Under His Protection

by Isabella Laase

  “I’m sorry, sir?” he asked, the last few sentences dramatically changing his poor afternoon. “Are you saying that you aren’t asking for my resignation?”

  “Your resignation?” responded Bradford with a scoff. “I want you to take over Victoria’s security detail.”

  It took a lot to stun Cruz into silence, but that bombshell shut him down. Taking a deep breath, he aimlessly scratched behind his ear with a frown. “Excuse me, Mr. President? But do you really think that’s a good idea?”

  “Running against that idiot for the Senate in 2005 was a bad idea,” said Bradford dryly. “And that targeted response after the drone attack last year? That was a bad idea. But for the last six years, you seem to be the only one who has had any impact on my daughter’s tantrums. Why shouldn’t you be the one to take control of her safety?”

  “Because, sir,” he said forcefully, “she’s not going to accept me, for one thing. And I’m not sure that I’d blame her. I mean, I spanked her. Without her consent. Women don’t tend to like that.”

  “Sorry, son,” said the president, “but I’m running out of options, and I’m worried about her safety. Victoria and I had a particularly big argument a few days ago, and she stormed out of here without her detail. They didn’t find her until about ten or eleven the next morning. Trust me when I tell you that nothing can disrupt your sleep more than knowing your child is missing, even if she is twenty-three years old. When they finally located her, she was with that loser boyfriend who I’ve spent the last three months trying to keep out of the press. He’s her type: family money, entitled, and he’s got a felony drug conviction, for god’s sake. Sometimes I think she works hard to find the biggest pain in my ass she can.”

  Cruz chose his next words carefully. “I understand that being a father must be difficult, Mr. President, but our job is to protect our assignments, not to keep them from making poor relationship decisions. If he isn’t trying to hurt her, there isn’t much any of us can do to stop her, nor can we become spies for you. We need the cooperation of the people we’re protecting in order to do our jobs, and that requires an element of trust beyond anything you might be trying to achieve as a parent.”

  “I understand that, Alec,” he added with a sigh. “Believe me, if I had the legal or even ethical ability to do it, I’d have her surrounded by a team of army rangers with M4s at all times. But I need to make some changes. With all of her publicity stunts, we’ve received an uptake in credible threats against her, and she’s not complying with any reasonable safety precautions.”

  “She’s pulling all this crap knowing that?” Cruz asked suspiciously.

  “No. MacMillan thought it best if we shielded her from that particular truth. He was afraid she’d leak something important to their investigation, and he assured me that his team could do their job, even without her knowledge. But it’s time to change that, and you’re the change we need. You have both the technical and physical savvy to keep her safe, and the personal skills to get through to her.” Bradford stopped to down the last of his scotch. “You know, Teddy Roosevelt had a difficult adult daughter, too. When people complained about her nonsense, he said, ‘I can either run the country or handle Alice, but I can’t do both.’ I need your help, son.”

  “And what happened to Alice?” he asked quietly, stalling for some time.

  “She married a guy her father hated, had a miserable marriage, and an illegitimate daughter before dying at almost a hundred years old as an icon in Washington society. Oh, and a whole bunch of historians blame her for the popularity of cigarette use in women. Look, Alec. I’m not ordering you to take this assignment even though we both know that I can. I want you to choose to do this on your own.”

  “Mr. President, even if I agree to this, Victoria won’t. I spanked her, sir. Not only is that not in any job description, it’s not even legal. She could probably press charges against me.”

  “You defended yourself,” insisted the president. “She was physically attacking you, and you never even mentioned to me the blood she drew on your face. I was there, Agent Cruz. I saw what happened, well, most of it anyway. That was the same night she disappeared for a few hours after we’d argued over something stupid. She was so embarrassed by what happened to her that she never even mentioned the incident to me. She won’t make this a deal-breaker.”

  Most of it? Cruz thought to himself. There was a real possibility that he’d been outmaneuvered by the president of the United States. “How much of that scene in the Oval Office did you actually see, sir?”

  Bradford stood, taking a few steps to stare out the window toward the Washington Monument and the crowds of tiny people still visible in the darkness. “Look, Alec,” he said, completely ignoring his question. “I’m just saying, I think that you’ve established some ground rules, and I think that she’ll respond to your requests accordingly.”

  In the last two years, Cruz had never heard the normally confident man use the phrase, ‘I think,’ twice in the same sentence. He remained silent, but the president continued to speak for both of them. “I wish I’d taken a stronger hand with her when she was younger, but politics kept me about as far removed from her as a father can get. I regret that, and I regret not doing things differently when her mother died. But she’s an adult, and when my second term is done, I’ll have no tools in my arsenal to defeat this behavior that I’m afraid is going to kill her. Even if we discount the drug-selling boyfriend, she’s a target for every crazy person out there. And despite her age, she’s still the same little girl who was so overwrought with grief that she refused to attend her own mother’s funeral.”

  “Sir,” he insisted. “You aren’t answering my question. How are you going to convince your daughter to accept my protection? I can’t make her behave if she doesn’t choose to do so, and I can’t protect somebody who doesn’t want to be protected. I’m not going to lie or manipulate or even physically threaten her into this arrangement.”

  For the first time all evening, the president relaxed. “And those morals are the reason why you’re the best man for this job. Son, if you agree to take this on, I’ll bring her to you without doing any of those things. I know my daughter. There is a very, very good person inside all of that abhorrent behavior. I just need you to, well, be yourself.” He stuck his hand out. “Deal?”

  This was a bad idea, Cruz thought to himself, but there was really only one answer. Taking the president’s hand, he said, “Deal, sir. I just hope that she doesn’t make biting her protective detail a habit, because I’m not sure how much patience I have to deal with that.”

  “I’m pretty much betting on your lack of patience to bring about the changes she needs, Agent Cruz,” said the president with another sigh.

  Chapter Four

  Between selectively ignoring his phone and text messages and the timing of his trip to Asia that the press was reporting as some weapons negotiations thing, Victoria had managed to avoid her father for almost an entire week since their little altercation at the Executive Mansion. Even restless sleep and a nagging guilt weren’t enough to break her self-imposed boycott of anything presidential. With any luck at all, she might be able to string this little game out until Thanksgiving when she’d planned to show up at the ceremony where he pardoned a turkey. That one had always been too ridiculously fun to miss.

  After a quick warm-up in her apartment building’s well-equipped gym, Victoria turned up the speed on her treadmill and adjusted the volume on her Bluetooth speaker to drown the chatter from two giggling women. Effectively blocking a pair of exercise machines, the thirty-something-year-olds had been staring at her since she’d arrived, but she bit her tongue to keep her cool. Just because everybody in the room was probably sneaking her picture didn’t mean that she needed to give them a scene to sell to the media. She’d learned one thing from the nefarious special agent who’d refused to leave her thoughts; she needed to work on being a nicer human being.

  The subtle shift in power happened with
out anybody else missing a step. She kept jogging at a steady pace, but out of the corner of her eye, her protective detail received a phone call about the same time a pair of blue-suited minions arrived in the gym, their dress and demeanor easily identifying them as Secret Service add-ons. Each agent took a position near the exits, but nobody rushed to her side or insisted that she leave the premises. She’d been through enough of this nonsense over the last six years to realize that the whole show had nothing to do with her.

  With a sigh, she stopped jogging about the same time her father walked into the gym with three more agents at his back. All smiles for the people who’d started taking his picture, he waved and acknowledged her new neighbors, giving each of them a personal handshake like he was working a rope line. Nobody could woo the voters like William Bradford.

  After this stunt, she’d probably have to move. It had likely taken thirty or forty official Secret Service cars to shut down Connecticut Avenue in a rolling wave of security to get him from the White House to Woodley Park. The neighbors who weren’t pissed off by the disruption would probably start stalking her, thinking they’d catch a glimpse of him. Little did they know, he wasn’t the kind of father who came to her house for dinner. He was the kind of president who demanded that you show up in his office, and when that failed, he usually sent his henchmen to find her. Coming to her in person was a rarity.

  “Hi, Dad,” she said, her teeth gritted with a forced smile. “I wasn’t expecting you today.”

  To the thrill of the small crowd, he lightly kissed her cheek. “I’ve been trying to reach you,” he said gently. “You should call your father occasionally. Old men worry, you know.”

  She couldn’t help but roll her eyes. Seriously? She was surrounded twenty-four/seven by highly trained professional gunslingers who recorded her every movement. Taking a breath, she spoke politely. “I’m sorry. Why don’t we go up to my apartment?”

  With his campaign smile burned into his face, her father continued to pose for the cell phone blitz. Speaking quietly so that only she could hear, he added, “Only if you promise not to throw anything glass at me, Victoria. I’m running out of Secret Service agents.”

  Her mouth fell open, but she grabbed her towel and headed out, knowing that the whole three-ring circus would follow. Damn. He knew more than he did before, but this couldn’t have anything to do with that jerk who’d left her so unsettled. Anybody with any sense of propriety would keep their mouth shut, and the dark, unsmiling bodyguard had looked like integrity should have been a defining characteristic.

  Another nameless, stern agent stood in front of her apartment, and he opened the door for them without the use of her key. She glared at her father, but he responded with a shrug. “I pay the rent, and my name is on the lease. I also have in my employment some pretty experienced covert operatives. Let’s just say one of them got me in here.”

  With another sigh, she entered the fifteen hundred square foot luxury space with her father close behind, but she was relieved when his silent command left his security detail in the hallway. At least they’d have a chance to lay down a few ground rules in private before starting their next big battle over whatever brought him all the way out to Woodley Park. Before she could throw a sweatshirt over her gym clothes, the sliding glass door to her balcony caught her attention, and the man who’d spanked her ass a few days earlier walked into her gray and cream living area. He nodded politely. “Ms. Bradford, it’s nice to see you again.”

  Turning to her father, she exclaimed, “You’ve got to be kidding me? Why is Agent What-the-Fuck here?”

  “Watch your language and sit down,” her father scolded. “We need to talk, and Agent Cruz has kindly agreed to help us with our current problem.”

  “What problem?” snapped Victoria. “I have nothing to say to this... this... abuser.”

  Rolling his eyes, Agent Cruz didn’t even have the decency to look uncomfortable. “All I did was to protect myself from a bratty little girl who was trying to castrate me with a pair of leather heels. If you promise not to scratch my eyes out, I promise not to spank you again. Why don’t you do what your father asks and sit down?”

  The ease at which the handsome brute of an agent talked about her chastisement burned her cheeks to a mortified red and momentarily silenced her. She risked a peek at her father, expecting him to do something, anything, to defend her honor, but he simply nodded. “Please, sit down and hear this out. I’ve asked Agent Cruz to join us today because I want him to take over your security detail, and I want all of us to have a clear understanding about my expectations.”

  “Him?” she asked incredulously, pointing her finger at the man whose mere presence had started a quivering across her backside. His solid good looks and the memory of his strong arms holding her over that damned thigh dramatically increased the red warmth enveloping her body, and she shifted her weight uncomfortably.

  Holding her just before he whacked her on the ass, that is, but the mental clarification did nothing to ease her overheating. With as much innocence as she could muster, she instructed her computer to turn down the temperature on her air conditioner and continued to point her finger in the ogre’s direction. “I’m not doing anything with him, so you just need a plan B.”

  Sitting on her couch, her father rubbed his forehead as though he was fighting a headache. “The only other plan I have is moving you to a nunnery in Switzerland, but I’m guessing you won’t go for that either. Sit down, Victoria, before I lose my temper. You too, Alec. We’re going to have this conversation like adults.”

  Agent Cruz sat in the matching chair, and both men waited for her to comply; her father’s exasperated expression was quickly lost to the second man’s heavily weighted glare. She stubbornly held her ground, but her father spoke softly. “Please, honey. This is important to both you and me. I don’t want to repeat our last conversation. That mess left both of us unhappy, and we need to work a little harder at this.”

  It was easy to yell at him when he was being an idiot, but a lot harder when he was being nice. Humans weren’t wired to fight and argue, and certainly not with their parent. Daintily sitting on the couch, she smoothed the imaginary wrinkles out of her smooth-fitting yoga pants and turned toward her father, putting her back to Special Agent Cruz. “I’m sorry, Dad,” she said, willing her voice to remain calm. “You’re right. I don’t want to fight with you, either. This is a bit of a shock, but I’m perfectly happy with the detail I have. I don’t want another one.”

  “Thank you, Victoria,” said her father as formally as if he were signing a new trade deal. “I appreciate your cooperation. I’ll cut to the chase since we’re all busy people. You may not want a different detail, but you need one, and I want Agent Cruz to take the job.”

  One of his more frustrating habits was to sidestep her when he didn’t like what she had to say, but this was a no-brainer. She took a deep sigh and prepared to be dramatic. “No. Fucking. Way.”

  “Watch your language, young lady,” warned her father, his tone rising in an eerie recreation of their last fight. “I’m not going to tell you again. If you don’t take this seriously and allow Cruz to protect you, I’m cutting you off. You can get a job and pay your own way, but I’m not going to sit back and watch you destroy yourself.”

  “My god, Dad,” she hissed. “If I had a dollar for every time you’ve made that threat, I could buy this whole building. Your credibility pretty much sucks all the way around.”

  “Excuse me, sir, if I may?” Cruz waited for the president’s nonverbal acknowledgement before continuing. “First, Victoria, let’s get something straight. I take my job very seriously. It’s an honor to serve this presidency, and no matter what option you pick tonight, I insist that you watch your language and your attitude. Whether you like it or not, you represent the Bradford administration and, as you well know, your integrity will be judged by millions of people every time you open your mouth. And where I come from, nobody talks to their parents like that
. So watch it.”

  The bastard had a way of making her feel like a five-year-old. He was right, but not too many people had had the guts to deliver lectures about integrity and professionalism to her face. She considered snapping at him to gain control over some small part of the conversation, but his stern expression reminded her way too much of those few dramatic seconds before he’d turned her over his knee, making her think the better of her choices.

  When she nodded slightly, Agent Cruz continued. “And second, this isn’t just about your behavior. Since your father and I last spoke, I’ve gone through every threat that the Secret Service received on you in the last six months. Plain and simple, you need somebody to keep you safe. I want to be that person, but we’re going to establish a few rules, starting with minding what I say and stopping all of this nonsense.”

  “What threats?” she scoffed. “Nobody ever said anything about any threats.”

  “I’ve known about several credible threats for a while,” said her father, looking away with a rare sign of guilt. “With everything else that you’ve gone through, I supported the Secret Service decision to shield you from that reality, but Agent Cruz has convinced me that you needed to know the entire truth so you can make the best choices.”

  “This is crazy.” She shook her head slowly. “You’re just making all of this up so you can keep a better eye on me.”

  Cruz leaned forward in his chair, those dark, handsome eyes holding her in place. “You haven’t known me for very long, but I can assure you that I’m a man of my word. I won’t lie to you, and I’ll do everything in my power to keep others from lying to you as well. Whether or not it’s been your intention, all of your publicity has made you a high profile member of this presidency and that makes you vulnerable.”

  “Vulnerable to what?” she asked warily. “How bad are these threats?”