To Serve at the Pleasure of the President (Billionaire BDSM erotic romance) Read online

  To Serve at the Pleasure of the President

  by Delia Dirk

  Copyright 2012 Delia Dirk

  This book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This book may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, the please return to Amazon.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the work of this author.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, events, and locations are fictitious or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to persons either living or dead is purely coincidental.

  Was it melodramatic of him to be more afraid of this phone call than the one that ended with a half dozen dead Palestinians or the one that stopped a Turkish bombing from escalating into an all-out war? He had never thought melodrama his strong suit, but he just couldn't read the calm he'd worn for those situations. He couldn't keep the floodrush of feeling locked down in his gut where it woudln't have the traction to hang him like this. Let it not be said that Alex Carver doesn't care about his friends.

  Click. “Mrs. Whitehall? It's Alex. Alex Carver.”

  “Alex? Oh Alex! I haven't seen you in a dog's age!” Then there was a hush and he could hear it, hear it when she connected past and present. “I- take it this isn't a social call, Sir.”

  This was a script Alex read with a draining regularity, but for a heartbeat – he faltered.

  “No. I'm afraid I have the sad duty of breaking some bad news.”

  “Oh god...” with those words she rendered the rest of the conversation a painful formality. The nerves were laid bare.

  “Anne, Jason's plane was making a routine pass over unfriendly territory this morning when they encountered enemy fire.” Alex heard a shivering sob. Yeah, she knew. “Their plane was shot down at 4:37 this morning. I'm so sorry,” he said into the dull silence on the other end of the line. Made out the rustle of tissues, the blowing of a nose, the outlines of a person in grief beyond words.

  “I can't give you any details,” he continued, “but Jason died in the service of his country. He was a hero, Anne.”

  “But I don't care about heroes. I just want my son!” burst out of the phone.

  “I remember him, Anne, he was a beautiful little boy,” Alex gentled. In fact he hadn't seen Jason since he'd been that little boy. “Listen, is there anyone there with you?”

  “No. No, I've been by myself since Henry left.” Dead. She sounded hollow. Like her voice was echoing out of the depths of a Pharaoh's tomb.

  Alex's mind preserved Jason as he last saw him, like a still from an old movie. A toddler, shot down over hostile territory.

  “Are there any friends you can visit?” he said.

  “I don't know.”

  “I don't want to leave you by yourself.” He had little manoeuvrability, as far as that went. This call alone had probably overdrawn him on his spare minutes.

  “I'll figure something out.”

  “I wish I could come help, Anne. That's all.” She didn't respond. Left him clutching at nothing but plastic and wire. It wasn't human enough to cushion the terrible hurt. He tried again: “How about dinner? Tonight?”

  “Okay.”

  “You can come here. I'll have them cook something nice. I just want to help, Anne.”

  “Okay.” He wasn't talking to a person. He was talking to her reptile brainstem.

  Alex touched his brow, smoothed his lacquered hair. “Alright. Alright, I'll get you picked up at 8:00.” Silence. She was long since gone and he was talking to dead air. Oh, there was a human attached there somewhere down the line, but it was little more than a heartbeat and a dead ear. “I'm going now. You call someone else, okay? Will you do that for me?”

  “Yeah. I'm okay.” But she had hung up before the end of the last word, so desperate was that woman to let go of her controlled grief.

  By the time the wretched conversation ended, he was state of agitation bordering on delirium. What he needed – and what else should be easier to come by? - was a spare moment. And Alex didn't have it. What he did have was a numb ache in his soul and the sensation that he was being ground down into a giant's bread.

  True to form, he barely had enough time to shit the papers on his desk before his secretary's telltale voice called out, “Miss Shepherd to see you, sir!”

  “Send her in,”Alex responded mechanically.

  Entering the Oval Office, his Chief of Staff's stride broke momentarily at his expression. The sentence she was starting didn't make it out of her mouth fast enough and Alex ducked in the open gap.

  “How did this happen? How did four Americans in one of the most advanced weapons ever conceived manage to get blown from the sky by a bunch of guys armed with the modern equivalent of really pointy sticks?”

  Sarah Shepherd stopped on the spot, not quite managing to get her mouth closed. She inspected Alex with cagey eyes. “Well for one, these guys were using equally advanced, equally American weapons. Pointed sticks didn't come anywhere near this one, Mr. President.”

  He understood how confused Sarah must be. After all, the situation wasn't all that far from ordinary, albeit a bit of a warped ordinary. He understood, and took a strange fierce pleasure in confounding her.

  “That had better be fresh intel I see there, because it's been almost 12 hours since he got gunned down and I remember us being better than that,” he said.

  “He, sir?”

  “What?” The bubble popped.

  “You said 'he got gunned down.' Did you know someone on that plane?”

  Hah. That was a stunning error to make. So much for being presidential. “The son of an old friend.” Alex cleared his throat. “Do you know which group it was?”

  “No,” she said, “Not yet. Ah, sir, you know we won't be able to respond to this. We weren't supposed to be in Syria at all. We were in the wrong, here.”

  “Four people died because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time, Sarah.” He didn't disagree with her but his belligerence was braying away in his head and wouldn't be quieted.

  Sarah barely rippled. “They were spying, sir. It was a spy plane. They weren't exactly out picking wildflowers.”

  “We can't let them think we'll sit down and let them push us around.”

  “I agree, sir, but it'll be because nobody will know this happened in the first place, not because we stat braying and prancing.” And, ah, Alex was thinking, he was so lucky it was Sarah to find him like this, because Sarah could handle him. She wasn't about to get squashed by him or let a little something like his being the most powerful man in the world get int he way of the real issue, but -

  “With all due respect, sir,” Sarah said, “I think you're taking this personally.”

  “And why shouldn't I!” he stormed.

  They stared at each other in ripe silence. He was irredeemably stupid, yes, but it went a long ways toward improving his howling mood.

  Sarah tossed her files on the table. “Sir, there's a meeting with the Join Chiefs in about five minutes to discuss our next step here.”

  Here eyes were troubled. The suspicion risen back to the surface.

  “Do we know how the Syrians have taken this?” he said, trying to chase the look away before it met the Joint Chiefs.

  “No, but I doubt they're in a position to do a hell of a lot about it, no matter what they think.”

  “And what do you think?”

  �
�About what?” Sarah perched, businesslike, on one of the chairs.

  “What we should do next.” Alex stepped around the desk, making an effort to keep his posture open, slipping into the him he wore for the media.

  She made a soft, amused sound, and from the smirk in her eyes, Alex knew she recognised what he was up to. Still, her face had lost its rigidity. “I think we should lie low for a while,” she said, “pull back on our surveillance of Syria and focus on Palestine and Iran.”

  “You know,” he started, leaning back against the desk, “in college, I had a professor whose young son was hit and killed when he ran out in the road. My professor spent so long beating the guy down in court that he cost a poor kid his college career and possibly wound up ruining his life.” Alex looked up so their eyes met, the torrent of emotion finally down to a slow simmer. “When Mary died, I tried to do the same thing. Except with me, it was beating down cancer and, well, you know how well that went.” Alex could still feel that one right down in his heartmeat. “Do not. Do not let me do that again here.”

  Sarah's frown filled the room. “Sir, you started a hugely successful cancer foundation in your wife's name. I don't think...” but she did. He had been so angry.

  “Alex,” he said.

  “Pardon?”

  “We're talking about deeply personal things here. I don't think we're President and Chief of Staff right now. For God's sake, call me Alex.”

  But Sarah looked at her watch and now her frown had a different tenor. Alex knew they were done.

  “I will, sir,” Sarah said, “but right now, I need to sit wit the Chiefs of Staff.”

  She stepped toward the exit but stopped, said over her shoulder, “Take as long as you need. We'll be waiting in the Situation Room.” Then she was gone.

  Alex pulled out a cigarette.

  “Where's the closest base to the crash site?” President Carver asked General Osgoode.

  The man's hands alighted on a folder but it was one of the others who answered.

  “That would be Tal Afar in Iraq.”

  Alex nodded and sipped at his fuming coffee, the third cup of the day. “Tell me what happens when I give the order.”

  Osgoode tapped a pencil against the relevant part of some document Alex couldn't hope to see from here. “A V-22 carrying a small Special Tactics unit will enter Syrian airspace.” The pencil slid somewhere else he was equally blind to. “They will remove the downed plane's black box and any other sensitive equipment. They will then plant explosives to render the lest of the wreck unusable by scavengers.”

  “And explosives are the only way we have of doing that?”

  “They're the most reliable, sir,” Sarah said. “The downed plane is top secret equipment. It'd be a nightmare to get the technology on either side of that civil war.”

  “Hm,” Alex considered. “What are our chances of being detected?”

  Sarah gestured to a map on a nearby screen. Osgood said, “Unlikely. The plane went down in a stretch of empty desert.”

  “Do they know the plane is ours?” Alex asked.

  Osgoode flipped pages. “We don't have that information yet, sir.”

  “But if they know it's ours, they'll know recon is coming.”

  “We can't be certain of that.”

  By now his choice was effectively made, but Alex asked Sarah for any additional information by way of a significantly raised eyebrow.

  Her response was about what he expected: “The diplomatic fallout could be ugly but I think this technology anywhere over there would be uglier.”

  “Alright,” Alex said. He incline his head a moment of contemplation before deciding once and for all:

  “Go.”

  There was a chorus of thank-you-sirs and a shuffling of chairs. Alex wondered when exactly there had stopped being a difference between wartime and peace.

  The rest of the day was the usual crush and shuffle of foreign diplomats, irate senators, TV appearances, policy meetings, economy meetings, staffer meetings, and phone calls, phone calls, phone calls. It was only through sheer luck that it didn't run long and he was able to make it to dinner with Annie Whitehall that evening. Another small victory over the increasingly hostile laws of probability.

  Their conversation left oh so much to be filled. Alex never expected Anne to be a scintillating conversationalist in the wake of her son's death, but it was as if the setting made her talk to a what instead of a who. Gone was Anne's old college friend Alex Carver. Today Anne was stuck in a flagging dialogue with the President of the United States.

  “How old was Jason? Twenty?” Alex asked.

  “Twenty two,” and answered.

  “Call me Alex”

  “Yes, Alex – sir.”

  His smile was wretched. “I remember a little four-year-old boy trying very hard to ride one of the dogs.”

  Anne gave a fragile little laugh but her eyes were ruddy and watery. “Mr President.”

  “Alex.”

  “He never stopped being that little boy.” And fell into silent tears.

  “Is there anything I can do for you? Anything at all...” he said.

  “Please, Mr. President...”

  Alex should bring up something else, put her at ease somehow. But he couldn't tell her about foreign policy, or balancing the budget, or the bill they were vetoing, and what did that leave?

  He smiled reassuringly, ate a little of the steak that sat heavy in his stomach, and listened to her weep.

  It was both after too long and too short a time when they were interrupted by a secret service agent with the message that Alex was needed by General Osgoode in a different part of the residence. For the first time, he was sickeningly thankful for military strife. After ensuring Annie would be taken care of, he was escorted to one of his private rooms where the General and Sarah were waiting.

  “What happened,” Alex asked before he'd even crossed the threshold. The door swung shut behind him with a solid click.

  “Mr. President,” Osgoode began, but he hesitated and Alex was in no mood for it.

  “What happened? You wouldn't have called me if it wasn't important.”

  “Sir, when our troops arrived, a skirmish had already broken out over the wreckage.”

  “The Opposition?” Alex said.

  “We don't know which of the groups it was.” Osgoode didn't shuffle his papers or hide behind his folders, just met the President's eye and gave the slightest pause. “Our aircraft tried to pull back, but they were spotted. It was shot down by a shoulder-mounted surface-to-air missile.”

  The quiet was sharp and toothy.

  It was punctured by Osgoode continuing. “A larger taskforce was sent out to break up the battle, rescue who we could, and complete the mission. They recovered the bodies.”

  “They're dead.” Alex wondered if he sounded as empty as he felt.

  “Yes, Mr. President.”

  Four more Americans. “What happens now?” Alex asked.

  “Now? Now we do nothing. We'll know in a couple days if this got us in trouble, but I think they have bigger things to worry about.”

  “Alright, thank you, General.” The dismissal was clear.

  Osgoode's nod as he left was curt. Formal. Sarah staying behind, however, was very much the opposite. It was what he needed.

  She flinched at the crack when Alex slammed his fist against a bedpost. His “Damn!” was nearly as loud.

  She took a halting step forward. “Easy.” A hand rustled his jacket. Sarah wavered near his shoulder.

  But Alex surged on. “Four men! Four Amercians killed – over what? A fucking hunk of scrap!”

  “Over intelligence that could have cost a lot more.” Sarah was unruffled. Grounded. She stayed close.

  “We'd already lost two. How many more are we going to throw at this thing? It's already enough that they've turned into numbers!”

  “With all due respect, sir-”

  “It had better be!” Alex interrupted.

 
Sarah's eyes were cinders on his skin. For the second time that day, his stupidity pulled him back.

  There was no chance we could have predicted how that played out. This is a job, and we did it as well as possible.”

  Alex slumped onto the couch. “That doesn't change what happened. How many people we lost.”

  “Sir...” Sarah released a heavy breath. “This isn't the first time people have died under your orders. It isn't even the first time this month.”