Not only did Reese know that she had a fine ass, when she woke up the next morning, she felt it too. Jim hadn’t focused on it alone. In fact, he’d gone to some impressive effort so that not a single inch of her felt neglected.

Clothes in her hand, she headed to her own shower so as not to wake him—the man had earned his sleep. Gods, had he earned it.

Reese felt loose, like a cat on the prowl. Curiously comfortable with her nakedness in a man’s room like she’d never been. She’d always been the one to race to the finish, won and done. Always first dressed.

Jim had refused to be hurried. And it hadn’t been just his hands or his mouth. He’d rubbed her instep with the top of his foot like he was performing reflexology on the pressure points there rather than just a nice contact. When she’d looped a leg over his hips, he’d taken the time to massage the calf muscles and reshape her until she lay more tightly against him than she’d thought physically possible.

She stood at the connecting door and looked back at him. The predawn light leaking around the edges of the hotel curtains revealed him flat on his back and arms flung wide, like a man cut down in his prime. It made her smile. He somehow knew that she would want to be on top. No power games, no avoidance. He’d let her ride him and take control, the only way she’d ever found to reach that pinnacle of release. Yet Jim hadn’t been merely compliant even then. Instead he’d teased, enhanced, driven her until she’d forgotten everything other than her own body and the man giving it all of his attention.

There really wasn’t time this morning, but she wished she had a chance to see if he could take her to that same impossible place again.

That’s when she spotted the butt of her handgun sticking out from under her pillow. She tiptoed back, circling wide around Malcolm, who lay on Jim’s jeans and tracked her with only his eyes.

As she reached for her HK Five-seveN, a hand clamped around her wrist. It was startling. She hadn’t slept with many white men, and the contrast of their skin was a surprise. Light and shadow. Whole and…Reese didn’t know what she was, but definitely not whole.

Without a word, Jim slowly dragged her toward him. She should resist, she should protest. His grip was actually only tight enough to ease her toward him and would be nothing to break from. Instead she dropped her clothes. There was a muffled woof of surprise and then a quick rattle of his collar as Malcolm shook free of her clothes.

“Shh,” Jim whispered to her. “Don’t wake the kid.”

“There isn’t time.”

“Hush. There’s always time.” And he pulled her in until she had no choice except to lie down against him, tucked inside the curl of his arms.

Resigned to the inevitable, not that she could really think of any reason to complain, she relaxed into him.

And he held her.

Nothing more.

Until she wondered if he had gone back to sleep.

She tried to raise up to look at him, but he rested his hand on her head and eased her back down onto his shoulder.

“Just lie still a moment. A man likes a moment to appreciate waking up beside a fine-assed woman.”

In one night, he’d managed to turn a phrase that had made her livid as hell her whole life into a tease, almost an…endearment. He made it sound as if they had a deep and abiding relationship, not an absolutely incredible one-night stand. She was even less used to endearments than she was to lasting relationships.

As he continued to lie there, holding her close, she could almost believe in it though. She wasn’t very skilled at relationships longer than one-night stands, because they required on-going civility. Or maybe because… Reese no longer knew. All she could think about was how nice it felt to lie here in a lover’s arms and pretend nothing more existed.

“You know,” Jim whispered softly.

“Yes?” Her voice was a smooth, liquid tone that she didn’t recognize at all. It was the tone of a woman’s voice in the movies before she made love to a man. Which sounded like a very good idea. She slid her hand down his stomach to see what his body’s thoughts were on the subject.

“We’re going to be incredibly late if you don’t get that fine ass of yours moving right quick.” Between one heartbeat and the next, Jim rolled out of her reach and she was watching his fine white ass as he strode for his bathroom.

She lay there for a long moment in disbelief, then rolled out herself and regathered her clothes and her sidearm.

“I’m sorry, Malcolm,” she paused to rub the dog’s belly with her toes. “But I’m going to have to kill your master. Just thought you should know.”

Malcolm considered for a moment, then flopped onto his back so that she could keep rubbing his belly. She continued for a few more moments, then smirked at the half-open bathroom door as she headed for her own shower. If the man thought he was going to sway her choices and beat her that easily, he had another thought coming.

Day Three and Jim was done in. Even Malcolm was dragging and he never dragged.

It wasn’t last night. He’d never woken up feeling so alive. He missed his first chance to keep Reese beside him because the woman went from asleep to full speed in about two seconds flat. He was a morning person too, but there were some limits.

But he’d had his chance when she came back for her sidearm. He found it there in the middle of the second round of the night’s gymnastics. During the first he probably could have grabbed onto a hot exhaust manifold and not have noticed the burn—Reese felt that incredible.

When she slid back in beside him, he’d had his chance to imagine what it was like waking up next to Reese when she wasn’t running off like a house afire. Damned nice! For all her hard edges and abrupt lane shifts, when she gave, she did it at full throttle as well—racing was definitely the right metaphor for Reese Carver. A breathtaking display of physical ability fueled by raw heat. Last night she’d seared his memories with her body until no one else’s remained.

And this morning, when she strode across his hotel room wearing nothing but a smile… Well, nobody got that lucky and he wasn’t sure why she’d decided it would be him. It really was a pity that they’d run out of time and he’d had to yank himself away from her. He had rather hoped that she’d join him in the shower, but he knew some women preferred to do such things in private and he hadn’t wanted to pressure her.

“We gotta find a way to keep her around,” he told Malcolm.

The dog barely looked up at him. It was their last stop of the day and they’d done their duty. The Downtown Manhattan Heliport was fully secure. They’d patrolled from the front steel gates along FDR drive, throughout the small parking lot, inside and out of the terminal building, the narrow driveway along one side of the pier, and around the various helicopters waiting to whisk the protectees back from where they’d come.

“Now just the ride home, boy.”

Malcolm sighed and plopped his butt on the sidewalk by the front gate to await the Motorcade already en route from the UN.

The lead route vehicle came by, slowing down only long enough to exchange a wave with the head of the detail waiting at the gate. That meant the rest of the Motorcade was less than a minute out. Jim spotted the flashing lights far down FDR well before he could hear the sirens. He and Malcolm were done except for the ride home.

“Looking forward to putting more fur on the First Lady’s seat?”

Malcolm looked up at him. Absolutely.

“Looking forward to a four-hour ride back to DC with Reese Carver?” Jim asked himself.

That sounded mighty good as well. Maybe on the way back she’d stop at a store for Fritos and root beer. Still odd not being the driver. Except for trading shifts on the long-hauls—they’d often do four hours on/four hours off for the entire duration of the Kandahar run—he wasn’t used to the passenger seat.

Felt as if he was doing that in many ways with Reese Carver, hanging on for dear life in more ways than one.

He could hear the sirens now.

“Hang in there, buddy.”

He wasn’t sure which of them he was talking to. Neither was Malcolm.

Reese liked that Jim had not asked why she didn’t join him in the shower. It meant that he was deliberately messing with her head and the game was still on. She was down with that.

The New York trip was in the home stretch—the final drive from the UN back to the Marine’s white-top helos waiting on the pier. The three women in the back were talking softly and even Detra in the right-hand seat was quiet. It had been a long couple of days for everybody and they’d all be ready to be done with it and get back to DC.

They emerged from the last tunnel two hundred yards from the heliport.

Up ahead she spotted a man and his dog leaning against the heavy steel corner post of the front gate. She’d give a lot to know what he was thinking. Which was a surprise. Normally she didn’t give a damn. Actually, that wasn’t right—normally she knew. Men were predictably interested in sex and power games. Yet even if Jim had been an enthusiastic lover, he’d been a very thoughtful and thorough one. He’d made sure it was about her as much as about him. Maybe he’d done that just to confuse her. If that was his intent, it had worked.

The six-motorcycle V was keeping the FDR’s right lane clear. She followed the Lead Car closely, not liking the tightness of the space as they emerged from the tunnel, a tall concrete wall to her right slowly tapering down as the Motorcade climbed.

At a hundred yards out, they were just close enough to make out Malcolm’s coloring, white-and-brown, but not yet close enough to separate out the small black police vest that also served as his harness.

That’s when she spotted a flicker of movement off her left side.

Before she had even fully registered it, her NASCAR instincts had crashed her foot into the floor and had her heading right until she was nearly into the four-foot vertical wall that separated the highway from a parallel lane of merging traffic. The Suburban’s big V-8 engine roared to life and they accelerated sharply.

Detra started some question from the passenger seat, which Reese ignored.

She barely had time to see the massive grillwork on the twenty-four-foot delivery truck arrowing in on her before it clipped her back end.

For half a second, terror slammed into her as her rear tires broke traction and went sideways. She bounced the right rear fender off the concrete wall. They’d have been pinned, perhaps crushed, but she reached the end of the barrier and was able to swing into the open merging lane. If she hadn’t accelerated when she did, the truck would have rammed squarely into her door.

There were screams from the women in the back—high and panicked, like the screams of her father’s tires as they broke free on the Charlotte Motor Speedway.

Then Reese recovered. They weren’t going two hundred miles an hour, out at the performance limits of a racing stock car. This was a big, tough, four-wheel drive Suburban doing its best to climb from sixty to seventy miles an hour. She snapped the steering wheel right, then left to regain control.

The black BMW Lead Car that had been immediately in front of her veered into the left lane to clear a path for her, then the driver slammed on his brakes—smoking his tires.

In her side mirror, Reese could see the BMW take the blow. The big delivery truck plowed into the rear of the BMW—forty thousand pounds versus four thousand. That Secret Service driver had just bought himself a long stay in the hospital and her eternal thanks.

The rear of the BMW disappeared in a cloud of debris before the car was flipped up and over backward. It buried its nose through the truck’s windshield.

Lurching to one side, the truck caught a wheel and tipped over, skidding along the road, throwing showers of sparks in every direction. The passenger compartment of the BMW was battered aside and spun into oncoming traffic causing a chain reaction of swerving cars, squealing brakes, and crunching metal.

Reese kept her foot in it as they crossed eighty miles an hour.

Congestion ahead—the police leading the Motorcade no longer clearing the path but rather blocking it as they slowed in surprise. She jumped the curb separating traffic from a two-way paved bicycle lane. She barely missed taking out two cyclists and a line of park benches along the sidewalk. With a sharp swerve, then a counter, she was able to avoid the cyclists, then the fire hydrant on the divider.

In a final glance back, Reese could see that Halfback—the heavily armed Suburban that had been on her tail—was also tangled up in the mess and now lay flipped onto its roof. Despite that, agents with MP5s and AR-15s were already out of their vehicle and surrounding the truck. At their lead was the fierce black woman who led former First Lady Matthews’ detail. Her jacket was shredded and she was limping badly, but her weapon was out as she led the way.

Focus ahead.

The police motorcycles, unable to jump the curb, remained on the main lane of the FDR as Reese raced past them to the heliport’s entry along the bike path. At the main gate, guards had their weapons up and one was waving her through.

Estimating the traction and the limits of the heavy Suburban, she waited as long as she dared.

Then she stood hard on the brakes to dump half her speed. At eighty, they’d just roll over for what she was planning.

Detra was shouting over the radio to have the helos ready. Not Reese’s concern.

When the speedometer hit forty, Reese turned hard to the right, slapped the transmission down into second, and punched the gas.

The rear wheels broke free.

She counter-steered into the sliding drift, watching the big heavy stanchion on the far side of the main gate looming large and heading squarely at her own door. If she hit it too hard, there was nothing to stop her from plowing through it and dumping them all into the East River.

Holding the line, she suffered only a glancing blow that served to finish the drift.

Now headed down the pier at ninety degrees to where she’d been a moment before, she punched the gas, barely dodging around a hot dog vendor’s cart. Down to thirty miles an hour but still in second gear gave her plenty of power when she goosed the engine.

A glimpse of Jim in the main parking lot, yelling toward the gate alongside the terminal that separated the parking lot from the narrow driveway onto the pier. They got it open just in time for her to barrel through without having to drive into it and risk hurting someone as she blew the inner gate off its hinges. The driveway between the terminal building and the edge of the pier was meant to be taken at five miles an hour—she didn’t ease off the gas until she was nearing the helos.

One last time, she cranked the wheel and stomped down on the parking brake. The big Suburban went into a sideways slide along the pier toward the waiting Sikorsky White Hawk. She stopped under the edge of the spinning rotor disk—with a low dip of seven-foot-seven, her six-foot-two Suburban was clear. It might have given the pilot a heart attack, but Reese had trained on this. She’d managed to place herself so that the rear passenger doors of the Suburban were facing the helicopter’s side door from less than ten feet away and any attack from the street would be shielded by the bulk of the Suburban.

Detra was gone out the passenger door and Reese could hear the women being unloaded from the rear and rushed unceremoniously into the waiting helo.

But all Reese could see was Jim and Malcolm racing down the pier toward her. He had his sidearm out—double-handed and aimed at the ground—and was swinging his head side-to-side watching for any renewed attack, but he was headed straight for her.

She didn’t know if she’d ever seen such a welcome sight.