Against Protocol (Protocol Series Book 1) Read online

  The mattress bounced when I sat up, then shook when I stretched, reaching for my thong at the foot of the bed. I nearly had it before Cruz came behind me, fingers back in my hair, moving it free from my neck.

  “Where are you going?”

  “I...” Head turning, I spotted the lazy smile on his face and decided to kiss him before I shrugged, feeling a little stupid. “I’ve never...I told you... I never...”

  “You don’t know what comes next?” he asked, kissing my nose, cupping my cheek to hold me still while he took my mouth. He smiled then, looking over my face like he wanted to memorize every feature. Then, Cruz gave me a smirk that felt filthy, a little devious. “You do.”

  IT WASN’T SUPPOSED to last. One night meant just that. There wasn’t supposed to be an attachment and for two days after I slept with Cruz, there wasn’t. But I could still feel him between my legs when I ran the track around campus. The slip of sensation he moved inside me came back when my mind was clear, when I thought nothing, or no one, could penetrate my thoughts as I exerted myself.

  There was no erasing him from my head. The flash of recollection was strong and as I jogged around the campus, as sweat coated me, Cruz consumed me. I remembered the way he touched me, how sweet he’d been, how much he wanted to make sure I was satisfied.

  “Stay,” he’d told me when I mentioned catching a cab. “I’ll take you to breakfast.” He’d rolled over, skin damp, like mine for all the times we’d exhausted each other, then Cruz touched my cheek and that same sweet almost reverent look came back onto his face. “I’ll feed you, but first, you feed me.”

  And he slipped between the covers, tasting, sucking, electrifying my body like he simply hadn’t had his fill of me and never would. All that was too sweet, too delicious to keep too far from my thoughts—how he’d fucked me again on his bed, then in his shower. How we’d slept spooned together, naked, his cock digging between my cheeks as we woke. Cruz had gotten me to my knees, bent me over without much more than the brush of his fingers between my sore pussy, easing all that ache with his mouth and tongue, getting me so wet that I went on all fours eagerly.

  He brought me to an all-night diner and we ate breakfast at eight, then he drove me back to campus with no promises to call, no agreement at all that I’d ever see him again. But then, the look returned to his face and Cruz stroked my cheek again, leaning over for one last kiss.

  “Beautiful,” he said before I left his car and he drove away.

  No attachments. No promises.

  I’d pushed back the disappointment when it came, reminding myself that this was what happened when you’re young and free. You get experiences that last for the right and maybe wrong reasons.

  I hadn’t expected much more than the sweet recall of that man and how he’d treated my body like his own playland; how he’d let me treat his the same. Then I came to my dorm, sweaty and exhausted from my run, looking like a disaster, hair in a messy bun, my loose tank sticking to me like a second skin, and stopped short when I spotted Cruz sitting on the hood of his car, leaning back on his palms.

  He watched me as I approached, that same satisfied, all-knowing grin getting wider and wider the closer I came to him.

  Cruz didn’t look at me. He gawked, all open and brazen like he didn’t have a single bit of shame in how blatantly he regarded me. He took his time appreciating what he saw before his gaze travelled back up to my face.

  “Like what you see?” I asked, not sure how to act or what to do with my damn hands. He was intimidating, not something I’d admit to thinking.

  “You know I do.”

  He didn’t explain himself, didn’t do much more than nod at the empty space next to him on his car hood and I obliged simply because I wanted to see if he smelled the same, if my body had the same reaction when I got close to him.

  “You get attached?” I asked him, smiling at two girls from my floor when they walked in front of us.

  Cruz exhaled, turning his body toward me and I caught a whiff of his cologne, my body instantly interested—nipples hardening, clit starting to throb. He leaned close, kissing my bare shoulder before he inhaled. “I think maybe I did.” When I glanced at him, he shrugged as though he wasn’t the least bit ashamed to admit that. “I don’t like it when you’re not in my bed.”

  “I only spent one night in your bed.”

  “Wanna change that?” For effect he kissed me behind the ear, humming with pleasure before he slipped a hand around my waist. “Feel like disappearing?”

  “Why?” I asked, caught up in his closeness and how his small, attentive kisses against my damp neck had me so turned on, so ready for him it seemed irrational and insane. I never wanted him to stop, didn’t think I could take it if he did, but then he stood, taking away the sweet scent of his skin and the warmth of his mouth against my neck.

  “Because,” Cruz said, staring right at me, no tease twitching on his lips. “You silence the noise.”

  It was a good line and just then, I didn’t care if he meant it. I didn’t care that it would only last a few months. He was leaving. I’d be stuck in New Orleans on my own. But I didn’t care. I only knew I wanted that line to be true. I only knew I’d take a little piece of silence for as long as I could have it.

  “You in?” he said, a frown of worry starting to form over his mouth.

  “Yeah.” I took his hand when he offered it.

  I had no idea how in with Cruz Solano I’d be. I had no clue how long the memory of him would last or where we’d find ourselves after our time together got interrupted.

  There was no warning for the hold he had on me.

  There was no way to see the destruction he left behind.

  There was no relief from the chaos knowing him caused.

  The months with him, the sweetness of that time wouldn’t last. But then, good things rarely do. It was a beginning that had no end, a fairytale with no happily ever after.

  Not yet.

  ONE

  Washington, D.C. 2018

  Lia

  It was a Tuesday when I discovered my husband’s affair.

  Tuesdays were mundane, boring, really and this particular day was no different—a literacy luncheon, and another meeting about the Christmas decorations a full four months before the holiday, the plan for the planning committee meeting with the staff about the president’s private Christmas party that wasn’t remotely private—all of which ran over so long that it was nearing ten that night by the time I’d stopped by my husband’s office to ask if he’d forgotten to grab dinner. He always did.

  In the middle of all that planning, all those meetings, I glanced away from his assistant, Charlotte’s, desk, over the shoulder of the Secret Service Agent standing near the window, long enough that the Oval Office came into sight and I caught a glimpse of Lincoln walking out of his private study, fastening his tie as an intern adjusted her skirt and rebuttoned her shirt.

  For someone intelligent enough to convince the country he was fit to lead them, President Lincoln Xavier Harris, III, had zero imagination. The intern was young, naturally, and shadowed the Chief of Staff from what I’d spotted of her as I moved around the West Wing. Image mattered to Linc. He had to look his best, wanted me to do so as well, but that irksome insistence that we maintain the veneer of perfect couple, perfect first family didn’t seem to matter to him as he bent the intern over the Kennedy desk when there was a lull in activity and staff was thin.

  The White House was secure, but that didn’t mean as First Lady I couldn’t get the information I needed. They might be his security, but not all of them were okay playing wingman.

  “She shadows Mr. Thompson, ma’am.” That information had come along with more than I’d ever wanted from a first-year agent my assistant Veronica dated. It was her job to fill me in on the details.

  The intern, Bethany Baker, I’d discovered, had cooed loud and thick, “Harder, sir,” earning a quick demand from the leader of the free world.

  “Quiet. They�
��ll hear you,” he’d said. “We can’t have that.”

  A small giggle, which could be heard, Roni explained, from his private study, was drowned out by mutual moans and panting as though they were so engaged in their activity that they didn’t seem to care about being quiet. But then, Linc never was when he got off.

  “Ma’am,” Charlotte said when I’d stood outside of my husband’s office, frowning at the intern as she scurried away. The assistant’s voice was anxious, insistent especially when I glared at my husband, taking two steps to bypass his security.

  It wasn’t the first time. It was just the first time in a long time.

  He looked tired, disappointed probably at me for discovering him. Possibly at himself because he’d broken what had been a one-year streak of not being a cheating bastard.

  Disappointment had become the emotion that floated between us during his second term. Whatever he felt, however put off he was at me or himself or the damn job, Lincoln didn’t say. Instead, he lowered his shoulders, pulling on his jacket again as he shot a quick “Not now,” to me, suddenly looking more exhausted just then, but not guilty before Mike Thompson, his Chief of Staff walked into the Oval and Lincoln’s Secret Service Agent shut the door in my face.

  Charlotte flinched when I waved her off as she tried making excuses for her boss. “I’m sure it’s nothing...”

  But it hadn’t been nothing. Sex never was, until it wasn’t at all anymore.

  My father had warned me about this. “Pretty lies never hide the ugly for long.” But I’d been young, so naive when the handsome, charming federal prosecutor had come to lecture at the History department my first year as Princeton associate professor.

  He was older than me.

  He was brilliant.

  He was rich.

  He had ambition.

  But Lincoln Harris was also a liar and my father had been right. Pretty lies hid nothing anymore.

  I’d escaped the West Wing, ignoring the knowing looks I didn’t think I imagined, darting to the third floor and straight into my own bedroom, just after I’d gotten three shots of bourbon down my throat, I was able to laugh, though nothing about my husband’s behavior amused me. It was sad, really, how stereotypical the intern was, and I wondered if Linc knew how obvious he was being carrying on with an infant. She couldn’t have been more than twenty-one, at least a good fifteen years younger than me, blonde, beautiful and seemed completely giddy that the President of the United States wanted to fuck her.

  I’d never been blonde or remotely fair. My Creole DNA, mixed with whatever else my father’s people pretended not to be was a gumbo we’d never quite figured out. It attributed to my light brown skin and made me standout among the staff and in D.C. social circles. It had never bothered me in New Orleans, not among my friends at the Catholic private school my father sent me to or in the elevated social standings his money afforded. But, that was the way of things in New Orleans. Most folk were made of so many different things, details didn’t matter. Lincoln had never cared, but I’d half-suspected he used who he thought I was, who my people were, as some sort of crutch that might land him votes. A rich, Irish Catholic lawyer from Boston would need some way in to grab what he often referred to as the “marginalized” vote.

  Maybe he’d loved me once. Maybe I’d believed the lies I got fed when I was younger, but somewhere bone-deep, I’d clued in to my importance—the pretty, intelligent wife who willingly gave up her teaching and research position at Princeton to support her man as he made a bid for the senate, then, six years ago, the Oval. Kids weren’t an option. I’d at least had sense enough to be adamant about that. I might be a trophy, but I wouldn’t make smaller, shinier Harris trophies to win votes. I could be part of the veneer, but no child of mine would be. Like me, they’d just be pawns, pieces Lincoln moved around and made sure everyone saw. Everything was a game in this business and trust me, politics, government, it’s the dirtiest big business in the world.

  “Mrs. Harris?” Phil’s voice was low—a soothing tone born from some slick, federal training I suspected all Secret Service Agents went through before they got the shades and nifty earpiece. Unlike the other men who’d served my husband the past six years, Phil was more paternal, inching on the grandfatherly side than any of the other men who’d spent my husband’s terms guiding, leading, shoving us to every part of the White House and other parts of the world we were meant to be. Phil though was softer, kinder, but then he’d served four presidents. He definitely knew his job. Linc was his last. The thought sent a chill down the center of my back.

  “Is it time?” My voice sounded distant, even to my own ears, as though there was a thought circling in the back of my throat and I didn’t know how to let it loosen enough to leave my mouth. But that had been my way, it seemed, since that night three weeks ago when everything in my life got shifted.

  The stage and bright lights.

  The crowd cheering Lincoln as he held them in his palm with slick words and sweet notions of prosperity and patriotism.

  Then, the gun shot.

  The screams.

  The piercing rip of what felt like fire in my shoulder and Lincoln pulling me down with him, blood and sweat coating us both, Phil frantic, the other agents circling us both, shielding us from the threat no one ever saw coming.

  They’d only kept me in the hospital three days. It was just a graze, the bullet not even penetrating my shoulder. Long enough that I could be patched up for the funeral. Then the swearing in of the new administration. The shuffling of staff—the intern among them. I never spoke to her, not when I discovered her fucking my husband, not when she stood quietly crying next to his coffin, but something weak and curious inside me had me staring at her during the burial. She cried real tears—thick, wet moisture my old granmè would have called “alligator tears” streaming over that pretty, lineless face. Maybe the girl had loved Lincoln. I felt sorry for her if she did. I’d been in her shoes once, but the job and the man himself had worn those shoes until nothing was left but broken seams and rubbed-thin soles.

  Boxes got filled, then moved from the residence, offices got emptied, and I couldn’t do much to help; not with the thick fog that clouded my head. Veronica, my assistant, took charge. She found me a townhouse away from D.C. but close enough that I could be seen if the new administration wanted to parade me around for official occasions. The presidency is for life, no matter whose has ended.

  So, I just watched—the valets organizing and packing, the White House aides and President Gable’s staff going over what to say to the press about the looming threat that had taken my husband. The same threat that still hadn’t been found.

  The White House had always been like a whirling, storm-swept ocean whose current I’d somehow managed to navigate, though I’d never been able to keep my head above water for long. In the aftermath of that night, those waters grew, spun into a typhoon, and I sat in the middle of it feeling useless, numb, and pathetic, all the while thinking what a rotten shit Lincoln was for fucking an intern three months before he was assassinated.

  He could have left me one good memory. One was all I ever wanted.

  Now it was time to leave. I’d spent nearly an hour watching the valets shuttle around the glorious closet, pulling down my dresses and shoes, hiding them behind discreet, black garmet bags and in non-descript luggage all in an effort to kick me out of America’s home—the home I’d never quite relaxed in during my husband’s presidency.

  The closet was empty now. My dresses and heels were gone from the racks. Linc’s suits and loafers were missing, some sent to a museum somewhere, maybe to the future library that would likely get built in his name, even though he’d never been given the chance to finish his second term.

  There were wooden hangers resting on these racks, all perfectly still. They waited for Bella Gable, the new First Lady, to direct the staff on where her dresses should be hung and how her bags and shoes should be organized.

  Phil cleared his throat, a po
lite insistence that I pull myself out of my thoughts and get on with the show Bella planned. I didn’t linger, managing one final glance around the room before I caught Phil’s gaze. It was time. It was past time.

  “Let’s go then,” I told Phil, though I knew the command was pointless. He’d lead me. Most of the time in this gig, someone else drove you, even the you that is stuck on autopilot because to move or think or feel would be a disaster you might not recover from.

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  Bella would make a scene, Veronica had already warned me.

  “She insisted you leave through the south portico. There are guests and photographers on the other side of the gate.” Tactful to the end. Roni meant “onlookers” or “the morbidly curious” when she mentioned guests and paparazzi when she said “photographers.”

  “And...the...networks, ma’am. They’ll be stationed right near the stairs.”

  They wanted a good shot. They wanted to show the world my grief like it was something they could dole out like Kleenex. Everyone lost the president. No one would be exempt from mourning him no matter who he’d been when he was alive.

  “It’s fine,” I’d promised Veronica, feeling a billion emotions inside my head that weren’t fucking fine at all. Bella Gable had coveted my gig, and Lincoln’s for her husband. She wouldn’t miss the chance to put me in my place in front of the world. She was the worst kind of woman—

  one that would hold your hand when you were upset and then use the thing making you upset as a weapon against you. She’d do it with a smile, and a sympathetic head shake, but it would be forced. It would be fake, and I was expected to take the hug and kiss she gave me and stuff down my grief, to let Bella have her show. I’d allow it because she knew my secrets. Not all of them, but definitely ones that would humiliate me the worst if they got out.

  “The car is waiting,” Phil said, mumbling something into the radio hidden beneath his cuff. I heard “Buttercup,” the name given to me the second Lincoln began his bid for the presidency. He’d been Wesley, but he’d never meant the “as you wish” claims when he spoke them. Now, my Wesley had gone. He wouldn’t be back.