By the time Jim got his breath back and wiped the dog slobber off his face, the President’s meeting was breaking up.

Again, he barely made it into the Lead Car before the Motorcade rolled out.

Mack and Mark had thought the whole thing was hilarious. Or was it Mark and Mack? They were both classic, six-foot, athletic agents with crew-cut dark hair. And it wasn’t just that they looked and sounded alike—he was sure they were swapping names just to mess with him.

The trip to the US Olympic Training Center was almost an exact replay of the trip to the Academy in reverse. Three exits earlier they plunged off I-25 and down onto the city streets. The police had a rolling blockade set up blocks ahead, stopping all side traffic until the Motorcade whisked down East Platte Avenue going eighty miles an hour during what should have been the bumper-to-bumper lunchtime rush hour. The city was going to be a snarl for hours to come—a typical byproduct of a visit by the Presidential Motorcade.

He steered well clear of Reese, even volunteering to augment the local’s dog teams. They continued their patrols around the perimeter of the secured site while the President lunched with this year’s athletes and his mother—a former medalist and one of the senior swim coaches.

His gut still ached from where she’d caught him, but he wasn’t going to rub it and give the guys any more reason to tease him. The entire ride down had been nothing but razzing from the front seat because, of course, every person waiting with the vehicles had witnessed it. He’d seen the blow coming and managed to partially tense for it—though not nearly enough with the power Reese could deliver.

Using Malcolm as an excuse, he left the patrol and grabbed a quick lunch at the Taco Bell on the corner. He had a beef burrito and Malcolm had a tray of diced chicken with cheese—he had a huge weak spot for cheese. One of the servers even gave him a service bowl of water.

Jim was halfway through his meal when Reese walked in with several of the other drivers. It was hard to hide in the crowd when Malcolm picked up her scent and trotted across the restaurant to greet her. Generally, Malcolm was so well behaved that there was no point keeping a leash on him, but he’d grown a definite weak spot where Reese Carver was concerned.

So had Jim.

Reese squatted down to greet Malcolm with a good rub, then looked up at him. After a moment, he could see her sigh deeply before waving Malcolm to return to him.

A minute later, with her plastic tray bearing triple beef tacos, she slid in across from him. He hadn’t expected her to join hi—

“Hey, asshole, you okay?”

Or perhaps he did. “Needed to clear all this fresh country air out of my lungs anyway, I suppose.” It earned him a flicker of a smile.

“Not apologizing.”

“Figured,” he bit into his burrito and ignored Malcolm’s pleading eyes. He’d long since finished his chicken and cheese. “Mind telling me what I did?”

“You can’t be that stupid.” She still wore her sunglasses against the bright Colorado sunlight that poured in through the windows. It made it hard to read what she was thinking.

“Apparently I’m twenty-four cents short of a quarter. Mind explaining? Simple words so a dumb Okie like me can understand?” Not many people made him feel slow, but Reese always raced so far ahead that he was only now beginning to get up to match her speed.

She eyed him for at least half a taco from behind those dark lenses.

He was beginning to wonder if she’d ever speak again when she finally did.

“You called me ‘any man’s fantasy’.”

“No, I called you a goddamn fantasy.”

“Well, I’m not.”

“You sure are mine.”

“Look,” she aimed the bit-off end of her second taco at his face like a weapon. “I’m not some fantasy poster on a stupid-ass garage calendar.”

“Shit! Is that what you thought I meant?” He could see how that might piss her off.

“Isn’t it?” Reese was clearly aiming for scoff, but fouled that ball off into still-seething anger.

“Reese. I never even dreamed of being with a woman like you.”

She opened her mouth to protest.

“And no, I’m not talking about your looks—which are incredible—or your body—which is awesome. I’m talking about you. I drove for a living from the moment I got my license to the day I got Malcolm. I know enough to see what you can do. What you did putting the Beast through its paces out at James J. Rowley Training Center. What you did to save the First Lady. No matter what you say, that isn’t ‘I just drive.’ It was a goddamn miracle to watch. I know what that takes to do. I sure as hell couldn’t have pulled it off. Ralph McKenna couldn’t. You stunned him speechless out at RTC. Tell me what part of that doesn’t fit fantasy woman.”

“The part that makes me a fantasy girl,” but this time she didn’t make it an accusation. This time there was some humor and maybe a bit of surprise.

“Well, shit, woman,” he leaned back and did his best to match her suddenly nonchalant tone. “Gonna have to get used to it if you’re gonna hang around this ol’ boy.”

They ate in what he hoped was companionable silence until “Ten minutes!” squawked over their radios. They drained their sodas and hustled out the door as fast as the snarl of rushing agents allowed.

Reese had a lot to think about after they checked over the vehicles once more and she locked and strapped herself in.

Maybe the way Jim had actually meant it, being a fantasy woman didn’t sound all bad.

Though she still wrestled with being more than a ‘just a driver.’ Granted, she wouldn’t be sitting in this seat if that’s all she was. But when she looked out the sideview mirrors and saw the rest of the vehicles arrayed around her, she felt very small.

When the President climbed aboard and called out his friendly greeting, she managed to respond. Secretary Matthews and Franks Adams followed him in, then Harvey closed the heavy door, which weighed as much as the door on a Boeing 757—over three hundred pounds—and hustled around to his own door.

Out the windshield, she saw Jim scramble into the back of the Lead Car. He turned around to smile at her and wave as Harvey buckled himself in.

“That boy is gone on you, Carver.”

“Yes, sir.” There was no denying it. And after his amazing speech, in a Taco Bell of all bizarre places, she was starting to feel a little gone on him.

A little gone on him?

Not even close. She finally understood that she’d crossed that line a long time ago. He saw her in ways that she certainly didn’t see herself. As if she was somehow amazing. And he was forcing her, inch by grudging inch, to see those parts of herself.

The Lead Car moved out.

She could hear the President and Secretary of State Matthews in the back of the car. Every spare minute they’d been talking about some country or other. She’d only caught snippets: South China Sea security, Indo-Russian Zapad military exercise, Egyptian government. They sat at the far back and were hard to hear even though they left the glass partition down. Chief of Staff Cornelia Day, who sat in the rear-facing seat directly behind Reese’s own, spoke rarely but the two men always listened when she did.

“We leaving anytime soon?” Harvey teased her.

Reese dropped into gear and quickly closed the four-car-length gap that she’d let open up between her and the Lead Car.

Out of the parking lot, down a quiet wooded block, and a left onto East Platte Avenue. The four-lane major thoroughfare was already closed eastbound for the short seven-mile run to Peterson Air Force Base and the waiting Air Force One. The President would make the short hop to Buckley Air Force Base outside of Denver, then hold onboard meetings while the Motorcade raced the ninety miles north to rejoin him. The next sortie for the Motorcade wouldn’t be until the dinnertime fundraiser and they’d be there hours ahead of that.

Through the narrow congestion of the first few blocks, there was little to see except for the bare limbs of the tall maple trees. Dark clouds were building to the West and the bright sun in the blue eastern sky was getting squeezed out fast.

Then they fell off the edge. What little beauty existed in Colorado Springs—arid landscape just didn’t sit right for a woman from the South—decayed into a depressingly familiar strip of light industrial and mini-mall sprawl.

On the plus side, the east and west lanes became broader and were separated by a low curb. The intersections were farther apart and the Motorcade began moving up to its normal speed. They were soon headed east at eighty miles an hour, little more than a long black blur to the people lining the roadside with their cell phone cameras.

She began counting down the miles like minutes: six to go, five, four.

A feeling of complacency that she recognized from her days of racing settled over her.

Stay in the slot and ride the groove home.

There was one key lesson she’d learned about that particular feeling—it was almost invariably wrong!

“Shit!” Reese raised her voice, “Everyone in back. Check your seatbelts.” She heard two loud snaps. Complacency! Double shit!

Harvey looked at her in surprise.

“Hang on!” She couldn’t see it coming—whatever it was.

But she could feel it.

Jim watched the Pilot Car and the motorcycle sweepers flash through the closed intersection ahead, against the red light. Things like red lights had no bearing on the Motorcade.

They were passing the last big box stores. Over the rise he could see the first ramped exit as East Platt Avenue transitioned into the divided State Highway 24. That exit and one more would see them safely back onto Peterson Air Force Base.

Other than a Perkins pancake restaurant and a pawn shop, they were out of town.

“Looks like an armored car convention,” Mack spoke up from the driver’s seat. Jim had finally straightened out which of them was which. Mark rode shotgun, literally—with the weapon propped between his feet.

Jim looked between the front seats and out the windshield. On the far side of the intersection, eight armored cars—the heavy-duty ones that banks used to move cash—were parked four on each side of East Platte Avenue.

He didn’t even need to think.

“Turn right!” Eight armored cars weren’t a convention. They were the attack!

“Why?” But Mack slammed into a sideways skid before he even finished asking the question. The motorcycle cop who’d been stopping traffic at the intersection barely had time to dive away from his bike before they slammed into it sideways. The collision was enough to get them headed south on whatever road this was.

Jim pinned Malcolm to the floor under his legs and glanced back along East Platte. He saw the armored trucks already in motion off the sides of the road, plowing into the police escort.

Cop cars, motorcycles, and—he swallowed hard—bodies were scattered in every direction.

Twisting further, he saw that Reese had taken the turn better than they had, doing her job of sticking on the Lead Car’s tail.

“Two more!” Mack called out.

At the end of the block, two of the big trucks were already rolling off the curb to block their escape. The attackers had anticipated this possible escape route. Did they have access to the alternate route plan, or was it simply good logistics? Either way, at the moment it was working.

Jim struggled to remember. The road to the left was called something Loop. Loop was a bad sign.

“Right again!” There weren’t any other choices.

The Lead Car slewed onto the narrow two-lane road—lights and siren blaring.

Two leafless maples stood by the Pine Tree Square road sign. They blasted by a dry cleaners.

“What have you gotten us into, Fischer?”

“Damned if I know, Mack. Just don’t slow down.” They were on a very narrow two-lane lined with trees and a sidewalk.

“No shit, Sherlock.”

Jim twisted to watch behind while Mack drove ahead.

Reese had managed the turn and was tight on their tail.

One of the Spares stopped sideways across the entry to the road, spanning all the way across the entrance.

An armored truck slammed into it at speed, plowing into it so hard that the truck’s rear end lifted at least five feet off the ground. The Spare was blasted aside in a tumbling roll. The hit was hard enough to crumple the armored truck’s front end. Goliath versus Goliath, both had lost. But three more trucks raced into the breach their companion had made.

He keyed the mic. “They’re pros, Reese. Serious pros.”

There was no response, but their gazes met across the tiny gap that separated their vehicles. She gave him a sharp nod of acknowledgement.

Halfback came in behind. Revealing its true colors, the Suburban’s split roof had been flipped open and an M134 Minigun had popped up. These trucks would be armored to B7 standards, able to survive a hit from a 7.62x51mm round. But the four thousand rounds a minute that the M134 could deliver was another matter. Despite the roaring engines, Jim could hear the distinct, chainsaw Brap! of the gun as it tore at the armored trucks.

He prayed for no stray rounds. The Beast could take it, far better than the armored trucks, but he was in a production Chevy Impala. Not so much!

“We’ve still got Halfback,” Harvey reported.

Reese had seen the Spare take the hit for her. Even inside the Beast’s armor, the driver would be lucky to live through that blow.

“Where’s the rest of the Motorcade?” President Thomas shouted from the back.

“Doesn’t matter,” she and Harvey yelled in unison. Harvey got the “sir” on the end—she didn’t.

Whether the rest of the Motorcade was in the fight of their lives or quietly parked on East Platte Avenue didn’t matter to her—they weren’t here. That was all that counted.

The Lead Car twisted left, then right through a short-sharp S that was meant to be taken at ten miles an hour, not sixty. In another hundred meters it opened onto a large parking lot—if she could get that far. The lead armored truck managed to tap her rear bumper, but she didn’t have any weapons back there big enough to stop them. She needed a missile.

As if in answer, a missile slammed down from above.

Overwatch—the Black Hawk helicopter that always flew above the Motorcade. Such a fixture that she never gave it any thought.

The third armored car disintegrated.

Halfback had been chasing so closely that they slammed into the wreckage. The Protection Detail poured out the doors of the destroyed vehicle even as it burned.

Now it was just her and Jim’s Lead Car against the two remaining armoreds.

She had half a second to understand what she’d just done. It wasn’t the Lead Car anymore. It was Jim himself who had seen and understood what was happening. He was the one protecting her and the President. Without him, they’d probably be dead on East Platte Avenue by now. He understood driving and battle.

Reese was willing to trust her life to his hands. And rather than being afraid, it gave her a renewed confidence.

In her rearview, she almost missed the streak of light slicing upward from the back of the second armored vehicle.

Jim could only watch in horror as the RPG shot upward from the rear of the second armored vehicle.

Overwatch, which had moved in for the kill, never stood a chance of evading.

They did manage to get the second missile off but it went astray and punched a smoking crater among the vehicles of the nearby parking lot.

The helo twisted and spun, tumbling out of the sky. Whether it was by chance or plan—it was hard to tell—the helo slammed into the second armored truck and both disappeared in a ball of fire.

“And then there was one,” he whispered to himself.

“You wish,” Mack didn’t sound happy.

Jim spun around. They’d emerged into a vast parking lot. Some people were running, others were just gawking.

The long, low stretch of a super-sized Walmart store rose before them.

“Don’t go around the side! It’s one lane. Too easy to trap us there.”

Mack slewed them into the frontage road along the front of the building. It was crammed with people. People, and two more armored trucks that must have come in from the original group on East Platte Avenue. He continued the turn and raced into the depths of the parking lot.

Someone lost their shopping cart and Mack slammed it aside. Jim half expected a squeaky toy moment on the windshield. Instead, big Number 10 cans of tomato sauce slammed into the Impala like mortars. One shattered the right side of the windshield as it shredded and they were all covered with tomato sauce. He’d have preferred the squeaky toy.

“Thanks, Mack,” Mark must be okay to be complaining in that steady tone.

“Needed a shower anyway, Mark.” Mack was fast running out of parking lot.

The other two armoreds were moving to block exits.

Jim had an idea. “Take us back, Mack. Straight at the main entrance.”

“Wish someone here knew what they were doing, because it sure doesn’t sound like you,” but he did it anyway.

“Just gun it for all you’re worth.”

Jim spun around to face Reese, who was still right on their tail. They had outrun the armored truck by twenty yards and the gap was growing.

He spun his finger in the air and then jabbed a finger forward as if she was launching gas canisters from a spinning car. He could only hope she understood.

“You’ve got a radio, doofus,” her voice sounded in his earpiece, “but I get it. How badly are you hurt?”

“Hurt?” Then some more sauce dripped out of his hair. “Tomato sauce. We’re going to go left.”

He saw her nod of understanding.

Reese raced after the Lead Car, then braced herself. She’d only done this once and that had been on a quiet practice field. No narrow lines of parked cars. No people running away, screaming.

At least the people inside her car weren’t screaming. Instead, a grim silence had settled over them while they waited for Reese to save them.

Some idiot started to back her Ford Fiesta out of a spot.

The Lead Car managed to swerve clear, but the Beast clipped the car hard. It spun away, bounced off a few others before Reese had raced by. The armored truck blew through it like it was week-old Kleenex.

Jim’s car, as he promised, turned left, then left again, racing once more into the depths of the parking lot.

Reese started her spin as she exited the parking lane. In the broad pick-up/drop-off area in front of the store, she managed to get through her one-eighty. Harvey fired the tear gas canisters for her at exactly the right moment.

She let the spin continue but there wasn’t enough room.

The side of the Beast slammed sideways into the four, six-inch concrete pillars that guarded the entrance. Three of them snapped off, but it stopped her sideways momentum. There was a hard thump and a sharp cry from the back. Perfect, she’d probably just concussed the President against the inside of a five-inch thick car window.

The Kevlar tires got traction and they shot aside mere moments before the armored truck came racing out of the cloud of tear gas. Braking too late, it flew past the pillars and disappeared through the front entrance of the Walmart in a cloud of glass shards and metal doorframes.

Gunning it for all she was worth, she headed deep into the parking lot once more.

She saw figures in black running in from East Platte Avenue.

The Counter Assault Team. There was blood on some faces. One ran with one arm hanging limp at his side and a rifle in his other hand.

In moments, one of the CAT unleashed an RPG. The rocket-propelled grenade raced across the Walmart parking lot toward one of the waiting armored cars. The grenade seemed to think about it for a moment after it hit beneath the lower edge of the driver’s door. For a moment she thought it was miss. Then the explosion bloomed upward, lifting the truck and knocking it onto its side. The shot had been intentionally low for that purpose.

A second RPG, that must have been fired before the first one even hit, slammed straight into the now-exposed gas tank, and the truck disappeared in a ball of flame. Now that was her kind of teamwork.

The last armored truck was trying to make good its escape, racing along the front of the store.

Reese ran a long curve through gaps in the middle of the parking lot, then chose her lane.

“What are you doing?” Harvey shouted from the right hand seat where he’d been trying to coordinate all of the attacks and counterattacks.

Yes, it was her job to get the protectees to safety. It was supposed to be her only job. But she had another idea.

“Get him!” President Thomas shouted from the back.

Precisely! She was sick to death of people ramming her, battering her, trying to beat her down when she was just trying to run the race.

Well, not this time.

In her lane, she raced the Beast back toward the building.

Maybe the armored truck didn’t see her coming.

Jim had the Lead Car racing along in front of it. He’d punched out the back window and was firing round after round into the armored truck’s windshield with a shotgun. The armored’s windshield was tougher than that, but it was likely badly star-cracked.

She slammed into the side of the armored car at over thirty miles an hour.

It flew sideways into the massive block-concrete wall of the Walmart and disappeared inside the store.

Reese backed up, ready to ram it again.

Harvey rested a hand on her arm, “Enough. They’re out of the contest.”

Reese glanced out her side window.

The Lead Car sat there, not ten feet away. Jim and Malcolm were grinning at her as Jim held his shotgun aimed at the sky. She could see the red sauce still matted in his hair.

It was easy to grin back.

Then the Lead Car pulled away and she turned to follow. She could feel that her Beast was limping. The hood was twisted up, the status indicator showed that three of the four tires had been blown and she was running on the inner tread. But she was running.

They covered the last two miles to the airport slowly, with no Motorcade, but they delivered a healthy President and Chief of Staff to Air Force One. Secretary Matthews would be wearing an arm cast for a while. Frank Adams nearly carried him aboard they were moving up the stairs so fast.

The blue-and-white plane already had its engines running and was in the air before she had a chance to park the Beast out of the way.