AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Well,” Natalie murmured, her stylus a blur as she answered the email. “He’s going to get totally wasted and probably make out with everybody under the age of forty, but he’s not going to get in a fight or anything because we invited only nice people, and nobody is stupid enough to bring drugs within a mile of the president. So, you’ll probably have to carry him home and drape him over the toilet, but that’ll be the worst of it, I promise.”
Chris laughed nervously. “Does he often make out with everyone at his birthday parties?”
Natalie smirked. “It ain’t a Barratt party until Jamie has kissed ten separate people, split up one couple because he was making out with both of them, and fucked somebody in a closet,” she replied seriously.
Chris was starting to feel ever so slightly apprehensive, and a little annoyed. “Is that how you got involved with him?” Chris regretted it the moment he said it.
Natalie gave him a look that could kill.
“I’m sorry,” he said immediately. “That was unbelievably fucking mean and deeply personal. I’m an ass.”
“Yes, you are,” Nat shot back.
“I’m sorry.”
They walked in silence for a few more minutes, Chris mentally kicking himself for his uncharacteristic outburst. Natalie was about the closest thing he had to a friend in the White House security circle. The last thing he wanted in the world was to upset her over his own completely irrational feelings of jealousy.
“It wasn’t like that,” Natalie said after a while, her stylus ceasing its movement on her PDA. “Me and Jamie—it wasn’t like that.”
“Oh, Nat, you don’t have to explain anything to me…”
“No, it’s fine,” she replied tightly. “I had just come back from a year in Russia. It had been awful—there are things about that year that I’ve never told anybody, that I’ve just buried down so deep that they no longer exist. The agency allowed me to take the lead of Governor Barratt’s security during her election campaign. Jamie had just finished college—he spoke all these languages beautifully, including Russian, and we had both done political science. We had stuff in common, he was funny, he had an amazing ability to batter down my walls and make me smile. He started realizing I had nightmares sometimes, when I’d show up the next day and be ratty with everyone and jumpy. We kinda started sleeping together when he confronted me about them—he was concerned, I was angry, and the next thing we knew, stuff was getting broken as clothes started flying everywhere.”
Chris looked pointedly at his feet, dragging them in the sand. He hadn’t actually wanted to know any of this.
“I thought you said it had only been physical,” he found himself saying. “Sounds like it was a bit more than that.”
Natalie shook her head and gave him a small smile. “It might have been if I’d allowed it. But I wasn’t ready to let anyone in just then. I put my foot down, didn’t let myself get emotionally attached. He seemed okay with that, and we remain more than amicable in our relationship.”
“Did the president ever find out?” Chris asked.
“Definitely not,” Natalie replied, shaking her head. “I’m practically considered family these days—I live out of that woman’s pocket; I sleep in the room down the hall. But two years ago, I would have been metaphorically shipped off to the gulag if she’d ever known. And she wasn’t nearly as protective of him back then as she is now.”
Chris bit his lip and glanced up, his eyes settling on Jamie’s back, his arm still linked with his mother’s. He felt a strange pang—not quite jealousy, but almost disappointment to find out that he wasn’t really Jamie’s first. It seemed like he had a bit of a thing for the Secret Service, and if Chris didn’t know for certain that Jamie’s feelings for him were real, if he hadn’t seen it in his eyes and heard it in Jamie’s voice, if he hadn’t have begged Chris that night at the Met to tell him that it was real, then Chris would have been done.
But he loved Jamie, and he was damn well sure that if Jamie didn’t quite love him back just yet, then he was at least close to it. Chris hadn’t really wanted to hide their relationship, but after hearing Natalie’s story, he was pretty sure they were doing the right thing for now. He trusted that Jamie knew what he was doing with regards to talking his mother around. Chris just knew they he couldn’t lose him, and he’d do everything in his power to stay.
* * * *
Jamie was still feeling a little jumpy. He had never come so close to losing the most important thing in his entire life until that morning. If he hadn’t heard the cars pull up…well, it didn’t bear thinking about. They had managed to disentangle in time, managed to cover it and hide the fact that they had been right in the middle of seriously mind-blowing sex a minute earlier. But Jamie was still on edge.
“Are you sure you’re okay, sweetie?” his mother asked as they walked down the beach, Boomer running ahead of them and chasing his favorite tennis ball.
Jamie glanced at her and managed a smile. “Yeah, I’m fine. I’m just…thinking.”
“Don’t hurt yourself,” she joked, linking her arm through his again.
His smile widened. “Nah, I won’t.”
Winifred Barratt, known fondly as Freddie by the entire country, was almost as tall as her son, but that was where the physical similarities ended. His father had been taller than him, but Jamie was his double in every other way, or so he had been told. Most people had mistaken Aunt Helen for his mother before their family had been thrown into the public eye, but after a while, everyone could clearly see that he had a lot of Freddie Barratt’s personality traits.
“Anything you want to tell me?”
Jamie looked at her and bit his lip. He wanted to tell her right now, get all of it out in the open about him and Chris, but this was not the right time. Jamie needed Chris to be with him tonight—he couldn’t afford for this conversation to go badly.
“It can wait,” he said. “When we get back to DC, there are a few things I need to talk to you about, okay?”
His mother frowned. “Anything I need to worry about?”
