You touch her and you’re a dead man,” Drake kept his voice low and calm.

The gate into the construction site was reminiscent of an army base guard station. Multiple stops, alternating concrete barriers forcing a slow, weaving drive to enter, massive floodlights fighting back the jungle darkness. And at the far end of the gauntlet, they’d been asked to climb out of their car.

When the guards went to inspect the inside, he’d hit the remote door lock on the key fob. The SUV had sealed itself with a smug click from all four doors and the rear hatch. There were items in there, like Nikita’s rifle, that were best kept out of sight.

That hadn’t exactly set the tone for a friendly welcome.

Then one of the guards had slung his rifle over his shoulder and moved in to frisk Nikita.

“I won’t repeat myself. Do not touch her.”

The guard glared at him, then made a point of looking at his three companions, all armed with M16A4s before sneering at him. The guard took the last step and raised both hands chest high to make it clear exactly where he was going to start patting her down.

“I tried to warn you.”

When the man glanced his way, Nikita shifted into action.

In a blur Drake could barely follow, she pulled the man’s KA-BAR knife out of his own sheath. With it, she slashed the carry strap on his M16. Snagged it by the grip with one hand as it dropped and aimed it at the guard who had been standing well back so that he could provide cover protection for the three closer guards.

She heaved his long knife, point first, into the ground, drawing everyone’s attention down.

Then, on the upswing of her arm, she yanked the guard’s SIG Sauer P226 out of his holster. She continued the upward motion and rammed the big pistol up under his chin hard enough to make him squeak.

While everyone was watching her in surprise, Drake pulled his pair of Glocks and rested the barrels on the temples of the two guards closest to him.

All four gate guards froze as if cast in concrete, their eyes shot wide.

“Nikita, can you please tell me why people just don’t listen to a simple warning?”

“Lack of education, Mr. Roman.”

“You,” Drake nudged one of them hard enough with his pistol to draw blood that began to drip down his temple. “Give us one good reason not to continue the lesson.” He’d finally found a problem with the Glock: because it had no safety, there was nothing to make a threatening click when he flicked it off.

“Because the tower guard will drop you where you stand,” he’d gotten over his surprise and shifted to anger. The tower they’d observed from across the river, looming above the front gate, had actually blocked their view of the gate itself. He wished it was still afternoon and he was once again lying close beside Nikita under the trees. Now the rising wind blocked any sound of the nearby river.

“Really, that’s your answer? Whichever one of us the tower guard targets first, the other one will still have time to kill at least two of you, but probably all four. You’ve got to do better than that.”

A Mercedes sedan rolled toward them from inside the compound. It didn’t come from a distance—one moment it wasn’t there, the next it was already in motion with its lights on. Whoever it was, they’d been waiting outside the floodlit perimeter to see how the first meeting played out.

The sedan stopped twenty meters back and a man in a suit stepped out of the driver’s side.

“What did I tell you boys about these people being guests?” He called out as he got close.

“They wouldn’t allow us to inspect their car,” the guard facing Nikita’s M16 from too close a distance didn’t sound happy about it.

“Or check them for weapons,” the man with the dribble of blood easing down his temple was still pissed.

Drake ignored them and focused on the man. “Mr. Gutierrez, I presume?”

“Franshesco, please, Mr. Roman.”

“Then I’m Drake.”

Franshesco. One of the most prominent members of the Gutierrez family, with dirty fingers in far more than large construction contracts. They also controlled shipping, a small airline that specialized in moving very questionable cargo from Colombia to Mexico, and much more. He was into everything ugly in the country.

“What do I do with these?” Drake nudged his pistol once more against the man’s bleeding temple, earning him a hiss of anger.

“I couldn’t care. They’re replaceable.”

“Hear that, boys?” he asked the guards. “Next time you’re looking for work, contact Drake Roman, Inc. On second thought, don’t. We’re looking for people with skills.” Then he made a show of reholstering his weapons slowly as if he had no worries in the world about the two angry and armed men standing less than a meter from him. It was a calculated risk but he figured that it made him look more like an arrogant mercenary. That, and Nikita was still armed to the teeth.

As a kid he’d always wanted to be a Wild West cowboy. Not cowboys and Indians or Pony Express, but a gunslinger on the streets of Tombstone, Arizona, had sounded good—sometimes on the side of the law, sometimes not, but always The Blazing Guns of Justice. It had sounded good to a kid anyway. That’s how he’d gotten into acting, now that he thought of it. Funny that this was the first time he’d ever played the role of gunslinger. There was a certain satisfaction to closing that circle.

He let Franshesco Gutierrez come to him. His handshake was good and his smile appeared genuine on his dark face, but unlike Arthur, Drake would bet that the guy was a good enough actor to make any impression he chose. His suit had the perfect fit of custom-made and the watch was a very distinctive U-Boat, recognizable at ten paces away and worth over seven grand. He had the broad shoulders of a military man, but his walk said businessman with a passion for fitness. He was the sort of man who would pack a .44 Magnum long-barrel revolver because that’s what Clint Eastwood had carried as Dirty Harry, the renegade cop.

The man was as smooth as an upper-crust Boston banker and probably just as trustworthy.

“This is my assistant, Nikita.”

She offered him a tight nod, more of a twist of her neck, but hadn’t yet eased off on her stance.

He recalled the sexy look of the outspoken Sugar, dressed in leather and firing a sniper rifle in an Alabama field. It was a good memory. But nothing compared to the quiet woman who had just disarmed a pair of heavily loaded mercenaries while wearing a white Marc Jacobs summer dress with a flowing skirt spangled with blue flowers. She was spectacular…and still not moving.

“We’ll consider this lesson taught,” he said softly.

Nikita couldn’t let go.

These were exactly the sort of men Curtis had always hired.

Had her father been one of these? Was that all he’d been? Big, tall, Jack “Lumberman” Hayward—so called because he was built on the scale of Paul Bunyan—had always been her idol. But what if?

What if his refusal to speak at the end hadn’t been to protect her, but instead had been the same raw, stubborn pride these idiots were portraying. Even the guard, up on his toes to ease the pressure of where she was jamming the barrel under his chin, was still glaring at her in fury at being outmaneuvered.

Had her father been so shallow? A part of her knew that for truth. He had only done two tours in Afghanistan, never climbing out of regular Army. Then a merc outfit. Not one of the good ones, which she finally had to admit existed and she knew which select few they were.

She finally looked across at Drake. A gunner for the Night Stalkers 5E. The 160th required five years in the service before you could even apply. He’d flown with the 10th Mountain Division for six, then fought his way up to the most elite helicopter company of them all.

Would her father have stood in front of Esly to protect her from Rafe’s suspicions?

Would her dead fiancé?

Those questions earned her a slim maybe and a not a chance.

Drake was the man who a young Nikita had thought her father and Barry were. That she had struggled all her life to be worthy of. She’d fought merely to win the admiration of a dead father. Yet by doing so, she’d won the love of a true warrior.

These two guards in her sights—over-armed, over-arrogant—didn’t deserve to walk the same dirt as…

“Nikita?” Drake’s soft call was like a slap of reality.

She thumbed the magazine releases, dropping them out of both weapons, cleared the chambers, and let both the rifle and the handgun drop in the dirt. Turning her back on the men, she stepped over to stand close beside Drake. She didn’t take his hand, because it would slow down their reaction time.

He didn’t reach for her either, though under any other circumstances he always reached out for her when she was close. At first it had been strange; now she missed the simple intimacy.

But there was no question that this was where she belonged, standing side by side with him. In that moment she knew that she’d never find a better place to be.

“Perhaps, Franshesco,” Drake continued smoothly as if she wasn’t assimilating a new reality for her life, “you can offer us a tour of the situation before we discuss whether we can benefit one another.”

“Why certainly,” and he began leading them toward his Mercedes.

“Let’s take our vehicle,” Drake turned for the armored Toyota Land Cruiser. The safety of the steel box was a good tactical advantage and also a good reminder to get her head back in the game.

The first thing Nikita did after being put in the back seat behind Franshesco was to pull her purse weapon and aim it through the seat at his heart. She’d wager that when they’d armored the vehicle, they hadn’t loaded up the seat backs. There was something slippery about him that she didn’t trust at all.

Drake wasn’t sure quite what had come over Nikita. Whatever the reason for the change, it had been amazing to watch. The guard who she’d disarmed had been so angry that Drake had been sure it was going to end in blood. The guard’s blood.

Then, when she cleared and dumped his weapons in the dirt and turned away from him, he’d deflated like a popped balloon. Drake actually had to pull the Toyota around him as he continued to stand there with two firearms, two magazines, and a knife scattered about his feet. If they came back this way, Drake was glad that they’d be doing it in a vehicle rated safe to higher than an M16’s ammunition.

As he glanced that way, he noted Nikita’s position, with a gun to the back of Franshesco Gutierrez’s seat. Whatever had changed in her, she hadn’t lost her focus. She was as much telling him as threatening Gutierrez: I don’t trust this man.

He heard her loud and clear; neither did he.

“There isn’t much to see here, Mr. Roman.” He pointed for Drake to follow the perimeter road, the headlights slashing narrow paths through the darkness. “We are having problems with the locals, but nothing we can’t handle.”

“What are you doing about the European banks pulling twenty-four million euros in funding off the project? I don’t think that Sinohydro will continue building your dam without being paid. Also, I don’t see that you have enough long-term collateral to offer them for the Chinese banks to step in. Your political environment is too unstable—they are notoriously conservative investors.” That accounted for most of the article he’d read about the murders of two leading environmentalists only a week apart. He’d never thought he’d use those boring Boston-society parties that his father’s parents had dragged him to, but without them he wouldn’t have understood the financial implications and maneuvering. Apparently everything had a reason if he could only find it.

“We will find other funding,” but Gutierrez didn’t sound happy about it, perhaps his first honest emotion.

“In the meantime, your investments sit idle. I see that you have cleared the construction area, but have done minimal work since then.”

“We are simply assuring the safety of our investments to date so that they will be ready as soon as additional financing is obtained.”

Meanwhile, Drake was observing what he could. The perimeter fence, a work of military beauty near the main gate, rapidly tapered to little more than coils of razor wire as it ran along the deeper jungle. That explained the frequent perimeter patrols. Out here, eyes watched him from the forest. The headlights revealed a deer and a few specimens that looked like furry pigs. A flock of white bats flitted across the beam of his lights but were abruptly batted aside by a blast of wind. Didn’t they know a storm was coming?

He reminded himself that the guard tower had been well enough armed to take out their helicopter from two kilometers away. Four or five guard towers could cover the whole area of the construction site…but he didn’t see another tower as they drove. Security was a stupid place to cut expenses.

That told him a lot about Franshesco Gutierrez. Not only wasn’t he military, but he probably didn’t listen much to his security advisors, neither Buck Baer while he’d been alive nor whoever was on site now. Gutierrez was high up enough to be worried only about the money.

Drake knew in that moment that Gutierrez was going to find out what Drake knew and then do his best to get rid of them permanently. Drake Roman, Inc. wasn’t being considered for anything. Instead they were being assessed for what scale of threat he represented.

No joke about the storm coming. Stray branches and leaves blew past his windscreen. When he could see the jungle, the trees were swaying heavily in the gusts.

So Drake kept the conversation light and matter-of-fact as they cruised the perimeter fence.

He had most of what he needed to know. Security was mostly concentrated at the point of entry and at least one alpha target was on site, sitting right now in his vehicle. Drake checked the odometer, had to remember it was in kilometers, and decided that the patrol’s timing was correct for a single Toyota constantly driving the perimeter. There was bound to be at least one more vehicle somewhere, but not out on patrol.

No, taking out the mercenaries wasn’t the challenge. The problem was Gutierrez and the other suits who had arrived on the helicopter this afternoon. How to remove them without just dropping a bomb on their heads.

He knew that the third helo was still here because the first call he’d made once they’d retreated into the jungle this afternoon was to Zoe’s boss, Sophie Garcia, back at the 5E base on Fort Rucker. She had the Avenger drone aloft and on station above the construction site in under three hours. The clouds from the approaching storm had blocked the view, but they didn’t slow down the radar in the slightest.

She’d reported two armed helos and one unarmed, all on the ground in the center of the site, well clear of the perimeter. But everywhere Sophia had looked, there were still no buildings.

He had to solve that first.

Nikita listened to the conversation, but couldn’t make any sense of it. It was as if Drake really was looking to turn this into a serious business discussion. He acted as if the clock wasn’t ticking and he had all the time in the world.

“You want to add three more towers, though I’d recommend five. I can source the steel for you. Your best price elsewhere minus ten percent.”

“I notice your boys are still using the M16A4s. You should set them up with something decent. You know that the US military has almost completely phased them out.”

“Your outer layer security is fixable, but it is only single tier. I’d suggest at least two more layers if you’re having the kind of issues you’ve mentioned.”

He offered a new earthmover at cost when their headlights lit up the burned-out one. “Engine fire,” Gutierrez had explained, not that she believed him—it was scorched from one end to the other.

It was as if Drake was commenting on every single piece of their security. Then she realized that’s exactly what he was doing. They had each taken an encrypted radio from the Little Bird. She’d tucked hers in the rifle case because there was nowhere to hide it on a dress. But Drake must have locked a frequency onto transmit and had just given a running narration to the rest of the team still aloft.

It gave her the creeps because it was shades of the militia that had tortured her father and Barry to death on an open frequency. But it also made her want to kiss Drake, the Duck-man was as sneaky as a DEVGRU SEAL.

Finally they dropped Gutierrez off near a small hut. Close by was a pair of Toyota pickups, another Mercedes, and the three helicopters. There was no way the people needed to man them would all fit in that shack.

That they weren’t invited in was a very bad sign.

“Are you sure I can’t run you out to your Mercedes at the gate, Franshesco? We are headed that way, after all.”

“No, Mr. Roman. I’ll have one of the boys fetch it for me. I have some business I need to take care of here. We will definitely be in touch. Thank you so much for coming to Honduras and introducing yourself.”

They appeared to shake hands sincerely. Nikita climbed into the front seat, keeping her sidearm ready, out of sight behind the still-open passenger door.

The instant the doors closed, Nikita practically shouted, “What the hell, Roman?”

He just stared out the window at the shack as Gutierrez went inside.

“Drake?”

“They’re set up underground. These guys are ready for a siege. They’re dug in.”

“Then we have to dig them out.”

“Or entice them. Too bad they’re going to try and kill us first.”

That was news to her. “Any time soon?”

“Not sure,” Drake dropped the Land Cruiser into gear and turned for the main gate. “But I’d say yes. They don’t want Drake Roman, Inc. any more than they wanted GSI. They think that hired guns equal security.”

Nikita pulled the side lever and laid her seat down so that she could crawl into the back.

“Where are you going?”

“I’ll be damned if I’m going to get killed wearing a dress.”

Drake’s chuckle made her smile…until she tried to figure out how to pull down the zipper on the back of her dress by herself.