Her Secret Service (Jane Roe 1) by Jason Letts (sites to read books for free TXT) 📗

on her based on her duties during the trip, but with just a few words Agent Trice was trying to make the case that the cycling had caused her to be negligent.

“Another easy question. I’m able to effectively perform my duties while also handling the responsibility of personally protecting the president during his weekend rides by being diligent and making sure my work is done to the highest possible standard. It’s also important to note that everything involving the president’s protection is the result of a team effort with the assistance of a technical security agent, an intelligence agent, a transportation agent, advance agents, and the assistance of field office agents.”

But none of them had gotten so much as a call from the Office of the Inspector General, and Jane had her suspicions as to why. She was the only woman, though perhaps she had stretched the bounds of her responsibilities by burgeoning into other agents’ territories. But that was only to help make things easier for them.

“The president is about two years older than you, correct?” Trice asked.

“Approximately.”

“My understanding is that during these rides there has been a high degree of socialization. Would you agree with that?”

The president. The president. The president. What Jane wanted to shout out was that his name was Alex, but that would’ve been the worst possible thing to say while this OIG agent groped for a sense that less-than-professional behavior was taking place.

It made Jane realize what Alex had been getting at that had disappointed him so much. Her responsibility was to the office and the officeholder, but he still wanted to be treated as an individual on his own merits and responded to with a human touch. When his own identity vanished within the office of the presidency, he was truly alone to the point of having disappeared completely.

“The president views the training rides as partially for the purposes of socialization, and with the Camp David perimeter encompassing roughly twenty-five miles of space protected from intruders in all directions this explicit directive from the Commander in Chief appeared permissible.”

Agent Trice looked straight on at Jane with neither malice nor sympathy.

“Many would consider it inappropriate for a man in his position to be fraternizing with a woman like this.”

Jane pursed her lips.

“He is not ‘a man’. He’s the president of the United States. I am not ‘a woman’. I am a member of the Presidential Protective Division charged with guarding the officeholder. We were not fraternizing. We were engaged in a discussion that predominantly centered on how the Secret Service carries out its mission.”

Though she said these things, Jane found it increasingly difficult to force the words out of her mouth, as they’d come to be anathema to how she felt. She wanted him to be Alex and her to be Jane, and after some of the things Leslie Hodge wrote about him in her tell-all she found herself feeling protective about him in ways that had nothing to do with his life and his job. She needed to find a way to tell him, to make right what she’d done wrong, and to do it of her own initiative in the way that he wanted.

“How would you describe your feelings toward the president?”

The way Agent Trice looked at Jane was so impersonal it was almost as if she hadn’t been arranging the entire line of questioning as a series of traps. The thought crossed her mind that this agent may have been posing these questions as much to further her investigation as it was out of a sense of loyalty to the president, perhaps to spare him a scandal, but whatever the reason it made clear that in this day and age who the president slept with was like a bed of nails.

“My feelings are patriotism, respect, and duty.”

Trice’s lip twitched ever so slightly. That wasn’t the answer she was looking for.

“Have you ever imagined yourself in a relationship with the president?”

“No, I haven’t.”

Jane had intended never to lie, but she hadn’t expected questions to pertain to things that existed entirely in her head either. She worked for the government and abided by its rules and regulations, but there was space in there that remained her own. After being close to him and seeing the way his strong body moved in ways that made her breathless to remember, she had imagined doing plenty of things with him that her employer was not privy to.

“Have you made any sacrifices to your job performance because of the cyclist training?”

“No.”

Agent Trice glanced down at her pad, perhaps imagining there were more questions to ask after that particularly vacuous one that only showed how desperate she was to identify even the slightest impropriety.

“That will be all.”

But she hadn’t gotten anything, and Jane left with a little bit of a sore rear because of the chair and a crushing sense that the OIG was going to be watching her like a hawk and scrutinizing her for things that had absolutely nothing to do with the Air Force One bombing. That made it an inopportune time to have a revelation about what was in her heart and the need to do something about it, but having to deny everything she felt only inflated her feelings.

Back in her office, she picked up the phone and gritted her teeth. Wanting to talk to Alex was one thing, but doing so in a way that wouldn’t get her canned was quite another. What was she even going to say to him? Bringing up her attraction and admiration were thorny subjects. And how was he supposed to respond? Even if he felt the same way, which she could only vaguely guess at, any sort of advance or proposition would be one leak away from ruining him. The Leslie Hodge story was already doing so much damage.

Why would he risk it all for her? She was nobody.

Trying to talk to him over the phone was out of the question. She knew as well as