CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

Hammer was not in bed when Amelia woke up the next morning. But unlike the morning before, she didn't trip. She didn't panic. If she had to go it alone, so be it. But she was getting answers today.

She got herself out of bed, took a quick shower to get all of Hammer's massive outpour out of her, brushed, gargled, and then dressed, modestly for her, in a pair of jeans, a sleeveless blouse, and a Versace blazer. She put on her Jordans, put her hair in a ponytail, grabbed her iPad and phone, and made it downstairs.

When she went into her kitchen and saw Hammer standing at the center island, fully dressed in one of those tailored suits he left at her house, reading an actual newspaper and drinking coffee, she inwardly did feel relief. And although Ozzie Jones, Hammer's bodyguard and best friend, a former special ops guy himself, was also in the kitchen sitting at the center island on his phone, she was okay with that too. He was Hammer's family. She accepted that. He knew the saga of Hammer and Amelia better than most.

"Good morning," she said as she entered the room.

Although Hammer didn't bother to look up from his newspaper, Ozzie stood up with a smile and gave her a peck on the cheek. "You look like a kid again," he said. "I'm used to you in stilettos and the bad bitch outfits."

Amelia laughed. "You can't catch the bad guys in heels," she said as she sat at the island and Ozzie sat back down too.

Then she looked at Hammer. His look was intense. "I didn't know they still made those," she said.

Although she was talking to Hammer, it was Ozzie who answered. "He has to read the fine print of certain stories we plant to make sure they stuck to the script."

"So the media is fake news and in the pocket of the government after all?"

Ozzie laughed. "I wouldn't go that far," he said.

"Where's the G-man?"

"The Secret Service agent? Hammer sent him back to DC. This part of the journey is not conducive to a law enforcement agent hanging around."

Amelia smiled. She knew that was right. Then she looked at Hammer again. The way he made love to her last night was criminal. Not because it was bad ass, although it was, but because it had her craving him again. The man she was supposed to be divorcing. The man she couldn't allow to take away the very essence of who she was. But her heart loved just looking at him.

And he finally looked up.

When he looked up and saw Amelia sitting there, what she didn't know was that his heart was doing calisthenics, too, when he looked at her. And Ozzie was right. She did look like a kid again. But she was all woman. His woman, he didn't care what their future held. He made up his mind late last night, as she slept in his arms. He couldn't lose this once-in-a-lifetime treasure. He just couldn't. He had to do better by her.

"Good morning," he said as he put a mug in front of her and began pouring her coffee. "How do you feel?"

"Considering how I should feel," she said, "I feel pretty good. It was a bad day, but a good night."

They glanced at each other. Hammer's penis began to throb again just thinking about that good night.

"No way to get a divorce," she said.

Ozzie wanted to look up from his phone when she said that, but he was shrewd enough to mind his own business.

Hammer smiled when she made that statement. But he wasn't about to touch that. "Why the iPad?" he asked her. "Planning to work from home?"

"I need an address. I need to go see a client."

"Which client?"

"Mrs. Beth Kucinich, the widow of the man they claim I murdered."

Now Ozzie and Hammer both were looking at her. "She's the one who hired you to check on her husband?"

Amelia nodded. "She's the one."

"What was her beef? He was cheating on her?"

"She didn't care that he was cheating. She didn't need any dick pics in the motel or anything like that. She wanted him to bend to her will and grant her everything she wants in their divorce. He also had to agree to dismiss their prenup. Did you know Stanley Kucinich was nearly a billionaire?"

When she saw that non-committal look on Hammer's face, she smiled. "What am I saying? Of course you knew! And I'll bet you know where she lives."

"Yes, I do," said Hammer. "What did she want you to do to get her husband to bend to her will?"

"Start by threatening him the way I did at that motel. He had great political ambitions. Like most senators, he saw himself as a president. I made clear nobody was going to elevate a man with no charisma like him to the highest office in the land when he couldn't even keep it in his pants. That sort of thing."

"How much did she pay you?" asked Ozzie. "You can tell a lot about a case based on what the client is willing to pay."

"She wanted to pay me two-hundred and fifty grand. I doubled that."

Ozzie looked at Hammer shocked. Hammer was looking at Amelia. "Are you telling me that Kucinich's widow was willing to pay you half a million dollars to threaten her husband?"

Amelia nodded. "That's right."

"And you didn't find that odd, Amelia?"

"In the context of a near-billionaire aspiring to be president, no. They'd do anything to keep that secret. I've had other clients like her who gave me even more to threaten to expose their husbands' bad behavior. She's taking the long view. She wants that big pot of gold at the end of her divorce rainbow."

Hammer exhaled. "I guess you're right," he said. "Only problem is, Beth Kucinich never filed for a divorce."

Amelia looked at him. "She didn't?"

"Not in Idaho. Not in Baltimore. Not anywhere."

"That's strange," said Amelia. "She told me that divorce settlement was what it was all about," she added as her phone began ringing.

When she looked at the Caller ID and saw that it was Dak from the office, she answered. "You and Katie haven't burned down my office yet, have you?"

"Not quite," he said. "But are you okay? What's all this talk about you being arrested for killing that senator we ran surveillance on? It's all over the news."

Amelia jumped up and began hurrying to her living room. Hammer and Ozzie looked at each other and then followed her. She grabbed the TV remote and turned it on. And Dak was right. It was on every cable news channel she turned on. "I'll call you back, Dak."

"But you're okay?"

"Yes. I'm fine. I'm out. It's all bullshit. I'll call you back," she said and ended the call as they watched footage on CNN of her getting into an SUV with Mick and Charles and Hammer.

"Whoever filmed that was inside that station," said Amelia. "They filmed us. Those assholes!"

Ozzie was peering slyly out of the window. "We got company," he said.

"The media?" asked Hammer.

"Big time. They aren't on the grounds. Security is keeping them out in the streets. But they're out in force."

"How many?"

"Dozens," said Ozzie.

Hammer sighed. "Damn. I was hoping we could get out of here before any shit hit the fan."

Hammer's phone rang. The other one that Amelia and Ozzie both knew meant business. Amelia muted the TV.

The voice on the other end was so loud that even Ozzie could hear it from across the room. It was the President of the United States, they could tell, and she was furious.

"A leave of absence?" she yelled out at Hammer. "Are you out of your fucking mind? You're our point man to the biggest disaster we've faced in years and you have the nerve to call my chief of staff and notify him that you're taking a leave of absence?"

Amelia looked at Hammer. She was shocked to hear such news.

"At a time like this?" the POTUS added.

But Hammer remained calm. He disagreed with the way she thought she owned him, but she was still POTUS. She was still the President of the United States. "I'm handling a personal matter." He knew she'd heard about it.

"I understand your wife has some issues. But I also understand you took care of that."

She spoke as if it was all over. "I'm taking care of it," he said.

"You're getting your ass back to Washington to take care of our situation. Personal matters do not trump national security I don't care who it involves, and you know that, Hammer!"

Now Hammer was pissed. "It trumps it this time," he said, and ended the call even as she continued to rant.

"She was still talking, man," said a shocked Ozzie. "You hung up on POTUS, man."

Amelia was floored too. He'd never chosen her over his duty to his country ever.

But Hammer had already moved on. "This media storm is going to only get worse," he said to Amelia, who was still staring at him. "There's going to be an outcry for you to be re-arrested and face justice."

Now Amelia was paying attention. "How long do you think we have?"

"Because they're going to cry cover-up and the only reason the charges were dropped is because you're my wife, we'll be fortunate if we have forty-eight hours."

The fact that she only had a couple days to prove her innocence was sobering. And the matter of Senator Reiner's "disappearance" hadn't even come to the surface yet. "Where do we start?" she asked Hammer.

"Where you planned to start from the beginning. With Stanley Kucinich's grieving widow."

"Grieving?" said Amelia. "She just inherited nearly a billion dollars. That bitch ain't grieving."

"All the more reason we need to check her out. She has a major motive." Then Hammer looked at Ozzie. "We need a car out back."

"Already there," said Ozzie. "Complete with driver. I assumed it was going to be media around here eventually."

"Good man. Let's go," Hammer said without waiting for anybody to say anything. But Amelia was ready. She and Ozzie hurried behind him.

They went out the back garage that had a back exit on her property that would lead them to a back street. But as soon as the back garage door lifted up and she saw a big black Escalade sitting there, she stopped in her tracks. Then she moved past Hammer to look inside. When she saw Mick behind the wheel, she frowned. "What are you doing here? I thought I got rid of you last night."

Mick looked at her as if she'd lost her mind. "Nobody gets rid of me," he said.

Amelia smiled. Her brother didn't take shit from anybody, no matter what the circumstances.

"Hammer's ass so soft now he has to be driven around. You need a driver. I'm the driver."

She could have said Ozzie was their driver, but she held her tongue. She knew like Hammer knew, who held his tongue too, that they needed Mick. They were both inwardly pleased to have him as they climbed onto the second row of his big tank of an SUV.

Ozzie got in on the front passenger side. "When did you get back in town?" he asked Mick as he buckled himself in.

"I never left," Mick said.

"Why?" Hammer asked him.

Mick looked at him through his rearview mirror. "As long as my sister is involved in this shit, I'm involved in this shit. I'm sticking around."

Hammer was actually touched by Mick's comment. Amelia already knew that was why he was hanging around like he was her prison guard. She knew Mick loved her to death. He just couldn't stand her inability to keep herself out of trouble. "What about Charles?" asked Amelia as Hammer buckled her in.

"He went back to Maine to check on his home front. Ted and Nikki's got it covered in Philly. Where to?"

"Idaho," said Amelia. All she knew was that Beth Kucinich lived in the state in which her husband was senator.

But Hammer knew more. "Not Idaho. Florida. She's in Florida."

Amelia looked at him. "Florida?"

"At a lake house in Coral Gables," Hammer said with a shake of his head. "Nobody's supposed to know it exists."

"But you know?"

"She's a senator's wife. The Feds keep taps on their living arrangements."

"My plane is waiting in Annapolis," said Mick. "We'll go there. The media already has Hammer's plane here in Baltimore surrounded. There's no way we can go there."

"Ozzie, phone my pilot and tell him to simulate takeoff to make the media believe I'm heading that way."

"Will do," said Ozzie as he pulled out his cell phone. Then Mick drove them away.

Amelia leaned back. And then looked over at Hammer. He was looking out of the window he sat beside as if he had lost his best friend. She still couldn't believe he hung up on the president. She still couldn't believe that he chose to stay with her. She knew how difficult that was for him to make that choice. But he made it.

That was why she reached out her hand to him. When he felt her touch, he looked over at her. Then he smiled a smile wroth with so many warring emotions that it wasn't a smile at all, but a grimace. Then he squeezed and held her hand.

Mick saw it through the rearview mirror.

Like a moth to a flame, he thought whenever he thought of the two of them. Beautiful at first. Then deadly. They were going to burn each other in the end. And he wasn't mad at them, either, because he knew the feeling. Because a lot of people had once given the same odds to him and Roz.