Table of Contents
Description
Title Page
Copyright Page
Also by the Author
Dedication
Author's Note
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Free Preview: The Great Turning
About the Author
He wants them.
When I first met Kevin Markos, we were both drunk college students at Spring Break. It was a week I never expected, and a week I’d never forget.
Especially since I took pictures.
Unfortunately, life got in the way, careers got in the way…as did Kevin’s miles-deep closet. I thought the only way I’d ever see Kevin again was on a TV screen.
But now?
He’s desperate, broken, and broke.
ShaeLynn Samuels is a unique woman with future plans I want to be a part of. And Kevin never left my heart or my thoughts.
Now I have a chance to make both ShaeLynn’s biggest dream come true—and mine.
Kevin’s coming along for the ride whether he wants to or not.
Desire
Determination Trilogy - 3
Lesli Richardson
http://www.LesliRichardson.com
Desire
Determination Trilogy Book 3
Copyright © 2018 by Lesli Richardson
First E-book Publication: December, 2018
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. This work may not be reproduced, transmitted, or distributed in any form or by any means currently available or available in the future, including electronic or photographic reproduction, in whole or in part, for free or for sale, without express written permission from the publisher and author.
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This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to real people, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
This is my livelihood. PLEASE do NOT share, upload, or otherwise distribute this book. When people buy my books, it pays my bills. Please don’t steal from me. If you want me to keep bringing you more stories, I need to be able to pay my bills. Thank you.
Also by the Author
Sign up for my author newsletter, where I post info about both my Lesli Richardson and Tymber Dalton pen names, and never miss a new release or update!
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Writing as Lesli Richardson:
The Bleacke Shifter Series
Bleacke’s Geek
Geek Chic
A Bleacke Wind
Bleacke Spirit
A Bleacke Christmas (Coming May, 2019)
The Great Turning Series
The Great Turning
The Great Turning: Into the Turn
The Great Turning: Future Ages
Governor Trilogy
Governor
Lieutenant
Chief
Determination Trilogy
Dignity
Diligence
Desire
Devastation Trilogy (Coming April, 2019)
Dirge
Solace
Release
Of Boardwalks and Bison
Cross Country Chaos
Poly (Coming February, 2019)
Jailmates (Coming April, 2019)
Lesli Richardson is better known by her more prolific Tymber Dalton pen name. Check out her website for more info on all her titles under both her pen names, including full book and series listings, trivia, character information, and more.
http://www.tymberdalton.com
Honest reviews are greatly appreciated and can help boost a book’s rankings on retail sites. Thank you!
Dedication
This one’s for Hubby, and for Sir. He knows why.
Also, a special thanks to Bree, who totally nailed the trilogy and book titles for me.
Author's Note
Politics are messy, nasty, sexy, brutal, funny, impossibly complex, and a lot of fun to write about. (Mostly because they’re messy, nasty, sexy, brutal, funny, and impossibly complex.)
Since the focus of this trilogy isn’t the politics so much as it is the people, I’ve taken certain liberties and simplified a few things here and there.
But the kinky shit is absolutely realistic.
The Determination Trilogy is a spin-off set in the same world as the books in the Governor Trilogy, Devastation Trilogy, and others. It is a standalone trilogy that can be read separately.
It is suggested the books in the Determination Trilogy be read in order:
Dignity
Diligence
Desire
Chapter One
Now
After spending over twenty-five years as a Secret Service agent, most of that in the Presidential Protective Division, it’s difficult for me not to think of people in terms of code names.
Mine is Priest.
Next to me walks a man. I rest my right hand on the back of his neck, possessively cupping it as we make our way toward the White House exit, where a detail is about to transport us to my townhouse here in DC. To anyone else, it looks like a friendly, familiar bro gesture, one man to another, the other who everyone knows has had one of the shittiest weeks of his or anyone’s life.
In reality, this man is the love of my life, my boy, my slave, my possession, my property—the poetry my heart sings.
He is mine.
This man is Prophet.
He’s also the chief of staff to the president of the United States.
Whose code name happens to be Portia.
AKA my wife, President ShaeLynn Samuels, the former three-term US Senator from the great state of Florida.
* * * *
Once we’re safely inside the back of The Beast, code name Stagecoach, the huge, armored SUV limo custom-built for transporting POTUS and fam, Prophet and I are effectively alone. We leave the White House grounds with a much smaller motorcade than Portia would normally warrant. Tonight we’re rolling silent with lights and the bare minimum detail they’ll let me travel with, trying to attract as little attention as possible.
I put my boy on his knees in front of me and spread my legs. He leans in with an exhausted sigh and rests his head against my thigh so I can stroke his hair and gently rub my thumb in a small circle in the middle of his forehead, right above the bridge of his nose.
I close my legs just enough he’s gently captured and I watch his eyes fall closed behind his glasses as peace settles within him.
“Prophet,” AKA Kevin Markos, is a man who graced the TV sets of millions of conservative TV viewers for nearly twenty years, before he blew it.
Which was great for me, because when he walked out of my life twenty years before the night of his on-air meltdown, he’d taken my heart with him and I’d never figured out how to get it back.
He’s deep in the closet. This thing we have is a secret except fr
om those who need to know—like Shae.
It’s been a rough couple of weeks, not made any easier by my wife’s inability to get her fucking shit together over the past couple of days, and thereby putting even more stress on my boy.
Then again, that’s partially my fault. I guess I trained her too damn well, her and Prophet, both. She relies on him far more than I ever dreamed she would, and has become to him what he is to me—heart and soul.
I didn’t wait all these years to finally have him back in my arms again just to lose him to another woman.
I mean, yeah, I sound judgmental and bitchy and more than a little like an asshole right now, sure. But here’s the thing—I’m tired, I’m stressed, I’m pissed off, and I’m more than a little bit scared.
Because these two people have become my world, and did so without me realizing how she was going to just slide on in there. Now, I’m worried I’m going to lose it all.
Correction, I’m not worried.
I’m terrified.
I’m a Secret Service agent. “Retired” is a descriptor and pension designation. When I turned in my badge and service sidearm, I was third in command for the PPD.
They don’t give that position to just any half-assed idiot who manages a GED and a meth habit simultaneously. You kind of have to know what the hell you’re doing, and the job requires you keep proving yourself to remain in it. We have a pretty high washout rate. Lots of agents end up at the FBI, because it’s hard, relentless, grueling work.
That means I can’t simply blink my eyes and forget everything I learned and trained for over the two and a half decades I was there.
In January, my younger brother and sister-in-law died when they were run off the road in Pennsylvania during an ice storm. That’s been almost ten months ago.
The other driver has not been caught.
Kevin’s ex-wife, best friend, and my wife’s press secretary—who’s all the same woman, sorry, I know that’s confusing—was murdered blocks from her DC townhome last week.
The shooter has not yet been caught, nor are there any substantial leads.
There is no rational reason to assume these two events are connected, two distinctly different crimes almost ten months apart. With every available government agency possible working the two cases, no one has thought they’re connected other than by tragic coincidence.
Except in my brain, there is something going on. This is kind of what I did for a living. One of my duties was threat assessment, which meant connecting the completely discrete and seeing how they fit together to form a larger picture.
My gut is telling me there is a connection, and that connection is through us as the First Family. This is not random, even though I have no proof. Everyone from my protective detail to the Secret Service director listens to me and nods and humors me, because I have a rep as a hard-ass for safety protocols and quadruple checking every last detail. They think I’m overreacting.
But let me tell you what—no protectee was killed or seriously injured on my watches—ever. I’m not talking stupid accidents like tripping, or falling off a bicycle.
It enrages me that there are no arrests in either case.
It terrifies me that the children could be in danger.
Oh, yeah. Adding to my already incredible stress, there’s also the little matter of Portia is up for reelection the first Tuesday in November, just a couple of weeks away, and we are now the guardians to my twin nieces and little nephew.
AKA Petal, Pixie, and Pyro.
He’s got a thing for fireworks, and he picked the name himself after he saw it on the code name list and we explained what it meant, so shut up. He’s five.
It was that, or he was going to pick “Pecan,” because he loves pecan pie, and I don’t feel like listening to five years of PPD agents arguing if it’s “PEE-can” or “puh-CAHN.”
And, duh, there’s two kinds of people—those who pronounce it correctly, and those who pronounce it the first way.
Losing Lauren has hurt all of us, but Prophet especially so. He’s the reason she was working here in the first place. He and Lauren worked at the same conservative cable news network when they met, and they were married for four years. It was an amicable divorce, and they remained close friends after.
Fast forward to six years ago, when a long series of events that started with him and I meeting at Spring Break in Daytona twenty years prior and having a week together neither of us could forget, ended with him literally melting down on live TV.
A week later, Portia and I stepped in, gave him a choice, and moved forward together, the three of us.
It wasn’t that simple, of course. There were some lies told by her, some by me to him and to her, and a helluva lot of hard work on the campaign trail and behind closed doors.
When Portia was elected POTUS two years later, the first hire Prophet made, on election night, was Lauren. He’d already told her he was gay, and hinted there was a guy from years ago. Then he hinted I was the guy, and that what Portia and I have is a mutual kind of beard sitch.
Which was a total fucking lie, because he’d long since stepped into Sir mode with Portia. He’s as in love with her as we are with him. And, yes, obviously, my wife and I definitely have a full relationship. She’s mine.
But she’s also His.
Prophet wasn’t even supposed to be here tonight, but Portia gets this thing sometimes where she can’t eat. I don’t mean she won’t eat—she can’t. She’ll puke it up. It’s a stress reaction. No matter what, no matter how I try, the sadist in me that she loves can never help her with that, and neither can Special Agent Bruunt, or the First Spouse, or even just plain Christopher Bruunt, her husband.
Believe me, I’ve tried.
Her Prophet, however, has the magic touch with His girl.
I wasn’t going to tell hm she still wasn’t eating, because even she admits after a few days her stomach will straighten up and she’ll be fine. Kev was trying to take a few days for himself to regroup and get his feet under him so he could get back to work with the election looming. Instead of staying at the White House, he’d retreated to the townhouse we all shared before Shae was elected. I visited him the past two nights to give him some stress relief.
But I’m guessing Leo, Shae’s body man, probably spilled the beans to Kev about her not eating. Kev unexpectedly showed up tonight to spend some time with her in her study and coax some food into her.
And now I’m taking him back to the townhouse to give him some personal time.
With me, he’s Kev, and he’s my boy, and I’m his safe space, his higher power. I can protect him from the world—or so I tell myself.
I want nothing more than to love and nurture him. Sure, with spankings, but he likes that.
With Shae, from me she needs the sadist, the primal man who won’t take no for an answer, who scares her in all the good ways and who can wrest control from her until she’s ready and able to take it back. A temporary mental break she can choose or not, depending on whether she needs it or not.
As Prophet, he can bring Portia in line with a raised eyebrow, a silent gesture. She’s a fierce lawmaker and executive officer in her own right, but we all need downtime. The thinking part of her brain never shuts off in healthy ways without a little assistance.
Prophet is that assistance. When the world sucks the life from her, Prophet breathes it back into her.
Unfortunately, you can’t drink from an empty well.
Tonight, that’s where I come in.
* * * *
We ride through DC’s darkened streets toward the townhome. There was a bit of a PR dance we did in the early days. After Kev melted down and lost his job, he sold his DC townhome and moved in with me, and old friend, to save money. Because he went to work for Shae, the public story goes, that’s how I spent time with her and eventually fell in love with and married her.
Once we married, we didn’t need my condo, so I sold it, and Kevin moved in with us. He was working for her, an
yway, because we were in the midst of a presidential campaign at that point.
No one’s questioned us.
Because he’s chief of staff, he has access to POTUS 24/7. No one thinks anything of it if he’s staying at the residence.
As Prophet, however, he is always acutely aware of the optics. So he goes home a few days a week.
Until this happened.
Thank god he was spending the night at the White House the night Lauren was murdered. Logs, agent statements, and video prove he was here. That’s in addition to me and Shae alibiing him.
There is nothing more horrible than standing at a funeral you know is being broadcast to the world and watching the man you love sobbing, and you are helpless to console him because he told you not to.
Not with witnesses around.
I mean, I can hug him, sure, but just like he couldn’t really comfort me at Charlie and Tory’s funeral, I get it.
Optics.
Prophet sees this shit, because it’s kind of his job to see it. He’s amazing at it and he keeps us on a steady course.
When we’re close to the townhouse, I tap him on the head so he can return to the seat and be ready to get out when we arrive. Secret Service moved the public cordon back to keep onlookers away in the wake of the pictures and video of Kev’s tearful goodbye to Lauren.
Now he’s being fucking swooned over women—and men—who feel sorry for the heartbroken ex-husband who was still Lauren’s best friend.
Hands off, bitches. He’s spoken for.
Times two.
Can I say that, though?
No, of course not.
Hence one of the reasons I’m so goddamned bitchy now. As chief of staff, Kev normally fades to the background, the power behind the throne. To have him so visibly in the spotlight in this job is uncomfortable for him, and for me. I don’t like my boy being that exposed to the world. This is different than when he was on TV. Now he’s a focus, a target.
Desire (Determination Trilogy 3) Page 1
