Pink Slip Read online

  “When I’m ready,” he said. “And you’re not gonna goad me into anything like I’m a young bull.”

  “That’s what you always say,” she said, shifting her weight from one foot to another.

  He didn’t move his head, but she knew that his eyes had tracked the movement. She’d lightly twisted her ankle on a mission to Portugal a month ago. It had long since healed, but she wanted him to wonder if she was still favoring it.

  He laughed, “You told me your ankle felt fine.”

  She didn’t answer him.

  “How much time we got?”

  She had to force her eyes not to shift to the clock on the wall to her left. If he wanted to know, then he could let his guard down and look.

  He didn’t.

  “You gonna answer me?”

  “Is your plan to talk me to death with that thick ass accent you think makes my pussy wet? Because that might actually work?”

  “Oh yea?” That easy smile raised into a self-satisfied grin.

  “Yep. You keep on talking and I’ll fall right to sleep.”

  He grunted a laugh.

  “Come on, darlin’,” she said, imitating his accent. “Let’s play.”

  His body tensed as the word ‘play’ left her mouth. “Are we playing? Is that what we’re doing?”

  She smirked, but didn’t speak. She saw his body shift to his left foot just as he lunged toward her. She held her sticks up to defend herself against his. They both retreated and began walking in a circle, studying one another.

  “That was nice,” she said, wanting to annoy him. “You got any more? Or do you need a break?”

  He smiled and struck out at her as he spoke, “I can go all day, all night. You know that.”

  Monica blocked Lane’s sticks easily, skirted to the left and then reached around to drop one arm and tap him lightly on his ass with the stick in her hand. “That’s one,” she said and then skipped backward out of his reach.

  He only grunted in response. But then he leaned forward to crouch down, eyeing her across the mat like prey.

  Monica’s nipples hardened at the sight but her voice was light. “Are we getting serious now?”

  “Nope” he said, “Still playing.”

  She thought he would lunge at her, but he stood up straight again and locked eyes with her.

  “I hope she wears something short today,” he said, waiting for her eyes to glaze over before striking. Her response was sluggish and she could only back away, but not far enough this time. He tapped her on the right arm and left hip simultaneously. “Two.”

  Monica was pissed. And horny. “That was low,” she hissed.

  And then he laughed. “No, that V-neck t-shirt she wore last week was low. And she just kept leaning over my shoulder all day. Trying to get your attention.”

  It was Monica’s turn to strike. Their sticks crashed together. “Flirt,” she said.

  And then Lane crouched, pushing his shoulder into her stomach, grabbing her around the knees. Monica’s sticks fell from her hands when her back hit the mat. She reached down to wrap an arm behind the back of his neck, and bent her knees. He grunted when she collided with his chest, but he held her tight enough to block her full blow.

  They wrestled on the ground, pushing and grabbing at each other, fighting for dominance. When his hold on her legs was finally broken, she pushed against his chest and flipped him onto his back.

  She straddled his waist. His hard dick pressed into her covered mound.

  “How much time do we have?” She asked the question this time, although the stakes of their activity had changed slightly.

  “Depends,” he replied. “You want to be in the office when she gets here? Or do you want me to fuck you, knowing that she’s downstairs with your coffee, organizing all of your files just the way you like.” His hands fell to her waist and he ground his hips upward, pressing himself into her harder.

  Monica moaned in spite of herself.

  He sat up and grasped her behind the neck to pull her mouth to his.

  “What’s is gonna be, boss?” The question was a thick rumble that stroked her already excited pussy.

  Monica licked her lips and tasted his sweat when it grazed the corner of his mouth. And then she remembered. “It’s her last week.”

  The words were like a bucket of cold water being tipped over them.

  Lane’s thumb smoothed soft circles on the skin at her hair line. “It doesn’t have to be,” he whispered, not for the first time in the four months since Kierra had handed in her notice. “We could ask her to stay.”

  She put her hands on his chest and tried to push him away. He tightened his grip to keep her on top of him. “No,” she finally said. “We both know what she’d want if she stayed.”

  “And we both want to give it to her.”

  It wasn’t that simple. Lane knew that. They’d been talking about it for three years. She opened her mouth to rehash this same argument for the hundredth time in as many days when their cell phones began to ring simultaneously.

  They pushed away from each other immediately. Lane sprang to his feet and offered her his hand. She ignored him and jumped to her feet. He shook his head and smiled at her affectionately.

  They walked to the edge of the mat, grasped their phones and scanned the secured message there.

  The full mission brief would be available on The Agency’s dark web site, but what they saw was enough to indicate that playtime was over.

  two

  Kierra pulled her car up to the large wrought iron security gate enclosing Monica and Lane’s home, pressed her thumb and her middle finger (Lane’s idea) onto the fingerprint scanner and then smiled nice and wide for the facial recognition scan. She knew there was a log of these photos somewhere and she always wanted to look her best for the Peters.

  “Identity accepted,” the digital voice announced.

  “Thanks, doll,” Kierra said with a wink at the machine, as always.

  She parked her car in the large circular driveway, grabbed her purse and the coffee and took long strides to the front door that she knew would look sexy on the surveillance footage.

  When Maya asked her about work, Kierra usually fabricated stories about running to the dry cleaners or dog walking; anything that sounded even remotely like the other personal assistant jobs their friends had. Because no one would have believed her if she’d started talking about reviewing satellite surveillance, hours spent on the dark web logging bitcoin transfers and scheduling maintenance on the weapons vault. And anyway telling Maya any of that would have been a violation of the NDA she’d signed when the Peters hired her.

  Kierra had literally stumbled into this job. She’d been a broke MFA graduate with no job prospects and no family to turn to for financial help, because unlike her classmates, she didn’t come from money. Thankfully her mentors had prepared her for the life of a poet with hard truths. “Making ends meet might be difficult and you will often be simultaneously sad and full of joy,” her mentor, Gwendolyn Miles, had drummed into her brain. “So plan accordingly.”

  Signing up at an agency that specialized in providing personal assistants to the rich, famous, and powerful seemed like a bog standard idea. She was an ideal candidate: well-organized, strong written and oral communication, fast learner, and a team player. The few positions she’d interviewed for, but hadn’t gotten, were quite normal. And then she’d interviewed with the Peters.

  Kierra hadn’t thought anything of signing an NDA to go on the interview, but had raised an eyebrow when they sent along a release for a more thorough background check after. In hindsight, she should have realized that they were not politicians or diplomats, as she’d originally assumed. What politician sent a hired car to pick up a job candidate for an interview, and then had the driver stop a few miles from the location to put a blindfold on the candidate? What diplomat held a job interview in an abandoned airport hangar? Who called from an encrypted phone number to offer someone a job?


  Sure, hindsight was 20/20 and she should have realized the kind of job she was accepting. But she wasn’t quite in her right mind. Because the entire time she’d been sitting across from Lane and Monica Peters in an abandoned warehouse answering the most mundane of interview questions ever (“What would you say is your greatest strength? Conversely, what would you say is your greatest weakness?”), Kierra’s pussy had been dripping wet. The mystery and excitement of it all had sent her adrenaline and lust spiking off the charts as soon as she’d laid eyes on Lane and then Monica.

  So of course when they’d called to offer her the job, she’d said yes. She’d have been an idiot to turn them down.

  The first few weeks had seemed like a probationary period through the looking glass, because nothing was as it seemed. Monica and Lane were still pretending to be not spies, speaking in code whenever Kierra was around, disappearing for days and having closed door meetings in the conference room they called “the vault.” While Kierra had been obliviously filing paperwork and authorizing payments to contractors, too distracted by her own lust to wonder what kind of services A & P Plumbers could provide that would warrant a $200,000 bill. But one day Kierra had shown up to the Peters home, coffee in hand and innocent smile on her face only to find Monica lying on the kitchen table, a gunshot wound in her side, and Lane bent over her prone form patching up the hole.

  And Kierra, the daughter of a nurse, had finally realized that her sexy bosses were definitely not diplomats just before she noticed that Lane’s stitches were uneven. She’d pushed him aside, fixed Monica’s sutures and then the real fun began.

  The Peters home was a small mansion in the Upper Montclair suburb of New Jersey. If one of their neighbors happened to stop by, which none did because of the very state-of-the-art security gate, they would have walked into a pristine and luxurious open plan front room, dining area and kitchen. All very modern. All virtually unused. Their home decor was so beautiful that most people would have found it hard to recognize that the dimensions were a little off. But without blueprints – which were classified – no one would ever know for sure anyway.

  Kierra walked through the kitchen, into the large pantry and lifted the small box of baking soda at the back of the second to highest shelf. She felt around with her fingers until they grazed the latch that opened the wall in front of her. She kept a firm grip on the railing as she descended a short flight of stairs and walked, in her very skinny heels, into the real heart of the house. She liked to call it Command. Monica and Lane did not. But like a few things here and there over the past three years, they’d eventually caved to Kierra’s enthusiasm and begrudgingly used the nickname.

  Normal days were few and far between in this line of work but she’d assumed that things would be light and breezy for her final week. Maybe it was her own lingering naiveté, but she walked into Command on that Monday morning with a very mundane to-do list for a PA/office assistant that consisted of some light filing, updating operational manuals for Monica, creating a detailed list of Lane’s favorite local restaurants and scheduling the next few months of household bill payments from their joint cover account. Her main objective was to smooth the transition for the Peters and whoever they hired to replace her.

  So she was not prepared when Monica rushed at her, grabbing the coffee from her hands.

  “Do you have your passport?” Monica barked.

  Kierra swallowed and clenched her thighs together, trying to focus. “Of course,” she said. If Lane had asked the question, she would have fired back with something sarcastic about this not being her first day on the job and rolled her eyes. But Monica didn’t like talk-back, so Kierra responded accordingly.

  Lane came around the corner in an easy stroll that contrasted sharply with his wife’s determined gait and intense glare. He wore the languid smile on his face that Kierra had come to love, even though she was almost certain that it was a mask. But then his eyes truly lit up. “Coffee!”

  Monica handed both cups over to Lane who read the writing on the side of each like an overeager child before he located his double shot macchiato and took a happy sip.

  “Turn around,” Monica ordered.

  Monica hated questions even more than she hated talk-back so Kierra turned slowly in her heels, tight dress and the cropped band t-shirt that exposed just the tiniest sliver of skin at her ribcage. She bit her lip as she faced away from them, trying to calm herself at the thought that they were seeing how absolutely perfect her ass looked in this skirt.

  “Perfect,” was all Monica said as Kierra faced them again.

  Kierra tried not to purr at the compliment; since she wasn’t sure exactly what her look was perfect for.

  “I hope you don’t have any plans this week. We’ve got an assignment and you’re coming with us.”

  At that, Monica turned to Lane. He offered her the other coffee cup and then she sped away.

  Kierra turned to Lane with dozens of questions surely reflected on her face.

  “European dictator. We’ll brief on the jet.”

  “You couldn’t have told me this twenty minutes ago? I could have packed a bag.”

  “We’ll buy you what you need when we arrive,” he said as if this was just a normal thing employers said to employees. Although, Kierra had to admit that this was pretty normal for them.

  She let out an exasperated sigh and put one hand on her hip. “Fine. What do you need me to do?”

  Lane took another slow sip of his coffee. Kierra tried not to ogle his lips on the lid. And then he said, in his serious voice, “Protocol Echo, Level 4. We’re not sure what we’re going to find when we land.” And then he quirked his left eyebrow and raked his eyes down her body and then back up again. “I like the shoes,” he said in his playful voice before walking away.

  Alone in the foyer of Command, Kierra’s mind raced through the Protocol Echo, Level 4 directives, beginning a list of support equipment to pack and overseas resources to compile, but it was hard to concentrate with her nipples hard enough to cut glass.

  three

  There are, unsurprisingly, a lot of perks to being the personal assistant to spies.

  First, the pay was absolutely insane. After three years working for the Peters, Kierra had paid off all of her student loans and saved enough money to register for a writing retreat in Enniskerry in County Wicklow in Ireland, travel for a year in West Africa like she’d always dreamed and still live comfortably while she tried to finish writing her first book of poetry. Sure, she had to route her paycheck through various shell companies controlled by the Peters – and maybe the U.S. government? – to disguise her actual salary and employer, but it was worth it. Especially since most of her friends were languishing in underpaid entry level positions.

  Secondly, Kierra thought as she settled into a seat on the luxury executive private jet they always used for international travel, the Peters knew how to travel in style. Granted, they had to have their jet swept for bugs and explosives before boarding and the pilots had been subjected to background checks so thorough Kierra could tell them their fifth grade English teacher’s names. And yea, they traveled under pseudonyms, with heavy encryption tools for all communications sent while in transit. But Kierra had never felt anything so lovely as the soft buttery leather of the jet’s seats.

  “Let’s get down to business,” Monica said, which was Kierra’s signal to lock the door to the main cabin; an unnecessary precaution but Monica always insisted on sticking as closely to protocol as possible.

  When she sat back down, Lane handed her his tablet. The screen showed a picture of Miroslav Banovíc, Serbian dictator, who had been very openly threatening to commit genocide against the Muslim refugees settling in the east of his country.

  “This is our target. We’re heading to Novi Sad, Serbia’s second largest city. He has a holiday home there that he only visits without his wife,” Lane said.

  Kierra nodded, understanding the implication. “So who is he fucking there?”


  She looked up just in time to see Lane turn to Monica with a small nod and smile that she reciprocated. Kierra wanted to feel ashamed that this small gesture of their approval made her feel good. But after three years of running after every bit of praise they handed out, she had long since stopped admonishing herself for the way her skin warmed and her sex felt tight when she received it.

  “There are a number of fetish clubs in the city that Banovíc likes to frequent,” Monica responded. “They’re not to his wife’s tastes.”

  “Shame,” Kierra said before she could stop herself and then she pursed her lips shut.

  Monica’s lips quirked minutely and Lane smiled broadly.

  “That’s what I said,” Lane laughed and then winked at Kierra.

  She could feel her face heat. She cleared her throat and then dropped her gaze back to the tablet.

  “We’ll be staying at an Agency-owned villa on the outskirts of the city center. It has easy access in and out of town if we need a quick getaway. Our local operatives are sweeping it as we speak,” Monica reported.

  Kierra nodded, “I made a special request for a few bags of the Italian coffee you like before we took off.”

  “That’s our girl,” Lane cut in.

  “And since it’s citrus season once we land I’ll head to a market and look for those oranges you both loved last summer. Anything else I should have my eye on?”

  That was the other perk of being the personal assistant to spies. Kierra was not a spy.

  Every now and then, Monica and Lane brought her to an exotic location so that she could make sure that all of their personal needs –even the ones they didn’t know they had – were taken care of while they were out helping to foment a coup or whatever it was that they did. But she was able to experience the adrenaline rush of their missions from a safe remove, either in Command or in a heavily fortified safe house. She only knew as much about the mission as she needed to help Monica and Lane execute their plans. She didn’t know any operation particulars. She didn’t have high enough security clearance for that. And she didn’t want it anyway.