and returned a plastic, pleasant expression.
For the first time, he really looked at her. Wow. He’d never seen her look remotely like this. Gone were the combat boots, dusty fatigue pants, utility belt, and assault weapon. She was wearing a tight skirt and a white silk blouse that hugged her curves until a man just had to sweat a little. And then he caught sight of those sheer black hose and high-heeled fuck-me shoes with sassy red soles. A definite urge to mop his brow came over him.
Jesus. She looked like a woman. A confident, sexy, all-woman one. The kind of female he’d steer way wide of in a bar. He wouldn’t exactly call himself intimidated by women like her—they just weren’t his type. She didn’t look the least bit pliable or easy to manage. Frankly, she looked like hell on heels. And it didn’t help matters that this female was glaring at him like she was contemplating shoving her hand down his pants, grabbing his testicles, and looping them over his ears. Right here, right now.
Yup, he missed the girl with the assault rifle. He knew where he stood with that woman. But this one? She was a mystery to him.
* * *
Piper froze as her stare locked with Mike McCloud’s. He was here? Now? Basking in the credit for her intel?
She took one aggressive step forward before André Fortinay boomed, “There she is. The lady who will be assisting you in finding and stopping the Scientist. She has a master’s degree in biochemistry and worked at the Centers for Disease Control before she came to work for us. She knows the handling protocols if you actually find live virus samples.”
Piper’s gaze hardened into a killer glare. She was supposed to assist the bastard who’d screwed her in bed and then screwed her out of it? Oh, hell to the no. “I would prefer to be the lead agent and have Mr. McCloud assist me. The nature of the materials we’re tracking make my expertise crucial to the decision-making process.” Hah. Take that.
Mike replied evenly, “Given the dangerous nature of the mission to date, I would suggest that my operational experience is paramount and that I should be the team lead.”
Piper’s jaw tightened until it hurt. Her fingernails positively ached to gouge his eyeballs out. Slowly and painfully.
The Army general interrupted the burgeoning argument. “This will be a joint op. Mutual cooperation, you two. Got it? This Scientist potentially has enough of the live virus to wipe out a major city. We’re talking tens or hundreds of thousands of deaths here. We need you two to share your toys, play nicely together, and figure out what his target is. Find him and stop him by any means necessary. Is that understood?”
Chastened, Piper nodded respectfully at the general and those impressive racks of stars on his shoulders. Mike looked grouchy but also nodded.
“All right then,” The general said briskly. “If we’re finished here, we’ll let you two get to work while we prepare a flash briefing for the National Security Council.”
Piper turned on her heel and marched out of the briefing room. She wasn’t about to scream and throw pencils at Mike McCloud in front of her boss and the assembled heads of the whole damned intelligence community—the very men she was determined to impress with the ability of women to play with the big boys.
“Did you drive here?” Mike’s voice muttered close to her ear.
“I took a cab.”
She jumped as a familiar hand landed lightly in the small of her back. Dammit, her pulse still leaped at the contact. And there went a shiver down her traitorous damned spine. Her body kept betraying her by reacting to Mike McCloud as if it didn’t know he was an ass who’d tried to torpedo her career, and now would have a new and improved opportunity to screw her over.
She stopped in her tracks and turned hard to face him. It had the happy side effect of knocking his hand off her back and getting his stupid mouth away from her rebellious ear.
“You listen, and listen good, Mike McCloud. I am going to complete this mission and by God get credit for it, and nothing you can do is going to stop me. I don’t like you, and I don’t like working with you. But I’m a freaking professional, and I’m going to do my job in spite of you. And as soon as this op is over, you and all your smoldering sex appeal can go
straight to hell.”
With a furtive glance up and down the hall, he grabbed her upper arm and dragged her to an elevator bank. He gritted out under his breath, “You can tear my head off to your heart’s content as soon as we get out of here. But until we’re in my car, for the sake of both our careers, put a lid on it.”
He had the gall to order her around? Her ire climbed a notch higher. The elevator door slid closed, confining them in close quarters. She opened her mouth to really let him have it just as he waved up at the ceiling. Instead of ripping him a new one, she blurted, “What are you doing?”
“Waving at the surveillance guys. Head of security for this building’s an old teammate of mine.”
Surveil—her balloon of rage deflated with an almost audible squeal of escaping air. Oh. No wonder he didn’t want her ripping him a new one until they reached his car. Rats. She’d really been looking forward to letting him have it in this elevator. She glanced up at the small black glass bubble in the corner of the ceiling and smiled wanly.
Mike led her into an underground parking garage and to a pick-up truck in a numbered slot.
“You have your own parking spot in a Congressional parking garage?” she asked in surprise.
“It pays to have friends in high places.”
Her stare narrowed. This was exactly the good ole’ boy network she was out to bust. Or bust into, if she was brutally honest with herself. Mike surprised her by unlocking her door for her and helping her into the cab of his truck in an old school act of courtesy. Contrite over stealing her evidence, mayhap?
“You look fantastic today, Piper. I knew you’d clean up great, but even I didn’t imagine you’d look this spectacular. You look like a cover model.”
Well, hell. There went another little piece of her irritation, bleeding away with his sincerely delivered compliment.
No wait, dammit. She was furious with him. He didn’t get off this easy. She didn’t forgive him for stealing her evidence, and she didn’t forgive him for ditching her in Djibouti. She didn’t forgive him for being able to turn his back on her and walk away from her so easily either—stop. Rewind. Strike that from her list of grievances. What they’d had between them in Africa had been serial hooking up among strangers. Noth. Ing. More.
Big. Fat. Liar.
Aww, crap. This was not good. She was not still carrying a torch for this jerk. It was not possible. Not after what he’d done to her. She was not that freaking needy, thank you very much. Except a little whimper way down deep in her gut proclaimed her exactly that needy. No!
The internal argument between her head and her heart raged unabated as he guided the truck west through the downtown area toward the suburbs. He’d driven past the Mall and was winding into northwest D.C. along choked surface streets before she finally exhausted her anger enough to ask tiredly, “How could you steal that stuff from my room?”
“I didn’t steal it. Well, technically I did, but I took it because I had a last-minute opportunity to jump on a cargo plane that was about to leave for the States. You were exhausted and needed sleep, and I felt okay to keep going. It was nothing personal. I just got the time-sensitive evidence back here faster than you could. I gave you full credit for collecting it during the debrief.”
“I could’ve gotten on that plane, too.”
“It was a Navy cargo plane. You’re a civilian. I’m Navy and could get thrown on the crew manifest as a supplemental security guy. You’d have had to go through a pile of paperwork and get on the manifest as a passenger, and the bird was about to start engines. There was no time to process you.”
His unassailable logic perversely annoyed her. Did he have to be so damned reasonable and have a perfect rebuttal for every accusation she threw at him? “You still should have told me.”
They were stopped at a red light, and he had the grace to look genuinely regretful as he glanced at her. “You’re right. I should have. I’m sorry.”
Dammit, he even apologized well!
Frustrated all to pieces, she searched for and found a kernel of suspicion in her gut that he was playing on her emotions. Hell, playing her. He was an ex-SEAL, after all. That bunch was traditionally known to dislike the idea of equality for women in the Special Forces field.
She subsided against the seat, thinking hard. She reviewed their interactions from the time they’d met, looking for signs that Mike thought she didn’t belong in the field with him. Examples were abundant, now that she stopped to think about it. The way he kept charging to her rescue over and over was proof enough. Like she couldn’t take care of herself and needed a big, strong man to barge in and haul her out of danger. She could take care of herself, damn it.
He guided the truck into the upscale neighborhood surrounding embassy row like he had a destination in mind. “Where are we going?” she finally asked.
“To see a hacker.”
“A computer hacker? Why?”
“All we’ve got right now is a money trail. Since I had to stick around the Scientist’s house to pull you out of the fire instead of following him, I lost his physical trail.”
There it was. The subtle dig about having to save her. Was he even aware he was doing it? “You didn’t have to come into that house after me. I could’ve gotten out on my own.”
“Oh yeah? How long would it have taken you to figure out that the house was burning down over your head? We barely made it out alive as it was and that was after I dragged you out of there against your will.”
“When that far section of the basement ceiling collapsed, I’d have caught on pretty fast.”
“You didn’t want to leave even after that happened. If I hadn’t been there and made you leave, you’d have stuck around too long in that basement collecting evidence. And when you got upstairs, you didn’t know which way to go. Face it. I saved you. You and your evidence would have burned up without me.”
Yup, she had been right to suspect his motives. He didn’t like women doing his job. Well, that was just tough. Eyes narrowed and jaw tight, she asked, “Who’s the hacker?”
“We’re here. Come on. I’ll introduce you.”
They’d parked behind one of many multi-story brick row houses. In this part of town, these big old structures had mostly been converted to condos. They stepped inside a building, and sure enough, a lobby and elevator waited inside.
Mike punched a number code into the pad in the elevator, and it lurched into motion. He must know this hacker pretty well to have the elevator code to the guy’s place. Maybe the hacker was a woman. That would explain the stud muffin ex-SEAL having the code.
Damn him! Now he had her jealous over some other woman he’d slept with! He’d gotten way inside her head without her even noticing. Begone from my mind, Mike McCloud.
God. If only it was that easy to quit thinking about him. Or to quit craving sex with him.
The elevator door opened at the top floor and Mike knocked on the lone, snazzy stainless steel door that occupied this smaller lobby. Penthouse, then. The door buzzed and opened and a petite blond flew through it, launching herself at Mike with a squeal of delight.
He had brought her to see one of his other conquests. Seriously? A knife of…something painful…twisted in her gut and she pasted on a polite smile out of long habit.
The blond finally unwrapped herself from around Mike enough for her feet to touch the ground. Piper was staggered to see the change in him. Genuine happiness lit his face and…crap…love shone in his eyes. He loved this woman. The knife completed gutting her and she felt her heart and entrails spilling out onto the ground as she stood there. Was he effing married? Her brain exploded into swearing and mental hair tearing. Surely he wouldn’t have the gall to bring her to meet his goddamned wife—
“Piper, this is Katie. My baby sister.”
Sister. Oh holy fuck. His sister. Thank God. She was actually hyperventilating a little. Piper shook herself mentally and took a belated step forward, holding out a hand to Mike’s sister. “Mike�
�s talked about you. And I’ve heard of you from André. I’m an aid worker for Doctors Unlimited.”
“Awesome!” Katie looked back and forth between her and Mike observantly. It wasn’t like she would see anything going on between them. Mike had pretty much taken care of that when he’d broken into her room in Djibouti. “Come on in.”
Piper restrained a gasp as they stepped into a magnificent and modern space. If this was what the future of interior design looked like, she was all for it. “Wow. This place is gorgeous,” she blurted.
Katie looked around fondly. “Alex decorated it. But I wouldn’t change a thing.” She bent down to scoop up a lime green plastic thing that looked like an oversized tablet computer. “Except for adding baby toys.”
“Where is my little princess?” Mike asked, looking around expectantly.
“She and Alex are at the park. They should be back any minute. In fact, let me text him to let him know you’re here. I know he’ll want to see you.”
Mike grinned boyishly. He and his sister chatted and poked jokingly at each other for the next few minutes.
Piper reeled at this relaxed, happy side of him. The family man. He was charming when he wasn’t in mission mode. What else about him didn’t she know? Intense curiosity to find out filled her.
Katie had just returned from a kitchen that looked straight out of a science fiction future with glasses of water for her and Mike when the front door opened. A handsome, dark-haired man and arguably the cutest toddler Piper had ever seen blew through the door, laughing together.
“Un-cuh Mike!” the little girl screamed. Like her mother, she launched herself at Mike and wrapped her little arms around his neck as if she was going to strangle him. The sight of him with a child wrapped in his powerful arms melted Piper’s ovaries on the spot.
Alex—that must be the famous Doctor Alex Peters, a legend within Doctors Unlimited—clapped Mike on the shoulder. “Good to see you, bro.”