Chapter Three
“Is it selfish that I want you to just wait here until I’m done with the errands?” I ask as Allee finishes pulling on the rest of her clothes.
She makes a show of pulling on her shorts now that she’s not wearing panties because I told her I’m laying claim to the ones she was wearing today since those were the ones she was wearing when she agreed to marry me.
“You’re crazy,” she tells me. “Who does that?”
“Only a man who is wildly in love with the woman who just told him she’d marry him. You’ve effectively made me the happiest man in the world.”
“But what are you going to do with my panties?”
“I don’t know, frame them maybe.”
“Frame them?” she laughs. “Alright, it’s official. I have agreed to marry a nutjob.”
“Say what you want,” I tell her with a shrug. “But I’m nuts about you, so I suppose that’s valid. But you never answered my question.”
“What question?”
“Am I a selfish person for wanting you all to myself?” I ask again with a laugh.
She shakes her head as she zips and buttons her shorts. I squirreled away the panties she was wearing into my nightstand, and I’m feeling pretty proud of my victory with that.
“No more selfish than me being torn between living the life we do and wanting to run far, far away where no one can ever find us,” she tells me. “Like I know in reality I would get bored with that, but right now, thinking about it sounds really appealing.”
“It does,” I agree. “But like you said, you’d get bored. Shit, I’d give you less than a week before you’d be trying to find a way to get us back on the task force.”
She laughs and agrees, but neither of us wants the afternoon to end. I knew that morning if the proposal went well, it was going to be difficult for us to get through the rest of what we had to do today, but that’s also a lot of the fun of being with Allee.
She makes everything we do together so good. It doesn’t matter if we’re working or playing together; I enjoy it all.
“It’s going to be a long two hours driving back home without you,” she tells me.
“Why don’t you put your sister on the phone with you when you leave here, and you can tell her our news?” I suggest. “You said a couple of days ago that you’ve been meaning to give her a call anyway, so I say multitask.”
“While that’s pretty brilliant,” Allee tells me, “If I tell her we got engaged, she’ll want to come out to celebrate with us for dinner.”
“What’s wrong with that?”
“Nothing, except for the fact that I want you all to myself.”
I laugh. “I’ve never even met your sister. I don’t know that she’d want to hang out with me right off the bat.”
“She would,” Allee tells me with a nod. “Trust me. She’s got her reservations about me dating American men anyway, and I know if I tell her that I’m now engaged to one, the first thing she’ll want to do is vet you.”
“I hope I pass the test.”
“You passed mine and that’s all that matters.”
“Fair enough.”
I pull her close and kiss her before looking down into her face as I hold her in my arms. “I’m sure your sister is going to be fine with me. You know I can get along with pretty much anyone.”
“Yeah, you’ll be fine once you get past the initial awkwardness,” Allee says. “And I’m not saying that you’re the one who’s going to be awkward. Camilla has her opinions on everything, and I’m sure she’s going to take her sweet time in getting to know you so she’ll probably make it weird for a while.”
“We’ll deal with it.”
“Yes, we will,” Allee says. “But I don’t want to deal with it on the night of my engagement. I think it would be great for you and me to have dinner, then we can go back to my place with a bottle of champagne, and continue celebrating.”
“I like that idea a lot,” I tell her. “We could set some records tonight. Most orgasms in one night. ”
“Buen se?or, you’re going to kill me! Is there such a thing as death by orgasm? She laughs and shakes her head.
“I don’t know if that’s a thing, but hey, if it is, then what a great way to go out, huh?”
“Yes, but only if we go out together,” she says. “I’ve got to get going, and so do you. You’ve got four hours until our dinner reservation, and a two-hour drive and errands in between.”
“Yep, I know. I’ll get my ass in gear,” I sigh, “Alright, come on, we’ll walk you out to the car at least.”
“Do you want me to take Gunner with me?” she asks. “That’s one less thing to manage.”
“Nah, I’ll keep him,” I say after a moment of thinking about it. “I feel bad that he had to stay here all afternoon, and if I send him away for a couple more hours – he might think he’s fucked up or something.”
She laughs at me. “That’s giving a dog an awful lot of credit.”
“It’s Gunner,” I say with a shrug. “Just you wait. When you live with him, you’re going to see that he’s pretty much a human trapped in a dog’s body.”
“If he’s human, he’s a bit obsessed with you.”
“Isn’t everyone?”
Allee laughs at me again as she gets into her Jeep, and I lean in to kiss her. “Be careful, babe.”
“You too, Mac. I’ll see you soon and we’ll continue this celebration.”
I step back with Gunner, then stand and wave to her as she pulls out of the driveway and heads onto the main street. I know I’m going to be seeing her in just a few hours, but I hate seeing her drive away. It gives me the feeling in the pit of my stomach that I can’t always protect her. I know she doesn’t exactly need my protection considering how well she can handle herself, but that doesn’t change the fact that she’s still potentially a target, and we both deal with some pretty bad people in our lives.
“Come on, dog,” I say to Gunner.
He hops into the front seat of my truck, and we set out to run our errands. The most pressing one is going to the bank, but I’ve got a couple of other stops before I can head down to Allee’s.
I’m glad to have the company in my car, even if he is just my dog. I’m a firm believer in animals feeling and understanding far more than we give them credit for, and I’m sure he can sense how excited I am, even if he’s not sure why.
“She said yes,” I tell him. “Boy oh boy. Did you think I was ever going to settle down? I sure as hell didn’t. But then, it might do us both some good to have a woman’s touch in our lives, huh? I mean, she’s been around for the past year, but only on the weekends. Now she’s going to be around every day.”
He wags his tail, but his attention is more on what’s going on outside the car. He’s happy… I’m happy… life is good.
My phone rings, and it’s Cruz – now known as Mateo. I still have a hard time calling him Mateo. He will always be Cruz to me, but when the Feds give you a new identity and agree to protect you, you take what they give you.
I’ll be the first to admit, the man isn’t my favorite person in the world. He struck a deal with the FBI who let him off easy in exchange for giving up his father. Will and Drew don’t mind him considering Will’s wife Nyssa is best friends with Cruz’s girl, Mia – now known as Marcy. Personally, at first I felt like he should have done some sort of time for his crimes. I guess time will tell if he’s truly turned over a new leaf and keeps his nose clean.
But, I’m not the guy who makes those decisions, and I can’t deny that Cruz has proven to be incredibly useful when it comes to valuable intel. Though he’s out of the cartel now, he’s still able to give me a lot of insider perspective on situations that I could use help with.
“Go for Mac.”
“Hey man, where are you?”
“Coronado. What’s going on?”
“There was another attack,” he says. “This one went sideways. The Cartel are using their trafficked victims as human shields. Can’t confirm the number of Cartel casualties, but none of those that had been captive made it out alive.”
My gut feels heavy and my mind immediately goes to my sister. “How many victims? Ages? Genders?”
“Three young men and two older women,” Cruz tells me. “All domestic slaves and all hit by American fire.”
“I wasn’t part of the mission, so I don’t know what the details are,” I tell him. “What do you have for me?”
I know he’s calling me because he’s got information, and I don’t appreciate the insinuation the soldiers involved had done anything wrong. I wasn’t there, but I do know the men I serve with, and none of them are going to do something reckless. Using humans as shields is sadly quite common amongst terrorists, Islamic Jihadists, and Cartels.
“The location,” Cruz says. “It’s one of the houses you’ve been watching, and thankfully, your sister could not have been there based on the ages of the victims.”
I breathe a small sigh of relief. I can’t imagine anything worse than Cruz being the one to tell me that my own sister had been killed, and I’m glad this isn’t that phone call. I asked him to keep an eye on several specific locations where I have reason to believe my sister could be, and I’m realizing he’s only giving me an update on that front. “We’ll see what intel we can recover when our next mission launches.”
He wraps up the conversation and I hang up the phone, feeling slightly deflated.
With the high I’m feeling after the engagement, there’s very little that could possibly bring me down, but hearing that I’m no closer to finding my sister definitely dampens my mood some. But it’s nothing new considering the years of hoping and searching for answers.
Gunner nuzzles my hand, reminding me I’m not alone in the car, and I smile as I rough up his ears.
“It’s going to be alright, bud,” I tell him. “We’ll find her.”
He wags his tail and directs his attention back out of the car, and I check the time on my phone and sigh. I’m glad I’m going down to spend the weekend with Allee. I know she’ll cheer me up as soon as I see her.
It’s only a couple more hours.
But time can’t move fast enough.