To Play or Not To Play Read online

  A woman who knew about choices herself, the Prime Minister rubbed her temples like a mom at a grocery store. Her gaze flicked to us. “The handlers are here. Let them take over. I’ll be in my office. I have a country to run.” On that dramatic note, she delegated the problem to us and left.

  Caroline tilted her chin in the air and spun faster. “Never. Never. No dog show.” Her angelic public persona spun away with each twirl, and her blue eyes took on a wild light like her brother’s. Wythe had probably started out with coal-matte eyes, and then his parents’ demands had spun them into diamond brightness.

  Despite her previous eagerness, Georgiana didn’t go to Wythe. She knelt in front of the child. “I’m Georgiana, and I can take you to the Summer Kennel Club, where 2,500 champion dogs will compete. Proud stately breeds will vie for best in show.” Georgiana had an unhealthy knowledge of dog trivia. Or she’d done her homework with the packet.

  I’d enjoy learning some dog trivia. Was Trapper missing me? I knew he would when Felicity scooped out his wet food. She never gave him an extra scoop like I did. Eat your dry kibble if you’re still hungry, she’d say. Trapper preferred the wet, smelly stuff. Because Felicity had stayed in the US, and interns there didn’t live in the White House, she’d gotten to take Trapper with her. Jealousy streamed through me.

  “You talk funny,” Caroline said.

  That was delightful. I was expecting a summer full of those type of comments.

  “Caroline.” Wythe’s voice held caution and amusement. He still didn’t look up from his tablet.

  “You’re an American, aren’t you?” Caroline drew out the nationality as if it had even more syllables than four.

  Wythe lifted his head and looked at me. “Now, Caroline. Manners.”

  Manners? How was that rude? Proud to be an American here. I moved to Georgiana’s side. Something about the child’s stance and attitude reminded me of my sister. I could take her. I had a lifetime of knowledge if I applied it correctly. I faced Georgiana, ignored Caroline, and said loudly, “I’ll take Caroline’s place. I hear there are real freaky-looking dogs there. Fluffy ones, baby ones.”

  “I want to see the baby dogs.” Caroline’s childish soprano pierced the air. Baby dogs in Scotland could have heard her clearly and were probably yipping right now. Caroline moved over to the large fireplace and stared at the mantle. A sleek, black, pointy-eared dog figurine hunched there by three cinnamon candles. She eyed the figurine with an intensity I’d only seen out of Trapper when I held a ball in front of him. “Freaky-looking dogs, too.”

  Georgiana glanced at me and then Wythe. “Should I get that down for her?”

  “Yes,” Caroline said in a hushed whisper, her gaze eager.

  “It was a gift from the Egyptian ambassador,” Wythe said.

  Georgiana backed away. “Oh.”

  Caroline made a demanding sound, not a growl exactly, but close.

  “Caroline…” Wythe said.

  Caroline flushed and tore her gaze away. “I’m only looking at it.” Each word was emphasized and defensive. They’d played this game before.

  Georgiana held out her hand to Caroline, displaying her French manicure. “Why don’t we find Nanny and look up puppy pictures? See if the Kennel Club’s show is somewhere you’d like to go?”

  “Nanny,” Caroline squealed and ran from the room with Georgiana chasing after her.

  That left me alone with Wythe. My palms prickled.

  No touching.

  Focus on the job.

  Getting Wythe to the dog show would tick one charity event off my list. They’d set the bar too low for me. Look at me go. I moved closer. “How about you? You up for the dog show?” I sounded cool, like I was good with it either way. I’d concealed my hand. Wythe couldn’t read me, so he had no advantage here. I also suspected he was as intrigued by me as I was by him. I’d read it in his expression. I had this.

  “You show up late to scavenge the buffet and then think you can come in and handle me? I won’t be as easily managed as my little sister,” Wythe said without looking up.

  He’d been a lot more charming when my dress had been undone. A lot.

  Guys.

  My cell beeped. Friends shouting out their plans for the day. As if I could join them from this side of the ocean. Oh, and another text from Felicity on the East Coast. Yay. Felicity had typed, Things could not be more amazing. Click on the link to my new ringtone, “My Country ’Tis of Thee.” The patriotic melody mocked me—it was the same one they used for the British national anthem, “God Save the Queen.”

  Annoyance made me hit reply, and I tapped on the speaker icon. “Sounds terrific. Things are beyond perfect here. Everyone’s so amazingly agreeable. You won’t believe it. Will send my new ringtone later. ‘London Calling’ maybe, or ‘Oh What a Beautiful Morning.’”

  Wythe snorted. “Who are you texting?”

  “Not your business.” Yeah. That was the way to win him over. I sighed. “My sister’s interning at the White House. Family tradition. It’s how I got this job.” I waved the phone. “I’m competing for top intern from across the pond.” I made my voice sound enthused but still cool, showing none of my roiling anger or frank desperation.

  Wythe looked me dead straight in the eyes.

  My heart caught.

  He shook his head. “Give it up. I did my duty during the campaign. Now that we’re in office, they can soldier on without me. I won’t have my family paraded about.” He rounded his words in that posh educated way. His tone said his decision was final, but it just challenged me.

  He didn’t get to decide my fate. I would be in that intern picture. I’d get three points. I’d find a way to get him to those public events. A bribe maybe. I pretended to drop the subject.

  “What are you reading?” I hoped his answer wouldn’t be weird British porn. What’d that even look like? If American porn stars looked like Barbie dolls, and don’t get me started on the creep factor there, what did the British ones look like? I guessed there were loads of buttons involved. However, I had no plans to find out. He’d better answer carefully.

  “Not your business.” He imitated my words and Texas accent.

  I was not charmed. A wave of tiredness hit me, and I couldn’t think about how to work this situation. “I’m too jetlagged to deal with your porn habit. We’ll talk about this tomorrow.” I gave him a pointed look. My dark blue eyes didn’t have the same brightness as his, but I could stir up intensity when I wanted to. “This is far from over.”

  His gaze had a hard edge, a hint of the matte-coal they used to be. “You lost before you got here. You just don’t know it yet.”

  I should not have found his words or his expression hot, but I did. Heat rose from my neck to my face. My chest lifted and fell faster. Maybe I was just annoyed with him. That was it. I wanted to fling the tablet from his hands, but he had me beat by a good six inches in height and fifty pounds in weight. Crap, they measured using the metric system. I’d have to start converting in my head. He had twenty-two kilograms on me and…wait, no, they used stones. He had four stones on me, and…forget it. Jetlag made conversions difficult. Just thinking of the flight over made the haze of sleepiness hit me. I drummed my fingers against my skirt and turned to walk out. “Tomorrow.” I said it like a promise, but it came out husky, kind of sexy, as if my voice knew of my subconscious desires and was offering them up to him.

  He shifted in the chair behind me, and I resisted looking back. If I looked back, he’d know he had me.

  When I got to the doorway, two security guards in dark suits rushed past. One held his hand straight up and tapped his fingertips into the palm of his other hand. “Move, move, move.”

  I stepped aside, and my heartbeat picked up, pacing itself double-time, skipping past all the stopped beats Wythe had caused. I scanned the room to figure out what was going on. Nothing. I saw nothing. No smoke. No fire. No hail of bullets.

  Wythe rose and sighed. Not perturbed at all.

>   Whereas my wild jump had woke me right up.

  The first guard grabbed Wythe’s arm and led him toward the door in a fast clip.

  The other guard spun back and scanned the surroundings. “Clear.” He pulled the arm on his headset until the microphone rested in front of his mouth. “We have Turnstile. Repeat.”

  Confusion tangled my mind. Logic said, hang back. Logic said, I don’t know these people or this situation. Something illogical moved me to go to Wythe for reassurance. “What’s going on?”

  Wythe snagged my arm and pulled me into the group, now headed out the door.

  The lead guy started to run.

  Chapter 6

  Wythe kept hold of my arm, as if I’d leave. “Threats and drills are treated the same.” His British voice came out educated and crisp. “I’m sure you read the packet.” His fingers tightened, and I half-jogged to keep up. My ballet flats thumped on the floor. I needed running shoes.

  Darn packet. No, I hadn’t read the packet. What was going on?

  We passed Georgiana, standing in a doorway, her mouth agape.

  Other members of the household seemed to be carrying on as if nothing was happening. A maid folding towels. A footman dusting a giant globe. We turned off the main hallway and down a narrower corridor. No pictures on the wall, no carpet runner on the worn tile floor.

  “I read some of the packet.” None of it. Well, I’d read page one. “Threat?” Adrenaline rushed through me, shoving away all the jetlag. “Where are we going?” I glanced at the lead guy and kept pace with their slow trot. What had seemed like running now felt really slow. My heart was thumping faster than our steps. “Point me the way. I can run way faster than this. Way faster.” I wasn’t proud of the shrillness in my voice, but I wasn’t ashamed either. This was like in grade school, when an alarm had gone off and we’d all done this slow unrealistic trot outside to line up. Had there been a real emergency, we would’ve run like crazy. That’s what we should have practiced, a realistic wild run and a slide to hit the dirt. Why? Why were we trotting? Was this somehow more civilized? Alarms weren’t meant to be civilized. They were…

  Wythe tightened his grip on my arm like he sensed that I’d bolt into the wall. I might.

  “Keep in step,” the lead said, his head swiveling, assessing the passageway. He opened a side door and led us down flights and flights of stairs.

  Gravity sped us up, but not enough, and my anxiety rose at their methodical plod, which was more suited to the tenth lap on the jogging track in Texas heat than a Downing Street emergency. Tell them to sprint. Make them get it. My mouth opened, and I sucked in a breath. I pushed on the navy-suited guard in front of me. “Move. Faster.”

  He didn’t.

  Wythe shook my arm, so I’d focus on him. “They have to clear the area before we move.”

  That was actually good thinking, and his even tones helped reassure me. “Got it. Clear that passage.” My voice came out loud, over-loud.

  Wythe winced. “We should keep quiet, you know. Not tip off the non-existent threat.”

  “Oh. Right.” I shut up. Non-existent. That had to be good, right?

  At the bottom, we came up against a long hall and a steel door with no knob. The guard typed in a key code on a security pad. Wythe pressed his face close to the panel for an ocular scan, and the door slid open.

  I bounced on the balls of my feet, searching the stretch for anything out of the ordinary. “Really? An eye scan, that’s the fastest way to secure us?”

  Wythe yanked me through the entrance. The door shut and clanked with a lock, sealing us into a dark room, alone together.

  The hairs on my arms rose, and I blinked to adjust to the lack of light. “What just happened?” My voice came out in a whisper. Not a sexy, me-and-him-in-the-dark kind of whisper, but a strained one.

  “Room’s soundproofed. You can speak up.” Wythe sounded bored.

  I tried to steady my nerves and failed. My shoulders folded in, and I wrapped my arms around myself. “I get the stiff upper lip thing, I even admire it, but my American lips are quivering. Aren’t you concerned?”

  I couldn’t see Wythe. How was he so calm? Was he calm? Was he lying? I felt for his wrist to check his pulse. It was slightly fast under my fingers, nothing like the way mine raced. He said nothing.

  “It could be anything. Bomb. Shooter.” Panic escalated in my voice. I threw out my arm to feel for a wall or one of their hidden doorknobs. “Will they get Georgiana? Caroline? Your mom?”

  “Shh,” Wythe said. “They’re fine. We’re fine. You’re safe. The emergency lights will kick on in a second. I’ve been in this panic room before. There’s plenty of space and supplies.”

  “What if one of the guards is a bad guy and they trapped us down here?”

  “It was a drill.”

  “But how do you know?”

  “Sit.” He pulled me to the floor and took hold of my forearms.

  The concrete was hard and cold but solid beneath me. Supportive.

  “Breathe. Breathe with my count. In. One. Two. Three. Out. One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six.” His voice sounded deep and strong in the dark and unafraid. He clearly believed this was a drill. “In. Out.” He kept the inhales half the length of the exhales.

  My breathing slowed, and my heart rate calmed under his instructions. My senses other than survival kicked in. I was close enough to breathe in his cologne, a kind of posh guy sophisticated cologne. I wanted to crawl forward and breathe in deeper. My shoulders eased, and his fingers moved in soothing circles on my inner arms. He traced large figure-eights from my elbow to my wrist. Infinity. He was tracing infinity into my arms. The motion was addictive. I curled my nails into my palms.

  More.

  In my romantic popular fiction class, the professor played a Romance Writers of America workshop recording. The author had lectured on putting sex in the middle of a stressful situation. She’d called it, “stop, drop, and roll.” I’d thought that was a crazy trope. Now I got it. Everything in me was heightened, falling apart, and Wythe anchored me. I could see grabbing ahold of him.

  “They run drills all the time. We react as if the threat’s real.”

  My brain had fuzzed out, but I forced myself to concentrate on his words. “You don’t think this is real?” My voice came out calm and steady, making me proud.

  His warm hands dropped away, and I missed them instantly. “I refused to do my duty and attend the kennel show. Mother called a drill. A little reminder of my obligations.”

  This was over the dog show. No way. They’d scared the hell out of me because he’d refused to go to the dog show. I sucked in a breath, losing my calm rhythm. It was like one of my sister’s manipulations times ten. “What?” Shock colored my voice, outrage replaced my fear, and I slapped the concrete floor with my palms. “You don’t want to go to the dog show, so they throw you in a dark closet?” My hands were waving in the air now, though he couldn’t see them.

  “Nothing so Harry Potter.”

  It wasn’t funny.

  He half-laughed. “They’ll secure the area, get an all-clear, and we’ll be out in fifteen. I don’t have to live down here hiding my magic.”

  I liked his turns of phrase, and I wanted to be distracted. “What magic?”

  This time, he full-on chuckled and tugged on a strand of my hair. “The longest I’ve stayed in a panic room has been an hour, and that was during a storm with com problems.”

  I wanted to lean into his hand or have him thread his fingers in my hair. He didn’t. “Storm? Like rain? Because rain is all you’ve got here. Why didn’t they build a rain-proof bunker? Don’t they live here? Don’t they know? We’ll be stuck here for hours.” I wasn’t proud of the escalation of my tone, but I wasn’t ashamed of it either. My emotions were fluctuating like a carousel of books at the library, a fast one where the books tumbled off. “Hours.” My eyes had adjusted. I couldn’t really see him but knew from my other senses that he sat crisscross in front of me while m
y legs curled to the side because of my dress. Dresses were no good in emergencies. I grabbed his knees.

  “I don’t hate it.” His voice deepened.

  As if timed, the overhead fluorescent lights buzzed on.

  The light calmed me down in a different way than his breathing exercise. We’d be fine. We were in a bunker. The room held a shelf of supplies, food, computer equipment, and bedding. A couch squatted against the far wall by an interior door. Bunkers meant stir crazy, cabin fever, and escalating paranoia. But we were safe.

  We needed out.

  Wythe rose, pulling me up with him and over to the couch.

  I was in no mood to stop, drop, and roll. Those books had it wrong. I dusted my palms off on my thighs and sat on the overstuffed cushion, ready to run again, but the couch didn’t let me keep my coiled posture. The couch had lost its support decades ago and sucked me in. My skirt slid up my thighs. I tugged it down.

  Despite the bunker’s age and secrecy, the room had been cleaned recently. The air smelled of apple polish, like the foyer and the furniture at my grandparents’ house. Must’ve been a British brand. At home, cleansers were more lemon or orange-scented. Apple didn’t scream clean. Our country had started with British immigrants. Maybe that’s where we got our fondness for apple pie, some urge for the fragrances from our homeland.

  Wythe eyed me with his impossibly blue eyes, in the way the European men did. American men stared at girls, too, but they were less obvious about it. I caught his gaze. His eyes were fascinating, like gemstones. I could look into his bright eyes a long time.

  I leaned my head into the couch cushion and did just that.

  He arched his eyebrows. “What made you choose to do this with your summer?” His tone was neutral, but I could tell my decision hadn’t impressed him.

  I blinked. Confessing that my sister tricked me into it sounded lame.

  I shrugged.

  He looked away.

  It made me feel lost for a moment. Like I’d had a chance to connect with him. And I’d missed it. It was one of those moments I didn’t know how to get back.