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“But I’m going to do something different. Something no one’s really seen.”
“Like?”
“It’ll be a pizza truck one day,” she said, “then specialize in bacon the next. Every day I’ll switch it up. The one constant though, is I plan to feature specialty ingredients. Without being specialized.”
“Is that why you keep clipping ingredients from your third job?”
Her face scrunched into an abrupt scowl. “Just how long have you been watching me?”
“Long enough.”
I wanted to tell her how I drew the short straw. How I’d only been following her that day because the others had won the chance to take her out and get to know her.
“I found out about the surrogacy program through a pair of married clients,” Quinn continued. “They wanted a baby, but couldn’t conceive. Eventually they ended up having twins through a third party, and I gently began asking how much it cost.”
“I see.”
“When I found out their surrogate made well over six figures…”
“You saw an opportunity.”
Quinn finally turned to look at me. Her expression was stoic.
“Sure, I can’t deny that,” she admitted. “But I was also touched by how grateful they were to their surrogate, and how incredibly happy they looked as a family. A family that couldn’t have existed but for the kindness of strangers.”
“Two birds, one stone,” I said.
She dropped her hands in her lap and grew silent. But only long enough to smirk.
“And what about you?” she asked. “No wait, let me guess. You’re enormous, so you were a football prodigy. Got recruited for some ivy league college. Since that’s exactly what everyonewantedyou to do, you went the opposite direction and joined the military. Or maybe you actually were up for it, but your grades weren’t.”
I drove on for a while, enjoying the feel of the wind against my face. If she was taking a shot at me, fine, I guess I deserved it. Somehow though, it didn’t seem that way.
“I was on the chess team, not the football team,” I eventually told her. “I had a 2100 ranking.”
“That’s master,” Quinn swore.
“Yup,” I agreed. “I was sort of a big nerd, actually. Math club. Dungeons and Dragons. Everything I did, I did to the extreme. Eventually I found my way into a weight room, and I didthatto the extreme too. I spent so much time in the gym they had to throw me out of the place at the end of every day.”
I had her full attention now, which was kind of funny. She was certainly looking at me differently.
“I did everything possible in the gym, until I grew to love boxing. I went undefeated for a while, until I finally got my ass kicked by some ex-Navy badass who wowed me with exotic stories of far-flung places. I signed on almost immediately.”
Quinn laughed, and her laugh was adorable. I knew it would be.
“So I had the grades to go wherever I wanted,” I finished, “but what I wanted was to travel. I ended up in BUDS school.” I couldn’t hide my smirk. “They’re not much for grades there. But I didthatto the extreme, and being on a SEAL team took me all over the world.”
We sat in silence as the long, empty road spun out before us, winding left and right. We passed the suburbs, and eventually drove into the heart of the city.
I thought back to the day we’d chosen her to be our surrogate. There’d been so many variables, so many little things to consider when looking for the person who would make up the other fifty-percent of your child. I’d been opposed to the idea at first. I’d thought it too dangerous, too uncertain.
But then Joshua had pulled me aside and posed a very simple question. One I really didn’t have an answer to.
If not now, Cole… then when?
We’d turned thirty together last year, leaving our twenties behind us. Our service, our soldiering, our mercenary days… practically all of it was in the past.
All of it except—
