“The barricade is down!” Zeke hollered.
Panic swelled in my throat as, yet again, it seemed that everything that could go wrong on this godforsaken trip did.
Maybe I really was cursed.
I was two seconds away from crouching down into the fetal position when deft arms lifted me right up off of my feet and I was enveloped in the sweet scent of vanilla bourbon.
Chapter Twenty
Lennon looked pale as I trailed behind her out of the stage area and I wanted nothing more than to press my hands to either side of her face and comfort her… but I couldn’t.
That much had become obvious the night of the Kennedy garden attack.
I’d gotten distracted, and in that distraction, I hadn’t noticed the asshole with a gun until it was almost too late.
Not only that, people had heard Dallas’s comment to Lennon about the Prince of Wales and the argument that had ensued after that.
It was stupid and sloppy, and to make matters worse, the president herself had issued a verbal warning.
That was enough for me to take several steps back.
Or it should have been.
It was a fight every single damned day to maintain professional boundaries with Lennon because now, after the fact, I realized just how much they had crumbled in the few short months that we had been protecting her in ways that they never had when we worked with protectees abroad.
I woke up every day and thought about her. About how messy her hair would be when she came out into the living area of the tour bus and requested the type of coffee that made your teeth hurt because of how sweet it was. Or how she stayed up far too late into the night on her computer poring over the different iterations of speeches that the president’s people were sending her way for the various events she was supposed to attend.
My eyes seemed to follow her wherever she went even when they weren’t supposed to, my instincts keyed into her scent more than ever since we kissed in the kitchen weeks ago.
Then there were the things that weren’t even inherently romantic that had changed.
The dynamic of my team had shifted and I was afraid the changes were irreversible now.
We’d always been buddies and coworkers. Hell, we’d even lived together for the better part of our adult lives.
But ever since Lennon had crash-landed into our laps as the object of our protection things had changed.
It was almost instinctual that we were together now, moving as a group in tandem. Half of the time I didn’t even need to usethe Comms unless I needed to talk to the outer team that we worked with.
I could move in one direction to protect Lennon and Brooks or Zeke or Dallas would naturally move in the opposite without me even having to ask. It was as easy as breathing.
It was almost pack-like.
Something I was terrified to say out loud.
“Lennon!”
“Lennon!”
“Can I get a picture?!”
People screamed Lennon’s name like she was some kind of popstar rather than a politician’s daughter, and normally it would have confused me why people were so obsessed, but I understood it now.
There was something magnetic about Lennon Holloway, something that I was pretty sure that people hadn’t seen during previous elections because she had been so sheltered by her parents and grandparents.
Now she moved as a solo operator. Add on all of the drama that seemed to swirl around her and her propensity to run her mouth? Lennon Holloway was a phenomenon, for better or for worse.
I watched the back of her, the way she held her shoulders straight and held her head high despite the fact that I had smelled the scent of her anxiety earlier when she came off of the stage.
