It was Jessica’s favorite day of the week, and even though she knew she shouldn’t, she spent extra time getting dressed and putting on her makeup in the morning. When she was going to be appearing on camera, she allowed the staff to schedule the White House stylist to do her hair and makeup, but Wednesdays were a press-free day in her schedule, and also the day that she had a standing meeting with the Egyptian ambassador, so she chose more casual clothes and pretended she was an ordinary woman dressing for a day at the office instead of a day in front of reporters and a few million people.

Ten minutes before Kamal was due to arrive, a knock sounded on her office door.

“Yes?” she called out, glasses perched on her nose as she sifted through a particularly dull legislative proposal on reducing carbon emission standards.

“Madam President?” Vanessa queried, putting her head into the room like a chicken. “I realize it’s early, but I wanted to let you know that the ambassador is here whenever you’re ready.”

Jessica’s heart jumped, and she fought back the urge to smooth her hair. “It’s fine, you can send him in. It’ll be far better time spent than this carbon credits bill that Fiona is making me read.”

Vanessa laughed, then disappeared, returning a few moments later with Kamal in tow. “Would you like anything sent in?” she asked.

Jessica looked at Kamal, secretly hoping that he wasn’t hungry or thirsty so they wouldn’t be interrupted by the staff.

“No, thank you, I’m fine,” he said, smiling at Jessica and sending blood pumping through her head like crazy.

“I am as well. Thank you, Vanessa.”

After the chief of staff left, shutting the door behind her, Kamal and Jessica both stayed where they were, gazing at each other, frozen in some sort of lust-induced haze. Because Jessica could feel it, the heat in his stare, the tingling in her core, the tightening in her breasts. She knew that this was dangerous, it was foolish, it was likely to destroy everything she’d sacrificed so much for, for the last six years.

“We…” She cleared her throat, but it was really her head that needed to be cleared. “We should get started. I think we were looking at how to handle missile silos?”

He nodded, stepping closer to the massive desk that separated them. “Are you well?” he asked softly. “I’ve been worried about you—since the shooting.”

Her heart tumbled from her chest to her gut, and she knew he could see it, because he stepped to the very edge of her desk, leaning forward, hands on the top, and then he seared her to the core with nothing more than his eyes.

“Madam President?”

She swayed toward him, blinking as she drifted into his heated gaze. And then she had the overwhelming urge to explain it to him. To make him understand how she’d arrived here, why she couldn’t do certain things, what it was that she craved so completely but could never attain.

“John had only been gone for a few hours when they came to me,” she said quietly. “They asked me to take his Senate seat, and I said yes. But I only did it because I thought he was going to come back.” She inhaled a shaky breath. “For the next week, I thought that they’d find him alive. I was saving the seat for him. But he never came back. And then I was a senator.”

Kamal’s eyes watched her sadly, and she sank deeper into her office chair, but he remained standing, looking down at her as she said words out loud to him that she hadn’t told anyone but Fiona and her late father.

“John’s parents were destroyed. The country was in mourning. And all I knew was that it made everyone happy to have me do it—take his place. And it distracted me. I hurt so badly, I wasn’t sure if I was going to be able to wake up every morning, but with the entire country’s expectations on my shoulders, I didn’t have a choice.”

Jessica was so swept up in her recollections that she didn’t notice Kamal moving around the desk until he was kneeling in front of her, his hands landing alongside her hips in the leather chair.

“And one day, you woke up and realized that you didn’t want it all. But by then, it was too late.” His voice was soft and his hands were gentle when they cupped her face. Her heart raced, and she wasn’t sure if it was because she wanted his touch so badly or because she knew she shouldn’t allow it.

“One morning, I woke up and realized I didn’t want it all,” she echoed. His thumbs caressed her cheekbones as he quietly pulled her toward him. She didn’t resist, even as every instinct in her was shouting to stop.

“I think, Madam President,” he breathed out as his hands wound their way into the thick hair at the back of her head, “that it’s past time for you to do something that you want to.”

“I thought we agreed to be friends,” she whispered back as his lips hovered above hers.

“We did,” he murmured, and his lips brushed against hers as a series of tiny explosions cascaded through her chest.

“Kamal…”

“Shh. It’s your turn, Jessica.” His lips covered hers again, and she knew then that she was lost. Lost to the sensations, lost to the feelings, lost to the sheer decadence of having an extremely sexy man kiss her like she was the most precious thing in the world.

As her lips naturally parted for him, his tongue invaded, sliding through her mouth seductively while his hand pulled her hair to adjust the angle of her head. She gasped when he nipped at her lower lip, heat and electric shocks zipping through her and landing in places so long neglected, Jessica had nearly forgotten they existed.

Kamal groaned, and she eased closer to him, craving more—more contact, more sensation, more warmth. Kissing Cade Jenkins had been enjoyable; kissing Kamal Masri was indescribable. Then they were both moving as he stood, bringing her with him, never losing contact with her mouth.

When they were pressed to one another, ankle to lips, she rejoiced in the feeling of having a big, tall masculine form to mold against. My God, it had been so long, she fought the dueling urges to strip down or to cry. It was all too much. All at once, with no warning, with no future.

Kamal pulled away slowly, gazing at her with a look of adoration. “Shh,” he soothed, while she struggled to maintain her composure beneath his hands, his gaze, and his compassion.

“It’s okay,” he whispered, pulling her into him, her head against his chest as his hands rubbed light circles on her back. “Nothing has to change. You just looked like you needed a kiss. It’s all fine now.”

“Six years,” she replied as if that explained everything. “It’s been six years.”

But Kamal seemed to understand her as well as she understood herself and acted as though it made perfect sense to him.

“And now maybe you’re moving to something different, but there’s no rush, no need to feel pressured. We are friends, and if sometimes we are friends who kiss, that is okay.”

She nodded quickly, nearly overcome by emotion as he moved away, rounding the desk and taking a seat in an armchair on the other side.

“Now, I do believe we were discussing the missile silos in the Middle East, Madam President.”

And Jessica Hampton, first woman president of the United States, sat at her desk and discussed the nuclear capacities of the major players in the Middle East while she sat across from a man who had just taken a very significant step toward holding her presidential heart in the palm of his foreign hand.

* * *

Kamal was racked with guilt. He’d been to see the president for their weekly meetings for three weeks in a row, and he’d still not revealed to her what his staff had learned about the attempted shooting. If the Americans knew anything new, she hadn’t shared it with him either, but she wasn’t obligated to. He’d been the one who’d committed to help her discover more about the shooting. He’d fully intended, and in fact wanted, to find out who had done this. Yes, truth be told, Kamal had wanted nothing more than to ride in on the proverbial white horse and rescue the damsel in distress—even if that damsel was the most powerful person on the planet.

But then the myriad pieces of a complicated puzzle had started to appear, and he was afraid of what he’d find once he dug deeper, afraid of what the evidence might say about his own father. So, he’d been holding back. Learning more bits and pieces from his security detail each day, and keeping it all close, refusing to allow the information to go to the Americans until he felt like there would be no surprises.

His guess was that when his father had been unable to obtain Kamal’s cooperation in ending the accord, the Bratva had taken matters into their own hands. His father’s increasing desperation to have the accord torpedoed fit with the theory, as did the fact that his men had discovered the Bratva were working on a drug deal that included much of the region the accord was trying to police.

But Kamal hated that he was keeping all of that secret from Jessica. He was often the keeper of secrets; he’d been charged with state secrets, business secrets, family secrets. Sometimes it felt like his entire life was nothing but secrets. But now he felt guilty, and angry. If Jessica ever discovered that his father might be involved with the Bratva, well, she’d certainly not be kissing him behind closed doors in the Oval Office.

Not that any more kissing had occurred since that first time. He’d sensed she needed some distance, a chance to feel that she had the situation under control, both for her own personal vulnerability and for the sake of her professional ethics. And he was fine to give her that for the moment, particularly since he had the shooting hanging over his head.

Because while he’d heard no rumblings that the US had discovered anything significant about the shooting, Kamal wasn’t naïve enough to think that his staff were the only ones who could gather intelligence. If Egyptian probes had uncovered the signs pointing to the Bratva, the Americans couldn’t be far behind.

“Mr. Ambassador?” Tariq leaned into the open doorway of Kamal’s office.

“Yes. Come in.” Kamal motioned for Tariq to enter and sit.

Tariq closed the door behind himself, alerting Kamal that this wasn’t going to be a discussion about the latest football scores from the English Premier League.

“I have more information on the shooting.”

Kamal sighed, tension radiating through his back and neck at the thought of what Tariq’s highly skilled agents might have uncovered.

“It appears that the Bratva have begun ferrying the drugs into the region as we’d heard they were planning. But they’re doing it through legitimate channels, shipping them via an Egyptian company…” Tariq’s voice faded away as he raised one eyebrow. Fuck.

“And I suppose that company is owned by Masri Enterprises?” Kamal asked rhetorically.

Tariq was visibly uncomfortable but looked Kamal straight in the eye as he answered, “No, sir.”

Kamal was admittedly surprised as he leaned forward and pinned Tariq with a hard stare. “Then who?”

“President Abbas’s company, sir.”

Kamal let out a long, low whistle. “Well, that certainly puts a new spin on things.”

“It puts Egypt in grave danger,” Tariq said solemnly. Kamal could only nod in agreement.

“And how are they managing to dump those drugs into the region?”

“There is a loophole in the current laws, Mr. Ambassador.” Tariq went on to explain the intricacies of the trade laws, and Kamal could see immediately why the accord would be against the Bratva’s interests. It was going to restructure all the regulations that were allowing the Bratva to run drugs disguised as aid to war-torn countries in the Middle East and do it in plain sight, right under the noses of the Americans and the UN.

“This puts you in an awkward situation, Mr. Ambassador.” Tariq spoke the blatantly obvious.

“Yes, it does. President Abbas has the authority to remove me, send me home, or worse, assign me to a post in someplace like Kazakhstan.”

“If it’s any consolation, we can’t find any indication that President Abbas has personally been involved in this arrangement. His company is enormous, it’s possible that this was simply a transport contract that someone lower in the company signed off on.”

Kamal looked at Tariq with one eyebrow raised. The man didn’t seriously believe that, did he?

Tariq shrugged. “It’s possible…”

“No, it really isn’t,” Kamal corrected. “But my compliments for the effort.”

He stood and walked to the long bank of windows that graced his large, comfortable office.

“I’ll need you to hold on to this information until I decide how I’m going to handle it.”

“Of course, sir,” Tariq said as he stood and moved to the door.

“If you do find evidence of President Abbas’s direct involvement in any of this, you’ll tell me?” Kamal asked.

“As I’ve said before, sir, I work for you and only you,” Tariq answered. “There is no one else for me to tell.”

“Thank you,” Kamal said, turning to look the other man in the eye.

After Tariq left, Kamal called Teague. “We need to move faster than we thought,” he told his friend when he answered. “Either my father or my boss is going to end up in Guantanamo before this is all over. I’d very much like to be as far away from them both as possible when it happens.”

“All right,” Teague answered. “I think we can get the rest of the details put together in the next forty-eight hours.” He paused, but Kamal hardly noticed as his attention was drawn to the news ticker running across the bottom of his computer screen.

“Do you have news updates?” he asked Teague, his voice sounding disembodied to his own ears.

“Holy fuck…” Teague gasped in response.

“You’re seeing it?”

“Yes.”

“I cannot believe this!” Kamal roared. The press had blown holes in Derek’s flimsily constructed cover that he had been the one involved with the prostitute, and now everyone knew Senator Melville hired hookers. His campaign was over. Which also meant that Jessica’s party was without a replacement for her. Kamal’s heart ached as he realized the implications of this public relations nightmare.

“Look, why don’t I go talk to him, try to figure out how to extricate him from this as painlessly as possible?” Teague’s voice was soothing, and Kamal wondered if that was how he spoke to his clients when they were in volatile negotiations.

“He’s fucked this thing up from day one,” Kamal complained. “Has it never once occurred to him that this campaign affects so many people other than him and Melville?”

Teague merely continued with the verbal Zen. “I’ve got this. You have enough on your plate. I’ll find Derek and get a plan in place. You worry about your shit storm for today. Let me worry about his.”

Kamal couldn’t reveal that Derek’s shit storm was impacting Kamal’s own shit storm, so he agreed, ending the call and tossing the phone down on his desk with a loud clatter.

Then, without thinking, he picked up his phone and scrolled through his specially coded contacts list until he reached contact sixteen hundred. He pressed the call button and waited to hear her voice. A few minutes and several secretaries later, she answered.

“Mr. Ambassador?”

“Yes, Madam President. Thank you for taking my call.”

“Of course,” she responded politely, because they both knew that the line was monitored and recorded daily. They couldn’t talk freely here, but he had no other way to reach her.

“I wanted to offer my regrets for this morning’s news. I realize that these latest developments put your own future plans in jeopardy.”

Jessica sighed, her voice turning softer. “Yes, it makes things more difficult for me, but you certainly don’t need to worry about all that.”

“But I do,” he said matter-of-factly. “I choose to make your worries my worries, Madam President. And I wanted you to know that while everyone else is thinking of the party and the press and how to save their own skins, I am thinking of you.”

There was silence on the other end of the line now, and Kamal worried that he had said too much, taken things too far when she wasn’t yet ready.

“I cannot tell you how much that pleases me, Mr. Ambassador. I think…” She cleared her throat. “I think you are one of very few people who understand just how badly I want to change certain things in my future.”

“I do,” he consoled her softly.

“Thank you.”

“You’re welcome.”

Then he heard her chief of staff come in to announce her next meeting, and within moments, the phone in his hand was transmitting nothing. He set it down on his desk, and made a vow, right then and there, that he was going to do everything in his power to make sure that Jessica Hampton was happy. Because he couldn’t think of a single soul who deserved happiness more than her.