Chapter Fifteen
The forest around Camp David was thick and lush as I climbed through the underbrush in an effort to clear my head.
Back at the lodge was too busy, too full of people enjoying their long weekend with asinine games of croquet and corn hole.
Hell, even Brooks, Zeke, and Maverick had gotten drawn into the laziness of it and were playing a game of cards back at the little cabin they’d given us to share when we had been taken off duty for the weekend.
But I didn’t want to be off duty.
The last place I wanted to be was off duty and alone with my own thoughts.
Ever since the night of the accident things had shifted amongst our little group and it was like we were all playing a game of chicken to see who would mention it first.
No one talked about the argument we had gotten into, no one talked about the lines that had been drawn between me and Brooks and Zeke and Maverick, and no one sure as hell talked about Maverick purring for Lennon in the SUV and soothing her panic attack.
No one talked about it but I sure as hell hadn’t stopped thinking about it.
I also hadn’t stopped thinking about the way she had looked coming out of the bathroom covered in her brother’s vomit with the same look in her eyes that I used to wear when I took care of my and Brook’s mother after she went on a bender.
And that pissed me off.
Of all fucking people Lennon Holloway shouldn’t have to deal with shit like that. She should have been insulated from all of the shitty parts of the world thanks to her family and they couldn’t even do that for her.
In fact, instead of protecting her it just seemed like they expected her to shoulder the load for her brother and everyone else in the family.
I’d watched it happen right in front of my eyes two days ago when they had convinced her to take on hosting an entire damned delegation dinner by herself, and while I didn’t know what exactly went into running one of those things, I knew it couldn’t have been easy.
“Bullshit,” I muttered to myself as I stomped through the forest, my apparent walk turning into a march as the greenery grew thicker.
“And what, might I ask, is bullshit, young man?” A familiar voice stopped me dead in my tracks as I nearly slipped on the leafy undergrowth.
I whirled around to find Farrow Holloway perched on a log with a rolled cigarette in between his fingers.
The scent of it reached my nose and I reeled back in surprise.
“Are you smoking weed?” I asked incredulously before tacking a respectful but hurried, “sir,” on the end.
Farrow tapped the soot off of the end of what I now recognized as a joint and grinned. “If I say yes are you going to snitch on me?”
“Of course not,” I answered automatically, standing up straighter. “But where is your guard, sir?”
“Hopefully far, far away from here.” Farrow looked at me for a moment before sighing. “You may as well take a seat, kid.”
I hesitated for a minute before sitting next to him, making sure to keep at least a foot between us on the mossy log.
Farrow held the joint out to me. “You want?”
I pinched myself, not sure if, in my quest to get away from the lodge, I’d stumbled into the Twilight Zone or not. Then I shook my head. “No, I don’t smoke.”
Farrow nodded his approval. “Good, good. It’s a nasty habit I’ve never been able to kick since my hippy days.”
Despite myself, I couldn’t help but ask. “Your hippy days, sir?”
Farrow grinned. “What, you think just because I’ve been dressing in three-piece suits since I could walk that I wouldn’t go through a hippy phase? I did grow up in the sixties, kid.”
“It’s Dallas, sir,” I corrected and immediately regretted it when Farrow frowned at me.
“I know that, son,” Farrow said gruffly.
We lapsed into silence for a few minutes, the scent of the marijuana making me feel dizzy, until Farrow turned to me suddenly. “What are your intentions with my granddaughter?”
I reeled back away from him. “Pardon?”
Farrow rolled his eyes. “Don’t play coy with me, Agent Wilson. I see how you and your team look at my Lennon and I don’t like it.”
I felt my proverbial hackles rise at his words. Farrow Holloway could insult me all he liked but my brother and our team were off-limits. Even if he was the former vice president of the United States of America.
“Sir, with all due respect, that is none of your business,” I said firmly, trying my best to remain professional.
“Lennon’s business is my business, she’s my only granddaughter and my pride and joy,” Farrow asserted with a huff as if his words would be obvious to a toddler. “And I worry about how attached you’re all growing to each other.”
I thought about the other day when he’d offered to give Maverick and Zeke the day off at first but not me or Brooks and my stomach sank a bit.
“Do you not want us around Lennon because we’re foster kids?” I asked, offense coloring my voice.
Farrow frowned at me like I was stupid. “What the hell are you talking about? Why would I care about something like that?”
“Your type always cares about pedigree, don’t you?” I asked, mimicking the words that the men had been using at the party yesterday.
“Don’t be silly, son, my own wife was an orphan. Don’t you know that?” Farrow asked before taking a long drag of his joint in an effort to calm himself down.
His words surprised me.
“No, I didn’t know that,” I told him honestly.
“Yes, so before you come up with some narrative about me in that head of yours, just listen to me.”
I waited.
Farrow seemed more human than I’d ever seen him as he nervously fiddled with the zipper of the vest he was wearing. The man had exuded confidence the night of the accident when he’d swept in to save the day, but now he just seemed… old.
“My family is very old, which I’m sure you’ve gleaned at this point. The Holloways have been around since before the Mayflower and if you asked my mother she could have told you down to the year about our family history,” he said with a shake of his head.
“That sounds horrible,” I said dryly, making the old man chuckle.
“It was. She was obsessed even though she married into the family. But we’ve always been entrepreneurs, doctors, lawyers, and her favorite: politicians.”
Farrow said it with a level of disgust that surprised me. He seemed to revel in all of the attention he’d gotten yesterday that had stemmed directly from his political career.
“I always did what they wanted me to, I went to school, started my political career, got elected to the senate—one of the youngest to do it by the way—and they even had a pack and an omega all picked out for me. A nice girl from an equally prestigious family,” Farrow continued, his eyes suddenly far away.
“And I probably would have done it too if I hadn’t gone on that tour to the Boston Omega Center that day.
Bunny was there, sitting under a tree reading a book like a painting and I was gone from the moment she looked at me with those big blue eyes of hers. ”
Farrow’s smile was soft as he spoke about his wife. “She was my scent match in every way and I’d be damned if I was going to marry anyone but her. It made my mother furious and my father disappointed, but I did it and I’m proud of the family we built together.”
“So…” I trailed off, wondering what his point was in this long story or if he’d completely forgotten because he was stoned.
“So, you impatient young man, I worked my ass off for decades to prove to them that we were good enough—that Bunny and I were a team. I became Vice President of the United States which, by most parent’s metrics, would be a crowning achievement.
But do you know what my mother said to me before she died? ”
I shook my head.
“It was two weeks after Inauguration day and she called me to her bedside and she told me that if I hadn’t married Bunny that maybe I’d be the president instead.”
“Ouch,” the word leaked out of me before I could catch it and I blushed but Farrow just nodded knowingly.
“Ouch is right, kid. What’s worse is Bunny was also in the room.
That threw us in a rough spot for a while.
Now, I’m not just telling you this because I love talking about my traumatic past that I have yet to get any level of therapy for, I prefer to do this instead,” he said, holding up the joint.
“But I want you to be aware of the reason why I can’t support whatever is going on between you all and my granddaughter. ”
“Lennon is a public figure,” he continued, looking directly at me now.
“She always will be, even after her mother leaves office. That’s just the nature of a creature like Lennon.
She’s meant for greatness in some way, shape, or form.
That comes with a lot of public scrutiny and that can be brutal.
We Holloways are built and bred for things like that and need partners who can handle such things. ”
“And was Mrs. Holloway able to handle those things?”
Farrow grinned. “Gods no, Bunny rarely leaves our farmhouse these days and she spent half of my political career neurotic as hell. That’s what I’m trying to avoid for Lennon because, like with any good marriage, I had to pick up the slack for my wife and I don’t know if Lennon can handle that.”
I stared at him, trying to digest the absolute shitstorm of information he’d just thrown my way on what basically amounted to a hunch.
“Sir, there isn’t anything going on between us and your granddaughter,” I said, carefully measuring my words.
It was partially true. Nothing had happened physically between us—which had nothing to do with what I thought and never planned to act on.
“And you, son, are full of shit.”
Hearing the old man say those words so bluntly made me gawk open-mouthed at him.
“Close your mouth, you’ll catch bugs like that and you probably want to school that expression of yours because my granddaughter is on her way over here right now,” Farrow muttered to me as he stood up and stubbed the joint out, putting it back inside of an empty mint tin.
“Grandpa, I was told to come find you for dinner…” Lennon said as she approached, her eyes landing on me. “Agent Wilson? What are you doing here?”
“I asked him to accompany me,” Farrow said, jumping in to help me out. “For security purposes.”
Lennon looked like she didn’t believe a word of it, but her delicate nose scrunched as she caught a whiff of what was in the air. “Grandpa, have you been smoking weed again? Mom’s going to be pissed at you. You know she hates it when you do that at Camp David.”
Farrow grinned at his granddaughter. “If you snitch on me, Lennie, then you’ll be snitching on grandma too because she’s the one who grew it.”
Lennon snorted and shook her head. “If the media ever caught wind of the fact that the former vice president and his wife grow weed in their house they would lose their minds.”
“Hah! If you think that’s crazy, wait until they find out about the aliens.”
Lennon frowned. “What?”
“Nothing,” Farrow called with a grin. “Now you run ahead and tell your grandma we’ll be there in a bit.”
Lennon paused, her gaze moving to me again and I gave her a small nod, letting her know I was okay. Then she whirled and began to run back through the trees, her long blonde hair whipping out behind her.
We started to walk back, me a few feet behind Farrow, making sure the older man was able to make it up the rocks and logs okay.
“One more thing, Dallas,” Farrow said, using my name for the first time since this interaction had begun as he turned to look at me.
“I may be old, but even I have eyes. You may say that nothing is going on between you and Lennon, but I know better. Ask me how I know.”
I really didn’t like being yanked around by this old man so much, but still I was curious. “How?”
Farrow grinned, his eyes dancing with glee. “Because the four of you look at her the way I look at my wife, that’s how I know. That’s not something that can be faked.”
Then he was gone, hopping up on top of the log with the sprightliness of someone much younger than he was as he followed his granddaughter out of the forest, leaving me looking like an idiot with my hands out ready to catch him in case he fell.