Her Secret Service (Jane Roe 1), Jason Letts [story reading .txt] 📗

15

The Rose Garden

1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW

Washington, DC

If Jane hadn’t been back and forth from the White House so many times in the course of her work, it may not have been so unexpected to bump into the president here. But she’d been brought here specifically, secretively to meet with him, and she could scarcely imagine the reason why. As tempting as he was, if he had called her over for his next one-night stand he was going to find himself disappointed. That wasn’t her shtick.

Slowly stepping forward along the manicured lawn beside the blooming pastel roses, she approached the man in the shadows, drawn to him but wary. His back was to her, but he had to know she was growing near as the grass crinkled under her feet. His dark suit, the dirty blonde hair, she could see it more clearly now. Jane was close enough to hear his heavy breathing.

All she could do was cross her arms and wait for him to come out with it. The powers of the presidency had compelled her to reach this point, but those powers only went so far. He wasn’t the type to dally or second-guess, so the longer they stood there the more Jane read into it that this was important. That it meant something to him.

“Jackie Kennedy planted these roses in 1962,” he said, reaching out to hold one and then letting it go.

“Your fascination with JFK appears again,” she said. If Alex had a predecessor in the young and handsome president department, JFK might have been the only logical choice, though Alex exceeded him handily in both. But Jane was sure Alex didn’t keep the 35th president top of mind to serve as a role model. It was the assassination that stayed with him, the need for a constant reminder that he was in danger from both lucid adversaries and fanatics who’d love to see him dead.

Alex shifted, turning to her and giving her sight of his face for the first time. He looked anguished, shaken, but his resolve seemed to grow stronger when he saw her.

“Does anyone know you’re here?”

“No.”

“Do you know what this is about?”

“Yes,” she said, reading it off of his face.

“What?”

“You need something.”

Hanging his head and laughing to himself, Alex then took a deep breath and stepped closer, giving her a better glimpse of his brown eyes, which were fixed on her.

“That’s true in a manner of speaking. Do you remember when you said that if I don’t like the news I should do something to change it?”

“I recall that, yes,” Jane said, though her guesses about his intentions grew murkier. Knowing when a man like him wanted a woman was easy, and she was prepared to accept the evidence on its face that he did want her, but there was something else to it that made her think the manner in which he wanted her wasn’t as usual as such things often were.

“I don’t know if I would’ve run if I’d known things would be like this. I wanted to be president, not fodder for gossip blogs and tabloids. I’m laughingstock of the Hill, my Family Benefits Plan is dead, and even my closest advisers tell me to expect things to get worse. They think there’s no way out of this trap, that there’s nothing I can do. They’re wrong. I need to do something,” he said, his chest rising and falling with each breath.

“Yes, you do,” Jane said, though she couldn’t have guessed why he was telling her any of this. It sounded like what he needed was a political mastermind, something she most pointedly was not.

“What I can do is restore confidence, restore stability, but I can’t do that alone. If I had just one person firmly on my side, someone people could look to and say, hey, she believes in him, that could change everything. The love and strength of that bond for presidents spill over into everything they do and is magnified a million times over,” he said.

Jane looked at him strangely and in awe, at once beginning to see but also speechless about what he was beginning to get at. He took another glance at her and nodded.

“But I can’t afford to waste more time with breakups, hookups, or finding the right person when women see my job but not who I am. I can’t let my one shot at this get ruined by another embarrassing interview throwing me under the bus for her own attention-seeking. I need to get it right the first time and right now,” he said.

Jane was breathing heavily. She saw what he was leading up to and was terrified of it.

“Alex…”

“Jane, you are beautiful and unassuming and discreet and trustworthy. People would buy it if they saw us together. I need you to play this part. You said yourself that we are more than our jobs. It’s time for the real you to step forward so that we can move the country forward. The only catch is that no one can know about our arrangement,” he said.

Her heart was getting caught in her throat, and it took a few deep breaths to bat it back down. Was he really suggesting that they pretend to be in a relationship to shore up his standing as president? What would that even mean, and would it work? But as much as Alex had opened the door to something that seemed beyond belief, doubts and the truth she’d hidden from him ate away at her composure.

“I don’t think I’m the right person for this,” she said, stammering. He grew more pained when she didn’t immediately agree.

“What are you talking about? You’d be perfect. I need someone who can stick with me and support me, not undermine me by blabbing to reporters about anything. You were right when you said you could keep a secret. And from our rides I could tell that we’d get along well enough. There