Retrograde (Galaxy) Read online

  “I don’t suppose he gave you a name or anything.”

  “Yeah, as a matter of fact, he texted me the info.” He pointed to the cell phone in a side pocket of his seat. “Go ahead. Look it up. You know the code.”

  One of the things they had all agreed on from the beginning was how they handled their cell phones. With no landline, by design, they’d purchased the most powerful cells made, phones that they could use to call someone on the ground and maintain a conversation from the air if necessary. They also knew each other’s codes. In a high-risk situation, they needed to be able to access one another’s information.

  Blaze picked the phone up and punched in the code to unlock it, then hit the text icon and found Nolan’s.

  Hey. Can you pass along to Blaze that a woman named Peyton West will be calling his secret phone? Take good care of her.

  Blaze read the message twice.

  “That’s it? That’s all he said?”

  Saint nodded. “He called me because he knew the four of you were actively involved with the rescue while all I did was sit my fat ass here in the chopper waiting for you guys.”

  Blaze chuckled. “That’s one way of putting it.” He looked at the screen again. “I’ll wait until I check with my brother. I wonder if it’s anything urgent?”

  “Dude.” Saint maneuvered the helo into a new flight path. “Everyone who calls you guys is urgent.”

  Blaze supposed that was true. When the four of them had gathered to celebrate becoming civilians after sixteen years as SEALs, little had they expected that their festive dinner would change their lives so dramatically. But getting a little drunk and buying a hundred dollars’ worth of lottery tickets had seemed a good way to celebrate. Who knew they’d win the largest Powerball lottery ever, and wind up with almost one-point-six billion dollars?

  Billion!

  Blaze’s mind still tripped over that every time.

  But after the original craziness had settled down, the four of them had realized the sky was now the limit. They could afford their dream, and Galaxy was born. With a Gulfstream 500 that served both as their office and transportation, a luxury cabin cruiser and a small racing boat docked at Viper’s home on Davis Islands, they were ready to go anywhere at any time. It suited all of them not to be tied down to regular offices and their type of clientele didn’t want a paper trail.

  He wondered idly what kind of woman Nolan had connected with and what her story was that he’d felt compelled to give her the phone number. Although he and his brother were close, they were also extremely busy with their own lives. He didn’t think any of Nolan’s patients were the kind to need Galaxy’s services, but of course he never knew. But he was damn curious what had brought about the out-of-character phone call.

  After they landed and got the Rosens reunited with their daughter, he’d give his brother a quick shout. If it sounded okay, he’d contact the woman to see what the deal was. Then he’d go home to his luxury townhouse on the water, call Fran and get ready for a night of unequaled sex.

  Five minutes later, they touched down at the private airstrip and double hangar they’d built on land they’d bought just north of downtown Tampa. Blaze and Viper helped their passengers out of the chopper and guided them toward where their daughter was waiting on the tarmac. He loved reunion scenes like this. It made everything they did so worthwhile.

  They all stood back to give the family room as Angela came running over to them. She wrapped her arms around Eagle, who had been the contact for her, and Blaze thought for a moment she’d drown him in her tears.

  “I have no idea how to thank you.”

  Eagle grinned. “That hug was a pretty good start.”

  “Well, you’ll like this even better. I already called my bank and had your fee transferred to the account you gave me. You just don’t know…” She stopped and swallowed hard.

  “I do. We all do. Thanks for the prompt payment of the fee.” He grinned again. “And the hug.”

  At last they got everyone to Angela’s car, accepted all the thanks and gratitude, and saw the Rosen family off.

  “That could have turned to shit,” Viper commented.

  Eagle nodded. “I know this sounds weird, but I’d rather deal with professional criminals every day. Guys like these are unstable and unpredictable.”

  “Amen to that.”

  “You gonna call that woman?” Saint asked, finished now with hangaring the helicopter.

  “Yeah. Forward the text to me.”

  In seconds, his phone dinged with the incoming message.

  This is Peyton West. Your brother, Dr. Nolan Hamilton, gave me your number. I have a desperate situation involving my sister and he said if anyone could help, it was you. Please call me.

  Her number was included.

  For a moment, he was tempted to leave it until tomorrow. But again, he thought how unusual it was for his brother to do this. The woman must be in a very desperate situation.

  Swallowing a sigh, he sent a text to his brother.

  Is this woman legit?

  All the way. Get on board. Please.

  Please. Well. Curious to see what had put the bug in Nolan’s ear, he tapped in her number. He wasn’t prepared for the sound of the voice that answered. Soft, musical, something that vibrated through his blood. But it also held a heavy overlay of desperation.

  “This is Peyton West.”

  “Yeah, this is Blaze Hamilton. You called.”

  “Oh. Uh, I really need to meet with you. I have a situation that your brother said you could probably handle.” Pause. “I have nowhere else to turn.”

  How many times had he heard that? Galaxy specialized in being the last chance for people, the agency that took jobs no one else could or would do. He wasn’t about to ask her for details on the phone. Galaxy clients only delivered information in person.

  “Okay. I can book you on a flight tomorrow afternoon. Say one o’clock.” Enough time to get his act together after this case. Hot, raunchy sex always did that for him.

  Another pause vibrated across the connection. When she spoke, the tightness in her voice was evident.

  “If you could make it today, I’d really appreciate it.”

  Today. Everyone wanted their meeting right now. Everything was an emergency. Sadly, it often was.

  “Look, Miss West—” he began.

  “No, you look.” The musical quality was gone from the voice, replaced by intense need. “My brother-in-law is dead. My sister is in a coma she may never wake up from and everyone from the local police to the FBI are hands-off on the case. You’re my last and only hope.” She paused. “I have money, if that’s the problem. I can pay.”

  Fuck. Why was everything always so urgent?

  Because you and the other guys have made a habit of dealing with urgency. That’s what you wanted, right? Right.

  He sighed and mentally said goodbye to a night of dirty, raunchy sex. The SEAL in him took over.

  “Fine. Okay. We just finished a…situation. Let me check with my pilot and see when he can be ready to go again.”

  He muted the phone and walked over to Saint, who was leaning against his car, watching.

  “I figured I’d better hang around. I can be set again by four this afternoon as long as we make it a short hop.”

  Blaze nodded. “Thanks, big guy. She sounds desperate.”

  Saint cocked an eyebrow. “Don’t they all?”

  Blaze unmuted the phone.

  “I’m going to text you an address. Use your GPS to find it. Be here at four sharp.”

  “I’ll see you then.” She disconnected.

  When Galaxy had been formed, the partners had determined that they did not want a cookie cutter private contractor agency. They wanted the clients no one else would handle. The jobs others turned away from. Maybe it was the adrenaline rush, or the challenges presented by off-the-book situations, or maybe it was just a commitment to keep using the skills they’d learned as SEALs. Whatever it was, they�
��d become the go-to place for those who had exhausted all other channels.

  They’d agreed from the beginning on having no formal office. They didn’t want to be confined to a building, hemmed in by the walls. Their meetings would be held where there was no chance of eavesdropping or wiretapping or any other listening device. When they’d bought the Gulfstream 500, they’d outfitted it with every electronic device they might conceivably need. Meetings were held in the air so there was no way anyone could eavesdrop or interrupt.

  He drove home to shower and change and run the name of Peyton West through all the databases he had access to. What he found didn’t sound any alarms. She’d had three tickets for speeding over the years, but so what? Who didn’t have at least one? Not married. Not in a relationship that even his deepest search could find. She lived in Texas—San Antonio—and was a multi-published author of romantic suspense novels set mostly in Texas.

  Was she looking for help with a book? Galaxy didn’t do that kind of stuff. It made them too visible.

  He learned her sister and brother-in-law had recently been in a car accident, hit by a speeding vehicle in front of a hotel. The brother-in-law had been killed and the sister was still in a coma. Blaze vaguely remembered reading about it online when he was idly skimming—just three paragraphs, and there hadn’t been anything that rang his chimes. Hit and run, that was it. He hated those, because no one was ever made to answer for it, but nothing had seemed out of the ordinary.

  Besides, Galaxy didn’t investigate auto accidents. That was what the cops were for. Did that mean she had an overactive imagination and there was little substance to whatever she wanted from him? He mentally shook his head. No, his brother was too much of a pragmatist to send him someone who saw shadows where there were none.

  Before he checked further, he decided to reach out to Nolan and get the skinny on Peyton West and her situation. His brother shocked him by having five minutes free at that particular moment.

  “She’s not a nutcase,” he said at once. “This isn’t something she made up for one of her novels, I promise you that. This is some serious shit and everyone everywhere is stonewalling her. If you can find out who the driver was, that ought to open up the whole can of worms. But I believe her, Blaze.”

  He couldn’t ask for better validation than that.

  He was waiting when the black sedan headed down the gravel drive exactly at four o’clock and parked by the hangar. All four of them tried not to prejudge clients before interacting with them. Appearances, as they all knew, could be very deceiving. But the woman who exited the Mercedes, tense and buttoned-up as she was, made every bit of saliva in his mouth dry up.

  She was of medium height, the slacks and sweater she wore doing little to disguise the mouthwatering curves of her body or the natural sway of her hips as she walked. Thick, glossy chestnut hair was pulled back tightly into a ponytail. When she came close enough, he could see her eyes were a rich dark green that looked out at him from beneath chocolate lashes. Out of nowhere, he was seized with a desire to strip off her clothes and run his hands over her body.

  Dickwad! Asshole!

  Where the hell had this come from, anyway, and what the fuck was wrong with him? He never, ever reacted to clients like this. He’d better get his shit together in a hurry. And figure out why he had lost his brain somewhere on the tarmac.

  But then his common sense caught up with him. He saw the rigid way she controlled herself, the look of strain etched into her face and the mixture of rage and panic that swirled in her eyes. It was a look he’d seen in so many of the clients who came to Galaxy. And that was enough to make his hungry dick, the one that had been looking forward to some action tonight, deflate in a hurry. This was business. A mission. This was what they did. What she was here for. Thank god for his SEAL discipline.

  He held out a hand to her. “Scott Hamilton, but please, call me Blaze. We’re all used to our military code names.”

  They had decided to use those with clients, since they addressed each other that way and there’d be less confusion.

  “Peyton West. I have a desperate need for your help, and I can’t stress that word enough.”

  He nodded toward the plane, waiting in front of the hangar. “All right. Let’s take a little flight to nowhere and you can tell me all about it.”

  Chapter Two

  Peyton studied the man waiting for her as she walked toward the plane with him. When Dr. Nolan Hamilton had given Peyton his brother’s phone number, she hadn’t been sure what she’d expected when she called. He hadn’t told her a lot about his brother’s company, just that they were an unorthodox group of men, all former SEALs, who did things no one else wanted to touch. That they took jobs no one else would, jobs often conducted in a thick cloud of secrecy. Whatever problem she was wrestling with, he was damn sure that if anyone could help her, it was them.

  She sure as hell hoped so, because at the moment she was convinced her life was in retrograde. Yeah, retrograde. Literally meaning ‘backward step’. She knew it usually referred to a planet moving backward, and that was exactly what everything seemed to be like at this point in time.

  Driving to this meeting, the past few weeks had raced through her mind like a movie on steroids. An unsolved hit-and-run had left her brother-in-law dead and her sister in a coma from which she might never emerge. Peyton’s publisher was not happy with her latest book and her editor was pushing for major revisions. Of course, the last situation was at the bottom of her list of important things. She was sure ignoring phone calls and sending cryptic messages would probably end up with her contract being yanked, but she couldn’t worry about that now. It was the least important thing in her life.

  She was pissed off and terrified at the same time. It was bad enough that Dane and Brianne had been victims of such a deliberate crime, but worse that the police were not only acting as if they had no leads but didn’t seem to be doing anything about it. She could smell money and political pressure scattered through everything. Too bad for whoever that was. She damned well wasn’t going to allow people to sweep this under the rug while verbally patting her on the head and expressing fake sorrow.

  So, just as when she plotted a book, she had made a plan, an outline, then attacked this problem and gotten…nowhere. She felt like some avenging angel, but one that needed help breaking down doors. After three investigative agencies she’d approached had turned her down, she knew that what she needed were people not afraid of anyone or anything.

  And every hour she wasn’t fighting this battle, she sat beside her sister and talked to her, hoping and praying that something would elicit a reaction. An eyelid tic. A muscle twitch. Anything at all. And the continued lack of response only made her angrier and more desperate.

  When Dr. Hamilton had approached her about some possible help, she’d had many questions. Who were these people, anyway, who had their office in a plane? What kind of men were they? What was his brother like? Nolan, as he’d suggested she call him, had given her one of his rare smiles and pointed out that the kind of clients they had wanted everything under the radar. Galaxy was usually the client’s last resort, he’d told her, and covert was the best description of what they did.

  Well, she was certainly looking for all that. The more she’d asked questions on her own and the more people had resisted her, the more convinced she’d become that at least one of them—Dane or Brianne— had deliberately been targeted.

  While she’d waited for her call-back, she’d done a search for information about them. It was better to learn as much as possible about the people she was meeting, but the web was devoid of information about Galaxy. She’d then turned to finding out as much as she could about SEALs. It was critical that the people she hired fit all the qualifications. She’d learned they were an elite Special Operations Force, warriors trained in, among other things, counterterrorism. That they completed assignments against the worst possible odds and they did not know the meaning of defeat. Well, okay, then. Just
what she was looking for, although she didn’t necessarily think counterterrorism entered into it.

  Then she’d thought, but who knows? Something was very wrong here and it could be anything.

  Watching Scott Hamilton walk across the tarmac to meet her, she knew at once he was exactly what she was looking for. He was the very image of what she’d imagined a SEAL to be, a seasoned veteran, a warrior with a take-charge attitude and a quiet air of power and confidence. Nothing would deter this man from completing his mission. He might as well have been wearing a T-shirt that said Don’t fuck with me.

  Her instincts, which she liked to think were good, told her he was a man who meant business. Who didn’t shy away from trouble but gave it in spades. A man whose enemies feared him. That was exactly what she needed. Someone not afraid of anyone.

  “Mr. Hamilton.” She nodded at him. “Blaze.”

  She certainly wasn’t prepared for his overwhelmingly powerful presence, the sheer aura of masculinity and control—and, yes, the sexual magnetism—that radiated from him. She judged him to be over six feet with a lean, muscular body, a face marked by a square jaw and high cheekbones, a well-trimmed scruff of beard and a nose that looked as if it had once been broken. Maybe more than once. Whiskey-colored eyes looked out at her from beneath lashes a shade darker than the thick head of black hair. He was like a glass of smooth, fine whiskey with a sharp bite to it.

  And oh, god, she felt as if she’d been bitten, and her body reacted accordingly. When he took her hand, her nipples hardened into tight peaks and the pulse between her thighs set up a wild throbbing. She had the wildest urge to strip off both their clothes and attack him right here on the runway. Damn! That definitely was not her. And sex was the last thing she should be thinking about in this situation. She had to focus on what had happened to Dane and Brianne, and was willing to do anything to get the answers she wanted.