Chapter One
Now
After spending over twenty-five years as a Secret Service agent, most of that in the Presidential Protective Division, it’s difficult for menotto think of people in terms of code names.
Mine is Priest.
Next to me walks a man. I rest my right hand on the back of his neck, possessively cupping it as we make our way toward the White House exit, where a detailis about to transport us to my townhouse here in DC. To anyone else, it looks like a friendly, familiar bro gesture, one man to another, the other who everyone knows has had one oftheshittiest weeks of his or anyone’s life.
In reality, this man is the love of my life, my boy, my slave, my possession, my property—the poetry my heart sings.
He ismine.
This man is Prophet.
He’s also the chiefof staff to the president of the United States.
Whose code name happens to be Portia.
AKA my wife, President ShaeLynn Samuels, the former three-term US Senator from the great state of Florida.
* * * *
Once we’re safely inside the back of The Beast, code name Stagecoach, the huge, armored SUV limo custom-built for transporting POTUS and fam, Prophet and I are effectively alone. We leave theWhite House grounds with a much smaller motorcade than Portia would normally warrant. Tonight we’re rolling silent with lights and the bare minimum detail they’ll let me travel with, trying to attract as little attention as possible.
I put my boy on his knees in front of me and spread my legs. He leans in with an exhausted sigh and rests his head against my thigh so I can stroke his hair andgently rub my thumb in a small circle in the middle of his forehead, right above the bridge of his nose.
I close my legs just enough he’s gently captured and I watch his eyes fall closed behind his glasses as peace settles within him.
“Prophet,” AKA Kevin Markos, is a man who graced the TV sets of millions of conservative TV viewers for nearly twenty years, before he blew it.
Which was greatforme, because when he walked out of my life twenty years before the night of his on-air meltdown, he’d taken my heart with him and I’d never figured out how to get it back.
He’s deep in the closet. This thing we have is a secret except from those who need to know—like Shae.
It’s been a rough couple of weeks, not made any easier by my wife’s inability to get her fucking shit together over thepast couple of days, and thereby putting even more stress on my boy.
Then again, that’s partially my fault. I guess I trained her too damn well, her and Prophet, both. She relies on him far more than I ever dreamed she would, and has become to him what he is to me—heart and soul.
I didn’t wait all these years tofinallyhave him back in my arms again just to lose him to another woman.
I mean,yeah, I sound judgmental and bitchy and more than a little like an asshole right now, sure. But here’s the thing—I’m tired, I’m stressed, I’m pissed off, and I’m more than a little bit scared.
Because these two people have become my world, and did so without me realizing how she was going to just slide on in there. Now, I’m worried I’m going to lose it all.
Correction, I’m not worried.
I’mterrified.
I’m a Secret Service agent. “Retired” is a descriptor and pension designation. When I turned in my badge and service sidearm, I was third in command for the PPD.
They don’t give that position to just any half-assed idiot who manages a GED and a meth habit simultaneously. You kind of have to know what the hell you’re doing, and the job requires you keep proving yourself to remain init. We have a pretty high washout rate. Lots of agents end up at the FBI, because it’s hard, relentless, grueling work.
That means I can’t simply blink my eyes and forget everything I learned and trained for over the two and a half decades I was there.
In January, my younger brother and sister-in-law died when they were run off the road in Pennsylvania during an ice storm. That’s been almostten months ago.
The other driver has not been caught.
