Chapter Nine
CHAPTER NINE
W hen they were settled in bed, facing each other, arms and legs intertwined, Nick released a deep sigh. “I’m so fucking relieved to hear Juan isn’t dead.”
Sam ran her hand down his bare back and over his equally bare backside, loving his smooth skin and the muscular contours of his body. “I was, too, for your sake.”
“So how do you conduct a fake homicide investigation?”
“Carefully. We were asked to go through the motions, hoping to uncover information that’ll assist NCIS in their effort.”
“Did they say who they’re targeting?”
“They believe Goldstein was the ringleader.”
Nick’s face lost all expression. “Damn. He was the one who was nicest to me while plotting to stab me in the back. Where’d they get the body?”
“Another military member who closely resembled Juan was killed in a motorcycle accident. The family has been notified and told the body will be turned over to them following an autopsy.”
“Wouldn’t there be fingerprints and stuff? ”
“NCIS took care of that, and I gave an ID for Juan. It made me sick to lie to Lindsey and the others.”
“I’m sorry. It’s my fault you’re in this position.”
“It’s not your fault.”
“It is, Sam. Without me in the presidency, Juan would’ve had no reason to warn me about anything, nor would he have been in any danger. Thus you wouldn’t be asked to lie to your closest colleagues and friends.”
“It’s hot when you use words like ‘nor’ and ‘thus.’”
“Oh my God, did you hear anything I said?”
“I heard everything you said and focused on the hot parts.”
“Samantha, I’m being serious.”
“I know, and it’s hot as fuck.”
“My job has put you in a terrible spot at yours, and you want to make jokes?”
“Isn’t that better than making myself sick over the lies I’m being forced to tell people I love?”
“Yeah,” he said with a sigh, “I guess it is. But I’m still sorry about all this.”
“Hopefully, they’ll forgive me when the truth comes out.”
“What if they don’t?”
“I can’t think about that right now. I just can’t.”
He pulled her closer, pressed his lips to her neck. “Sorry.”
“Quit apologizing to me. It’s annoying.”
She felt his lips curve as he continued to kiss her neck before he shifted to hover above her.
“I regret putting you in this position. Is that better?”
Raising her hips to press against his erection, she said, “This is my favorite position of all the positions. You know that.”
Oh, she loved that gorgeous smile of his, the way it lit up his lovely hazel eyes and relieved some of the burden that weighed on him so heavily these days. She loved that she alone could do that for him. “So are you going to follow through, or is this all tease and no action? ”
“You must be exhausted after the day you put in.”
She was tapped out, her elbows and knees hurt, and she craved sleep, but not as much as she craved him. “I am, but now you’ve got me all… interested.” She rubbed against him suggestively. “It’d be a shame to let that go to waste.”
“Indeed it would.” His forehead landed on hers as he took a deep breath.
Sam ran her fingers through his thick, dark hair. “Are you okay?”
“Today’s been a lot for me. I can’t imagine what it was like for you.”
“I’m okay if you are.”
He pulled back to help her out of her T-shirt and then worked her pj’s pants down her legs, going for maximum impact as he dragged his fingertips over her sensitive skin. When she was down to just panties, he took a long, perusing look at her, devouring her with his gaze.
“What happened to my favorite knees?”
“A few scrapes from the arrest earlier.” She raised her arms to show him the bandages on her elbows.
“Ugh. Do they hurt a lot?”
“Not too bad.”
“That’s good,” he said as he leaned forward to nuzzle her breasts.
She’d learned that it was pointless to try to hurry him along when he was set on giving her the full treatment, and since his full treatment was the best thing she’d ever experienced, she closed her eyes and settled in for the ride.
Her nipples stood up at attention, waiting for him to get to them. He didn’t disappoint. He never did.
She gasped and buried a hand in his hair as he sucked her left nipple into his mouth. He ran his tongue back and forth over it. The combination had her clamoring for more. His lips on her skin set her on fire as he moved from left to right and back to do the whole thing over again .
This… This was the only thing that could wipe her mind clean of the daily stress and struggle. He alone could take her away from everything other than the two of them and what they were together.
His lips skimmed over her belly, making her shiver and squirm. “Samantha… My sweet, sexy, difficult Samantha…”
Her eyes flew open as she raised her head off the pillow. “Difficult?”
His low chuckle vibrated against her abdomen, adding to the fire building inside her. “Just making sure you’re paying attention.”
“I’m definitely paying attention. In fact, if you wanted to move things along?—”
The swipe of his tongue over her clit shut her right up as she dropped back down to the pillow, her muscles gone liquid.
“You were saying something?”
“Forgot.”
“Hmm, thought you might.”
“Less talking, more—” A noise came from deep inside her that barely sounded human. “Holy shit .”
Fingers, tongue, lips… He was the master and quickly had her biting back the urge to scream her head off, which would start an international incident, surrounded as they were by world-class security.
She ought to do something for him, but she couldn’t have moved if she had to. “Nick…”
“Hmm?” Still in no apparent rush…
“ Please. ”
“What can I do for you, love?”
“You know!” Only he could make her beg for release. Only he could make her want it that badly. She used to think there was something wrong with her that she couldn’t quite seem to get there, but it turned out she’d been trying with the wrong men. After she found the right one, that’d never been an issue again .
“In good time.”
She exhaled and then gasped when he doubled down, taking her up and over the edge so quickly, she never saw it coming until she was in the middle of it, shaking like a tree in a tornado.
Then he was pushing inside her, riding the waves of her release, taking her up again like the first time had never happened—another thing that’d been unthinkable before him.
“Hey.”
She opened her eyes to find him watching over her. “Hey, yourself.”
“What’s up?”
Sam smiled. “You are.” She ran her hands down his back to cup his ass and pull him deeper into her.
He gasped from the impact. “Way to almost finish me off, babe.”
“I do what I can for my person.”
As his laughter rang out, he never missed a beat, rolling them so she was on top, startling her out of her stupor to realize he’d turned the reins over to her.
She brushed the hair back from her face and then rested her hands on his chest, watching him closely as she pivoted her hips and made his eyes roll back in his head. Her aching knees made their presence known, but she ignored the pain to focus on the pleasure.
His fingers dug into her hips as he arched into her, nearly making her forget that she was in charge.
She recovered and took great pleasure in drawing out the suspense now that she was controlling the situation, even as her knees screamed from the friction of the bed against her bandages.
“Samantha…”
“Yes, Nicholas?”
“You’re doing this on purpose.”
“Doing what? Exactly what you did to me? ”
“Yeah, only better.”
“There’s nothing better than you.”
“I disagree.”
“We can fight about that later. I’ve got work to do.”
His laughter quickly became a groan as she picked up the pace, driving them both to explosive releases that left them panting in the aftermath.
“Holy moly,” he whispered as he held her close to him.
This was her favorite part, the peaceful quiet that followed wild passion. Not that she didn’t love an orgasm or two as well. The thought made her giggle.
“It’s not polite to laugh when your husband is still throbbing inside you.”
That only made her laugh harder.
“What is so funny?” he asked indignantly.
“I was thinking that I like this part the best, the aftermath, the cuddling, but then I thought a couple of orgasms don’t suck either. That made me laugh, and then you made it worse by being prissy.”
He rolled her so suddenly, she had no time to prepare before she’d landed on the bed with a large, still-aroused man on top of her. “Who you calling prissy?”
Sam laughed helplessly as he started to move again, showing her with every deep stroke that he was anything but prissy. She was as tired as she’d ever been, but what did sleep matter when your sexy, insatiable husband was gearing up for round two?
She woke in the morning to his lips on her back.
“Wake up, babe.”
“Not yet.”
“What time do you have to work?”
“I don’t know. ”
“Yes, you do. Kids to get ready for school and shift change at eight, right?”
“I think.”
“Samantha.”
She forced her eyes to open. The bedside clock read six twenty. “Ten more minutes.”
The next thing she knew, he was kissing her shoulder as the citrus scent of his cologne washed over her in a comforting cloud of home. “Your ten minutes are long up.”
“Why are you being so mean to me today when I was very nice to you last night?”
He laughed. “Because I don’t want you to get fired. We don’t need the headlines.”
“They need me too much to fire me.”
“You worked a double yesterday. You could technically take the day off.”
Sam turned over so she could see him, handsome and dressed for another day of world domination. “I would, but we caught a new case right as I was leaving last night.”
“That your team can more than handle without you.”
“They’ve been covering for me too much lately. I want to save that for when I really need it.”
“Gonna miss you when I’m gone this week.”
Just that quickly, her entire mood changed. “Where you going again?”
He rolled his eyes in pretend annoyance. “You know exactly where I’m going—three days and two nights out west.”
“No.”
“Yes.”
She shook her head, despondent at the thought of it, as ridiculous as that was. “Don’t wanna.”
“You could come with me.”
“I can’t on such short notice.”
“In fairness, I told you about this last week.”
“I blocked it out. ”
He chuckled. “Of course you did.”
“What are we doing about Juan’s funeral?”
“His mother said they’ll schedule it around my availability. In light of what I know now, I’ll be unavailable until later next week. Do you think that’ll be enough time?”
“I really hope so. I suppose you could come up with another delay if needed.”
“Probably.” He linked their fingers. “We have to make a solemn vow, you and me.”
“I thought we already did.”
“Another one.”
“All right…”
“We can never, ever, ever tell anyone that we knew about Juan being alive. We have to be as surprised as everyone else when the truth comes out.”
“I was planning to come clean with my team after the fact.”
“You can’t. If you do, it could take me down.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Because I need to be able to deny that I knew, and no one who knows us, even a little, would ever believe you’d keep something like this from me.”
“NCIS knows I know. Juan knows I know. Joe knows I know. That’s a lot of people to trust with a gigantic lie.”
He sighed. “Yeah, it is.”
“How about if I come clean with knowing, but say I didn’t tell you?”
“People who know us won’t believe that.”
“I could say I put national security interests ahead of my own marriage.”
“People won’t believe it, Sam. Even those who’ve never met us in person know how we are, thanks to SNL and all the mocking of our obviously close relationship.”
“So what do we do?”
“I need to think about it, but in the meantime, I’ll tell Juan’s family that later next week will be my first opportunity. I just hope by then they’ll know the truth.”
“Why do I feel like this is going to turn into a gigantic shit storm?”
“Because it probably will, with me at the center of it.”
“If I’d known exactly what I was going to have to keep from you before I went into that room and saw Juan, I would’ve said no way.”
“I keep going back to them specifically asking you to keep it from me and Joe’s theory that they were counting on you to tell me.”
“You think it was intentional?”
“I do.”
“Why don’t you call the NCIS director in to explain it to you?”
“Wouldn’t that give away the fact that you told me?”
“Or it could be something you picked up in the morning briefing that tipped you off to a bigger story.”
“That’s a possibility. I could hear about it from someone else. Let me see what I can do.”
“I hope we can find a way to manage this. I absolutely have to come clean with my colleagues after it’s over. There’s no way I can let them think I lied to them for no good reason.”
“Just when I think I’ve seen everything…”
“I know. I thought the same thing yesterday.” She ran her fingers over the silk of his burgundy tie. “What’s up for you today again?”
“Going to Baltimore for the thing at the boys’ school.” His brothers, Brock and Brayden, had invited him to their elementary school and would be interviewing him in front of the student body.
“Oh right. They must be so excited.”
“Dad called yesterday to tell me they wanted new suits for the occasion and hair gel. ”
“Stop it.” Sam laughed. “Oh my God. Please tell me it’ll be recorded.”
“It will.”
“I can’t wait to see it.”
“I’ve got lunch with the Maryland governor and Baltimore mayor followed by a fundraising thing in Baltimore with the Maryland Democrats, so I’ll be home late.”
“I’m already in a pissed-off mood, and I’m not even out of bed yet.”
“Should I warn Freddie?”
“You might want to.”
He held out his arms to her. “Come here.”
Sam sat up and fell into his warm embrace, soaking him in while she could. “I miss being able to pout like a five-year-old when I’m not getting my way.”
“It’ll be Friday night before you know it, and I’ll be back for the weekend. We should go to Camp David for Easter.”
“Do we have to?”
“I think we should. We’ve got a dedicated staff there waiting to welcome us back, and we need to make some new memories there.”
The bucolic presidential retreat would forever be associated with the sudden, tragic death of their brother-in-law Spencer late last year. Until disaster struck, Nick had been relaxed there in a way he seldom was anymore. She would go back for his sake, even if it would be painful. “Let’s do that.”
“The family time away from here will be critical to maintaining my sanity.”
“I know.”
“I’ll ask Dad if he and Stacy and the boys want to come. We’ll change it up this time.”
“Sounds good.”
“We have the Easter Egg Roll on the South Lawn on Monday. I’ll need you and the kids there for that.”
“Lilia has it on my schedule, and I requested the day off. ”
“You’re going to be okay today?”
“Yes, but I’m mad that you’re going away.”
“We have two more nights before I have to go, so we’ll make the most of them.”
“I’m still mad.”
Smiling, he kissed the pout off her lips. “Have a good day, my love.”
“You, too. Have fun with the boys.”
“I’m sure it’ll be the highlight of my time in office so far.”
“Try to fully enjoy it, okay? You so rarely get to have fun anymore.”
“I will. I promise.” He kissed her again and went to don his suit coat. “If I get Scotty up and the twins dressed, will you do breakfast?”
“Yep, I’ve got it.”
“Excellent. Then it’s off to the daily security briefing, also known as the thing of nightmares.”
“Have a blast.”
“No blasts. We’re hoping for no blasts anywhere.”
“Ah, got it.”
“Be careful with my cop. I love her more than anything.”
“Be careful with my POTUS. I love him more than anything.”
He blew her another kiss and was gone. She was glad he had the event with his brothers to look forward to. He loved connecting with young people and would truly enjoy that special time with his much-younger brothers.