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Pierce sits up. He’s catching on, and his face is practically on fire with excitement. “You realized?”
“I was late. So, the concierge picked me up a pregnancy test.”
“And?” he asks, practically jumping out of his skin.
“We’re pregnant,” I answer, trying to stifle my smile. When I look up, Pierce looks like he’s about to explode. He laughs happily and picks me up in the air, spinning me around and around until we are both dizzy and giggling. When he puts me down, he kisses me long and slow, then pulls away and brushes my hair out of my face.
“You’re my family now, Arie. And I’m going to make sure you, and Chloe, and whoever else the universe brings us, will be safe forever. I love you, Arie.”
And when he pulls me into his arms, the warmth of the Fijian sun beating down on us and the gentle lapping of the waves filling out ears, I believe him.
Epilogue
One Year Later
“Congratulations on the addition to your family, Mr. Cochran. We heard you and your lovely wife welcome twins.”
Spencer James and the man I’ve come to know as Rufus are sitting across from my desk in our Auckland office. I look at the picture sitting across from me: Chloe on the beach with our twins, Layla and Beckett, and my heart swells. Chloe may look like me, but the twins are the spitting image of Arie, and together, we make a perfect family. I peek over the men across from me, and see Arie sitting at the reception desk. She was going crazy at home, so we got a nanny for the kids and now she works in the office with me. As if she knows I’m watching her, she turns her head and gives me a wink, then goes back to answering one of the dozens of emails we get every day, asking for our services.
While we take on the occasional side case, then contract out to another local security firm, my main business is what Spencer and Rufus brought me over a year ago. And it was a doozy. The men were the head of the Worldwide Securities Agency, or WSA, a privatized offshoot of the CIA. They were a group of elite former Marines and SEALs and “secret agents” who were hired to take on missions too intense for any federal government to handle. Sometimes, the cases were so covert, a government might not even know about them. But they were always too dangerous to risk the lives of anyone who was considered a “volunteer.” So that is where we come in.
For the last year, Cochran Securities LTD has been putting together a private, select collection of men and women who travel across the globe, helping solve issues that the average person never even hears about. From our base in Auckland, we assist the WSA in finding agents to help complete their missions. My job isn’t just to find the agents; I help them plan, organize, and do damage control, accounting for any eventuality and strategize future missions. It’s an amazing, rewarding, and challenging job, and I can never allow myself to devalue its importance.
Arie has also proven to be an invaluable part of our CSL branch in Auckland. I always knew she was brilliant, but over the last few months, she has shown me that she is a wiz at mapping and charting. Every time I think I have figured out the best course for a planned mission, she shows up and within five seconds, she’s found a safer, more efficient course. I couldn’t even begin to guess how many lives she’s saved, or how much money. She calls herself my receptionist, but she’s much more… and she knows it.
I realize I’ve been staring at Arie when Spencer clears his throat. “Mr. Cochran?”
“Yes! Sorry. You were saying?”
“Well, first, we wanted to thank you for saving our asses in with that thing in Tasmania. Not sure our guys would have made it out without your help.”
I nod. “That’s our job.”
“Now, we need to ask you for something else,” Rufus says with a stern look. I try and keep my poker face. There is no telling what these men want from me. It could be anything. Literally.
“Go ahead.”
Rufus sets a chubby hand on my desk. “Mr. Cochran, we’d like you and your wife to start doing some field work. Getting out there in the muck, so to speak.”
I don’t remotely intend to laugh out loud, but that is exactly what happens. I actually laugh loudly enough to draw Arie’s attention from the front of the office. Laughter isn’t generally something she hears coming from meetings with the men from WSA.
“What the hell are you talking about? We can’t go out in the field. My leg never properly healed from the injury I sustained in service and Arie isn’t trained in… anything. What could you possibly want us to do in the field?”
Spencer gives me a very serious raised eyebrow. “Mr. Cochran, we know full well that your wife is the brains behind your mission charting. And she’s exceptional. Training or no training, she has an instinct that can’t be taught. And you may be injured, but the fact you think that means you are sidelined from the game permanently? That’s just disappointing.”
I sit back, processing what he’s just said. “So, explain to me what it is you want us to do. What you think we can do.”
“Track and report only. You will travel to wherever we tell you and collect whatever information we need. Maybe follow a target. Maybe gather some intel. Maybe just map out a mission that we’re planning before we go boots on the ground. Nothing that would put either of you in any immediate danger. But we feel that your unique talents are being wasted in an office. Both of your unique talents.”
I can’t even begin to guess how Arie is going to respond to this. “Can we have some time to consider it?”
They stand up at the same time, and nod at the same time. “You have twenty-four hours. Same as last time.”
Before I even have a chance to fo
llow them out to the waiting area, they have completely disappeared from the office.
“How do they DO that? How do they just… vanish like that?” I ask Arie, who is eyeballing me. But Arie is looking at me with a very defined scowl.
