But…
No. No thinking about Burke. It doesn’t even matter where he is. You can’t care about him anyway. You just care about shipping his car and money to him and getting all the paperwork signed.
Oh, how I wish that thought was true. I wished I didn’t care. I wished that all that happened was a stiff handshake, watching him getting in his car…with me in the front seat…that thick, calloused hand of his moving up my thigh…
Oh my God, Emily. Get it together!
So much for not caring. So much for forgetting about that asshole.
It hadn’t even been fifteen minutes back home, and already my plans for a grand two-week vacation were crumbling. Perhaps I should have asked for two weeks of overtime at work; at least then, I would have something else to focus on.
I picked up my phone. If Burke was going to haunt my mind, I figured the least I could do was try and call him. But I decided that this was going to be the last call—for real. I would leave a voicemail message and be done with it. If he wanted the money and the car, he’d have to call me back. I was putting the ball in his court.
I dialed. I had hoped that he’d pick up. I’d try and keep a stern face up while talking—
“Your call has been forwarded to an automatic voice messaging system.”
My heart had sunk to my gut before the word “forwarded.” The point had been made. Wherever Burke was, he did not want to talk to me. So be it.
But it would now be up to him to close that space.
The phone beeped, indicating I could speak to him.
“Hi, Burke, this is…Emily,” I said, hesitating only because I was unsure of what I wanted my tone to be. I decided to be as cold and formal as possible as if I was a lawyer delivering news. “I have completed the implantation. You will need to come and sign the documents as soon as you can if you wish to receive payment and the car.”
I paused. This wasn’t doing it. I just let it slip right after that.
“So, it’s done. I’m hopefully pregnant. I just wanted to say thank you.”
I hit End right then. That was…that was a bit abrupt. I didn’t know if I was actually pregnant yet, technically, there were a whole host of things that could go wrong that would prevent this pregnancy from ever reaching fruition.
But you know what? If it got the ball rolling…
I put a hand on my stomach. Somewhere in there, a tiny human could be starting to take shape. I would know for sure in about two weeks if the pregnancy had taken hold. It would be the longest two weeks of my life.
And for the moment, I felt…
Happy.
But not quite as much as I would have wanted to.
And, though perhaps maybe a bit naive, also a tad hopeful that Burke would still show up again at some point.
Chapter 12: Burke
In a moment of quiet, it felt like the good old days.
Liam and Scott sat at diagonals from me as we formed a triangle in a bunker. The three of us hadn’t been together on a mission like this in years. Even before Scott went into semi-retirement to settle down, we hadn’t had many opportunities to work together. But the hunting of Snake mandated it, and so I wasn’t going to allow this to become a moment of sentimentality.
If we needed to, we could toast each other and share a glass of Scotch after the mission had been completed.
But for right now, we had such serious shit on our plate that we couldn’t even contemplate eating something, let alone drinking any alcohol.
“So to confirm,” Scott said. “Five Jeeps of the cartels. Two cars of Snake’s own men. And, of course, the truck.”
“From what I saw,” I said. “Good chance that the bastards have much more at their disposal than that. They’ll probably have more after the shit I’ve done.”
“There’s no probably in that,” Liam said.
“I know.”
Scott nodded. None of us were unsettled by this fact. We just had to accept it for what it was. If we were the type to have gotten easily flustered by long odds like this, none of us would have ever become DOM agents.
“All right, here’s the order of operations,” Scott said. “One, we secure the targets. Two, we find Snake and we end him. Did you see Snake among the group there, Burke?”
“I didn’t have time to see if the cartels had women or men shooting at me, let alone if Snake was one of them.”
Scott nodded. The answer he wanted to hear was actually likely the truth—Snake probably was among them. But there was a huge difference between launching a mission on faith and launching it on effective intel, and we were a long fucking way from having effective intel right now.
Just faith. But it wouldn’t be the first time we’d operated on assumption. It just wasn’t ideal.
“All right, then here’s how we break it down,” Scott said. “Burke, you’re going to go after whoever is guarding the truck. How you do that, I’ll leave it up to you. Just take out Snake’s men.”
“Fuckers will be dead before you even get the door open.”
“Liam, you’re going to provide backup to distract or kill the cartel members. Again, I don’t really care how you take care of it. I know there may be too many of them
