You've heard this story before: a guy supposedly kills himself, but his best friend can't accept it. He calls in an investigator he knows to take a second look, certain there's more going on.
I'm the investigator. Secret Service Agent Sean Avery. The guy who called me? My ex, Vice President Jonathan Sharp. And the guy he doesn't believe put a bullet in his brain?
That was President Steven Baker.
The deeper I dig, the more things fall apart. I've got a dead president inside a locked room. A hidden note. A secret gun. A missing CIA officer.
And no one I can trust.
Now Jonathan's in the crosshairs, and if I don't figure out what really happened that night at Camp David, the love of my life might be the next president to die.
***This M/M romantic suspense features smoldering forbidden love and a May/December second chance romance that ignites your pages.
One
Camp David at midnight reminded me of a held breath. A sharp inhale, a tightened chest. Waiting. Expectant. Always on the edge of something.
There were a thousand eyeballs in the woods around me. All the hundreds of sailors and marines who manned Camp David—technically a navy shore facility—on duty, watching over the president. And, of course, us. The Secret Service. As a whole, we were a group of overwound, arrogant pricks, and anal-retentive assholes on top of that. Best people I knew, hands down, never mind the ulcers and the high blood pressure.
I’d said it a thousand times before: life on the detail felt like you were forever on the starting line at the Olympics, waiting and waiting for a gunshot that never came, for the sprint and the race that you’d never—if you were lucky—run.
Even there, in the stillness and the silence, I was on edge. A hint of moonlight stretched like watery milk across a hammered night. The sky was a dome overhead, a shield. We were thirty-two minutes by helicopter from DC and yet it felt like a lifetime away. The churn of the capital belonged to another place and time. Five layers of hardened security would give you that sense of isolation. Especially when every one of those hundreds of protective agents, military officers, and special operations soldiers had been trained to be silent. To disappear deeper than an echo.
We were all hitting the Pepto Bismol bottles. Usually there was a little more pep in my step at Camp David, but not with eight heads of state on station. It was like Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, except the dwarfs were seven other heads of state as President Baker hosted the year’s G8 summit. Honestly, it was better to have the summit here, someplace we could lock down tighter than a virgin’s nervous asshole, than have it in a hotel in some god-awful city, exposed to the public and a thousand different threats.
Each of the dwarfs—each head of state—was allowed one aide, personal or political or both, we really didn’t care, and one protective agent to stay with them at Camp David. Of course, we acted like the protective agent shadowing their dwarf’s every footstep was a flint-eyed, cold-blooded intelligence agent. That would be the case if the shoe was on the other foot. Of course, we’d never accept a limit of only one protective agent for our president, but hey. Our Camp David. Our rules.
The rest of the mass of humanity supporting the visiting delegations, all the aides and advisers and special assistants, were bunked down in Thurmont and shuttled up every morning on a fleet of buses. White House staff were bunking at Hickory Lodge and in Chestnut cabin, and us Secret Service agents were hot racking it in Witch Hazel and Rosebud. Wherever we could find room for a cot and a sleeping bag to share with our designated partner on the opposite shift, our newest, closest best buddy. So close you could still feel the toe sweat at the bottom of the sleeping bag when you crawled inside. Witch Hazel cabin smelled like feet and corn chips, and I’d rather sleep in my SUV than hot rack in there. Twenty-five agents and one bathroom? Eau de toothpaste and ass? Fuck off. I’d shit in the woods, thanks.
In this, a secluded retreat for the president to get away from it all, we were all tripping over each other’s shadows and breathing in each other’s burps. Things were crowded.
I was the graveyard shift supervisor. My blood pressure didn’t need the workout of watching eight heads of state and a hundred aides try to navigate dinner on President Baker’s patio. Was that staffer reaching for the butter or for a knife? Was the prime minister only pretending to strangle the European Union president, or did I need to draw and take aim? Who was getting thrown into the pool first, and would it be a ha-ha-funny moment or a boiling-over-of-geopolitical-stresses moment?
No fucking thank you. I’d stay up and howl at the moon. Listen to which cabin snored the loudest. This dark path through the woods was exactly the right amount of socialization for me, thank you. Not that I got what I wanted. I’d been on duty for twenty hours straight, working the back end, the behind the scenes of the behind the scenes. Now, I was finally on my own.
Vibration in my pocket made me still. I fished my phone out. Number blocked. Right before I swiped to answer, the call ended. I waited in case a voicemail popped up. Nothing. I shoved the phone back in my pocket.
Maybe it had been—
I curled away from where the whispers in my mind were edging. No need to go digging around in that darkness, into the other reason I stayed on the night shift and had pulled myself off the president’s detail for the past three hundred and sixty… five days.
Jesus, it had been a year. Exactly.
My boots dragged to a stop on the dirt path, the gravel-and-ground-dust sound chewing through the black night. Images slammed through me: dark hair, ocean eyes, a slow, teasing smile. Almost no one could make him smile, but damn it, I had. I’d felt like the biggest man in the whole damn world the first time I’d teased a smile out of him. It was the first time my heart had stutter-stepped, too, the first time I’d realized I was fucked. But not as fucked as that night, when—
Don’t. I had shut the door on that three hundred and sixty-five days ago, and it was staying shut.
I could still remember how he felt, though, like his memory was a vapor that slipped through my touch. I flexed my hands, curled my fingers, chasing an echo of his silken hair.
But that led to the other memories. Don’t go there.
I stared at the sky again, watching a cloud shiver in front of the moon. Dark treetops scraped the night as if trying to shovel down the stars. The pinpricks above were brighter than in DC, but still muted. They weren’t anywhere close to the brilliance we had seen a year earlier on the other side of the world. On that beach, the stars had burned down on us like the whole sky was an ocean, like waves had lapped against the night and left a billion specks of glittering sand shining on him and me alone. He’d stared at the stars until I couldn’t breathe, transfixed by his profile carved from shimmer and shadow and the hint of a secret smile as his eyes slid sideways. I’d thought he was asking, Are we really doing this? Have we been moving toward this moment, this night together, every hidden glance and smile and stolen conversation building the path that led to right here—sand, starlight, and a tentative touch—right now?
Yes, I had thought. Yes, yes, yes.
I scrubbed my hands over my face and blew out a breath. Maybe it was time to request a transfer. I couldn’t outrun what had happened… or outrun him. And I’d never be on the president’s detail again. I didn’t deserve it. I didn’t deserve the badge, not anymore.
You didn’t need to be a psychologist to see what I was doing. But who was I trying to escape? Myself or him? Or was I trying to escape what I’d done?
If I let my thoughts lurch too long down that path, things turned dark, fast. The last time I’d tried to face what lay behind that shut door, I’d upended a bottle of bourbon down my throat and woken up facedown on the kitchen floor with my gun locked in my freezer. I’d zip-tied the fridge doors together. If I hadn’t, well.
Enough. I started walking again, leaving those thoughts behind me like I could physically drop them on the ground and let them fester in the woods behind Aspen, the president’s cabin. I was on the trail that ringed the golf course—one hole with three different tee-offs—and the president’s backyard. Aspen was a dark blob outlined in shadows and the hazy glow of orange sodium lights. A dull shine burned from behind the shuttered windows of President Baker’s bedroom. He and the First Lady had turned in around ten, after a near-silent dinner and an uncharacteristically tense schmoozefest on the president’s back patio.
President Baker had been acting strange ever since he’d disembarked from Marine One at Camp David. No, before that, even. I’d already arrived as part of the advance team, but I’d heard the other agents reporting it over the radio. And I’d seen it, too: the storm clouds on his normally cheery face and the thunder in his expression. President Baker was a man with a smile always at the ready, along with an open palm and an ear to listen to whoever needed his attention. He’d won the nation over with that openness, that warmth, that ability to sit down and connect with voters in small towns across the nation. I remembered the campaign. I remembered how he’d tear up his schedule so he could sit for three unscheduled hours in a Starbucks with a group of moms and dads.
But tonight, he’d been distracted. Sullen. Gloomy. His words were short and his temper hot, and he skipped delivering the welcome speech at dinner. The seven dwarfs had looked on, confused, but they were professionals at rolling with it, and they talked among themselves as President Baker chewed his salad and scowled at the wall. Not even his closest friend among them, Andrew Rees, the prime minister of the United Kingdom, could pull him out of his funk.
Not that Baker wasn’t under some extra fucking stress. It had been a long, long few months at the White House. The disappearance of Paul Hardacre, the CIA’s chief of station in Rome, was the CIA’s worst security breach in decades. Maybe ever. I didn’t know how he stacked up against Ames, but I did know his disappearance—and assumed defection—had strained the US intelligence community and President Baker almost to the breaking point.
Five CIA officers had turned up dead over the past six weeks, mysteriously shot or stabbed or suffocated or found in their car with their throat slit, in Paris, Lagos, Dubai, Berlin, and Karachi.
Hardacre had left a trail that led to Moscow, but the Russians were insisting they didn’t have anything to do with his disappearance. The Russian president had said that right to Baker’s face tonight, cigar in one hand, brandy in the other.
Baker had been too aggravated, too frustrated, and too surly to spar with the young Russian president, and he’d just growled at the man, said they’d discuss it later, and then parked himself against the patio railing for the next hour, brooding as he stared at the pool.
I’d watched it all from my post on the trails, counting the minutes that Baker had spent alone and watching his own reflection as the rest of the world rotated around him. A bubble built—impenetrable, it seemed, walling off anyone and everyone and locking him in a prison of his own rage. Not even the First Lady tried to talk to him.
Baker’s bad mood had followed him into his cabin. I’d been on the close side of the perimeter, rounding the back of the pool, when the call came over the radio two hours ago: POTUS and FLOTUS were arguing, screaming at each other.
That was unusual. They had a fairy-tale love, twenty years of marriage, and knew each other down to the molecules that made up their bones. You could see the love they shared whenever they looked at each other. I’d felt it, even, when I had been on the president’s detail. Their marriage was warm and full of affection, and the private moments I’d seen away from the press and the public had made me smile, made me believe there might be some truth to love stories. Not much made my dried-up, shriveled heart feel romantic, but seeing them together had made me think, You know, maybe.
Maybe that was why I’d been so fucking stupid I thought I could—
I shook my head. No matter what my reasons were, they, like me, had been fucking stupid. And I wasn’t thinking about this, damn it.
Every agent had been advised to give Baker and the First Lady some breathing room. Ease off. Even from where I’d been by the pool, I could hear the shouting. What would the other dwarfs think if they heard Baker and his wife bellowing at each other, especially after watching Baker throw his attitude left and right all evening?
Those were not my problems. I wasn’t on the president’s detail anymore. I was in charge of this trail, this patch of dirt ambling through the woods, and these midnight hours. That was it. In fact, I was barred from anything beyond these duties. I’d forgotten that once, but I wouldn’t again.
Never again.
One foot in front of the other. I kept my mind blank through sheer force of will.
Dirt crunched beneath my boot. An owl hooted. The cloud shifted away from the moon, opening up the wide, open expanse of the president’s backyard. I could see all the way across the golf green, all the way onto the pool deck and the back terrace.
I froze midstep. My heel touched the ground. The rest of my foot did not.
Someone was on the president’s pool deck.
Someone hugging themselves and staring at the water. Slender, tall. The fine details were obscured, and they were more a shape and an outline than anything else. They also weren’t moving, weren’t sneaking around or trying to hide in the shadows. They were just standing there, almost as still as I was, arms wrapped around their waist as if they were chilly, despite the warm summer night. It wasn’t a secretive pose.
Another figure came from around the far side of Aspen from the direction of Witch Hazel. They came out of the shadows and strode up the path to the president’s pool deck without so much as a glance over their shoulder, not a worry in the world. Someone who was confident in their place at Camp David. High probability this was another agent, then. Dick move to not announce their movement on the radio, but then again, after midnight we kept chatter to a minimum. Especially with so many ears around us and seven nations’ worth of intelligence agents breathing down our necks.
Figure number two—a man, I could tell by the silhouette as he passed through a band of moonlight—joined the first at the pool deck. His arms went around the first one, wrapping her—I saw her silhouette as she turned—up and pulling her into the circle of his hold. Her head rested on his chest, and they became one dark blob as he stroked her back.
Lovers’ rendezvous, maybe? It didn’t look overly romantic from here. More comforting than sensual. But still. Was it a Secret Service agent and a presidential aide? If I picked up a handful of rocks and hurled them in any direction, I’d hit half a dozen aides. If an agent were carrying on with someone on the staff, they wouldn’t have time for much more than a midnight rendezvous by the pool, a quick kiss and maybe a dash to the bushes if they were brave and didn’t mind scopes watching their every move. Were these two that brave? Or foolish? A year earlier, I’d risked it, a world away. But I’d taken him way, way outside the ring, and we’d been alone, absolutely alone, when I’d—
I set my foot down and walked on. Left my thoughts on the trail, like they were trash I could drop behind me. Like black oil and regret.
My mind slithered back to what I’d left behind, though. I couldn’t move on. I remembered so clearly the sharp bark of his laugh, the softness of his hair, the warmth of his skin. Goddamn it. Another G8, another moon-soaked midnight, one year ago. I didn’t want to remember—fuck, not at all. But maybe I should. This was the punishment I deserved, after—
A gunshot fractured the night. Its echo rolled on and on, over the green and into the woods. Into me and through me, as if the cavitation had opened a hole in the center of my chest.
For a second, there was stillness.
The radio in my ear screamed, “Shot fired! Shot fired! Shot fired in Aspen!”
All hell broke loose as I ran, tearing toward the cabin. The couple I’d spotted on the pool deck had vanished. Voices fought for dominance on the radio. “What’s POTUS’s status?” “Who fired?” “Lock everything down!”
“Oh, Jesus Christ!”
The last, I heard both over the radio and bellowed at the top of Garcia’s lungs as I barreled up the pool deck steps and vaulted over the patio railing. The doors to Aspen were open, and the three agents who had been stationed outside were already in. I had heard a door splintering open as I ran, and now flashlights were bouncing around inside, down the dark hallway to Baker’s bedroom.
I was at the back door when I heard in my ear, “POTUS is down! POTUS is down! Get the medevac, now!”
I shouldered past a frozen agent in the doorway and burst into Baker’s bedroom.
And stopped dead. My stomach wrenched itself inside out. Every muscle seized. I felt a part of myself continue forward, inertia and momentum ripping something loose. It banged around inside me as I stood there like a crash dummy, frozen and stupid. Something cold took root in my heart: failure.
President Baker lay slumped on his side, one cheek resting in a pool of blood that ran down his neck and circled his throat before soaking his chest and his dress shirt and spreading to the floor. Jesus, there was so much fucking blood, like someone had turned on a faucet and it just kept coming and coming. The one eye I could see was open, his pupil fixed and dilated, a glaze already beginning to settle. It was like I was looking into a doll’s eye, not a man’s. Not President Baker’s. Not good, not fucking good.
Garcia, Pitt, and White were the three agents on duty. I’d passed Pitt on my way in. Garcia was on his knees behind Baker, his hands fluttering over him like he didn’t know what the fuck to do. White had his gun drawn at the side of the bed, his body performing the sweep-and clear maneuvers even as his gaze was locked on Baker. All three were more junior than me, just a few years on the detail. Junior enough to have drawn the short straw for the graveyard shift.
I was the senior agent on scene. Fuck, it was all on me.
“Is he breathing?” I bellowed at Garcia, skidding to my knees beside Baker’s limp and motionless form. More agents were pouring in behind me and filling the room.
Garcia’s mouth moved like a dead fish. I could see the whites of his eyes all the way around his irises.
“Roll him over! Now!” Together, we tried to minimize how much we moved Baker’s neck and spine. Save the man but paralyze him? Not good. I’d take living over dead at this point, though. My fingers slid through the blood soaking Baker’s throat as I searched for a pulse. They skated off his skin once, twice, before I managed to find the carotid. Nothing. I laced my hands together and started pumping his chest. Ribs snapped beneath my palms, breaking off from his sternum. Keep the heart pumping. Go deep.
It had been forty seconds since the gunshot. Maybe less. Too many bodies were filling the room, Secret Service agents running into each other and staring, all about as useful as a crocheted condom. “Four inside, stay!” I roared over my shoulder. “Everyone else, secure the perimeter!”
Voices were still screaming over the radio. A full lockdown was slamming over Camp David: sentries were on the move, helicopters were inbound, the motorcade was roaring up from Thurmont. A dozen people wanted a status update. “Start a search!” I bellowed. “Comb the camp!”
I didn’t need to say what we were looking for. There’d been a gunshot. Somewhere, there was a man who’d pulled the trigger.
We had a thousand eyeballs watching this place. What the fuck had happened?
I kept pumping. Kept counting.
“Medevac inbound, landing on the pad in one minute.” The helicopter pad was two-thirds of a mile away, down a meandering concrete path through the woods. It was a pretty drive. It also would pass in front of a hundred pairs of eyeballs and take far longer than five seconds.
We didn’t have five seconds.
Garcia was pulling the remnants of Baker’s jaw down, trying to make an airway in the soup at the back of his mouth. I kept the compressions going as I swept my gaze over and around and down Baker’s limp form. His rumpled, bloodied dress shirt, the top two buttons undone. His suit pants, crotch stained with urine. Fuck. His left hand was draped over his hip, something dark smudged all up the side of his index finger. His right was underneath him, trapped when we’d rolled him. “Garcia,” I barked. “Get his hand.” Garcia reached for his right hand, pulled it free—
A black revolver lay in President Baker’s palm, his thumb violently twisted through the trigger guard. Dislocated. As if it had been caught inside, his hand wrenched sideways after he fired—
Garcia and I stared at each other. “Sean…” Garcia’s voice trembled. He was up to his wrists in Baker’s blood as he tried to find an airway and hold the president’s head straight. Our knees were soaked in Baker’s blood, the hot liquid seeping into my pants and crawling up my skin like spiders skittering along their webs. I kept pumping Baker’s heart. My shoulders burned. Don’t think.
“Land the bird on the green,” I spat into the radio.
“What POTUS’s status?”
Like hell I was going to say it over the air. “Land the fucking bird on the green!”
“Avery!” It was the director, breaking into the radio net from DC to yell at me personally. “What is POTUS’s status?”
I ignored him. Instead, I turned to the four agents I’d ordered stay to behind, jerking my chin to Baker’s bed. “Strip the sheets. We lay him in one and use it as a stretcher to run him out. Put the second over him. We’re covering him up.” No way was I letting someone snap a cell phone photo of this.
“Won’t that look—” Garcia asked.
Yeah, it would. But we didn’t have an alternative.
“Where’s FLOTUS?” I barked into the radio. “Someone get eyes on FLOTUS!” I needed to know if she was safe. And more than that, I needed her to stay the fuck away from here and from this, whatever this was. She couldn’t see this, my God.
“FLOTUS secure,” a female voice replied in my ear. “She was taking a walk to Hickory when it happened.”
Hickory, the large lodge near the center of the camp. Over half a mile from where we were. She had to have left the cabin ten minutes ago, at least, to get there. Good. “Hold her there,” I said, motioning to Garcia as the others laid out the sheet beside us. I counted off, and then we moved, two agents grabbing Baker’s legs while the other two grabbed his shoulders and repositioned him on the fabric. Garcia and I moved with Baker, Garcia leaning over to attempt a rescue breath in the half second I stopped pumping.
Garcia’s face came away blood-covered. I started pounding on Baker’s chest again.
“She wants to know what’s going on. She wants to fly with POTUS to Bethesda.”
“No fucking way.”
“Agent Avery—”
“Send her on a second chopper!”
We heard the rotors overhead, felt the roar of the helo as it came into the clearing above the backyard like a fighter at Mach 5. The pilot wasn’t fucking around. This was a combat landing. In less than a second, he had the bird on the ground, the skids making a hollow, heavy sound on the lawn.
“Go, go, go!” I shouted. Each agent grabbed a corner of Baker’s sheet. Garcia and I threw the spare over Baker and grabbed the middle, our hands soaking the fabric crimson. We ran him out of the cabin like we were carrying a stretcher, meeting the medevac team on the lawn and transferring our package to the gurney in the belly of the helo. Everyone fell back as I pulled the cargo door shut and gave a thumbs-up to the pilot. He didn’t waste time looking at me. He was already climbing.
I stumbled back, bumping into Garcia and falling on my ass. Sirens roared in every direction, and somewhere, someone was screaming. A woman. The radio was still bellowing, a hundred people wanting answers. The search of Camp David was taking place. I heard shouts, orders to clear cabins. Saw flashlights in the woods. Choppers were overhead, searchlights painting the woods, the trails, the night sky.
I stared up at Garcia. His mouth was open, slack and loose as he stared at his blood-soaked hands, his blood-soaked clothes. We both looked like we’d taken a bath in Baker’s blood.
Garcia fell to his knees beside me. Another agent hit the lawn, his forehead in the grass as he screamed into the dirt.
“Avery!” the director shouted over the radio. “Avery, respond! What the fuck happened up there?”
I pulled my earpiece out and buried my face in my wet, red palms.
Tal Bauer is an author of gay romantic suspense/thriller novels.
The world needs more gay heroes, gay love stories, and powerful women kicking ass. I try to write those stories. With a background ranging from law enforcement to humanitarian aid, my stories are global in scope and with diverse characters in all roles. My goal is to help normalize gay characters as action heroes and to bring to life strong, dynamic, holistic women in all of my novels.
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