Page 87 of Direct Action

My arm tightened around Chloe. She nuzzled her cheek on my chest and pressed closer.

“What’s on your mind?” she continued.

All the ways I could lose you.

I didn’t tell her that. Instead, I asked, “Are you up for helping me in the office for a few hours tomorrow?”

I felt Chloe nod before she pushed away, and her head came off my chest. “At the Plank?”

“Yeah.”

“Yes.”

I had mixed feelings about this. She was supposed to be on vacation, resting. But I knew after the week was up, she’d be back to pulling double shifts. Today while she was running her errands, between going over the intel we had—which was the definition of not enough—I’d talked to the guys and pitched the idea of bringing Chloe on as an office manager.

“Wait. Is this a ploy—”

“We hate paperwork,” I interrupted her. “And personally, I’d rather be waterboarded than sit in the office and check email. Twice in the last three months, we got payroll in five minutes before the cutoff time. So this isn’t a ploy or a handout. We need an office manager. The added benefit to that is when we go out on missions, we won’t have to rotate who stays behind if we have someone we trust in place to run the bar while we’re gone.”

Chloe settled back onto my chest and asked, “Can you tell me about your missions?”

Well damn, I’d opened that door nice and wide.

“What do you want to know?”

“Where was your last one?”

“I stayed back the last mission. The team went to Dubai to help Calista. The one before that, Aiden and I met the team in Belize.”

“Can you tell me the specifics?”

I gave her a tight squeeze to soften my denial. “I’d rather not.”

When I felt her nod, I started to relax. I quickly found I should’ve stayed on guard.

“Because you don’t like to talk about it, or is it because you don’t think I can handle it?”

Fuck.

“It’s not about what I think you can handle. It’s that I don’t want you carrying the burden of knowing.”

She seemed mollified with my answer and switched gears to another topic I didn’t want to discuss. “Do you think that Cynthia’s dead?”

“I don’t know.”

“But you think she’s being hurt,” she whispered.

“Yeah,” I whispered back.

“I need to know, Ryan. I need to understand so I can help Poppy when the time comes.”

Sneak attack using her big heart and loyalty to get details I didn’t want to give. I wouldn’t call it manipulative as such, but it was clever.

“If the time comes, Chloe, we’ll all help Poppy. But for now, let’s concentrate on finding Cynthia.”

“I’m scared for her,” she continued whispering. “Scared for both of them, but mostly Cynthia. I’ve seen enough true crime shows to know what could be happening to her. So has Poppy, and it’s killing her. She feels so guilty for not seeing something that I don’t think was there. But she’s got it in her head she missed something. And I think she feels a little guilty for thinking that Pamela was overreacting at first.”

Poppy was a wild card. Her dedication to finding her friend could lead her to making poor decisions, or it could lead to hypervigilance that would give us a piece of intel we needed.