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Thing was, the PHP gang was her turf. Her mission. If she could nail down the PHP’s goals, it would be a win for her. A win her career could sorely use after she’d let an asset from another government agency steal her hot intel.

Unfortunately, this mission was too important for her to hold onto a snit over him stealing her thunder.

“Let’s do it,” she answered a shade reluctantly.

He glanced over at her, a lopsided grin making him look boyish. “Girls as hot as you need to be careful about saying things like that to the boys.”

Dammit, there went her gut again. And this time her brain had a much harder time stuffing her Pandora-like reaction back into its horny little box.

10

Piper hopped out of Ian’s truck in front of her apartment building and didn’t invite him in. He undoubtedly had a much nicer place in a much fancier zip code, and she had no desire to parade her general poverty in front of him.

He’d offered to walk her up to her door like he had in Khartoum, but this was America and she would be fine. She turned him down firmly. While she appreciated his protective instincts, he seemed to think she would like being hovered over like a helpless, wilting lily.

She knew all too well what it felt like to be helpless, and she’d long ago vowed to herself never to feel that way again. She’d been helpless to evade her father’s unreasoning rage whenever she reminded him too much of her mother, helpless to escape his brand of crazy, helpless to stop the man for forcing her to master skills she’d never wanted to learn. She’d made it a lifelong project for nobody ever to make her feel that way again, in fact.

She reached for her front door and noticed a sliver of wood had been knocked off the door jamb at knob height. It wasn’t anything big, just a thin strip of missing paint and bare pine. But still. It made her frown.

She cast a furtive glance around the basement landing and pulled her pistol from its holster in the small of her back. Quietly, she unlocked her door, stepped to one side, and eased the latch open. No violent reaction exploded. She spun through her door, crouching low, back pressed against the wall beside the door.

Holy crap. Her place wasdestroyed.

Tossed didn’t begin to describe the mayhem. Furntiure had been overturned, drawers emptied, her TV smashed to smithereens. It was hard to pick her way through the debris, but she raced to her tiny kitchen, made sure it was unoccupied, then headed down the short hall to her bedroom, bathroom, and closet. It took about sixty seconds to determine that whoever’d robbed her was gone.

She headed for the front door, turned the corner out of her bedroom and lurched as a big silhouette spun into the doorway brandishing a handgun. Her own weapon whipped up into firing position.

“Stand down!” Ian barked at her. “It’s me. Ian.”

Jeez. She sagged against the wall in the hallway, her heart pounding. She’d almost shot him. Not that she’d have cared all that much, of course. It just would have been messy. Blood everywhere, andoy vey, the paperwork.

“What the hell are you doing here?” she demanded.

“Had a gut feeling something wasn’t right. Came to check on you.”

Dang. Good instincts. “As you can see, I’m fine. But my apartment is not.”

“It’s clear?” he bit out.

“Yes, of course.” She wasn’t a total amateur. She knew to clear the scene and make sure bad guys weren’t lurking in a closet before she got around to assessing the damage.

He stepped gingerly into the war zone and closed the hallway door behind him. “What’s missing?”

“At a glance, nothing.” Which was weird. Why would a thief come in and trash her place without at least carrying out the portable electronics?

Ian righted the couch in an impressive display of casual strength that made her grit her teeth a little. The one way in which she couldn’t ever be one of the boys was that raw, physical power he’d just unconsciously demonstrated.

He piled cushions on the sofa frame, making a path through the worst of the mess. Her flat screen TV was a shattered wreck, as was her desktop computer. Its tower looked like someone had taken a baseball bat to it.

Her books were intact, however, still sitting on the shelves as if nothing had ever happened. Their calm unconcern was wildly out of place in the midst of the chaos. She moved into her kitchen. Total destruction was the name of the game in here. Her coffee maker, microwave, and the nice blender she made smoothies with were smashed into spare parts and wires.

Even her stove was trashed, the electric burners torn out, handles ripped off, the oven door torn free of its hinges. Her refrigerator door hung askew and the contents of both her freezer and refrigerator had been emptied on the floor into a spectacular, drippy mess.

Thankfully, she’d only been home a day and had yet to restock on food. She’d stopped by a convenience store yesterday and grabbed only a few items to tide herself over. She grabbed a trash bag from under the sink and quickly scooped the thawing vegetables and TV dinners into it.

“You got a wrench?” Ian called from the vicinity of the bathroom.

She fetched her toolbox from the front closet and carried it back to him. She’d registered hissing in her first pass through the apartment but hadn’t stopped to investigate.