The Maximum Security Series, Book 4
Romantic Suspense
Publisher: HQN
Date Published: Jun 22, 2021
The eldest of the three wealthy Garrett brothers, Reese Garrett is in the
middle of a major purchase for his multimillion-dollar oil and gas company,
Garrett Resources. The Poseidon offshore drilling platform venture will
greatly enhance the company’s value.
But when Reese is on a trip out to see the rig, his helicopter crashes,
leaving him hospitalized and two men dead. It’s discovered the chopper
was sabotaged, and Reese is determined to find out who’s behind the
crash—and whether he was the intended target. Then, when his lover,
Kenzie, is accused of her ex-husband’s murder—a man with a
vested interest in the Poseidon deal—clues start pointing to a
connection that puts Reese, Kenzie and her young son in the sights of a
killer.
From the Texas heat to the Louisiana bayous, Reese and his brothers must
track down the truth before the body count gets any higher.
Read an excerpt
Chapter One
Galveston,
Texas
Last Day of
July
Seconds
after the chopper lifted off the pad, Reese felt the odd vibration. Along with the pilot and co-pilot and five
members of the crew, the Eurocopter EC135 was headed for the Poseidon offshore
drilling platform.
For
a moment, the ride leveled out and Reese relaxed against his seat. As CEO of Garrett Resources, the
billion-dollar oil and gas company he owned with his brothers, he was always
searching for the right investment to expand company holdings, the reason he
was flying out to the platform.
For
months he’d been working with Sea Titan Drilling, the owner of the offshore
rig, to complete the five-hundred-million-dollar purchase, an extremely good
value when the average price of a similar rig was around six-fifty.
The
vibration returned and with it came a grinding noise that put Reese on
alert. The men in the cabin began to
glance back and forth and shift nervously in their seats. A sharp jolt, then the chopper seemed to fall
out of the sky. It climbed again, began
to dip and sway, dropped then climbed as the pilot fought for control.
The
pilot’s deep voice rumbled through the headset.
“We’ve got a problem. I don’t
want you to panic, but we need to find a place to set down.”
There
was definitely a problem, Reese thought, as the vibration continued to
worsen. The chopper was out of control
and the whole cabin was shaking as if it would break apart any minute. His pulse was hammering, his adrenalin
pumping.
Along with the men in the crew who rode back
and forth from the rig every few weeks, he stared out the window toward the
ground. They were no longer above the
heliport. Clearly the pilot was looking
for an open space big enough to handle the thirty-six-foot blade span. All Reese could see were the rooftops of
warehouses and metal commercial buildings.
The
chopper kept shaking. The crew was
grim-faced but resigned. The pilot did
something to take the pitch out of the rotors and the chopper started falling.
“No
need to worry,” the pilot said. “We’ll
auto-rotate down. I’ve done it a dozen
times.”
Auto rotate
down. Reese knew the concept, the
technique helicopter pilots used to land when the engine failed. The trick was to find a safe place to hit the
ground.
Both
engines went silent. The blades were
flat now, the wind whistling through them, tying his stomach into a knot.
“Brace
for impact,” the pilot said. Below them,
Reese spotted an open flat slab of asphalt in the yard of a small trucking
firm--the only possible landing site anywhere around. Trouble was it didn’t look wide enough to
handle the blades.
At
the last second, the pilot flared the helicopter in an effort to slow the
descent, then the ground rushed up and the chopper hit with a jolt that wracked
Reese’s whole body.
For
an instant, he thought they were going to make it. Then one of the spinning rotor blades hit the
corner of a building and tore free. The
Plexiglas bubble shattered as the long metal blades exploded into a hundred
deadly pieces, careening like knives through the air, slicing into buildings
and the cabin of the helicopter.
Reese
didn’t feel the impact. One moment he
was conscious, then the world suddenly went black.
About the Author
New York Times bestselling author Kat Martin is a graduate of the
University of California at Santa Barbara where she majored in Anthropology
and also studied History. Currently residing in Missoula, Montana with her
Western-author husband, L. J. Martin, Kat has written sixty-five Historical
and Contemporary Romantic Suspense novels. More than sixteen million copies
of her books are in print and she has been published in twenty foreign
countries. Kat is currently at work on her next Romantic Suspense.
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