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More importantly, this region marked their return to North Sudan. She breathed mental sigh of relief.

“God, Africa’s big,” she said in a hush. “Sometimes I forget just how big.”

The Dark Continent lived up to its name as night fell quickly.

The sky faded to purple, then navy, then velvety black.

She was surprised when Ian continued to leave the headlights off, however, driving only by the scant starlight starting to twinkle overhead.

Must be more of his aversion to drawing attention to their presence.

“Please tell me you know this road,” she said nervously.

He looked surprised. “Oh. Yeah. I drove it all the time when I was working with…an American contractor…down on the border.”

Contractor, her foot. He’d been working with mercenaries.

Probably hired to observe the informal war raging along the disputed border, or maybe to smuggle supplies and/or people one direction or the other, or maybe he’d been ordered to tip the scales in the conflict by helping one side or the other.

Guys like Ian were assigned to “watch” and “observe” but not to interfere or, heaven forbid, get caught participating in the wet work and black ops run by civilian mercenaries.

They drove for a good hour across that gigantic plain, and then the road passed into light forest interrupted by plentiful tilled fields. Ian turned on the headlights and proceeded more normally toward the north.

Abruptly, he broke the silence. “When we get back to civilization, we need to follow the money. It always comes back to that. Someone’s got to pay for the bullets, bombs and bad guys.”

“And bacteria, while we’re alliterating B’s,” she added.

One corner of his mouth turned up sardonically. He leaned toward her, and her pulse spiked like crazy in spite of her resolve to let what had happened in Khartoum stay in Khartoum. After the epic sex they’d shared, she would’ve thought she would be used to his nearness by now. But apparently not.

He reached behind her seat with his free hand and emerged with a two-liter water bottle. “It’s the only one I’ve got left, but we can share it.” If it was a peace offering, or at least a truce offering, she took it gratefully, murmuring her thanks as she lifted the bottle out of his hand.

Greedily, she guzzled her half of the bottle of tepid water and passed the rest to him. She watched, enthralled as the muscles of his throat worked with each swallow he took. There was nothing boyish about him. He was all man, muscular and in his prime.

“How old are you?” she asked.

He looked over at her startled, tossed the empty plastic bottle over his shoulder, and replied, “Thirty-four. You?”

“Twenty-five.”

“What’s a baby like you doing out in the field?”

“How old were you when you went on your first Special Ops assignment?” she demanded.

“Nineteen. But I was a SEAL and dumber than dirt. I had a team to save me from my lack of age and experience.”

She shrugged, her point made. They drove for a while more in silence, thankfully a little less tense than before. Ian followed crappy little dirt tracks generally north and east across North Sudan.

“How’d you get into this line of work?” he asked her.

“I kind of fell into it. My dad raised me and my brother by himself. He was a Marine. If you met him, you’d know how I ended up here.”

Ian made a sound of commiseration. “My old man was a Green Beret. Ex-military men can make for high intensity parents, eh?”

“That’s one way of describing it.”

“Did he teach you how to shoot?”

“Yup.”

“Hell of a teacher.”

“Thanks.” She was surprised by the compliment from him.

“What happened to your mother?” Ian followed up.

“She took off when I was a baby.”

“Were you that rotten a baby?” he asked humorously.

She snorted. “I don’t remember. But I suspect it had more to do with my father being crazy than with me.”

Oh, how she’d raged at her mother over the years for abandoning her with him. If her mother couldn’t stand being with the man, what made her think her daughter would be able to tolerate him, either?

Of course, if her mother had taken Piper with her, no telling how different her life would be. One thing she knew for sure. She wouldn’t be sitting in a Jeep with Ian now, bumping across the African bush, wearing combat boots and toting a pistol.

Would she be a girly girl? Wearing pretty clothes and make-up and doing something traditionally feminine? Although, what that feminine thing might be, she had no idea.

“Are we headed back to Khartoum?” she asked cautiously.

“I’m burned in K-town. Can’t go back there.”

As was she . Maybe more than she’d realized until today’s events. “Where to, then?”

“Djibouti. U.S. Navy operates out of there to fight pirates along the Somali coast. We can catch a hop stateside from there.”

And get a hot shower. And a decent meal. And some sleep. She couldn’t decide which one sounded more orgasmic.

They stopped for gas in a medium-sized village, punctuated by Ian muttering strict orders for her to stay in the car at all costs. What she could see of the village looked a lot like the worst slums in Khartoum.

Ian handed her a greasy paper bag and a couple more bottles of water when he got back in the Jeep, and he pulled out quickly. A half-dozen young men were just converging on the gas station when he peeled out. Good thing she hadn’t asked for a potty break.

She did ask for one once the village’s lights had retreated well behind them, though. He pulled over and stopped the engine. “Don’t go more than ten feet from the rear tire, Piper. And make sure your pistol’s in your hand while you pee.”

“Jeepers, how dangerous is this place?”

“Thugs aren’t the only problem at night. That’s African bush out there. Critters who think humans are tasty snacks abound. Make it fast.”

She had never peed half that fast in her life. Visions of lions chowing on her tender tush sent her racing for the safety of the jeep in a matter of seconds.

The paper bag turned out hold some sort of fried, falafel-like cakes made of ground grain and a bean-based paste. They were tasteless and greasy, but they eased the gnawing sensation in her stomach.

The border crossing into Eritrea, a narrow strip of a country running along the north side of the horn of Africa, was uneventful. Better to transit this relatively peaceful country than Ethiopia’s more restless regions to the south, she supposed.

Whatever documents Ian showed the border guard satisfied the guy completely. The soldier didn’t even ask to see her passport. As Ian accelerated away from the checkpoint, she asked, “How’d I get through there so easily?”

“American dollars grease palms effectively in this part of the world. I slipped a hundred-dollar bill inside my passport when I handed it to him.”

She wouldn’t have had any clue that a bribe was expected. Why didn’t somebody brief her on that back in Washington?

Ian’s comment from the night they’d met danced through her brain, not for the first time.

Did her bosses want her to fail out here?

To die? To prove that girls were not as good as boys at hostile surveillance ops?

It sounded like the sort of thing her father would do.

Her jaw hardened as she stared out the window at the blackness.

She fell asleep sometime during the drive and woke up with a stiff, sore neck when a car horn honked nearby.

They were in a big city, albeit mostly deserted at whatever late hour this was.

She surreptitiously wiped a little drool from the corner of her mouth and prayed she hadn’t snored while she was out.

“You will need to show your passport at the next checkpoint,” Ian commented as he slowed and turned into a heavily fortified driveway leading to some sort of sprawling, fenced industrial area.

The guard, in civilian clothes, was American with a thick southern drawl. He dropped ma’ams and sirs in every sentence and stood ramrod straight while he inspected their passports. If that guy wasn’t military or recently retired from the military, she was a monkey’s uncle.

Whatever this compound was, it closely resembled a military base, complete with temporary quarters along the lines of a very clean, very sparsely furnished hotel.

Before long, She and Ian each had a room assigned to them.

She’d kind of hoped they would stay together.

She really liked sleeping with him—or not sleeping as the case might be.

“I’m going to try and scare us up some food,” Ian announced. “I’ll stop by your room in a while. You wanna take a shower?”

The mere thought of a hot shower made her shudder in delight. She hadn’t had a real shower in weeks. Even the bath at Ian’s place, although heavenly, hadn’t really steamed her clean all the way to the bottoms of her pores. “You have no idea,” she breathed.

He grinned and left the building while she made a beeline for her room. She stripped and climbed under the hottest shower the building’s water heaters could deliver up.

It was even better than she’d anticipated. It pounded out the soreness from her muscles and finally eliminated the gritty feeling she’d had ever since she hit the ground in Sudan last month. God, she hadn’t thought she would ever feel clean again.

She wrapped herself in a bath towel, turbaned her hair in another towel, and headed out to the bedroom. A white plastic grocery bag stood on the lone table. He’d broken into her room to deliver her food but hadn’t stuck around to join her in the shower? Bummer.

Frowning, she peeked into the bag. A couple of big water bottles, a box of snack crackers, some jerky sticks, a can of children’s pasta, and a pouch of dried apples were inside. And a bottle of after-sun lotion. Aww, he’d noticed her sunburn. God bless Ian.