Chapter One
Now — Early September
Sometimes, my morning starts with having to awaken the president of the United States.
Who is not, by any means, a morning person.
Let me say that there are times the small-plane crash I survived when I was in the Secret Service was a far less terrifying experience than having to awaken President ShaeLynn Samuels when she hasn’t had enough sleep and is expecting to sleep in for a couple more hours.
Especially at 4:49 a.m. on a Sunday morning.
Doubly especially if I know she’s in bed with her husband and with her chief of staff.
Who—just to be clear—are twodifferentmen.
Actually, it’s her chief of staff I really need to awaken first to help me wrangle her. Because we’ll also need him downstairs in the SitRoom.
I made the mistake of coming to work this morning, so staff decided I drew the short straw by default. My timing was perfect—or sucky, depending on how you want to look at it. I’d no sooner arrived than one of the duty officers from the Watch Team scurried up to me and tasked me with this.
Rat bastards.
I mean, yes, wrangling POTUS isliterallymy job, but still…
That’s why I’m now armed with a tray of coffee and their favorite cheese danishes. Unfortunately, I’m not allowed to carry a cattle prod in the White House, or I would have one on me now.
I watch the three chickenshit residence staff who just came on duty scatter as I approach the private living room door, that room through which I’ll enter to go knock on their inner bedroom door. I approached from this room rather than one of the other bedroom entrances because I don’t know what state the room—or its inhabitants—are currently in. I want zero risk of household staff seeing or hearing anything they shouldn’t.
I wait until the living room door shuts behind me to approach the bedroom door. Balancing the tray on my right hand, I lightly rap on their bedroom door three times with my left, wait, then rap three more times, a little harder. Another brief wait, then three final, hard knocks before I punch in the numeric code on the lock so I can open it.
It’s our prearranged signal. If they’re awake, it gives them time to call out and respond to keep me out, or to at least give them a chance to pull the covers around them.
Except in an emergency, only the kids and I are allowed to knock on their bedroom door before they emerge on their own in the morning.
If they’re not awake already, it means Chris will have likely roused enough by the third series of knocks that he won’t come up off the bed swinging at me before he’s fully awake.
Hey, he’s retired Secret Service. It wouldn’t surprise me if he has a gun stashed in here somewhere. He’s also extremely protective of his two pets.
Especially since Kev almost died two years ago.
They’re sound asleep. Well, Chris lets out a soft groan but doesn’t get up, meaning he awakened enough to recognize it’s me and immediately started falling asleep again.
It’s dark inside their bedroom. After the door swings shut behind me and chokes off the dim light from the living room, I pause just inside the doorway to let my eyes adjust. The heavy blackout curtains on the windows do exactly what they’re supposed to. There’s a nightlight in the bathroom that, after a moment, gives me enough working illumination trickling in from the dressing room hallway that I can step around the clothes and shoes strewn across the floor in a path from the door to the bed without tripping over them.
I carry the tray over to Kev’s side of the bed and set it on the nightstand. Shae ended up in the middle and only the top of her head is visible. They keep the bedroom temperature set to sixty-five at night because they like it comfortably chilly.
It means whoever’s in the middle can snuggle between the bodies on either side of them without getting overheated and kicking the covers off all three of them.
Shoving back the angry grief trying to roil inside my soul at the sight of the three of them comfortably snuggled together, I focus on the here and now.
On myjob.
In this way, they’re blissfully happy and lucky. It’s also not their fault my personal life right now is a shitstorm they don’t even know about. Well, maybe Chris has an inkling, but he’s been pretty busy the past couple of weeks, so he might not know.
Kev’s lying on his right side, his back to Shae, and still lightly snoring. I head across the large room to one of the walk-in closets, pull the door mostly shut, and close my eyes as I turn my face away while I reach inside the doorway to find the light switch.
That’s not as insanely obnoxious as turning on the dressing room hall light, or one of the lamps on the nightstands. Or opening the curtains. Besides, I don’t want any of the more astute members of the press seeing a light appear in the president’s bedroom this early on a morning she’s supposed to have nothing on her schedule except her PDB in a couple of hours, followed by family time with her husband and children.
And with her chief of staff, who’s also unofficially one of her husbands. The public doesn’t know that, obviously. They only know Kev is her chief of staff and a close friend the First Family considers part of their family, and that he lives here with them in the residence. Public opinion is greatly in favor of that, considering all Kev’s been through and survived.
