Page 18 of Made for You
Tristan stood, and right as he was leaving, Nikki arrived in the doorway. My stomach clenched at the sight of her, just as beautiful as she was in my memory. Today, she wore a black suit with the jacket open. The shirt underneath was a creamy color that looked both feminine and professional, and I added it to the list of things she looked great in. I suspected there wasn’t anything that wouldn’t make the list.
“Hi, sorry for being a few minutes early,” she said, eyes tracking from Tristan to me, then back to the man who stood directly next to her, and she held out a hand. “I’m Nikki.”
He took it with an even shake. “Tristan Donnelly. Nice to meet you. I’m just leaving—have a good morning.” Then he tipped his head toward me. “Jaws.”
“Oak, see you later.”
With one last nod to Nikki, he moved down the hallway, and I waved Nikki farther inside my office. “Please, have a seat. Thanks for coming.”
Thanks for talking with me the other night. Thanks for not telling me I’m doing a great job just for the sake of the platitude. Thanks for being honest with me. Thanks for standing in the moonlight and making me feel something.
I’d moved on from the reeling, falling sensation that’d hit me during our conversation after the premiere. I’d promised myself all those lightning strikes about her being exactly what I wanted were rooted in that moment of stark truthfulness paired with her in that dress and the intimacy of the dark, cool evening. The sense she was seeing me, hearing me, and not placating me.
But the thrumming in my chest at her arrival, the primal awareness as she entered my office, shot holes right through this carefully constructed web of faulty logic.
I stood and took a minute to collect my thoughts—or rather, gather up those saccharine feelings, tie a lead weight to them, and let them sink to the bottom of my mental sea—then grabbed the pre-printed packet I’d created from the top of the fancy cabinetry holding files in the corner. When I turned back, Nikki was sitting with her hands lightly in her lap, looking alert but comfortable.
“So… Veronica.”
One of her brows arched, and the faintest smile hit her lips. “Yes. Exactly no one calls me that, but it is my legal name.”
Maybe I shouldn’t have been charmed by that, but I was. I liked it. I liked that her name was Veronica and she went by Nikki. A silly thing to enjoy, but I did. “Good to know. I’ll stick with Nikki.”
Her smile stretched a bit wider. “Please do.”
I nodded. “So if you don’t mind, today we’ll talk about the job, what we do here at Saint, and then if you’re still interested, run through a few questions for you to make sure it’s a generally good fit. After that, we’ll do a background check and the usual stuff and get you hired, again, if it seems like a good fit for both of us.”
“Makes sense,” she said, all business.
I launched into a basic explanation of what Saint Security did—lots of personal security work, setting up security systems, and branching into more now that we’d established our baseline work. “We’re adding new capabilities all the time. You may have gathered a lot of our staff is former special operations and other agency talent, so we have a breadth of knowledge that can extend in a few different directions.”
She tipped her head to one side. “Like?”
Well, I couldn’t tell her too many details at this point. To know the full ins and outs, she’d essentially need to be read-on to the Saint scope of things, and we couldn’t do that just yet. “Well, one example is that Tristan and I are running self-defense classes now. We’re also going to branch into other kinds of courses eventually. We can also do K and R recovery if the need arises in conjunction with someone we’re hired to guard, and we sometimes advise on other things.” And that’d all stay pretty vague for now.
“K and R? Kidnap and ransom?” Her eyes grew wide.
“Yes. Not a constant issue, as you’d imagine, but we do have expertise in that area.”
She blinked once. “How does one develop expertise in that area, I wonder.”
Not a question so much as a statement.
I could tell her that much as it was, in some circles, common knowledge. “The unit where quite a few of us worked dealt with a fair amount of recovery work. When Americans end up kidnapped, especially in certain regions of the world, in many cases, it’s special operations who go in and get them. It’s a lesser-known function, but obviously an important one.”
She absorbed that information. “Huh. Good to know. So you’re all experts, and it makes sense to do that kind of work.”
Again, another statement. “Yes. And so, there are a few other capacities we’re developing. Obviously, our resources here are fairly different than they were on active duty, but we do have a solid foundation growing and are working on funding streams that will assist in more complex work as needed.”
A.k.a. a bunch of jargon to say we had money to keep us going, and we had Julian’s deep pockets to reach into if we happened to need it, though that wasn’t how we wanted to proceed. So far, we’d only needed his help once outside the initial investment to get Saint Security up and running.
“And what do you think an accounting major with zero background in this kind of thing can do for you?” she asked, tugging at each side of her suit jacket as she leaned back in her chair.
“I think you’d be a very overqualified administrative manager. Sarah, my partner’s wife, has been our admin but is on maternity leave. We’ve handled it, and she’s been doing some part time lately, but I know she doesn’t want to. Your duties, should you choose to accept them, would be everything from basic admin like answering phones up to hiring your replacement when you get bored of us.”
Her brows rose. “Please explain.”
“From what Rosie’s said, you’re an actual genius who has an advanced degree in accounting. While I know we can expand your purview beyond basic admin since Sarah’s duties have always been well more than that, even I know we don’t have enough work to keep you busy in terms of accounting.”
