14

HART SENATE OFFICE BUILDING

Annie pulled her Fiat 500L up to the steel barrier and stopped.

“Morning, Charlie, how are you today?” she asked the uniformed Capitol police officer as she lowered the driver’s-side window, flashed her Senate ID badge, and handed over the man’s usual, a Venti caramel macchiato from Starbucks.

“Better now,” he replied, smiling broadly as he took his first sip. “Hey, I saw you on TV yesterday at the big shindig at the White House.”

“Please tell me you’re pulling my leg,” she replied, wincing.

“Nope,” he replied as the gate rose and the steel barrier began to lower. “During the speeches, C-SPAN kept cutting to various people in the audience, and suddenly there you were. They were focused on your boss, but you were right there—you and some guy you were holding hands with. Anything you’d like to tell me, young lady?”

Fortunately, there were now six cars behind her. One was laying on the horn.

“No comment,” she said, hitting the accelerator the moment the barrier was fully down.

Inside the building, she boarded a packed elevator, avoiding eye contact with everyone and trying to make sense of what Charlie had just said. If he had seen her holding hands with Marcus, who else had? She was a high-level staffer on the Senate Intelligence Committee, for crying out loud. She’d spent her entire professional life in the shadows, carefully maintaining a low profile, determined never to take the spotlight off her boss.

It wasn’t that she was embarrassed to be seen with Marcus, she told herself as the elevator began to rise. To the contrary. She had always had enormous respect for him, even if he lived a life far too dangerous for her taste. She was an intelligence analyst, not an operative. She knew the nation had to be guarded by people with guns and the will to use them. But it would never be her.

Annie would always be grateful for all that Marcus had done to protect her in Afghanistan. More than grateful. She was pretty sure she had fallen in love with Marcus on that dreadful day. She had never told a soul, of course. Not her closest girlfriends. Not Senator Dayton. And certainly not Marcus. He had been engaged, after all, or nearly so.

Upon returning to Washington from Afghanistan, Annie had entered years of counseling. Not to process her feelings toward Marcus but to deal with everything else that had happened on that mountainside in Kandahar. That experience was stirred up again several years later when her own parents died in a private plane crash. All of it had given rise to nightmares and panic attacks and prescription narcotics and, for a time, an addiction to the very drugs that were supposed to help.

By the grace of God and the patience of dear friends, she had come through it all. Miraculously, she hadn’t lost her job. Hadn’t lost her security clearance. She’d gotten help. Gotten clean. And remained so for eight years, four months, and nine days.

Now Marcus Ryker was threatening all the progress she had made.

He didn’t know how intensely he was rattling her. How could he? They had only been out on one date, intending to go to the White House correspondents’ dinner but bailing on that at the last minute and going to dinner by themselves instead. Then Marcus had headed to Lebanon and all hell had broken loose.

Dinner after the peace signing with Marcus and his team and even his mother might have counted as a second date, but the truth was Annie had no idea what Marcus was really thinking or where any of this was leading. All she knew for certain was that she was far more interested in Marcus than he was in her, and that frightened her.

There was something else Annie knew for certain—three things, actually.

The first was that Marcus was far too busy for a serious relationship.

The second was that the life Marcus lived was not one she wanted to be part of. She understood what he did, and she knew how good he was at it, but it simply wasn’t for her.

The third truth was that she cherished Marcus’s friendship too much to play games. If they were really meant to be together, good. She would like nothing better. But she was going to hold this thing loosely, make her own choices, and just see where the road led.

That said, she had certainly been pleasantly surprised when Marcus had taken her hand during the peace ceremony. She just never imagined being outed on national television.