Eight million, six hundred and forty thousand seconds and counting.
That’s it. The amount of time that’s passed since Aubrey Taylor began his first term as President of the United States. Everyone knows the first hundred days of a President’s tenure set the stage for the rest of his time in the Oval, but no one thinks—or cares—about what those days feel like for the First Lady. They don’t notice her slowly unraveling, morphing into the sort of person who breaks her existence down into milliseconds just so she doesn’t get overwhelmed by the thought of her next breath. They don’t see that her entire life has become numbers.
Thatmyentire life has become numbers.
Twenty-three items on my agenda for the day.
Two days dedicated to my actual career.
Ninety-three full-time staffers who see everything and comment on nothing.
One hundred and thirty-two rooms to sit in and be ignored.
Twenty-eight fireplaces to stare into and contemplate my life choices.
Six floors, two basements, three elevators and eight staircases.
One mind quickly rotting.
One heart slowly dying, waiting for brief flashes of hope that are far too infrequent to sustain me.
“How is this my life?” I mutter, pacing the length of floor that exists outside of the security camera’s field of vision.
There’s only one in the stairway that takes staffers from the second floor to the third without being seen by the public, but that’s all the space needs. It’s tiny, secluded, and, despite its designation, rarely occupied. The camera is perched high in the far left corner, focused on the stairs but not the door designed to blend with the wall it’s built into, which means there’s no random Secret Service agent watching me wring my hands and talk to myself while I wait to see if I’ll get to taste hope today.
My phone vibrates, and I pull it out of my pocket, heart pounding as I read the text.
Agent Shaw: 5 and 1. ETA 30 seconds.
More numbers, but these make me smile. I shove my phone back into the pocket of my trousers and run a hand through my hair, enjoying the feel of the blunt ends as they pass through my fingers. I talked Diane into cutting it into a bob a few days ago, and despite the influx of articles and news segments questioning if the style is too severe for my features and wondering how I’m going to put it in an up-do for formal occasions like the upcoming State Dinner, I’m in love with the decision.
The door opens, and a mountain of muscle in a black suit joins me inside the space. My breath stalls in my lungs as I watch him maneuver around the door carefully, making sure not tolet even an inch of his broad shoulders come into the camera’s line of sight. He turns to face me, and I see it on his face: confirmation that he’s in love with the change I’ve made too.
Onyx eyes run gentle lines over me, caressing the crown of my head and skating down until they reach the tips of my toes. The examination is equal parts lust and love, and although the intensity of his gaze starts a slow thrum of anticipation in my core, we both know we only have time for love.
Five minutes, to be exact, and we’ve already spent a solid forty-five seconds staring at each other.
He crosses over to me in two strides of his long legs, hands going to my ass and lifting me up. I wrap myself around him, squeezing tight. I’m not afraid of falling. I just need the closeness.
“Beck.”
His name is a desperate, broken whimper that’s accompanied by the gathering of tears in my eyes. I force them away, knowing I don’t have time to fix my makeup before my next meeting.
“Gorgeous.” His tone reassures me that I’m not alone in this longing. It’s in his kiss too, an ache that causes a tightness in my chest when his lips glide against mine in two filthy, yet unsatisfactory, kisses.
One from him.
One from Cal, who couldn’t be here because they can never get away from Aubrey at the same time. Part of me wonders why Agent Shaw even bothers to specify how many men I should expect during these clandestine meetings. Never once has she had cause to say two instead of one.
Beck presses me to the wall, his hands shifting to my waist. “I’ve missed you.”
“I’ve missed you, too.”
I miss him all the time. I missthemall the time. I miss us. Who we were to each other in the early days of this forbidden love. Who we could have become if it wasn’t for Aubrey’s malicious intervention.
He’d meant for it to break us.
For a moment, I thought that it had. My heart still clenches painfully every time I relive the day they committed to Aubrey’s detail. Every second after that meeting was filled with the kind of grating hurt that I can only compare to what I felt after losing my son. And then came the letters. Handwritten letters delivered to me by Agent Shaw but penned by the two men who love me most, who couldn’t go a single day letting me believe they’d chosen their careers over me.
