The base commissary had delivered a stack of pizzas. Drake figured that if you ever wanted to know the location of every top secret outfit on a base—and be welcomed into the compound every time—you just had to get a job as an on-base pizza delivery driver.

Drake had managed to stick close beside Nikita as well as snag three slices of fully-loaded pizza to go with his beer, more than sufficient solace for his battered ego. He’d been razzed for the way he spoke—he was an Army sergeant with the speech befitting a West Point officer—more times than the sirens had called to Odysseus, so it was no big deal. Though he could have done without Nikita laughing at him.

Everyone was calling the guy J-dawg and he bristled just like a junkyard dog every time. If the guy would just chill, it would go away, but Drake expected that chilling wasn’t in the guy’s repertoire.

Well, it might eventually go away for everyone except Nikita. Something had crawled way under her skin.

Drake always did his best to take his own name’s advice: Drake the male duck. He just let it all slide off his back. He’d had to bust his ass to make Night Stalkers, but only because everyone did to make it into such an elite outfit and he’d wanted in. The rest of life? He did his best to just swim through, and it came easily—especially the women. The women before Nikita anyway.

He’d never gone for the difficult or tricky women before. Wasn’t worth the time. For every one of that type, he could mow down a half dozen or more. But something about the DEVGRU SEAL sitting beside him, and her glowering at J-dawg, made him want to work for it this time. He bet himself a twenty that it would be worth it. He wasn’t yet ready to bet money on whether or not he’d succeed. All of his normal lines wouldn’t do anything but push her away.

“Now, tell it, Jared,” the colonel thumped his bottle on the table for attention. He was the only one who hadn’t gone all J-dawg on the guy. “Nikita, keep your mouth shut and let the man speak.”

“Nikita?” Sugar looked at her with surprise. “Hayward?”

J-dawg looked at his wife, who continued to watch Nikita. “What?”

Sugar just shook her head, “Times I wonder how it is you manage to stay alive, J-dawg.”

“Easy. I’m too ornery to die,” he spoke around a mouthful of pizza.

“Next time,” Sugar informed him, “think before you argue with the first woman to make the cut into DEVGRU.”

He stopped mid-chew and narrowed his eyes at Nikita. “No shit? SEAL Team Six?”

Nikita didn’t say a word. It was obvious that she didn’t like having her name out there.

Sugar must have noticed, “Don’t worry, honey. Your secret is safe with me. I only heard because I have low connections in high places. And J-dawg hardly speaks anything to anyone aside from me and Asal except in incomprehensible snarls and grunts.”

“I knew you guys recruited women for when you went undercover. But one actually made the cut? Like through the front door?” J-dawg asked Altman, ignoring his wife’s tease.

“You seem kinda slow when you don’t like a new fact, J-dawg.” If Nikita’s words could kill, Drake figured J-dawg would be a dead man. He must actually be too ornery to die because he was still breathing.

“We have a grand total of one who came directly in as a full-on operator,” Luke Altman grunted out. “So watch your goddamn step.”

When the pizza first arrived, Altman had ended up across the table from Drake, between Sugar and Zoe. Instead of leaning forward to look at Jared around Sugar, he kept looking across the table at Drake—as if he was the one Altman was threatening.

Drake nearly choked on an over-large piece of pepperoni. First, he wasn’t doing anything more than thinking about Nikita. And second, this was a DEVGRU lieutenant commander threatening him. About the only guys in the military tougher than that were Delta Force…and there would be an argument about even that.

“Alright,” J-dawg rinsed down the last of his pizza with a slug of beer.

Still, Altman was watching Drake as if nothing else was going on.

Okay! Okay! I got the message: don’t hurt the lady. It was more likely that if he did, Nikita would be the one to break him into tiny bits like so much kindling. If ever there was a woman who could take care of herself, it was her.

“So my Titan group took over this outfit—” J-dawg restarted.

“Global Security International,” Nikita snapped it out like an accusation.

Drake had never heard any of what she’d said about the guy. Titan and Global were just as much of a mystery, but she knew. He’d also never heard her speak this way. Maybe why she knew all that was tied up in her reaction to them.

“Yeah, GSI,” J-dawg nodded and the slash of anger that crossed his face said that Nikita wasn’t the only dangerous one at the table. “Those assholes deserved the title of mercenary. They were scalping on government contracts, trafficking with foreign powers, all the bad shit.”

“Like attracts like,” Nikita growled it out.

“Can it,” Altman stated mildly, but there was no doubt about the direct order in his tone.

Nikita looked down at her empty plate, but Drake was close enough that he could feel her practically shaking with suppressed rage. One of the best-trained warriors anywhere and a gutful of rage seemed like a lousy combination to him. Using the cover of darkness and the edge of the table, he patted her thigh in what he hoped was a comforting motion. The clenched-tight muscle eased a little. When he left his hand there, she didn’t remove it or even make any motion to shake it off.

He picked up his next slice one-handed.

The contact shock of Drake’s hand stilled Nikita’s nerves enough that she didn’t know how to respond.

Drake had good hands. Not merely big and strong, but he had great control. It was why she’d first noticed him. Most people simply yanked the trigger on an M134 Minigun; Drake coaxed it to life. He managed all of the necessary suppression and destruction with a third less ammo than any other helicopter crew gunner she’d ever seen. That’s why she’d thought there was a chance he could learn to shoot well and been willing to spend an afternoon with him.

That hand on her thigh, the first time they’d ever touched, was a whole different matter. It was exactly the right amount to pull her back from the cliff edge that lay so raw inside her that her past had threatened to overwhelm her present.

She managed a breath, then another. Finally a third as J-dawg continued his story.

“So, we’re cleaning up GSI’s files. Running down the people they were was using. Mostly arms and drugs. GSI was only starting to get into people—human trafficking, mainly for the sex trade—but we shut that down first of all and shut it down hard. I’ve got a team that’s…particularly touchy on that subject and I let them loose.” Then his smile went evil. “They’re damn good at what they do.”

“However,” the colonel prompted from where he leaned back into the darkness of the Alabama night.

“However,” J-dawg continued, “there’s a mess in Central America that needs cleaning up on the quiet.”

“Let me guess,” Nikita couldn’t help herself despite Altman shutting her down. “The State Department didn’t want to send in a bunch of out-of-control door-kickers like yourselves.”

J-dawg grimaced in disgust, “Almost an exact quote. I’ve got a team run by my second best man—”

“Why not your best?”

“Because I’ve been busy,” this time the smile was genuine and Nikita could almost like him for that. Special Operations soldiers needed a certain amount of arrogance to survive. “My second team specializes at working in the gray areas, but…” He shrugged.

But no matter how good his team was, they weren’t the 5E and they definitely weren’t DEVGRU. There was a long silence broken only by the plink of moths battering themselves against the lantern’s glass.

“The current party in power in Honduras,” Colonel McDermott leaned forward into the light, “is both democratically elected and friendly to the United States, which makes them a popular target. So far, one of our teams—assisted by a group of wildland firefighters—has managed to stop the most serious coup attempt, which was touch-and-go but they did it. We’d like to make that permanent as their president is finally working to clean up the corruption. It means that you need to go in, find whatever it was that GSI was financing, and get rid of it.”

“Without anyone the wiser.” Nikita was the first to voice it, but she could see the others had reached the same conclusion.

“Not the local government. Not their military. Certainly not the media. No one,” Colonel McDermott confirmed. “I don’t even want Sugar, with all of her connections, to be able to hear about it except from us.”

It’s what the 5E and DEVGRU were best at, being completely invisible.

“We have GSI’s files,” J-dawg signaled Sugar and she extracted a thumb drive from somewhere within her tight leather and handed it to J-dawg.

Nikita wondered what else Sugar could extract if the situation turned ugly. All civilian weapons were supposed to be turned in at the base entrance, but Nikita wouldn’t be trusting the results of a contest between a gate guard’s diligence and the razzle-dazzle of Sugar’s deep cleavage and tight leather.

“It includes my contact info as well as Parker’s, if you need him. He’s the one who put this together for you. Best data geek there is; he’s got every scrap of info GSI knew in here.” He set it in the middle of the table, then let out his evil smile once more. “Well, other than what was in a dead man’s brain.”

Unsanctioned killing on American soil. This guy gave her the creeps, no matter how much the leader of GSI had deserved it. Buck Baer’s reputation had always been bad and it was a relief to know he and GSI were gone. Nikita wouldn’t be happy until all “contractors” were six feet under like the bastards deserved.

She reached for the drive, then hesitated. She glanced at her boss, then Pete Napier—the major in command of the 5E—and, receiving a nod from both of them, finally took it. She wanted this one. Taking down a GSI operation would appease a small part of the pain inside her.

“You fix it, shooter,” the head of Titan glared at her. “Whatever it takes, you goddamn fix it.”

“Sure thing…J-dawg.”

Sugar’s laugh filled the darkness.