Chapter Thirty
Lennon’s Home — Cape Cod
Three Weeks Until the Election…
“Uno!” Zeke crowed, slapping his final card down on the table with the pride of a man who had won every board game we had played this afternoon and would probably continue to do so no matter what we picked.
“Fuck!” Dallas cursed, slapping his stack of cards down with disgust. “You have to be cheating. This is some actual bullshit, I’ve never played this badly in my entire damned life.”
“I quite literally kicked your ass at Uno in Missouri, like, two months ago,” Zeke said, hiking a thumb over his shoulder like it was only a couple of days ago.
I sat quietly with my own two cards, trying not to draw the ire of my hotheaded alpha as Brooks did the same with his own three cards.
Truthfully, we had ganged up on Dallas because it was adorable to see him get so mad about the game, but there was no way in hell we were about to admit to it.
The past few days since my heat had finally eased off completely had been the calmest of my life. My grandmother had assured me that all was well with the campaign and that no one really missed me and even Carter sounded good on the phone.
Other than the identity crisis of no one really needing me in that world that her words had brought on, I was doing great.
The constant sex helped.
Between board games, walks on the beach, and more sex, it wasn’t hard to keep my mind off of just how much my perspective on life had shifted in such a short time.
The sound of the windows opening drew my attention just in time to see Maverick stepping inside from his afternoon run.
My gaze took in his sweaty form with appreciation, lingering on his glistening biceps and shaggy dark hair that was still unkempt from this morning.
As if feeling my eyes, he glanced up at me, his lips pulling up into a smirk as he pulled out his ear buds.
“Haven’t you had enough today?” he asked as the other alphas continued to bicker about Uno.
I shrugged. “Have you?”
Maverick’s honey brown eyes darkened, answering my question.
But before he could scoop me up, my phone started to ring in my pocket.
Frowning, I pulled it out to look at the screen.
No one had called or texted us all week, leaving me to recuperate from my ‘flu’.
And now my grandmother’s name was lighting up as the phone continued to ring.
A sense of unease filled me, leaking down my shared bonds with the guys as the living room fell silent almost immediately.
I answered the call and put it on speaker.
“Grand—” I started to say but her panicked voice cut me off.
“Sweetheart, have you seen the news today?”
I looked at Maverick who was already diving into the conversation pit for the remote to the TV on the wall.
“No? Why?”
“Oh, honey, I’m so sorry… I thought everything was going smoothly because nothing was in the news but it looks like whoever took the picture was waiting for a lull in the news cycle…”
“Grandma, stop, please explain what’s going on!” I practically shouted into the phone as Maverick finally managed to get the TV on, switching the channels until he made it to a news station.
A very serious-looking news anchor sat at his desk as a headline that made my world freeze began to scroll at the bottom of the screen.
“The top story this afternoon. A few weeks ago we reported the rumored relationship between the president’s daughter and her Secret Service detail, well today the associated press received these images… ”
There, in 4k, were pictures of me in Zeke’s arms as he carried me out of the bathroom in the hotel lobby the night of my mother’s donor gala. My face was flushed and I was smiling up at him like he hung the moon.
The other guys were surrounding us, on the lookout and failing to see the camera that was taking the picture that was going to be used to expose us completely to the world.
“Do these people have nothing better to do than this shit? Aren’t there wars and famine going on for them to report on?” Brooks asked from behind me, sounding disgusted.
“This is an election,” my grandfather’s voice came from the other end of the line, making me jump. “Lennon knows that better than anyone. They will use anything they can and I can assure you the other camp paid a pretty penny for these pictures.”
“Grandpa…” I trailed off, feeling ashamed.
“I’m not saying that to make you feel bad, Lennie,” he said, his voice soft. “But this is the situation at hand. Your mom has been blowing up our phones since this started dropping an hour ago. I’m pretty sure she knows we’ve been helping you.”
“And where you are, sweetie, Marine One took off from D.C. an hour ago.”
I groaned, putting my face in my hands. The information was coming at me too fast and I wasn’t sure where to even start to deal with all of this.
Dallas stood up quickly, hurrying over to the front entry way to look out onto the driveway. “The SUV has a tracker on it.”
“So we can assume she’s coming straight here,” Brooks said, his face suddenly looking pale as he glanced at the rest of our pack.
“And she’s going to land on the damn front lawn,” Maverick finished, his jaw clenched.
“What can we do, Grandpa?” I asked, wishing more than anything that he could fix this like he fixed everything.
During my heat I’d impulsively said I didn’t care what my mother thought about my relationship with my pack, but I also hadn’t been thinking about the fact that she employed them at a job that I knew they liked.
My grandfather sighed. “I’ll try to get on the phone with her, but you know she hates being lied to, Lennon.
You boys just try to keep your mouths shut and let Lennon do the talking, you hear me?
My daughter inherited my unfortunate temper and she’s about twenty years from that calming down.
She’s liable to fly you over the ocean in that helicopter of hers and drop you into it. ”
After the call ended I stared out at the ocean which seemed calm now, but soon the sound of chopper blades would interrupt the peace we’d built in this house that had been mine for less than a week.
“Hey,” Zeke said, his hand massaging the back of my neck. “It’ll be okay.”
I just shook my head. “No, it won’t.”
They didn’t understand. This was my mother during an election year. The first election she was running in without my father to humanize her and bring her back down to earth again when she needed him to.
I had no idea which Athena Holloway was going to walk through the door in the next hour, but the sour pit in my stomach told me that no option was a good one.
We were national news during a time when I had promised her that I would be there to support her.
I’d broken that promise, and while I didn’t regret it, I knew that we as a pack were about to pay that price.
And an hour later as my mother stood in front of me, wearing a crisp dark blue suit and a thunderous expression, I saw that I’d been right.
She had walked out of the helicopter in a silent rage, flanked by Arthur McDaniels, Vincent Collier, and the rest of her Secret Service team who were waiting outside now as we sat waiting for her to say something to break the tense silence that had permeated the living room over the last ten minutes since her arrival.
I sat on the sofa, my pack behind me—though I was sure none of them knew about the bonds now marking my body. None of the guys had bit me anywhere visible and the people in front of me took enough suppressants that they couldn’t smell popcorn burning let alone the change in my scent post-bonding.
And we weren’t going to tell them yet. That had been the one thing we’d quickly agreed on as we tried to plan for worst-case scenarios while waiting for Mother to arrive.
“Before I lose my mind, Lennon,” my mother finally started to speak, her voice terrifyingly even as she held her fists at her side. “I’d like for you to explain just what the hell is going on here.”
“What do I have to explain exactly?” I asked, tilting my chin up with defiance, glad I threw on a sweatshirt before she got here so she wouldn’t see Dallas’s bite on my collarbone.
My mother blinked at me like I was some kind of an imposter. I couldn’t recall a time, even during my teenage years, when I’d ever talked to her like this.
“Maybe,” she said through pursed lips, her gray eyes flashing dangerously at me and then to the men standing just behind me.
“The fact that there is a picture of you being carried out of a bathroom by one of your Secret Service agents while you grin at him like you’re in love with him and the fact that you are hiding in a love nest with said agent… s.”
She added the plural at the end as she realized that Maverick, Brooks, and Dallas were probably also a part of the equation.
“Seems like you understand what’s going on then,” I told her flippantly and I could feel all four alphas send a cautioning tug on their ends of the bond.
I sighed. “Mom, I like them. Like how an omega likes an alpha? With scent matches and all that?”
“That’s ridiculous, Lennon, you don’t even know them! Besides, you’ve been on suppressants since you’ve met them, how can you know anything about scent matches,” my mother said with a shake of her head and a roll of her eyes, like I was sixteen and not a fully grown woman.
Irritation filled me at having my feelings written off so easily. This was her biggest issue. I loved her but she was so damned awkward when it came to talking about her feelings.
She tip-toed around the hard stuff like love and romance claiming that ‘Dad was better at that sort of stuff anyway,’ and now that he was gone it was like she couldn’t function and it had fallen onto me to fill that role.
I’d done it, becoming her de facto first lady, taking care of Carter, taking on more appearances on the campaign trail than ever, and becoming her sounding board for whatever semblance of emotion she could muster up on any given day while she refused to get help for her grief.
And I was so damned tired of it.
“Mom, you’re not listening to me,” I said, standing up and cutting off whatever ramble she was about to go on about responsibility and how much work it was going to be to get the press to shut up about my mistake. “I love them. They’re my pack.”
Warmth filled my bonds, a stark contrast to the horror blooming on my mother’s face.
“No. Absolutely not,” she rasped as if I had reached out and smacked her across the face.
Confusion filled me. “Mom, I’m a grown adult, I can make my own decisions and I choose them. I’ll quit the campaign if I have to, but I want to be with them.”
My mother turned to shoot a panicked look at McDaniels and Collier and the head of her Secret Service cleared his throat, stepping forward. “That’s fine, Ms. Holloway, but I’m afraid your participation in the campaign and your, ah, pack’s employment with the agency are two very different things.”
“Pardon?” I asked, my voice cracking as my brain struggled to catch up with the man’s words.
“Your relationship is a clear violation of a Secret Service agent’s code of ethics, and not only that they willfully used government property to transport you and themselves to this location,” he said, glancing at the front door.
“That SUV out front with the tracker in it? That belongs to the U.S. government.”
I looked over at my mother. “You aren’t seriously going to do this, Mom.”
She didn’t look at me.
“I’m afraid,” Collier continued, almost gleefully as I felt my pack begin to panic as their careers began to teeter precariously in the balance. “That they do serve at the pleasure of the president.”
“Stop,” I said, putting my hand up in surrender. “I get it.”
“Lennon,” Maverick spoke for the first time, his voice a low rasp of pleading as he realized what I was about to do.
I shut them out. All of them.
Clamped down on my end of the bond and built a wall up strong enough that they couldn’t feel my despair.
I had made each of them promise they wouldn’t leave me and now here I was about to make that decision myself.
“I’ll finish out the campaign,” I said softly and I heard a chorus of angry exhales behind me.
“Lennon don’t do this,” Dallas said, reaching for my hand and I let him hold it for a moment, feeling the desperate pounding of his heartbeat where our pulses were connected at the wrist.
But I couldn’t say anything back and pulled my hand away.
“Gentlemen, you are officially on administrative leave until the end of the election,” my mother said grimly, still not looking at me.
I knew I would find guilt in her eyes if she did.
“We will figure out this whole mess after that point. I ask that you lie low, do not speak to the press, and I am sorry for this, but please do not speak to Lennon either.”
They protested, calling my name as Secret Service agents that I didn’t know seemed to flood my home, the home my grandparents had built just for me. The home that had bonded my new family together only for us to be torn apart only a week later.
“Lennon…” my mother tried after the house fell silent and I stood at the window staring out at the ocean.
“I don’t want to talk to you right now,” I told her, not looking at her.
“I’m trying to do what’s best for you, honey,” she said, drawing a comforting hand down the back of my head.
“Do Grandma and Grandpa think so?” I asked blankly. “Would Dad have thought so?”
It was a low blow, but I figured she deserved it after today.
I heard her sigh deeply.
“The helicopter takes off in fifteen minutes. Make sure you’re all packed up and the house is locked up.”
Then she was gone.
I was alone and all I wanted was my alphas who were probably angry because I had forced them to leave me when we’d promised to stay together.