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Chris took a deep breath as he was bid to enter, nervously straightening his tie. President Barratt wasn’t sitting at her desk—she was on one of the couches in front of it, a pot of coffee with two cups and a plate of biscotti on the walnut table.
“Glad you could make it, Christopher,” she said conversationally. Chris was thrown off slightly—he had expected this to be a very formal meeting. “Would you care for a cup of coffee?”
“Yes, ma’am,” he said, finding his voice. “Thank you.”
He sat on the couch opposite and watched her pour coffee. It was surreal. She didn’t speak again until Chris had added cream and sugar and picked up his cup for want of something to occupy his hands.
“I’ve been running this scenario over and over in my head for the last couple of days,” she said, “and I still can’t come up with a good way to start.”
Chris looked at his feet, not knowing what to say either.
“I suppose,” the president continued, “that I should start by apologizing for giving you a job and not making you fully aware of the circumstances. I have to take responsibility for that.”
“It still wouldn’t have stopped me from falling in love with your son, ma’am,” Chris replied softly, raising his head to look her in the eye.
He’d thought a lot about that over the last couple of days and he’d concluded that, even if he’d known about Reiss and Pierce and the nightmares, he would have still ended up here. Because those things, however horrible, made Jamie the person he was today and that was the person Chris had fallen so crazy in love with.
President Barratt inclined her head slightly—another trait she had in common with her son. “Probably not,” she replied. “But I’m quite sure you would have acted on it a little differently if you’d known.” She set down her coffee cup, leaning forward. “Christopher, my son means everything to me.”
“I know, ma’am.”
“Do you? Because I have to live every day with the fact that I sentenced him to three months of torture, for the reason that I could not trade his life for the lives of millions of others. I could have stopped it in a second, but I had to let it carry on for the sake of the rest of the world. And I can never forgive myself for that. I am fiercely protective of him, Roberts, but the only thing I want is for him to be safe and happy. Can you promise me that you can make him that?”
Chris blinked at her. “I can promise that I will keep him safe and do everything I possibly can to make him happy.”
“Okay,” said the president.
“Okay?”
“Okay,” she repeated. “Just not as his personal security. You’ve lost that job, I’m afraid—it’s gone to Phil Coulter.”
“Good,” said Chris with relief. “Jamie said Coulter was the only person he’d trust with the job.”
President Barratt nodded and said nothing for a long moment. “You’ve not asked about your own job,” she said eventually.
“I assumed that I no longer had one, ma’am,” he replied truthfully.
She smiled. “You still have one, but only pending a meeting with Nick Foster tomorrow morning. I’m not promising anything—you have to prove tohimthat you’re still competent and trustworthy.”
“Yes, ma’am.” Chris allowed himself a small smile, the knot in his stomach finally easing and uncoiling.
“Now, if you don’t mind, I need you to take a trip upstairs to the residence—I have a son who has been moping about miserably for about forty hours and acting like a sullen child. I think he might need a little cheering up.
* * * *
Jamie really had been seriously miserable. It hurt to breathe, it hurt to sigh dramatically, it hurt to lie down, to sit up, or to do anything at all really. The cabin pressure on Air Force One during the flight back to DC made him almost pass out but he still refused to take a painkiller stronger than Tylenol 3. He had hated the morphine haze—it made him feel sick and brought back too many bad memories. Even though he was in agony now, this was better.
He had spent the rest of the time moping about on the couch with Aunt Helen, who had made the trip back with them for a few days. Jamie had been devastated to find that he had left his phone in the Hamptons and, even though a staff member had supplied him with a new phone, he had been close to tears when he realized he couldn’t get his text messages or had none of his important phone numbers at his disposal. And he couldn’t very well ask someone on staff to make a trip all the way to the Hamptons simply to retrieve his phone. So it was worse than torture, not being able to hear Chris’s voice.
Jamie’s memories of the hospital were cloudy, but he remembered Chris. He remembered Chris pushing back his hair and holding his hand and kissing him softly on the head. He remembered Chris crying. He remembered Chris. And Chris was all he wanted right now, all he wanted ever.
His tried to occupy his mind with attempting to learn another language. Helen was curled up on the couch beside him, reading some novel in Italian and Jamie had a laptop on his knee and headphones on, trying to learn Mandarin Chinese. He was a sponge when it came to languages. The only two things he’d ever been good at were languages and shooting a rifle with a ninety-eight percent accuracy rate.
He didn’t even notice anyone else was in the room until Aunt Helen hit him on the arm with her book.
“Ow!” he protested, whipping off his headphones. “What was that for?” Helen inclined her head and Jamie followed her eyes to the person standing in the middle of the living room. “Chris!”
Jamie all but threw aside the laptop as he leapt from the couch and immediately regretted it as pain shot through his left side, doubling him over and knocking the breath from his lungs.
