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I bit my lip. “I’ll have to think about it. Tonight was fine because it wasn’t at all stressful. I’m starting a part-time job at the VNA in Asbury on Monday. Let me see how that goes, and I’ll let you know.”
Tony smiled. “Fair enough.” He held out his hand. “I think you’d make an excellent addition to our team.”
I shook his hand and said, “Thanks. That means a lot to me.”
As I drove home to New Jersey, my thoughts were filled with the two D’Angelo brothers for two entirely different reasons.
8
Marco
I was sitting with Tony in the Manhattan office of Angel Security, the business he’d started ten years ago after giving up on being a police officer. It’d been rough at the beginning when it was just him, Michael—who’d still been in college—and two part-time drivers. They’d had a small, shared office in a shitty part of town. After they helped Jeremy get rid of his cyber-stalker, the business exploded because Jeremy sang their praises to whoever would listen. Now, they had a suite in Midtown Manhattan, not far from Times Square. At the moment, though, I was ready to throw my brother out of his fifteenth-story window.
“Damn it, Tony,” I growled. “Why would you do that?”
My asshole older brother rolled his eyes. “Because he’s good. He walked into that mess at the Marriott and didn’t blink an eye. He stayed cool and calm, even when the lead paramedic gave him shit. He even got you to sit still long enough to get stitched up.” Tony glared at me. “I’m not going to pass up adding a good team member because you get a boner when you see him.”
I was saved from having to reply—or punch my brother in the face—by a knock on his heavy wooden office door. Tony called, “Come in.”
His administrative assistant, Liz, popped her head in. “Your one o’clock interview is here, Mr. D’Angelo.”
“Interview?” I asked.
“Yeah,” he replied. “It’s why I asked you to come up. Not to bitch at me about your cute nurse.”
I ground my teeth. “He’s notmyanything.”
Tony gave me the side-eye. “You keep telling yourself that.” To Liz, whose eyes had been ping-ponging between us, he said, “Send him in.”
I sat in one of the chairs across from his desk and folded my arms across my chest. “Why do you need me here?”
The door opened and in walked one of my SEAL teammates. “Gabe!” I shot out of my chair and grabbed him in a bear hug. “It’s good to see you, man. When did you get back?”
Gabriel Warner held me tight. “Last week. I decided not to re-up. It was time.”
I knew things had been rough for him after our failed mission. Gabe had been close with one of the guys who’d been killed. He hadn’t been on the mission with us, and he’d been pissed that we’d been given bad intelligence. He’d almost gotten himself thrown in the brig for getting in our commander’s face.
“I guess you decided to take me up on my offer,” I said.
Gabriel squeezed me once more before letting me go. “Hell yeah. I’ll take any opportunity to work with you again, Chief.”
I glanced over at Tony, who was grinning like an idiot. “You already hired him, didn’t you?”
“Of course,” he told me. “I’m not gonna pass up having another SEAL on my team.” My brother shrugged. “He said he was in your platoon, and you told him to look us up if he decided to opt out. I trust your judgment.”
“Thanks, bro,” I said quietly.
Tony sat at his desk again and brought out a bunch of papers. He slid them across the desk toward Gabe, who took a seat next to me. “Here’s all the paperwork I told you about on the phone. You can take it home and look it over before you sign it.”
I frowned in confusion. “I thought Michael had all that stuff online.”
Gabriel grunted. “Yeah, well, I’m staying with my sister right now and my nephew spilled his juice on my laptop. Fried it. Now it’s an expensive paperweight.”
I frowned over at my brother. He waved me off. “Michael’s already on it.” He looked at Gabe and said, “He should have a laptop set up for you in a couple of days. If you bring your old one in, he should be able to salvage what’s on the hard drive.”
Gabriel looked stunned. “You don’t have to do that.”
“Actually, we do,” Tony replied. “Everyone on the team needs to have a secure laptop.”
