Page 105 of Her Defiant Warrior

Would he or she have set a trap for it to go off when the panel was opened?

He wouldn’t have.

This whole thing felt like it was planned to cause casualties, otherwise it would have gone off as soon as the perps had left the house.

Nope. This was a remote signal or a timer. A remote meant they had a chance to catch the asshole. A timer was scarier. That meant that someone knew the comings and goings of Gideon and the rest of the team.

Mateo looked at his watch. It’d been four and a half minutes since Gideon had sent the text to their teammates, and nobody had texted him to say they were close to the house to help him out.

Dammit!

He thumbed off the latch of the tall electrical panel and there it was.

A bomb.

Not just any bomb.

A timer connected to three bricks of C-4.

Three bricks.

Someone wanted to annihilate Gideon’s house.

It was set to go off in eighteen minutes. Mateo did the calculations in his head and realized it would have been fifteen minutes after the kids were actually due to arrive from the games center, but an hour before the men would have arrived from the pub. Somebody was keeping track of the members of Omega Sky, and they were aiming for their families.

He needed Nolan O’Rourke; he was the guy who knew demolitions inside and out, forwards and backwards. Linc and Braxton weren’t far behind in their skills, but he’d prefer Nolan, and if Maggie had been with the girls, then Nolan couldn’t be far away.

“It’s gotta be Nolan,” he muttered.

Mateo pulled his phone out of his back pocket and hit Gideon’s number.

“Found a bomb. Eighteen. Nope, scratch that. Seventeen minutes and nineteen seconds before it goes off.” He ignored the clap of thunder. “It’s connected to the electrical housing for the pool pump. Shit, man, I can’t tell which wires are for the pool and which wires are for the bomb. I need Nolan.”

“Nolan’s with Lark and Ryker. We’ve hopped the meridian. We’re flagging down drivers heading west on the expressway. So far, no takers. I’ll call Brax for his ETA. Linc and Leila are up in Maine for the weekend.

“Tell Brax to get here fast.”

The timer now said sixteen minutes and fifty-one seconds. Mateo set the timer on his watch to coordinate with the timer on the bomb while Lucy growled at him, then she ran off.

What the ever-loving fuck?

“I found the bomb, girl. It’s okay, now.” Mateo yelled after her as he climbed over the wall enclosing the pump. Lucy had run around to the other side of the house, but now she came running back to him. She butted her huge head against his thigh.

“What, girl?”

She gave him that same look again. The look that told him he was being a dumbfuck.

“Show me.”

Lucy streaked off and Mateo ran after her.

The dog careened around past the patio to the other side of the house and ground to a dead halt in front of the air conditioning unit. She looked up at Mateo.

Fuck, I have another bomb.

Looking at the unit, he didn’t see shit, then he spotted the connection point to the house's electrical box. That was it. He yanked open the door, expecting to see the C-4. There was nothing. There weren’t a lot of electrical wires like he’d seen on the pool pump, and there was no sign of a bomb. He looked down again and examined the hose connecting the unit to the house. Every bolt looked shiny and new. There was no way to know if somebody had recently unscrewed them and shoved C-4 inside with a timer.

He looked all around the bottom of the unit, and it was the same thing. None of the bolts connecting the unit to the concrete pad looked like they had recently been turned, but he couldn’t really tell with the rain pouring down. Lucy began to whine.