by: DeeDee Lake
My dad worked in some very secret settings during his Navy career.
His workplaces had no windows. There were layers of security before he could reach his office. I never once saw the inside of the places where he worked.
When we lived in Rota, Spain, he worked at a place known as the Bull Ring—a massive circular antenna surrounding a compound where Navy cryptologists worked. From the outside, it looked like something created for a Cold War spy movie.
Considering what my dad did for a living, that seems rather appropriate.
Growing up, however, I didn’t know much about what he actually did.
That’s because Dad couldn’t tell us.
Need to Know
My parents tell a story about something that could have dramatically changed our family’s life when my siblings and I were very young.
My mom was a young housewife with three children under five. At the time, she didn’t even drive.
My dad was considered for an assignment that, as my parents understood it, would have required our family to disappear from our normal lives with little or no warning. There would be no rounds of goodbyes. Our belongings would be handled for us, and people we knew wouldn’t be told where we’d gone.
Needless to say, my mama was a bit freaked out.
My dad was trained and immersed in a culture of secrecy. She wasn’t.
Ultimately, the military didn’t select Dad for the assignment.
Why?
We don’t know.
Because that’s how secret stuff works.
Need to know—and apparently, we didn’t need to know.
So, What Does Your Dad Do?
Dad was a Navy code breaker and Spanish translator, but we knew very little about his work.
When we asked what he did all day, Dad told us he typed.
So naturally, I told people he was a secretary.
I’m sure that cleared everything right up.
What I didn’t understand as a child was that my father wasn’t keeping secrets from us. He was keeping secrets for his country—and for us.
There’s a difference.
I thought all that security-clearance, need-to-know stuff would end once Dad retired from the Navy.
Oh, how wrong I was.
I married an Army officer.
From Navy Daughter to Army Wife
Seth held a secret clearance for much of his military career. Fortunately for him, I had been raised to respect the need to protect information without probing for answers I wasn’t supposed to have.
That wasn’t particularly easy for me.
I’m a gal who likes to be in the know. I don’t just want to know what happened. I want to know why and probably what everyone thought about it afterward.
Instead, I fell back on something I’d learned as a Navy brat:
Need to know is more than a slogan. It’s protection.
Seth was a pilot, and many days I didn’t even know whether he would be flying.
When we lived in Panama, he sometimes flew to other countries for the day. Occasionally, he’d forget my car keys were still tucked inside his flight suit.
Off Seth would go.
Off my car keys would go.
And I wasn’t driving anywhere that day.
Years after he retired, someone asked the obvious question: “Why didn’t you just make a second set of keys?”
Truthfully?
It never occurred to me.
Apparently, military training only gets you so far.
Harley Understands Secrets, Too
That world became part of Mission: Matrimony, The Final Engagement.
Harley works in the high-security world of NSA intelligence. She knows how to protect information, compartmentalize, and keep things to herself.
But those skills don’t conveniently shut off when the workday ends.
Harley guards more than government secrets. She guards her personal history and her heart.
Canyon understands military duty, and there will be things Harley cannot tell him. But loving someone in a high-security career requires something more important than access to every detail.
It requires trust.
Harley has to learn that trusting Canyon with her heart is different from protecting classified information.
That’s a much harder security clearance to grant.
The Truth Behind the Secrets
So, what’s the truth behind all those secrets?
I still don’t know.
My dad retired from the Navy more than forty years ago, and Seth retired from the Army nearly twenty years ago.
The military taught them well.
Some secrets simply do not need to be shared.
What both men taught me was how to ask different questions.
How was lunch?
How are your coworkers doing?
Did you have a good day?
Questions that say, I care about you, without asking someone to violate an oath or reveal something that isn’t mine to know.
More importantly, I learned that someone doesn’t have to tell you everything about his job to be trustworthy, honest, and reliable.
Trust isn’t knowing everything.
Sometimes trust is knowing the character of the person who can’t tell you everything.
My father earned that trust.
My husband earned it.
And in Mission: Matrimony, The Final Engagement, Harley and Canyon discover that some of the strongest relationships aren’t built by having access to every piece of information.
They’re built by knowing which things must be protected—and knowing when it’s finally safe to let someone in.
Mission Matrimony
by DeeDee Lake, Susan M. BaganzRelease Date 2026-11-06
ISBN: 9781522305408
ASIN: B0HC8HXCLJ
PelicanID: 1744
Genres: Fiction / Christian / Romance / Suspense, Fiction / Christian / Suspense
Pages: 189
Harley Barnett survived the Army, but the war she's fighting now is the one against herself. Working in the shadows for the NSA, she's built a fortress around her heart, hiding from a guilt so deep it's stolen her ability to live. But she never built a defense against Captain Canyon Davis, the man whose patient love has followed her across continents. He' s back, not as a memory, but as a promise of a future she's terrified to claim. Canyon has fought for his country and prayed for her heart, and he' s ready to make his final stand. But every gentle advance is a direct assault on the walls she's built. When a long-buried secret is finally forced into the light, Harley must face the truth of her past and make a final choice: stay a prisoner of her guilt, or surrender to the love that has been her anchor all along.
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