The Marshal Pt. 06

He nodded. "And what a year it's been."

She snuggled in a little closer. "Yes, it has."

"Any regrets?" he asked.

"Only one."

"What?"

"I wish I could let Dad know I wasn't dead and that I'm okay."

He kissed her on the head. "You know that's not possible."

She sighed. "I know. Do you have any regrets?"

"No. Not yet."

"Not yet?" she asked, perking up. "Do you expect to have some?"

He sniffed out a brief chuckle. "I certainly hope not." He paused for a moment. "There is one thing I need to ask you, though."

"What?"

"I need an honest answer, okay?"

She looked at him in confusion. "Okay. What is it?"

"Wait here. I'll be right back."

He slowly slipped his arm out from under her and stood before disappearing into the bedroom. He reappeared a moment later. He stood, watching her, his gaze intense, as if he were trying to memorize every detail. She sat up.

"What?" she asked, her voice lilting up.

He settled into the pillows beside her and opened his hand. Inside was a small black velvet box. Her heart nearly stopped. He opened the lid and inside was the most beautiful diamond ring she'd ever seen. The stone wasn't large, but it sparked and flashed with the flickering light of the fire. She looked up, holding his gaze, unable to speak, unable to breathe.

He pulled the ring from the box and took a deep breath. "Britney Bailey Hadley, will you marry me?"

She swallowed hard, her gaze flicking between the ring and his eyes. Her heart thudding in her chest, she tried to speak, but the words wouldn't come. She swallowed again. "Yes," she murmured. The whisper broke the dam holding back her words. "Yes! Yes!" she cried, each repetition louder and more assured than the previous.

She threw herself into his arms and he held her. She wanted to laugh and cry, so she did a little of both. She held him, squeezing him tight, never wanting to let him go. After a long moment, he began squirming his way out of her embrace while gently pushing her back. He took her hand and slid the ring over her finger. It fit perfectly. As he settled it into position, he released the ring and pulled her gently into a kiss.

She wrapped her arms around his neck and leaned back, pulling him down on top of her and into the pillows. He kissed her slowly, lovingly, until she'd taken her fill.

"I love you, Britney Hadley," he whispered.

"I love you, Robert Cogburn."

He took her lips in another long and gentle kiss. He sighed as he slowly pulled back. "You asked me if I had any regrets?" he whispered, his lips so close to hers she could feel the tickle of his words. She nodded. "The answer is no. No regrets."

She smiled, tears flooding her eyes. She pulled him down into another long kiss. Not two hours ago she thought she couldn't be happier, but she'd been wrong. She could sense his passions rising, fueling her own desires. They might not be married yet, but he still had some husbandly duties to perform.

He performed them well, and their soft sounds of passion filled the room long into the night.

"With zero down and zero percent financing for up to forty-eight months, or fifteen-hundred dollars cash back, get your new Subaru at Mesdick Subaru today!"

"That's good, Britney. Perfect. Ready to do the fine print?" Joel Egger, her normal engineer, asked, his voice clear in her headphones.

She was standing in a six-by-six-foot room with a microphone in front of her, the walls of the studio covered with heavy sound deadening that reminded her of the inside of egg cartons. She smiled at the older man through the glass partition.

"Yeah. Hang on a second." She shuffled the cards to the one that had the details and nodded her head. "Ready."

"In your own time."

She looked up so she was speaking directly into the mic. "Tax, title, license, and dealer fees extra. Based on MSRP of thirty-eight forty-nine..." She trailed off when she realized she'd made a mistake. She glanced through the glass at Joel and rolled her eyes. "They'd love that," she said with grin. She'd just cut the price of the car by almost thirty-thousand dollars. "Let me try that again." She took a calming breath and let it out slowly and looked at Joel to make sure he was ready. He bobbed his head once. "Tax, title, license, and dealer fees extra. Based on MSRP of thirty-eight oh forty-nine and customer cash of forty-eight forty-two on select vehicles in dealer stock, while stock lasts. Not compatible with lease and some other offers. Must take delivery by twelve thirty-one eighteen. Visit dealer website at www dot mesdicksubaru dot com for additional details and limitations," she said as she read from the card.

She spoke in a normal voice at normal speed. Once Joel had what he wanted, he'd process her reading of the fine print through the station's software to remove her pauses between the sentences and speed her voice up to about double while keeping her tone the same. That got all the legal mumbo-jumbo that nobody listened to, but was required in the spot, out of the way as quickly as possible. He'd then cut her various takes together, along with music and sound effects, to make the Mesdick Subaru commercial scheduled to start playing during the morning drive time in a couple of weeks.

Joel began nodding his head. The fine print was easy. It was so heavily processed all she had to do was get all the words right. The commercial itself was where a bit of flair and acting came in, and that couldn't be fixed with software.

"Perfect. Ready for the next one? We're going to do Ploughton."

She set the Mesdick Subaru cards on the copy stand in front of her and picked up the next stack. She was doing six commercials today. This one was for Ploughton Equipment. They were having a sale in a few weeks to start clearing out mowers to make room for snowblowers. One of the perks of doing commercials was she knew what was going on sale, and where, before most of the residents of Bangor did.

She read through her copy a couple of times. She took the script given to her and copied it onto a series of index cards to break the commercial down into easily spoken chunks, underlining words she wanted to punch up, and changing the spelling of some words to a phonetic spelling to help her with unfamiliar words. Ploughton, for example, was spelled PLO-ton on her cards, and Kubota was broken down into Ka-bo-ta, so she could make sure she pronounced the names correctly.

"Ready," she said with a nod.

"In your own time."

"Family owned and operated for fifty-four years, Ploughton Equipment..." she began.

She didn't have to work, her small stipend was enough to live on, if barely, until it ran out. It would cover rent for an inexpensive apartment, and food and utilities, but not much else. She didn't want to live like that, and she didn't want to depend on the generosity of Rob.

Not long after she moved to Maine, she'd shopped her voiceover skills to the various radio and television stations. It didn't hurt that she was coming from a much larger market, New York City, so she had little trouble getting a chance to prove herself. She'd taken the opportunity and run with it. Now she was working a couple of times a week doing radio and television spots.

Mesdick Subaru was her first client, and in the past year she'd become the voice of their dealership. They'd wanted to put her in front of the camera for their television commercials as well, but she declined that opportunity. There was a reason she was in witness protection, and having her face plastered all over the television, even if it was just in Bangor, wasn't a good idea. She did all her work behind the microphone and was content with that.

Working a couple days a week was perfect for her. It was the same schedule she was working when she lived in New York. In New York, she worked only two days because that was all the work she could get, and here it was because that was all the work available, but it didn't matter. She also wasn't earning the same rate for her work as in the city, but that didn't matter either. The cost of living was so low in Maine that she was banking more even though she was earning less. Between what she was making from working, plus her stipend, plus living with Rob in his house, she was earning a more comfortable living than she ever had before.

She finished with Ploughton Equipment and wrapped up her day with Royal Flush Plumbing. When she'd first started doing Royal Flush, she'd had a hard time getting through their commercials without giggling because of their tag line, A Royal Flush beats a Full House. It wasn't as funny after doing more than two dozen ads for them, but the tag line still made her smile every time she had to say it. Every one of their spots ended the same way, with her saying, Remember! A Royal Flush beats a Full House... every time!

"That's it. Great job, Britney!"

She smiled as she pulled the headphones, what Joel called her mickey mouse ears, off her head. "Thanks." She opened the door and stepped out of the soundproof portion of the studio.

"Next week you've picked up another client. Campbell Ford. They asked for you specifically."

If she picked up very many more clients, she was going to have to start driving into Bangor three days a week to meet the demand. Bangor was almost an hour's drive from her home in Wurth, and she wasn't sure she wanted to make that drive three days a week. She was volunteering one day a week at the Wurth Public Library, so that would leave her only one free day to do things around the house, but until her schedule was full, she'd take all the work she could get. She was paid by the spot, from a hundred dollars for a fifteen-second ad to two-fifty for a sixty second ad, and she could do between ten and fifteen spots in a day.

"Great!"

"Just between you and me, you're starting to piss off Melvin."

She grinned. Fredrick Bosch, also known as Melvin in the Morning, used to do a majority of the station's voiceover work, but she was slowly edging him out. He'd done Campbell Ford for years, but apparently, they were her client now.

It was the same at the other two stations she contracted with. She was slowly taking over more and more of the voice work. She'd never have it all because some companies wanted men's voices, and there was more work than one person could possibly do, but she was slowly gathering clients into her portfolio. She had a range of voices she could do, such as a little girl, one she called the ditzy blonde, and an old lady, along with a couple of others, in addition to her own voice. She could also mix in a thick New York or Korean accent if she wanted to change the voices even more. She was also working with Rob, practicing a heavy Maine accent, in case she might want to use that at some point in the future. The most fun commercials were the ones where she'd do two or three different voices in the same spot before they were cut together so she was carrying on a conversation with herself.

She shrugged. "Oh well."

She didn't feel the least bit guilty for taking Melvin's client. Radio and television was a cut throat business, and it wasn't like she'd wooed Campbell Ford away from Melvin. They came to her, so if he didn't like it, he could take it up with whoever was in charge of Campbell's ad buys.

"You'll be back next Tuesday?"

"Yes."

101.3, WBGR, a classic rock station, was the eight-hundred-pound gorilla in Bangor. She spent one full day with them and half day each with WBEA, The Bee, a new country station, and WQFT, a top forty station. She also did work for various television stations, slotting them in around her other work when she was needed.

"See you next week," Joel said.

"Have a good weekend!"

She pulled her purse from her locker and walked to her car. She'd finally adjusted to having a car at her disposal. In New York she didn't own a car because she rarely needed one, and when she did, she just borrowed one from the several Dad owned. In Maine, though, a person couldn't get anywhere without wheels. Most of the people in Maine had probably never seen a subway, much less ridden one.

She plopped into her Subaru. Rob had bought the car for her not long after she moved to Maine. When the estate of Han Bo-bae had finally finished probate, he'd inherited her small estate thanks to the help of U.S. Marshal Service. Some of the estate went to repaying him for the car, but the rest of the money went into an account in his name that she could draw on. In effect, she'd inherited her estate from herself after her death. Weird shit like that happened when you went into witness protection.

She took highway fifteen north and west out of Bangor. When she'd first came to Maine, under Rob's protection, she'd been amazed at the wildness of it. Maine was almost another planet, not just another state. She'd grown up and lived in New York City her entire life, and she'd been amazed at how few people lived in Maine. Eight times the people lived in New York City than lived in the entire state of Maine, and a hundred times more people lived on Staten Island, where she once lived, than lived in Wurth, the nearest town to home. That had taken some getting used to, but now she loved it. She smiled as the Outback buzzed along the road. It was so isolated they'd even made love in the yard once, in the rain another time, and in the shallows of the lake where the water was warm. She squirmed in her seat with the memories.

She pulled into their drive, if someone could call a road a half-mile long a drive, and stopped to check the mail. There was a thin carton inside the post box, and she smiled as she tingled in excitement. She returned to her car, tossing the mail into the passenger seat, and crept the rest of the way to the house, pulling into the garage and putting the door back down. It was almost five. Rob would be home in about an hour.

She gathered the mail and carried it into the house, dropping her purse and the rest of the mail on the dining table. Her tingle of excitement grew as she began opening the package. She couldn't believe it was actually happening. She pulled the sample wedding invitations out and spread them on the table. They were all beautiful.

She glanced around and smiled. She still had a hard time believing this was her home. Rob's home-- their home she corrected herself--wasn't huge. It was less than a third the size of the house she grew up in, but it was amazingly beautiful, and she'd fallen in love with the place the moment she'd arrived, and now, over a year after she'd first set foot into the house, she loved it even more.

Leaving the cards spread on the table, she quickly thumbed through the rest of the mail, sorting out the bills from the junk mail. The bills she'd deal with later, and the junk went into a pile for burning in the fireplace. Once that task was done, she started dinner.

The extent of her cooking before she met Rob was sliding a frozen dinner into the oven, but like so many things, she'd found she didn't mind cooking nearly as much as she thought she would. Learning to cook with Rob had been a lot of fun, especially when he'd smear something on her and then kiss it off. That had led to more than one meal being delayed because they'd ended up fucking instead of cooking. He was a better cook than she was, taking over the cooking on the weekends because he claimed he enjoyed it, but through the week she normally took care of the meals.

She was stirring together the lobster meat and mayonnaise for the lobster rolls they were having for dinner when she heard the garage door rumble up. She left the spoon in the bowl and crossed the room to the tiny mudroom that separated the dining room from the garage. She opened the door and stood watching as Rob's marshal car rumbled to a stop. She met him like this every day she was home. Most of the time she was dressed as she was now, wearing the same comfortable clothes she'd been wearing at work, but sometimes she surprised him by wearing something suggestive, like the time she was wearing nothing but the apron that said Kiss the Cook on the front. He'd done a hell of a lot more than kiss her, and dinner had consisted of finger food eaten very late that night.

"Hey," he said as stepped out of his car. He must have had a hard day because his voice was missing the life it normally had.

"Hey, yourself," she replied.

Just seeing him left a pleasant heaviness in her loins because he was perfect, and he was going to be her husband.

"How was your day?" he asked as he rounded the front of her car.

"You know... work, work, work..." she teased. "I slaved over a hot microphone all day."

"Yeah," he said as he pulled her into a gentle kiss.

She was getting close to her period because the simmering desire she always had for him came to a full boil with the kiss. It was almost like she went into heat as her cycle approached, and soon she would get what Rob teasingly called F.A.T., or Fucked All the Time. As her period made her crazy, he'd never failed to rise to the challenge, so to speak, and for that she'd be forever thankful.

She sighed out of the kiss. "Nice," she murmured.

She hoped her period held off until after the weekend. When she was like this over a weekend... oh my God! They'd sometimes spend an entire day in bed, screwing their brains out as they tried to fuck each other into surrender. She wasn't keeping score, but she thought it was about even on who could outfuck who.

"Very," he agreed.

"The sample wedding invitation came today. Come see." She knew Rob didn't give two shits about the wedding invitations, or anything else dealing with the wedding, but he was a good sport and pretended to be interested. She pulled him to the table. "What do you think?" She asked as she waved her hand over the four samples on display.

"Britney, I need to talk to you." Something was off in his voice, something more than could be explained by him just having a tough day.

"Okay. What?"

"It's about your dad."

A chill passed through her. Dad had been sick with lung cancer for several years, likely the result of his many years of smoking, and he'd turned the Han organization Kwang-hoon when the disease began to ravage him. When Kwang-hoon went to federal prison for the rest of his life, and Dad had stepped back into his roll as leader of the jopok into fill the gap, she knew that would only hasten his decline.

"What?"

He held her gaze for a long moment. "I found out today that he passed away."

Dad might've been a gangster, a thug, and a murder, but unlike Kwang-hoon, he'd allowed her to walk away from the family business. Dad wasn't a good man, not like Rob, but he was still her dad and she loved him.

She sniffed, trying to hold her tears. "When? How?"

"Monday evening. From what I understand, he was rushed to the hospital on Thursday when he had difficulty breathing."

She whimpered, melted into Rob's chest, and began to sob as his arms surrounded her in a loving embrace.

Rob held Britney as she sobbed softly into his chest, her shoulders shaking with her grief. He felt like shit for telling her the news and had been dreading it all day. He didn't feel bad the old bastard was gone, not after all the lives the Han organization had ruined, but his heart still went out to Britney. He didn't know what to say, there was nothing for him to say, and he couldn't even offer her the comfort of taking her to see her father's body. As far as the world was concerned, Han Bo-bae was dead.

It was unlikely anyone in the Han organization believed she was dead, but she still couldn't visit her family, such as it was. With Kwang-hoon in prison and Kyun-ki, her father, dead, Britney Hadley, née Han Bo-ba, was all that was left of one of the most powerful crime families in New York City. The Han organization ran most of Queens, supplying drugs, guns, protection, whores, and anything else someone might want. It was ironic that she'd walked away from the most powerful Korean jopok in New York rather than be part of it, but with her father's death, she was by default the head of the family and had inherited the empire. If she were to suddenly appear it would be highly probable someone would take a shot at her. The fall of the Han empire would have the vultures circling, and they wouldn't want anyone around to revive the body.