Chapter 27

"So you knew about this storm," Noah said. "Seems like a strange time for a pickup."

"Emergency extraction," said the goon. "As if you need to know that."

Our captor was still talking too much. Still looking ahead to the moment when he"d knock us out. Make us forget everything.

Not gonna happen, fucko.

Noah said something else, and the guy said something else, but I couldn"t hear what it was because they"d put on headphones. What about my hearing protection?

I didn"t ask, and they wouldn"t have heard me if I did, because the clouds chose that moment to break open. The formerly soft drizzle was now pounding on the chopper"s roof like the state police trying to serve a felony warrant on a frat house.

The drumbeat of the downpour did more to drown out my so-called running commentary than three layers of duct tape over the mouth. I couldn"t even hear myself.

Better not to distract Noah from his piloting job anyway. Did he really know how to fly this thing? It didn"t seem to me that earning your wings on a flight simulator would do you much good in a situation like this.

Nobody needed my doubts. Least of all Noah.

It wasn"t like he had a choice.

Better to focus on my own job. Escape. I shrugged my shoulders from within the uncomfortable confines of the hogtie. The stupid goon had eagle eyes when it came to watching how Noah bound me. He wanted it nice and tight.

Of course, I flexed as much as I could, swelling my muscles where I was able in order to make my bonds look tighter than they were. Noah had known what I was doing. He made a show of tying me securely, but we both knew I could relax those muscles, stretch and elongate my arms instead of pumping them up, stretch and elongate my fingers...

Unless we were wrong about what we thought we knew.

Unless I couldn"t quite get a grip on those knots.

The knot felt large and complex. Noah wanted it to look more complicated than it was.

Unless it really was that complicated...

I rocked and wriggled. The goon glanced back at me a couple of times, then settled in.

We were about to take off. The lightning was striking close enough that it seemed to light up the inside of the cabin, briefly blinding me each time.

For me, blindness didn"t matter. I couldn"t see the knots I was working on anyway. That"s the whole point of the hogtie. You"ve got the guy helpless on his belly, arms and legs pulled together to make a pretty bow for the pictures.

But what about Noah? Didn"t those blinding jolts to his vision concern our captor? Were we really in that big of a hurry? The goon had plenty of time to mess with us before. What had changed his mind?

Or did he welcome the storm? Did he think it gave him cover?

Maybe it did.

Had Bill Mitchell mounted a rescue after all? Too late if so.

We were in the air. I closed my eyes but the drop in my belly informed me that we were lifting off from the beach. The engine roar joined the clatter of rain noisy enough to be hail and the occasional nerve-shattering clashes of thunder.

The noise had reached death metal levels of deafening.

I couldn"t clap my hands over my ears until I got out of these stupid ropes. A fancy shibari knot meant to look good in bondage photos wasn"t necessarily designed to hold a guy captive for any extended period of time. Still, it was taking me longer to pick apart that first knot than I thought it would.

The goon glanced back to see how I was doing. I froze. Not that I was far enough along that he would"ve seen any loose rope, but I didn"t want to give him the satisfaction of seeing me belly-flop around like a catfish on a boat deck.

If he"d asked me how I was doing, I wouldn"t have heard him. But of course he didn"t. He just bared his teeth at me before he turned around again.

My fingers ached from the stretching and twitching. So did the long muscles of my arms and shoulders.

There was another complication. As long as I wasn"t fully free, I needed to hold myself in the hogtie position. If the goon glanced back to see me out of my painful hogtie, he"d light me up with that tranquilizer gun. I needed to look all tied up in a pretty bow until the last possible moment before my attack.

The knots unknotted. The rope began to slip.

Crash! Boom!

Lightning struck around us again and again. It circled the island we were leaving.

Lightning likes trees. I knew that because you"re not supposed to hide under the trees during a storm. For the first time, I wondered why. Do trees do something to attract it, do they have their own electric fields, or does lightning go after them just for being tall?

A helicopter"s taller than the whole forest.

Not a useful line of thought.

Where"s the rifle pointed? Not at Noah, not with all this going on. You wouldn"t want to accidentally knock out your pilot in the middle of this mess.

The strobe effect of the lightning gave me glimpses of the guy in flashes. I blinked to be sure.

The gun was currently pointed up at the roof of the helicopter.

Crash. Boom. Blinded by the light.

There would never be a better moment to make an offensive play.