I frowned at that. "Me? Don't you want somebody who has more field experience?"
He shook his head. "Not necessarily. It's strictly a surveillance mission. All you have to do is plant a few bugs, and then you're gone. We just want to be able to listen in on who he's talking to."
I hesitated. It felt like I wasn't being told something. I studied him. "What's the catch?"
"No catch. You do this mission, bring us actionable intel, and knock your sessions off to six months."
Holy shit. “You're fucking serious?"
“Yes, that's how important this is."
"And all I have to do is listen?"
“Yes. It shouldn't be too difficult. One small thing. You won't be doing it alone." Gabe frowned when he muttered this. "We don't want to rouse suspicion, so we are sending you in as yourself, but you will be going in with your wife."
"What? Who?"
"Since you two have been working so well together, you'll be going with Saff."
The other shoe had dropped. It was one thing to obsess about her, have her walk around in my dreams. But it was a whole other kind of temptation to be stuck on a mission with her.
* * *
Saffron
“Doyou want to tell me what your problem with King is?"
Gabe had waylaid me in the hallway on my way to training and pulled me into his office.
“I don't have a problem with King," I lied smoothly.
He lifted his brow and crossed his arms after tossing his tablet on his desk. “You forget, I grew up with you. I know when you're lying. Is he a problem?"
“What?” I shook my head. "No. He's fine."
"All right, then what's going on?"
"Nothing."
He frowned. "Look, Saff, you and him obviously have a thing, and I need to know if it's going to be a problem."
I sighed. "No, it's not. He's not bad. He's a little cocky. Hand-to-hand is pretty good, actually. He has never been put in a position where he has had to fight for his life, but I think that he will rise to the occasion. He got a little distracted today, but also, I wasn't actually trying to kill him. I think he’ll be fine. We've got months left before his final evals."
Final evals were essentially hell week, where we took the recruits out in the middle of nowhere. They had to survive, and we could jump out at any point. Attack, attempt to kill them.
We did that in a closed environment because the last time we tried to do it in a real-world scenario, we almost lost an agent. That had been mum and dad's era.
“I need your honest opinion because I’m about to put him on a mission."
My brows lifted. "What? You're putting someone untrained in the field?"
“I thought you just said he was pretty good."
"That was before I knew you were putting him in the bloody field. Are you kidding me? I've been out begging for field duty for over a year. You won't put me in the field, but you'll put him there?"
Gabe held his hands up. "Settle down."
"No, I will not settle down. What's the billionaire got that I don't have? Because I have the chaps, I have the heart, and I've been pissing my life away."