Simultaneously, the roof lights blazed on, strafing the night sky and surrounding land. The powerful floodlights, on and around the house and outbuildings, were assisted by floodlights strategically placed around the entire property, also activated by the tripping of the first alarm. The moonlight dimmed in comparison.

  White-garbed operatives poured over the eastern ridge, emerging from tree cover, on skis or snowmobiles, converging on the house. A few minutes later, Savage’s people dashed from inside the house, guns blazing with pops of light brighter than the floodlights. Honey nodded in satisfaction as they left her house. They had no way of knowing that the front door would slam shut and lock behind them. “You’re outside for good, now, assholes.”

  Rafael chuckled.

  Once activated, the system would blare until someone turned it off. Herself or Pollack. Everyone else would just have to cover their ears and deal.

  Seconds later, the sounds of more gunshots echoed in the shallow bowl of the valley. Dolan had been right. The lights and sirens were a nice, effective deterrent. Or, in this instance, an excellent distraction.

  “Aw, look. Isn’t this sweet? They tried to break in,” Honey said unsympathetically, indicating the various attempts with assorted instruments to jimmy the locking device on the main door of the garage, and numerous and sundry points of contact along the frame of the smaller side door.

  Sliding aside the hidden panel, she took off her glove and passed her palm over the sensor, punching in a series of numbers before scanning her palm again. Made a mental note that it took too long as the door opened soundlessly. Something else to address–after. “Quick.”

  Stepping inside, she waited for Rafael to join her in the semidarkness then used the pad inside the garage to deactivate the alarm. If this entry was breached, and the second device not activated or deactivated within seven seconds, a metal cage dropped from the ceiling, trapping the intruder. As she’d told the other operatives, she’d leave the door unlocked, giving them a clear entry point.

  “Hang on,” Rafael, took her upper arm.

  “What?”

  He shoved up his goggles, and pulled down his facemask, then reached over and did the same with hers. Instantly, their breath showed white in the darkness. “This.” He kissed her hard. Too short. But it delivered a jolt that shot all the way through her. “For luck.”

  “Preparation will meet opportunity.” She pulled her headgear down around her throat and shoved the goggles on top of her head.

  They walked between the Lamborghini and her go-to ranch vehicle, a bright red, four-wheel-drive truck. The garage led into a mudroom, then into the large kitchen.

  The mudroom was gloomy and empty. The outside lights reflecting off the snow shone through the window, covered with fingerprints. They’d tried the windows and found them impossible to breach.

  Savage, impersonating her, had let them in.

  Voices in the kitchen.

  She indicated Rafael go left, she right.

  There was no magic to survival. LockOut would protect them as well as, if not better than, a bulletproof vest. But a bullet at close range could very well penetrate the thin skin, if fired at the right angle, and a bullet to the head would do plenty of damage, even if it didn’t go through the fabric. Nobody was invincible except Superman. Even he had his vulnerable moments. Pollack was her Kryptonite.

  She’d been rated excellent in her hand-to-hand urban warfare training. She’d practiced the techniques again and again, not because she’d thought, as a cybertech, that she’d need the knowledge, but rather because it had interested her, and if she did something, she figured she might as well do it well. Plus, she’d wanted to show her old trainer how wrong he’d been about her. She could do anything a male operative could do and many things a whole hell of a lot better. Now she was glad for that training and for the extra hours she’d put in.

  Weapons ready, they kicked open the doors.

  In a split second, she assessed who was in the brightly lit kitchen. Five tangos, clearly interrupted by the noise and lights while playing cards at the scrubbed wood table, getting ready to do whatever the hell they thought they could do with their weapon harnesses hanging on the backs of their chairs.

  No friendlies. Honey took out the two on her right, while Rafael efficiently dispatched the three on the left before they could fumble their weapons into their hands.

  They deserved to be shot for their ineptitude alone. Honey froze for a second, recognizing the thought as sounding much too much like Savage.

  Glancing around her warm, cozy kitchen, she frowned at a shattered clay pot, the dark soil scattered near one of the guys bleeding on her polished terracotta-tiled floor. “Damn. I’d been growing that avocado for months.”

  Cowl shoved down around his throat as hers was, Rafael grinned at her. “I’ll buy you a tree.”

  Bending down, she checked her two tangos. “Nicely dead. What’s your score?” She had to raise her voice to be heard over the annoyingly piercing trill of the sirens as Rafael moved away to check his three. He gave her a thumbs-up.

  The kitchen led into a large dining room. Empty. But signs of rude people helping themselves to her food were everywhere. Dirty dishes and glasses and dozens of soda cans littered the huge, reclaimed wood, harvest table large enough to seat thirty. The glass doors in the massive antique sideboard across the room were all broken. Her china was in jigsaw puzzle pieces all over the floor. “Pigs.”

  A brief glance through the large picture windows showed dozens of ant-like figures descending the foothills, more traveling across the flat fields toward the house. The bad guys were out there too, firing at the cavalry. White garb for the good guys, black for the bad. Appropriate. And an indication that Savage hadn’t thought of everything.

  “Asses will be kicked,” Rafael said with satisfaction, his mouth curved in a smile as he, too, watched the action for a moment. “Names taken for headstones. Move it, Winston. That lasagna looks good, and I’m hungry.”

  “Don’t they know smoking kills?” The lasagna in question had two cigarette butts in it. She pulled the protective hood back up to cover her head and lowered the goggles, as he did the same. “Yeah. Let’s find her and get this over with.”

  “We win.” Not merely survive this but win. All in the mindset. Trounce Savage and her tangos so they can’t rise again from the ashes. Savage wanted scorched Earth? They’d show her how it was done.

  “Yeah,” he said softly. “We win. Just say when.”

  Honey indicated she’d go into the next room low, shoving open the double doors.

  She took in the cavernous great room with a sweeping glance. Fast. Her people bound, held at gunpoint on the left by the fireplace.

  “When!” She fired off a succession of shots into the cluster of black-garbed guys on the far right. She and Rafe had the advantage of the “startle” reflex. The noise and action outside hadn’t prepared those left behind for an attack inside the house. Their fight or flight chemical response to imminent danger diminished their motor skills, narrowing their visual and audio focus. It was obvious they didn’t know from which side of the huge room they were being attacked.

  Two of the tangos fell. Several fired back.

  She blocked Rafael’s actions and concentrated only on closing in on her Bad Guys. Mind going at warp speed, as ingrained responses in her neural pathways kicked in. No time for mental discussion. On autopilot, she fired with pinpoint accuracy and kept going.

  Moving the muzzle of the SIG with her eyes as she looked rapidly right and left between blasts, Honey scanned for secondary targets as she advanced quickly, firing two one-shot strings per adversary, to the chest, in rapid succession. Felt the sharp recoil, and target re-acquisitioned as she moved.

  Her rapid heartbeat was due to excitement, not fear.

  Two tangos, one male, one female, guns blazing, ran toward her in tandem. Honey’s first shot caught the woman in the head. She shifted the SIG laterally on the recoil, using the time between the two shots to hit the man between the eyes. Supercharged, high-octane racing adrenaline kept her moving and alert.

  Rigorously trained to expect the worst, she didn’t bother hoping for the best. They were intent on killing her, and she wanted first dibs. She shot a guy, seen on a side sweep, in the throat, destroying a painting behind him that she’d commissioned of the meadow behind the house. Damn.

  Ignoring a few screams from some of the hostages, Honey fired until there were no more targets.

  She turned to check on her people then jerked around as Rafael yelled, “Your three!” Another tango bore down on her, weapon raised.

  She pulled the trigger. Click. Jam. Shit.

  The man got off a shot, hitting her hard in the hip. The impact spun her around, off balance. He kept coming. A woman in black joined him, and they were like the Living Dead as they ran toward her.

  As she moved, Honey pulled the slide back on her pistol in the hope that it would unjam. When that didn’t do the trick, she slammed her nondominant hand up hard against the clip. Click. Failure to feed. Shit. She vaulted over the back of a nearby sofa, the leather slick with someone else’s blood. Hidden from view, she struck the spine of the mag a couple of times on the floor until the clicking stopped. Woohoo. Back in business.

  Someone got off a series of rapid-fire shots, producing sparks and the ping of striking metal. Honey slid to the floor, inching her way across the carpet to get the tag-team from behind when a horrendous creak and crack made her look up at the wood ceiling. Rafael had shot the heavy chains holding the enormous center light fixture.

  The six-foot chandelier, comprised of dozens of faux antlers set in wrought-iron fittings, dropped thirty feet from the beamed ceiling and shook the planked floor beneath her knees. Honey instinctively jerked an arm up to cover her face, despite the protective covering of mask and goggles, as the massive piece shattered on impact.

  The two tangos were antlered to death.

  Honey got to her feet. “Easy there, Cowboy!” She checked to make sure only the Bad Guys had been hit by the flying debris. Then glanced back at Rafael, standing legs spread, pretending to blow on the muzzle of his H&K. “That chandelier was custom-made.”

  “I’ll buy you another one to go with the tree.”

  They grinned at each other through masks and goggles. Crazy.

  Honey turned to check on her people, who were still tied and gathered on the other side of the room. A clear swath of roughhewn floorboards between them and the utter devastation where the shootout had taken place. Splintered wood, the shattered chandelier, assorted and sundry broken glass and ceramics, divots in her polished wood floors—the picture completed by a dozen bloody corpses. It was gruesome, infuriating, and satisfying at the same time.

  “Teach you to waltz into my home uninvited,” she told a guy staring sightlessly at the ceiling as she automatically kicked his weapon out of his hand as a precaution. Honey slammed a fresh clip into her weapon as she crossed to the tethered group by the fireplace. There was a round still in the chamber to allow a shot midstream should the need arise as she jettisoned the partially empty magazine.

  Not giving a damn about all the things that were easily replaceable, she and Rafael started the process of liberating everyone from the plastic ties on their ankles and wrists. Pollack wasn’t with the women. She tamped down her fear and worked faster.

  “Anyone hurt?” she demanded, cutting through the restraints around her housekeeper’s wrists first, because she was closest. There was a chorus of “No” and “I’m okay,” but everyone was various degrees of terrified and pissed.

  There was blood in Bianca’s eye as she looked around her usually pristine home. “You keep some of those others—” She pointed through the windows, where another battle raged. “Keep them healthy long enough to help clean up their mess! How’m I gonna get all this blood off of my floors?”

  Honey patted her skinny arm then assisted Kimberly Luz, their resident nurse. “How was Pollack the last time you saw him?”

  “Unhurt.” Her eyes told Honey that might not be the case now. “We all thought she was you. Honestly, Honey, you could be twins, for God’s sake! Pollack and I came running when we heard you’d come home injured. He took one look at whoever she is— Unlike the rest of us,” she said bitterly, “He knew right away she wasn’t you. By then the place was swarming with guys with guns and shitty attitudes.” Kim was still furious. “That scary crazy bitch grabbed him, and the men rounded up everyone and tied them up. Sorry, Boss.”

  “She’s fooled a lot of people. Where are the men?”

  Diane Mason, accepted a pair of scissors from Judi, and went to work removing the ankle bindings from Fran. “The thugs rounded them up and took them- No idea where. We haven’t seen or heard from them since they were taken. But I’ll tell you this, they didn’t go easy!”

  “No, they wouldn’t. Can you take a look at Hollie’s wrists? She’s bleeding. Then check everyone. Thanks,” she told Bianca, who’d gone to the sideboard and was dispensing sharp steak knives, so that each woman was liberated, she could help the others.

  “How many more Bad Guys inside, do you have a vague head count?” She cut as fast as she was could. No one appeared seriously injured, just shaken and scared. She appreciated none of the women was having hysterics. She didn’t have the time or skills to deal with them if they were.

  “Bunch of the bastards went outside when they heard the sirens. Told us to turn them off. I’ve never been so pleased to tell a man to go to hell,” Jennilinh Dinh, one of her ranch hands, said with relish, rubbing the raw, red indentations on her wrists and ankles. Getting to her feet, she took one of the knives and started freeing Nikki and Cheryl, pausing to say over her shoulder, “Go do your thing, Boss; we have this.”

  Honey looked at the group as a whole, as she shoved her cowl down, and shoved the goggles on top of her head. Taking off her gloves, she tucked them into a hidden side pocket. “Where did she take him?” They all knew to whom she was referring.

  “To your room,” Steph told her, pulling the cut ties from her wrist. “I’m so sorry, Honey, we tried—”

  “I know you did. I’ll—” She suddenly realized it wasn’t a case of only herself here. Rafael was with her. Really with her. It was an odd, heart-melting feeling, knowing that she wasn’t alone. “We’ll take care of it.” And since she was painfully aware that Savage had more friends in low places and was good buddies with an internationally known bomber, she urged everyone to clear out and reconvene in the fortified horse barn.

  THIRTY-THREE

  A few more minutes and they could’ve locked themselves inside the Safe Room. It’s only fifty feet away from where they were held,” Honey said quietly, and although she was merely a few feet away, her voice was soft enough to be picked up only by his headset.

  “None of them was seriously injured.”

  “True. And things better stay that way.”

  The number of women in the house surprised Rafael. Two dozen females of assorted ages. The Ice Princess wasn’t the girlfriend type—not the Ice Princess he’d first met, anyway. He had more questions than answers. Because whoever those women were, she cared deeply for their well-being, taking care of them first even though the adrenaline rush was surely kicking her like a wild thing, and fear for her Pollack had to be paramount in her mind.

  “This way.” She headed down a wide hallway at a dead run, trusting he’d be right on her ass. Which he was.

  Her private quarters were in a separate wing of the ten-thousand-square-foot house. Why anyone would need a house of this size, when she lived alone and was out of the country half the time, was a mystery to him. Unless she’d taken in boarders?

  An odd and uncharacteristic move, but he was learning there was more to Honey Winston than met the eye. Interestingly enough, not one of the hostages appeared hysterical, none even cried. Yeah, they were clearly pissed, and they might even have been afraid of being assaulted by armed tangos, but they hadn’t let that fear debilitate them. So who were these women, and why were they in Honey’s home? Rafael kept his questions for later.

  The war for world security played out beyond the picture windows, seen like frames in a silent movie as he and Honey moved quickly through the house. There were fewer T-FLAC operatives than tangos, but they had skill and razor-sharp training, whereas Seymour’s people made up for skill with sheer numbers.

  “Interesting being an observer, isn’t it?” Rafael pointed as two bad guys rushed a female T-FLAC operative.

  “I’ve been an observer all my life.” Running, weapon in hand, Honey spared a sideways glance outside as the woman creamed the two men with her bare hands in about a minute flat.

  Grim-faced, Honey paused only to activate security doors that soundlessly slid closed behind them as they moved deeper into the house. “Jesus, you have some serious shit around here.” He jogged beside her through corridors that were increasingly narrow, and less decorated. Unadorned walls now, no windows. No logs. No woodsy country décor.

  “Did you honest to God think that you’d ever be under siege? The security here is better than what they have at Fort Knox.”

  “Jake and I had fun with it, we have a few patent—”

  The hallway dead-ended at a door. She reached out and her fingers held a fine tremor as she soundlessly turned the handle. The door cracked open. Weapons raised, they entered high low as the door swung wide.

  The room was empty as they straightened from their ready positions. The high ceilinged room looked inviting and sexy as hell with a massive lode pole, four-poster covered in pristine white opposite a local stone fireplace that stretched to the beamed ceiling twenty feet overhead. He heard her breath escape in a sigh as she looked around. Gleaming wide-plank dark floors, plush rugs, soft, feminine neutrals.