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“All of them,” Ronan said. “Baseball, basketball, football, lacrosse.”
“Which were you best at?”
Ronan shrugged. “I was okay at all of them.”
“Okay?”
He smiled at her. “Good.”
“Just good?” she egged him on a bit.
“Okay, I lettered in all of them and had three scholarship opportunities. Football, lacrosse, and baseball.”
She laughed. “Which one did you choose?”
“None. My brother and I went to the Air Force Academy and from there went to flight training.”
“You’re a pilot?”
“I am,” he admitted.
“What kind of planes did you fly?”
“Heavies.”
She blinked. “What is that?”
“Big planes. C-17. We had high enough picks to go for the fighters, but our family’s business, Guardian, uses transport planes on the regular, so we trained on the heavies. Deacon has his helicopter license, too.”
“You didn’t?”
He shook his head. “Flying isn’t my passion. Some people want to do nothing more than be in the sky. I’m not that guy. Neither is Deacon. We’d ratherrun a team, make an impact one mission at a time, not be a glorified taxi driver.”
“I never thought of a pilot that way.” She’d always romanticized the job, thinking how great it would be to be able to fly a plane.
“You would after a while. We did our required commitment for the academy and the flight training and then came to work for Guardian. The training to be a team member was the hardest thing I’ve ever done, but advanced special operations aren’t for the weak or the untrained. Deacon lives for this. I’m dedicated, and the job is everything to me, but my brother is on another level with it. We decided to split up and make our way on different teams.”
“And you love what you do.” She knew he did.
“I do. I enjoy the teamwork. These guys are just as much my family as Deacon and my sisters. Closer at times.” He glanced over at her. “What about you? How did you get here?”
“Oh, wow. That’s a convoluted process.” She paused before continuing, “Dad passed when I was in college. It hit me hard, and the scholarship wasn’t enough to cover all the expenses. Dad used everything he had to pay the rest without telling me, of course.”
“Of course,” Ronan said as he lifted his hand andplaced it on hers. “I wouldn’t let my kid know if I was tight. I’d ensure they had everything they needed and deal with less.”
“Right? I realize that now, and that’s what he did. He took a second mortgage on the house, and I lost it because I didn’t have a way to make the payments. He had a small insurance policy, and I used that to bury him next to Mom and my baby brother, Ian.
“Anyway, I left school after my junior year and got a job working for a local construction company in project management. I used the school’s online program to finish my degree. Then, the company went bankrupt. It seems the owner and his wife lived way above their means. I had zero in the bank and ended up living on my cousin’s couch. I scoured the job openings and applied for everything I remotely qualified for, but there weren’t any offers and very few face-to-face interviews. That’s when I decided to look outside the United States. Nothing was keeping me there. I applied for a lot of different positions but was interviewed for the anti-trafficking position because it’s project management at the fundamental level. I run separate parts of the program and keep everyone accountable. That’s why I was reprimanded so severely when I went out after displaced people instead of waiting for them tocome to us. I have a law enforcement title with no training or enforcement ability, but I have the desire to do the right thing for the right reasons.”
“Would you want to do project management in the States?” Ronan asked after they rumbled over part of the road that rattled the fillings in her teeth.
“I don’t know.” She gazed out at the emptiness and shook her head. “I have a substantial savings now. I think I’ll see if I can camp on my cousin’s couch again and look around since I don’t have an apartment. My goal when I came over here was to make a difference and, of course, receive a paycheck. Ninety percent of my pay has been shoved into savings for the last four years.”
“Keep in mind that Guardian is always hiring people with experience.”
“Yeah, at war stuff, right?”
Ronan barked out a laugh. “We’re primarily an investigative agency. Domestic Operations is our bread and butter. Our investigations branch is huge and has branches in almost every state. Overseas ops, which I’m a part of, is a small arm we’ve kept alive because of situations such as the IDP camps. Usually, we go in, do our jobs, and get out.”