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