Jamie hadn’t been in the Oval Office too many times—it always seemed a little too surreal. The last time he had ventured inside was the day the president pinned the Purple Heart to his pristine uniform once his feet had healed and he was able to stand without crutches. It had made a pretty picture—president and war hero, side by side. America had loved it.
The president was on the phone when Jamie walked in, his new Secret Service goon tailing him and Boomer at his side. Nobody ever questioned the dog. President Barratt looked up from the desk, spotted him, and smiled, holding up one finger while the conversation finished. Jamie stood patiently at ease until the phone slotted back into the cradle.
“Jamie!”
“Hi, Mom.” He smiled warmly, stepping forward to embrace her.
She held him tightly for a long minute before kissing his cheek and stepping back, holding him at arm’s length while surveying him. “You look tired, honey.”
Jamie laughed and shrugged. “Ah, I’m okay.”
“Are you sure?”
He raised his eyebrows. “Mom, I’m twenty-five, not five. I’m sure. I’m fine.”
The president nodded before letting go of Jamie’s arms and heading back to the other side of her desk. “Okay,” she replied, gathering some papers and handing them to her aide, Natalie.
Jamie raised his eyebrows in acknowledgement and Nat gave him a brief smile before the president spoke again.
“I’ve asked them to get the house in the Hamptons ready for you. I thought you could stay there for a couple of weeks while you get back on your feet.”
“What?” Jamie replied in disbelief.
This was not what he’d expected. He’d thought that his mother would put him up in the White House for a little while until they found him an apartment or a penthouse. He’d been in the last place for only six weeks, but it made him sick to think about going back there. It didn’t hold good memories.
“I just don’t think it’s good for you to come right out of hospital and back into big city life when you’ve just recovered from a burn-out.”.
Jamie shook his head. “Do I not even get a say in this?”
The president looked up and around the Oval Office. There were only a few staff inside, but the door was open. “Can we have the room for the moment, please?”
They all filed out, and Natalie closed the door behind her.
His mother turned back. “Jamie, I can’t have you in DC right now. Not after the last time. You know that you can’t manage it at the moment—you need to take it easy, keep a low profile, make sure you’re fully recovered before you start all that again. If you go to the house in the Hamptons, then you can ease into it. Have a quiet drink with friends, walk Boomer on the beach…”
“Be boring?”
President Barratt fixed him with a stony glare. “Boring is just what you need right now, Jamie.”
He stared at his feet and drew his top lip between his teeth, anxiously gnawing it. Beside him, Boomer whined and nosed his hand, and Jamie pulled a deep breath, drawing himself up straight, and calmly looking his mother in the eye. “Alright.”
She smiled at him. “Good. How is your new Secret Service guy?”
“Roberts? Stoic.”
“Natalie says he’s exceptional. You have similar backgrounds.”
“Well, if Natalie says he’s decent…” Jamie muttered sarcastically.
“Be nice,” his mother warned. “You’re going to be stuck with him for a while.”
* * * *
Earlier at the hospital, Chris had already tired of Jamie’s shit.
This hadn’t been his first time meeting James Barratt, although it seriously felt like it; Chris and Jamie had crossed paths very briefly, two years earlier. But the man who had sat next to him on the drive back to Washington had been vastly different to the man he remembered meeting. This new James Barratt was more like a sulky teenager than the vibrant, charming personality he’d been before.
Jamie had walked out of the hospital at Bethesda to a horde of paparazzi and reporters. You could tell that he came from money and politics, the way he handled them with casual grace and charm, easily dodging questions that were too prying and reaffirming that he was fine, that he was back on form, fighting fit and ready for the world before sweeping away and climbing into the black Secret Service car, Chris sliding into the back with him.
“Fucking vultures,” Barratt had said venomously as he buckled up and hunched down in the seat, pulling a pair of sunglasses from the breast pocket of his uniform jacket and effortlessly sliding them onto his face. Seconds later, the tie was loosened, the top shirt button undone, and an iPod was being pulled from nowhere. The Pretty Reckless blasted from the speakers as the car pulled away from the army hospital and headed back into DC with the president’s son lighting up a cigarette and rolling the window down fully.
“Hey, do you mind if we stop for Starbucks?”
Chris raised an eyebrow. “Sir?”
“Starbucks,” Jamie repeated in a tone more suited to a petulant teenager. “I’ve been stuck in a damn hospital for six weeks, away from anything good. I want a Frap, and then I want Krispy Kremes, and then we can go to the White House.”
Chris reluctantly agreed, telling the driver to make a detour. Foster had told him not to deviate, to take James Thomas Barratt directly to the White House, but Chris really couldn’t see the harm in taking the guy to get a coffee and a donut. That was until they pulled up to the drive-through.
Jamie unfastened his seat belt and kneeled on his seat, leaning over Chris’s lap to see the girl at the window. He gave the girl the most charming smile. “Hey there, beautiful!”
“Good morning, sir. Can I take your order?” The girl blushed slightly, smiling as she keyed into the cash register.
“Yeah, I’ll take the biggest Frap you guys do, caramel, extra shot, extra cream, extra everything and…Roberts, do you want anything?”
Jamie leaned back to look at Chris, shifting in his lap and pressing down with hips just where Chris really didn’t need the pressure.
He shook his head. “No, thank you, sir.”
Jamie shrugged and turned back to the Starbucks’s girl, mercifully shifting his weight. “Nothing for Roberts!”
“Anything else, sir?” she asked with a smile.
“Only your phone number.”
The girl gave Jamie her damn phone number, written on the side of the enormous plastic Frappuccino cup. Later, at the Krispy Kreme, he did the exact same thing. When he’d finished both the frozen coffee and the two glazed donuts, Jamie deposited the trash and the phone numbers in the parking lot bin.
Chris frowned.
“Why did you ask for their phone numbers if you’re just going to throw them away?”
Jamie shrugged and looked at Chris, licking the sugar of the donut from the tips of his fingers. “Seemed like a good idea at the time.”
Chris’s frown deepened. “Do you not think they might be…I dunno…upset when you never call?”
James Barratt lowered his sunglasses and blinked slowly at him, his head tilted to the side. “Why do you care?”
Chris took a deep breath and looked out of the window. “I don’t, sir. Only voicing an opinion, that’s all.”
Jamie snorted and let his head fall onto the head rest, replacing his sunglasses over his eyes and folding his arms over his chest. “Next time, just keep it to yourself,” he had murmured.
Now, back at the White House, when the president ushered her staff out of the room for a moment alone with her son, Chris turned immediately to her aide, Natalie Richmond, and launched into the story of the morning. They had worked together for two years now, and she was particularly good at keeping secrets. Chris trusted her.
“Why is he such an ass?”
Natalie looked up from the papers she was leafing through and smiled wryly at him. “He hasn’t always been.”
Nat had been with the president for three years, and was not only her assistant, but her bodyguard. Richmond had been recruited by the CIA at the tender age of eighteen. She was incredibly smart and had fast-tracked through college with a Political Science major and spent a year working for the Agency in Russia before joining President Barratt’s election campaign.
“But when you’re held and tortured by the Taliban for three months, things tend to change you a little. And then there was that thing with Agent Reiss…”
Chris’s eyebrows rose, curiously. “What did happen with Brett Reiss?”
Natalie looked hard at him, then lowered her green eyes to her papers. “Trust me, Roberts. You don’t really want to know.”
He sighed and leaned back against the wall, crossing his arms over his chest. “Was Jamie that much different before Afghanistan?”
Natalie glanced up again and sighed, closing the file and joining Chris to lean against the wall. “A little. He was sweet. Funny. His smile reached his eyes, and you’d want to smile, too, when you saw it, it was so infectious. Always confident, always cocky, but I guess he still is. I suppose he was just a little softer around the edges than he is now.”
“Oh.” Chris grinned at her. She had one of those expressions on her face. “So, you and Barratt…?”
Natalie shot him a hard look, but almost immediately it softened, and she grinned also. “Yeah, well. It was campaign year; everything was a bit wild. It was only ever physical, though. We broke it off when his mother was elected, and he was shipped out to Afghanistan.”
The door opened behind them, and they both sprang up, switching to professional mode in a split second as the president and her son exited the Oval Office. Jamie Barratt looked like a scolded child. The man could pout.
“Natalie, my son is leaving for the airport now. Would you kindly call ahead and make sure the helicopter is ready for when he gets there?”
“Of course, Madam President.”
Chris and Natalie gave each other a nod of acknowledgement before parting, Nat walking back into the Oval Office and Chris hurrying to catch up with Jamie, who was practically storming out of the White House.
* * * *
It wasn’t that Jamie hated the Hamptons. He had grown up in New York, had spent weekends and holidays at the house in East Hampton, and he had loved it. But now, it really felt as though he were being exiled. He’d just done six weeks in a military hospital, recovering from a serious burn-out, not allowed to leave the premises, military escorts to the bathroom. His life had been dictated and regimented worse than when he had been deployed. Jamie finally had freedom to go out, breathe the fresh air, but instead, he was being carted off to the Hamptons with a new Secret Serviceperson that he knew nothing about.
Not that he missed Reiss. That guy could rot in hell for all Jamie cared, but he knew that Roberts had been employed because he was decent, dependable, and honest. It was written all over his face. He was going to watch Jamie like a hawk and make sure that he didn’t slip back into self-destruct mode.
He got it. He really did. He was the only person his mother had left after Jamie’s dad had been killed in the Gulf War in 1990. Jamie didn’t even remember his dad.
And it wasn’t even that Jamie didn’t want to live, because he did. Three months of torture and never knowing if his next breath was going to be his last had only made him more determined to make the most of his life when he got it back. His only problem was that he had tried too hard at it.
Jamie knew that his mother was trying to gently let him back into the real world. He just wished he’d been allowed more of a discussion about it. But here he was, sitting on the presidential chopper with an agent who already looked like he hated Jamie’s guts, and heading to Long Island.
“You don’t like me very much, do you?” Jamie asked, leaning forward to look at Roberts, who was sitting opposite, leafing through a paper file. He looked up and blinked slowly. Jamie could tell that the man was searching for the answer least likely to offend and he grinned wryly. “It’s okay, I don’t mind. You don’t have to like me to be able to do your job.”
Jamie sat back and turned to look out the window, and Roberts closed the file and placed it on the table in front of him.
“You don’t remember me at all, do you, sir?”
Jamie raised his eyebrows in surprise. “Should I?”
Roberts cleared his throat. “Two years ago, sir. Helmand Province, 85th Infantry. We overlapped command for three days—you rotated in just as I was going out. We went on one patrol together when we were ambushed. You pushed me out of the line of fire and behind cover. We took out—”
“Six insurgents,” Jamie finished. He remembered it very well, the blinding sunshine, the heat, the dust that kicked up in the spray of bullets and the stomping of combat boots as they scrambled for cover. And he remembered the man that had slipped on the loose ground and fallen, who he had grabbed by the straps of his back and hauled behind a rock. “You’re Christopher Roberts. I remember you.”
* * * *
Jamie’s entire face changed. He went from being bored and sullen one second, to sitting up straight in his seat, eyes bright with recognition as he grasped Chris’s hand, his smile genuine and warm. Chris suddenly knew what Natalie had been talking about earlier.
“You know what? I am so sorry. You must have thought I was a total asshole,” Jamie said.
“Well…” Chris trailed off, unsure of what to say.
He had thought Jamie to be a total asshole, but he really didn’t want to say so. In the army, they had both been of equal rank, but here, Chris was in Jamie’s service. He didn’t have the right to speak to him like an equal.
“No, seriously.” Jamie grinned, finally letting go of Chris’s hand and relaxing into his seat. “I was an asshole. I apologize. I didn’t realize that you were military, too.”
Chris absently rubbed the back of his neck, still taken aback at the warmth radiating from this man, how sudden and unexpected it had been. He honestly hadn’t believed that Jamie would remember that day in Helmand. They had met the night Barratt had arrived, had a drink in the mess, gone out on patrol the next day, and then Chris had rotated back to the States the day after, leaving Jamie Barratt in charge of his old unit. Chris had then applied for the Secret Service and been discharged from the army, spending the next few years on the payroll of the president.
Jamie sighed and smiled. “I’m afraid I’m a little distrustful of the Secret Service right now—after the last guy. It all went to hell, and I was nervous about having another shadow, but now I know who you are and that you’re one of my own…I trust you. I know I can trust you.”
Chris felt himself smile at that and he nodded—this was more like the man he remembered. “Okay.”
“Okay,” Jamie repeated. “Eighty-fifth, huh?”
“Eighty-fifth,” Chris said and chuckled.
“Well, fuck me. Small world.” Jamie drew a deep breath, then slapped his thigh with the palm of his hand. “This calls for a drink.”
“Sir? It’s barely midday.”
Jamie grinned wickedly. “Even better.”