Wants from me.
I pray with every cell in my body that I’m not wrong.
But at the same time, I find myself hoping the car doesn’t show. Because if it shows, if I get in it, then it’s all over. I’ll go from being Greer Galloway the academic to Greer Galloway, Presidential mistress. And the Beltway will smell the Galloway in me and finally suck me down into its swamp once and for all.
Headlights sweep across the living room, and for a moment, I consider locking the door from the inside and refusing to go out. Sending a message to Ash saying, “Sorry, but I can’t be part of your world.” Continuing my life of solitude and study.
But then I look around my living room—clean wood floors and loaded bookshelves, and the well-used fireplace—and I see the decades stretching out before me. The new Greer with her scars and all her reserve living lonely and empty, while the old Greer—a girl who wrote a soldier halfway across the world her darkest thoughts—suffocates silently and dies slowly under a veil of dust and term papers.
I go outside to the car.
The Secret Service agent has a faint smile on his face as he opens the door for me. “Good evening, Ms. Galloway.”
“Good evening,” I say a bit breathlessly.
And that’s the last we speak for the entire drive.
Growing up as Leo Galloway’s granddaughter, I’m not intimidated by Secret Service agents necessarily, but I do wonder what this one thinks of me, since it must be painfully obvious what’s going on. But he acts as if there’s nothing abnormal about a young blonde being summoned to the President’s side this late at night.
And then I have a terrible thought, a thought that twists my stomach. What if it’s not abnormal? What if I’m just another in a long line of women secreted into the Residence, like some kind of modern-day concubine? What if all of Ash’s talk about being mine, about wanting me, is just the game he plays to get women into his bed? He hasn’t publicly dated anyone since Jenny’s death, but that doesn’t mean that he hasn’t been seeing women privately. I mean, how likely is it that a man like Ash—sexy and powerful—would be celibate for more than a year?
I have no right to be upset about it, but I find that I am. It was hard enough knowing he was with Jenny when she was alive, that she got to be the one next to him, the one kissing him, the one who heard his murmurs and moans late into the night. But that there might have been any number of women since then…
Suddenly feeling very lonely, I pull my legs up onto the car seat and rest my chin on my knees, an old habit from when I was a girl riding with Grandpa Leo back and forth across Manhattan. But as much as I’d like to pretend I’m still a little girl safe with her grandfather, I can’t. Not with where I’m going. Not with who I will see when I get there. Even the city outside wants to remind me I’m not a child anymore, the sedate streets and stately parks a world away from the busy, messy capitalism of Manhattan.
It is beautiful, though, and I find myself lulled by the passing of gold and red trees, lamps wreathed by fog, sternly noble buildings rising together as we approach Pennsylvania Avenue.
And then the car is rolling through the gates, through the various security checks, and we come to a stop. I’m helped out by the taciturn agent and delivered to a young Hispanic man wearing a tweed jacket and horn-rimmed glasses waiting by the door.
There’s something about his boyish, bookish face that makes me trust him immediately. But even though he looks kind, capable, and discreet, my stomach still clenches at yet another person being involved. Another person who thinks that I’m—what? A mistress? A whore? A weak, lonely woman?
“Ms. Galloway?” he asks.
It’s only the memory of Ash’s lips on mine that nudge me forward. “Hello,” I say. “It’s nice of you to meet me.”
He waves my words away. “I’m here all the time anyway. This is the first time I get to do something fun for the President.”
His words give me the tiniest edge of relief; maybe Ash isn’t secretly fucking his way through Washington’s eligible women after all.
“I’m Ryan Belvedere, but everyone calls me Belvedere because there’s like four Ryans on staff,” he says, his words coming out in the fast pattered rush of the chronically busy. He sticks out a hand, which I shake. “I’m President Colchester’s personal aide,” he continues. “He wanted to be the one to greet you, but his meeting with his foreign policy staff has gone late. He sends his apologies, but it was necessary business after his meeting with the ambassador, I’m afraid.”
Carpathia, I thought. He’s had serious news about Carpathia from the Polish ambassador.
“I completely understand,” I say.
“I knew you would. You’re Leo Galloway’s granddaughter, huh? What was that like?”
“What’s it like working here?”
Belvedere glances around the nondescript entrance we’re standing in. “Less glamorous than the brochure.”
“Then you’ve got your answer.”
He laughs and starts walking, gesturing for me to follow. “It can’t be all that bad. And it made it really easy for them to do your background check tonight—you’ve had so many already over the years.”
“I’m still not sure they didn’t do one on me before I was born,” I say and he laughs again. He seems quick to laugh…I could see why Ash would have chosen him to be his right-hand man.