Page 27 of A Chance for Us
Not even a little, but the word clandestine is screaming at me.
“I do . . . not. Are you a spy?”
“We frown upon that word.”
She’s kidding, right? “Wait, you really are?”
“No, I’m not. I work for them. I’m not in the field.”
My mind is coming up with all kinds of shit thanks to all the spy movies I’ve watched. She’s like . . . fucking cool.
“Considering you work for a security firm, I’m going to assume what you do is dangerous.”
She nods.
“Maren, if you want me to be on the same page as you, you need to tell me a bit more. We’re supposed to work at the same company and be getting married. I get you can’t tell me everything, but I’m lost here.”
“I know, and I know you signed the NDA, but there are very few people who really know what I do—or did. I don’t know how much to say when everything inside of me says not to speak at all. Even Oliver and I didn’t talk about work and I am his analyst. It’s like my job and I aren’t the same. They’re separate parts of me. My dad is the only person I’ve ever disclosed anything to, which was limited, but he loved it. He had dreams of being a field agent, like Oliver is.”
“No shit,” I say with a little awe.
“Yup.”
“I’m fucking badass.”
She rolls her eyes. “You are, but not for that reason. My ex,Oliver, does a lot of covert missions. I’m part of the support team. My job is analytics and risk assessment, so I help outline the team’s tasks and troubleshoot all the possible failure points.” She pauses and runs her finger along the rim of her glass. “Basically, I find the best series of actions to get our guys in and out safely. Then I find every alternate situation they might run into and find them a way out of it. My goal is to get the team in and out with the least amount of risk or injury.”
I blink a few times. “Injury?”
“Sometimes it’s inevitable.”
“Okay. And you said you work with other agencies?”
“Yes, we do.”
I’m impressed. Not going to lie. I want to ask a million questions, and I fully plan to, but she really doesn’t look like she wants me to ask which agencies, so I set that question aside for now. “What do you tell people who ask what you do?”
“I do admin work for a security team. All very boring.”
“Sounds like it’s anything but boring.”
Maren giggles. “Really, not many people ask anything beyond that. My aunts and uncles know very little. Daddy knows a lot more since he sort of lives vicariously through me. Of course, I withhold a lot of the info to keep the team safe, but he doesn’t mind. Still, he will think you work with me, so he’s going to want to talk shop with you. There’s really no avoiding it.” She chews on her lower lip, drawing my whole focus to that single action. “I’ll be with you almost all the time, so I can handle it if he does, but if he gets you alone . . .”
“I’ll need to be able to divert?”
“Which isn’t going to be easy. It’s what he loves, so you’re going to have to answer without actually answering.”
“I see,” I say with a smirk. “I get to make up stories, and you’ll have to go along with it?”
Maren’s eyes widen. “Uh, well, you probably should not do that.”
“Probably.”
“Oliver,” she says with a little warning in her tone. “You have to stick to the story.”
“The one that you wrote.”
“Yes, because it’s the best option.”
