Kamal followed Peter up the stairs to the residential floor of the White House. It had been six days since he’d last seen Jessica, and he was starting to go stir-crazy without her.

When they reached the small waiting room that he was always led to, Peter made his usual speech. “The president will be with you shortly, Mr. Ambassador.”

“Thank you, Peter,” Kamal said. The other man nodded to him. They’d developed a grudging respect over the last few weeks. Once Peter realized that Kamal wasn’t going to do anything to harm the president, and Kamal realized that Peter wasn’t going to betray them, things settled into a pattern that both of them could live with. Kamal was always cognizant of the fact that Peter would rather he wasn’t fucking the boss, but to that, Kamal merely shrugged and grinned when the other man wasn’t watching.

As soon as the door closed behind Peter, Jessica bounded into the room from the other side, leaping into Kamal’s arms.

He kissed her deeply, letting himself be carried away by her need, digging his hands into her long hair and dipping his tongue into her mouth like she was the center of a cream-filled confection.

“Mmm,” she moaned, her hands winding around his biceps and squeezing. “I’ve missed you,” she whispered between kisses.

He walked them backward toward her bedroom, smiling into the kisses she rained over his lips, his jaw, and his cheeks. When they reached the presidential suite, he kicked the door closed, reaching behind him to flip the lock.

“I ought to stay away more often. It makes you very friendly.” He grinned down at her, and she rolled her eyes. “But—” he said as he loosened the knot in his tie and wrenched it off his neck, “the problem is that I’ve missed you as well.” He tugged on the bottom of her silk T-shirt and pulled it over her head, gazing reverently at her lush breasts in a pale pink bra trimmed with white ribbon. He shook his head slowly as if trying to clear it from a fog, then moved his hands to the warm flesh, cupping the most perfect pair of tits he’d ever seen.

“Really?” she asked, grinning. “Anything in particular about me that you missed?”

He exhaled, his cock hardening painfully in his expensive dress slacks. “I couldn’t possibly choose. It’s all so magnificent.” Then he dragged his gaze from her bare skin to her eyes, and he knew she could see how much want filled him.

He took her by the hand and led her to the bed. Once there, he toed off his shoes and stripped his shirt, pleased by the look of pure lust that she leveled at him when her gaze fell on his bare chest.

“Lie down with me,” he murmured, pulling her onto the bed with him so that they were lying side by side.

She was quiet, watching and waiting for him to take the lead. And as anxious as he was to be buried in her, he also craved her company, was greedy to gaze on her beautiful face, and wanted to hear her voice as she told him about her days.

His hand stroked up and down her smooth arm as they looked at one another.

“I did miss you,” he said.

“I missed you too,” she answered, her eyes shining.

He looked at the circles under her cornflower-blue eyes, and it hurt his heart to see them. “Your press conference yesterday was perfect. Those families are lucky to have you as their president. Is there any more news on the hostages?” A radical faction in Spain had taken three American students hostage in an occupation of a college in Barcelona.

“Yes, we can’t release it yet, but they are alive and well, and the rebels obviously bit off more than they can handle. They’ve asked for us to meet to discuss arrangements for transferring the Americans to embassy custody.”

“Good. They’ll be home soon, then.”

“Yes.”

“So, the president will be fine. How is Jessica?”

“Lonely without you,” she said, brutally honest.

“I am so sorry, love. I wish so much that I could be here with you every day. I would love nothing more than to hold you in my arms each night.”

She nodded. “I would love that too.”

“And your in-laws? You had a nice visit with them?”

Kamal knew that Jessica had loved her late husband deeply, and also that his family was important to her. He sensed that they put undue pressure on her, but he treaded carefully where they were concerned. He was the president’s secret lover, and until he was something more, he tried to keep his thoughts on John Hampton’s parents in check.

“It was…predictable. The senator is recovering nicely from his surgery and won’t need any further treatment, so there is that to be grateful for.”

Kamal nodded as he ran a hand up and down her back, watching the play of light across her face, and wondering how he’d ever gotten this lucky.

“They want me to run again.”

He sighed. “As you expected, I assume?”

“Yes. I held them off, but they’ll try again. They always do. And it’s so hard to tell them no. It’s so hard to look in their eyes knowing that they lost one of the most precious things in the world to them, and this is their only way to keep him alive.”

“Jessica,” Kamal said, looking at her with an ache in his heart. “John is gone. You can’t bring him back, even for his parents. You aren’t making things better for them by acquiescing to their grief, you’re only facilitating them in avoiding it.”

“I know. Rationally, I know that. But they’re getting old, and I hate to see them suffer. They really are good people. When John was alive, I loved them so dearly. My own mother had been gone for so long, and my dad was far away…” Her voice trailed off.

“Does it keep him alive for you as well?” Kamal asked, fearing the answer but knowing he needed to hear it now, before things passed the point of no return.

She blinked as if the question was unexpected. “You know, I realized a while back that I can’t even remember what John’s voice sounded like. I can’t remember his touch, or how he looked when he slept. I used to know all those things as well as I knew myself. I miss the life that John and I had planned, but for me, trying to keep John alive has become such a burden that it’s made me resentful.”

“That’s entirely understandable.”

She huffed out a small laugh. “You don’t think I’m horrible? Blaming my dead husband for all the things I wish I didn’t have to do now?”

“No, love, I don’t think you’re horrible. I think you’re a young woman who never got the chance to mourn her husband. Instead, you had to become him—for his constituents, for his parents, for the nation, and even the world. I never had the pleasure of meeting John, but he had to have been a wonderful man if you loved him. I cannot imagine for a moment that he would have wanted you to live a life that trapped you and made you unhappy.”

Her eyes became glassy, and he stroked her long hair. “You’re right. He would have never agreed with it, and I know he would have told me, ‘Jess, you only get one shot, you’d better give it your all.’ And I’ve been giving it my all, but to the wrong things, so I’m going to fix that going forward.”

Then she placed a long, tender kiss on his lips, and as the heat between them grew again, along with his need to crush her beneath him, driving into her until they both saw stars, he knew that this was more than an affair of the body, more than a meeting of the minds, and even more than a merging of two hearts. This was something that was weaving itself into his very soul. He was falling deeply, irrevocably in love with Jessica Hampton, and Kamal had no idea where that was going to lead either of them.

“Make love to me,” she gasped, arching into his hands and lips.

“Gladly,” he growled, divesting both of them of the rest of their clothes before turning her to face the headboard on her knees and holding her hands on the top of the wood frame underneath his.

His cock ached, and his head spun, driven dizzy by her scent, her taste, her touch.

He arched over her, nudging her knees apart as he stroked up her center with one hand. He squeezed one side of her ass, eliciting a moan from her, and then he dipped a finger into her channel, finding her hot, wet, and swollen.

His teeth found the space between her neck and shoulder, and he nipped and sucked as she tossed her head back, resting it on his shoulder behind her.

“So good,” she gasped as his fingers continued exploring her core. But then he moved them back, up the seam of her ass.

“You trust me?” he asked, his voice hoarse with desire.

She nodded, her head falling to her chest as she rocked against his hand. Gently, he brushed her hair to one side and tipped her chin to the side so he could capture her lips. “Such a good girl,” he whispered as he thrust a finger into slick heat. Once it was coated in her lubrication, he slid it out and moved it to her ass, slowly, steadily inserting it there instead.

“Oh,” she choked out, leaning heavily on the headboard. “Oh God.”

He worked it in and out, in and out while pressing on her clit with the heel of his other hand. Jessica’s breathing became erratic, short, uneven gasps.

“I want you to come,” he instructed softly. “Show me what it’s like when you come this way. Show me how beautiful you are like this.”

Jessica complied then, groaning deeply as she ground against his hand and came apart, her entire body heaving and shaking in his arms. He wrapped an arm around her waist to support her and waited while she rode out her release.

“Oh God,” she sighed as the tremors subsided.

He withdrew his hand from inside her and buried his face in the crook between her neck and shoulder.

Everything in him ached to say it out loud, to tell her that he fucking loved her, but it was so far from where they’d started, he wasn’t sure what she would make of it. He also knew that in the midst of sex wasn’t the ideal time to say such things. So instead, he held her steady as he lined up and drove his cock deep inside her, seeing stars when he finally found himself in the midst of his favorite place on earth.

She hadn’t had any time to recover from her first orgasm, so another was quick to follow, and as she pulsed around him, hot and sweet, Kamal squeezed her to him, arms wrapped around her torso, one hand on her breast, one on her clit. When his balls drew up so tight and hard that he thought they might explode, the tingling turned to full-fledged fire, and he emptied himself into her in luxurious waves of ecstasy, growling her name into her ear as she filled his every sense.

They both collapsed onto the bed, panting and gasping, limbs trembling, skin slicked in sweat. When he could manage to move, he pulled her to him, tucking her into his side, and toying with the ends of her hair.

“I think something might be permanently broken,” she said, giggling softly.

He paused, considering what he wanted to say. He was, after all, a diplomat, a businessman, someone trained from birth to consider his words very carefully, to never let emotions overrule his sense and the needs of the situation.

But then he had a wave of that sensation she always gave him, the weightlessness, the freedom, the utter bliss, and he decided that a lifetime of deliberation and consideration and caution was fine for some things, but not for this. Not for her.

“Jessica,” he began, his voice rough in the quiet dark of the room. “We began this as something sexual, I think, but there has been flirting and conversation and friendship, and something else has happened. Something I didn’t expect.”

She raised herself onto one elbow, watching him with concern. “Are you going to break up with me now?” she asked, a small furrow between her brows.

He smiled, shaking his head. “No, love, just the opposite.” The backs of his knuckles stroked her silky cheek. “I care about you deeply. I know that it’s still over a year until your term of office is up, but I find myself thinking about what things might be like between us if you were no longer president.”

She blinked at him, processing his words, and his heart pounded in anticipation and, if he were being completely honest, with trepidation.

Then Jessica Hampton, forty-fifth president of the United States, leaned down and pressed an utterly sweet and completely honest kiss on his lips, and his heart moved from his body to hers in a moment. When she pulled back, he struggled with the knowledge that someone else now held his entire life inside her.

“I think I would like nothing more than to dream about the day I’m no longer president and you’re there with me,” she said softly.

Kamal pulled her into his arms, holding her close, listening to her breaths. “And I think I’m falling in love with you, Madam President,” he whispered.

* * *

When Jessica woke, Kamal was gone, the only thing remaining of him the scent of his cologne on her pillow. She burrowed into the expensive cotton and breathed deeply, remembering the feel of his hands on her body—in her body—the way he cried out her name when he shuddered his release, the soft heart-wrenching words he spoke to her in the darkness. Then she did what all women worth their salt did when they fell in love with a gorgeous hunk of a man: She hugged her pillow tight and squealed into it like a little girl.

“Madam President?” The housekeeper knocked lightly on the door and called Jessica’s name. “You’ve overslept, ma’am. Your secretary says your first meeting is in forty minutes. I have breakfast waiting for you.”

Dammit. Jessica bolted up in bed. “Yes, thank you, Marie,” she called out to the housekeeper.

She tried to rub the grit from her eyes, then looked around her. There on the nightstand was a small velvet box with a handwritten note on top. She eagerly reached over and snatched the paper.

Madam President,

In my family, it is an old tradition to give those we love a token of our esteem one time per month. This monthly giving of a small token is our way of reminding the people we care about how much they mean to us. This is my gift to you this month. I hope you enjoy it.

Jessica opened the velvet box, listening to the snap of the hinges as it popped open. Inside was a ticket stub. She read the words printed on it—Le Cordon Bleu Patisserie I, January 22, 2018, reservation confirmed.

She turned the ticket over and read more in Kamal’s angular, bold handwriting.

For the day when you are simply the president of my heart.

He’d paid for her to take a pastry-making class at the world’s finest cooking school in Paris two days after the inauguration of a new president. He’d remembered—how much she loved cooking, her sweet tooth, that she’d majored in French in college. He’d remembered her.

Jessica held the ticket to her heart and curled up on her side in the big bed, breathing in his cologne again. And for the first time in so many years, she was remembering her too—the woman who fell in love, the woman who wanted a family, the woman who worked because she loved the job, not because she was obligated. And for the first time in all those years, she thought that she might find that woman again.