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“Jesus Christ. Not again,” Ian groaned. How in the hell did these PHP guys keep sneaking up on him like this?

“You didn’t seriously think we wouldn’t have this field under video surveillance did you?” Piper’s father asked as he gestured one of his men to frisk Ian.

Ian threw up his hands in apparent disgust. “Okay, this one’s on Piper. I told her it was a bad idea to see if we could get into this helicopter and leave a note for you, but she thought it would make up for the way we split from your place in Idaho.”

Piper looked at him as if she couldn’t believe he was throwing her under the bus. Too bad he couldn’t explain to her that in his experience, humor was often the most effective way to diffuse otherwise tense or even deadly situations.C’mon, baby. Get with the program, here. Keep it light.

It was a deadly dangerous moment with his life and hers balancing on a razor’s edge. Only his many years in the field made him able to pretend to a calm he was far from feeling. Piper didn’t have anywhere near the same experience to draw on. And worse, she knew these guys and the violence they were capable of. The deck was doubly stacked against her. Mentally, he begged her to hang in there, follow his lead, and keep her wits about her.

She stared intently at him for a millisecond more as if trying to read his mind. And then she declared tartly, “Yeah, well, you couldn’t sneak up on a corpse without it hearing you and waking from the dead. How in the hell you manage to hunt for deer is beyond me.”

“I didn’t say I ever kill any deer. I just said I like to hunt ‘em,” he retorted in an aggrieved tone.

She rolled her eyes. “Nowyou tell me.”

A youngish guy Ian thought was her brother commented, “When are you gonna quit trying to be just like the boys, Piper? You’re a girl. Get over it.”

Sure enough, she scowled and shot an annoyed sibling glare at the guy.

Ian chimed in. “I keep trying to tell her to let me do the manly stuff. But she insists on trying to keep up with me. I’m the one who wears the pants, baby doll.”

She huffed and threw him a dirty look.

Ian glanced around at the half-dozen assault weapons pointed at him. “Guess I’m not getting any tonight, huh?”

Commiserating smirks erupted all around. There it was. The break in tension. The relaxation of shoulders. The imminent threat of them getting shot was past. For the moment.

Piper whined in a tone he’d never heard from her before, “I’m hot. And thirsty. Can wepleasego inside where there’s some air conditioning and cold water?”

Joseph Brothers shook his head in disappointment. “And this is why you’ll never be one of us, Piper. You’re too attached to creature comforts. You’re not self-reliant enough.”

“Yeah, well, I wouldn’t live in the Nevada desert if there weren’t air conditioning, either. I’m notstupid.”

Ahh, nicely done. She’d pitched her voice in just the right tone to make it clear that she was, in fact, dumber than a post.

On cue, Brothers rolled his eyes and muttered in Ian’s direction, “You’re welcome to her.”

Ian reached over and looped an arm over her shoulders. “She may be high maintenance, but she’s worth it.” He paused a heartbeat and added, “So far.”

A few chuckles were audible as Brothers ordered, “Take them into the FBO. Get her some water and tie them up.”

Ian had received enough supply shipments at obscure civilian airports to know that FBO stood for Fixed BaseOperator, a small aviation company operating out of a local airport. It would provide a variety of services to pilots—weather reports, maps, fuel, and even simple maintenance service.

He and Piper were herded to the one-story building with a cluster of trucks parked in front of it by the PHP gang. They were, indeed, given bottles of water before he and Piper were parked on metal chairs and tied up. Their ankles were tied to the chair legs, and their hands tied behind their backs.

“We still on track for this afternoon?” one of the men asked Brothers.

“Yeah,” Piper’s father answered, “See to it the plane is topped off for gas. We want the explosion to be as spectacular as possible.”

Had the PHP already transported their small plane and its bomb all the way down here? Wow. Those guys weren’t wasting any time putting their plan in motion. Interesting that his and Piper’s repeat appearance hadn’t disrupted the schedule. They must be on a timetable dictated by someone else. The shadowy El Noor, maybe?

If a suspicious person turned up twice around the edges of one of his ops the way he and Piper had this one, that would be cause for him to scrap the op entirely. Or at least to delay the op until the suspicious person was eliminated as a threat. He would never send his men out on a compromised mission. But it didn’t seem to be giving Piper’s father the slightest pause.

“We gonna leave a guard on these two?” one of the men asked Brothers.

“Nah. We’ll bring ‘em along and dump them,” Piper’s father replied casually.

Piper glanced over at him in alarm.