“You’re a bit overdressed for a day at the zoo.” She arched an eyebrow in challenge.
He ignored protocol and arched an eyebrow right back at her.
One corner of her sassy mouth turned up, the action seeming to surprise even her. “I recommend you at least change your shoes. We’ll be leaving in twenty-five minutes.”
Lucky for both of them, Adam still had several changes of clothes in a locker downstairs inside the Secret Service lounge. Not to mention his favorite pair of combat boots. If Josslyn Benoit thought she’d get the best of him today, she was sorely mistaken.
“I’ll be ready in ten,” he said.
With a flick of her hair and a swirl of her skirt, Josslyn turned and headed into the Center Hall. Adam fell into step behind her before she stopped abruptly, spinning around so that the fabric of her skirt nearly got tangled in her thighs.
“You don’t have to follow me into my room, do you?”
Adam bit back a smirk. “Just to your doorway.” He paused deliberately before adding, “Ma’am.”
Her gray eyes narrowed and she was off again in a huff. Adam spoke into the microphone tucked discreetly in his cuff, updating Josslyn’s location. The First Family and all protectees within the Crown were tracked on a computer monitor downstairs in the Secret Service director’s office.
“Doolittle to the Queens’ Bedroom,” he relayed. He nearly chuckled at the irony of her room assignment.
Josslyn halted again. Her shoulders shook before she turned to face him. A flush stained her cheeks and she swiped at a strand of hair concealing her eyes. He tried not to notice her fine cleavage on display before him like a decadent buffet, but damn, if her deep breaths weren’t drawing his gaze down like a homing beacon.
“First things, first,” she drawled, bringing Adam’s attention back to that sassy mouth of hers. “That code name is ridiculous. We have to come up with another one.”
“You don’t like your code name?” He shouldn’t be engaging with her. The smart thing to do would be to tell her to take it up with the director. It would serve the man right for sticking Adam with this damn detail, anyway.
“No. I don’t. How would you like to be compared to a character from a children’s book?” she replied before resuming her trek to her bedroom.
“I thought everybody liked Dr. Doolittle.”
She tossed a smokey-eyed glare over her shoulder at him. Adam ignored her. Too bad he couldn’t unsee the cute way she wrinkled her nose.
Cute?
If his head wasn’t already pounding, he’d smack himself.
“Okay, how about Pita?” he suggested before quickly admonishing himself for falling into her trap.
She came to a stop and whirled on him once again just as she reached the East Hall. “PETA? As in the People for the Ethical Treatment for Animals?” She donned a quizzical look that had her damn nose wrinkling up again. “That’s good.”
Adam might have felt a little burst of pride had she not looked as if she didn’t expect him to have a lick of sense in his head. She took a few more steps before placing her hand on the doorknob to the Queens’ Bedroom and pinning him with another one of her steely-eyed looks.
“Or, did you mean pita as in the sandwich? That wouldn’t surprise me given how you’ve been hungrily checking out my ass.”
She was so close.
Ignoring the voice in his head telling him to stand down, Adam decided to put the She-Devil in her place. “I meant P-I-T-A as in Pain. In. The. Ass.”
Her eyes went wide for a moment before narrowing to slits. With a roll of her shoulders, affording him one last glimpse at the thin silver chain buried between the hollow of her breasts, she flung open her bedroom door. Before she could storm away from him, however, Adam snared her wrist in his fingers. He was way out of line, but he didn’t care. Let them send him back to convalesce in the dark. He’d deal with it. But if he had to withstand the next few weeks protecting this woman, he was sure as hell going to let her know who was in charge.
“And you don’t need to trouble that pretty little head of yours about the competency of your protective detail,” he growled next to her ear. “Because there’s not a single part of me that isn’t in prime working order. Not. One.”
Adam let that sink in before releasing her. Josslyn’s tongue peeked out to trace her lower lip. Her breathing was a bit unsteady as she slowly raised her gaze to meet his. His junk tightened up at the challenge reflected there.
“You’ve got twenty-one minutes, Special Agent Lockett.”
Chapter Three
Josslyn flopped back onto the mattress of the centuries-old canopied bed in the suite that, true to its name, had hosted actual queens. When she glanced up at the floral fabric overhead, the pattern began playing tricks on her vision, making it look as though the canopy was slowly easing down to smother her. Given how her life was going, it would be a fitting way to die.
Slamming her eyes closed, Josslyn tried to calm her breathing. She dug into her blouse, yanking at the chain anchoring her talisman to her neck. Reverently, she fingered a silver St. Luke medallion her daddy gave her the day her momma died. The metal was warm from resting against Josslyn’s skin. Its edges had been worn smooth from years of sliding against her daddy’s chest. He’d first put it on as a young flight surgeon in Vietnam. Josslyn’s earliest memory of her daddy was his booming laugh when she tried in vain to grab at the shiny piece of jewelry with her chubby toddler fingers.
Tears burned the back of her eyes when she brought the medallion to her lips.
“You promised if I kept this with me, you’d always come back, Daddy,” Josslyn whispered. “Well, I never take it off. Yet you keep slipping further and further away.” She swallowed what might have been a sob.
Crying never solved anything, her daddy would always say. At least, the daddy she remembered—the one who remembered her. He was always so proud of Josslyn’s bravery; her tenacity. Never be one of them girly-girls your grandma is trying to turn you into. She’d spent much of her life trying to live up to the ideals he’d laid out for her. And now the man who’d claimed she was the light of his golden years didn’t even remember she existed. Just where did that leave her, exactly?
“Trapped,” she murmured. “At least I can relate to how the elephants feel at the zoo.”
Josslyn thumped her fists down on the bed with a growl. Of all the damn Secret Service agents in the White House, of course, she had to be assigned the Tower of Testosterone. And the idiot pretended not to know her. Her breath stuttered again. She’d spent the past two years fantasizing about what it would be like to come face-to-face with her rescuer again. This morning’s confrontation was nothing close to what she’d dreamed. For months after he vanished, she’d bugged Conrad’s chief of staff for information about the man who had saved her life. All she’d been told was his identity was classified because he worked as a sniper for president’s elite protective detail. But she’d recognize those eyes anywhere. Probably because she knew the secrets behind them.
Well, he would never do as part of her detail. The arrogant man saw too much with those sharpshooter eyes of his. Most women were probably sucked in by the thick lashes—as dark as his close-cropped hair—framing bottle glass-green pupils. Josslyn, however, was not. She saw Special Agent Adam Lockett for exactly what he was. A man who could kiss a woman senseless and then vanish into thin air. If that wasn’t enough, he obviously liked to wield power through the barrel of a rifle. He was the very antithesis of the ideals Josslyn championed.