The Closer. Rhonda Nelson

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      FORMER MAJOR GRIFFIN Wicklow had heard countless tales about Ranger Security and their often bizarre assignments—ensuring the safe passage of fertility statues, finding lost Confederate treasure, recovering Truffles, the dognapped millionaire—but this...

      This had to take the top spot for the Strangest Assignment Ever.

      He stared at each of the founding members of Ranger Security in turn. Brian Payne, the Specialist, whose cool demeanor and keen attention to detail was legendary. Jamie Flanagan, a proper genius who’d been a notorious player until he met and married Colonel Carl Garrett’s granddaughter, and Guy McCann, the Maverick, whose ability to skate the thin edge between recklessness and brilliance was still locker-room lore.

      When their expressions didn’t change and he was sure that this wasn’t some sort of joke, he looked at the photograph once more and struggled to find the appropriate response. One that wouldn’t make him appear ungrateful for the job, because nothing could be further from the truth.

      He cleared his throat. “I’m escorting a bra from West Virginia to New York and back again?”

      “Not just any bra,” Payne corrected levelly. He hooked a leg over his knee and leaned farther back into the comfortable leather chair he currently occupied. Downtown Atlanta was framed in the window behind him, glittering with glass and steel. “That’s a Rossi creation, designed exclusively for the Clandestine Lingerie Company.”

      Though Griff had never had any reason to purchase anything from the iconic lingerie company, he could certainly remember thumbing through the catalogs in his teens. His lips twitched. They’d been a source of inspiration, for lack of a better term, and were more easily procured than the traditional skin magazines.

      “And that bra, in particular, is worth two and a half million dollars,” Jamie Flanagan added. “Naturally, Montwheeler is keen to protect its investment.”

      A tremor of shock rippled through him. Griff felt his eyes widen and he whistled low. “Two and a half million? For a bra?”

      Guy shrugged. “It’s good advertising for the Montwheeler Diamond Company, for Clandestine Lingerie and the jeweler—in this case, Frank Rossi—who was tapped to create the design. Ultimately, Montwheeler gets the jewels back. They’ll put the bra up at auction. If it doesn’t sell, they haven’t lost anything—they still have the stones, after all, and it’s Clandestine who covers the cost of the designer. As far as PR goes, it’s brilliant.”

      He supposed. Still...It was hard to believe that people actually spent this much time and money on something so...unimportant, frivolous even. Given what he’d seen over the past several years in service to Uncle Sam—the death and destruction, the horror, the poverty—it was hard to reconcile this new assignment to those he’d had in the past. He swallowed.

      But that’s exactly what they were—in the past.

      Thanks to some misguided sense of duty and honor—to the very person who’d inadvertently wrecked his family and prematurely propelled him into adulthood, no less—he’d decided a career change was in order. Could he have continued in the military with one kidney? Probably. But given the prep, surgery and post-op care, not to mention his mother’s and sister’s continued come-home pleas, he’d ultimately decided that Providence was trying to tell him something. Once he was certain of the job at Ranger Security, he’d initiated the necessary paperwork.

      And the rest, as they say, was history.

      Whether or not this new life was going to be an improvement over the old one remained to be seen. He certainly couldn’t find fault with the benefits package, that was for sure. In addition to a very healthy salary and a fully stocked, furnished apartment, a company car had been waiting on him when he’d arrived this morning. He’d been given a laptop, a cell phone, a new Glock with permission to carry concealed and a sincere slap on the back that had welcomed him into the fold.

      For whatever reason, that slap had been more appreciated than anything else. He’d instantly liked all three men, felt an immediate kinship. As former rangers themselves, they got him. Honor, duty, service. They were more than words; they’d been a way of life. His new employers knew the decision to leave hadn’t been made lightly, knew that coming to terms with this career change was a struggle. Because it wasn’t just the career—it was a different world, one he knew his place in.

      And here? Well, that still remained to be seen.

      “We’ve been hired by Montwheeler to ensure the safety of the bra,” Payne continued. “You’re to pick it up at Rossi’s in Shadow’s Gap, West Virginia, at three tomorrow afternoon—a representative of Rossi’s will accompany you—and take it to New York, safeguard it throughout the СКАЧАТЬ