Major Nanny

“Looking forward to seeing Zachary?” Lila murmured, drawing Stacy’s attention back to the cabin of the small jet.

“Yes,” she answered, even if there was a small part of her that was dreading seeing her son after the unexpected night away from home. Zachary hated changes to his routine, so he’d probably given poor Charlotte a hard time last night. Stacy almost envied Charlotte—at least a tantrum was a response. When Zachary was immersed in his own little world—a frequent event—he barely acknowledged Stacy’s presence.

They arrived in Freedom a little after 7:00 a.m. Stacy stayed with the governor for a few minutes, going over the changes to Lila’s schedule arranged in response to the events in Austin and planning ahead for a couple of television interviews to let the people of Texas see that the governor was ready to finish out her term with her usual sass and vigor.

Finally, Lila told her to take the rest of the morning off, but to come back to the ranch house for lunch. “I have something else I need to discuss with you.”

With curiosity niggling at the back of her brain, Stacy walked to the ranch guesthouse she shared with her son. She found Charlotte Manning in the middle of helping Zachary find a pair of socks to wear to school.

Charlotte looked surprised to see her. “How’d the governor get the hospital to let her go so early?”

“You know how the governor is. What doctor was going to say no?” Stacy smiled at Zachary, who looked up at her for a second, then looked away, showing no sign of interest.

He went back to his search, sorting through the socks to find the blue pair. Tuesday meant the blue socks. Always.

A cold ache settled in her chest. After a year and a half of trying to come to terms with Zachary’s condition, she now realized she wasn’t ever going to get used to it. She’d spent every available hour researching Asperger’s syndrome, reading books, blogs, dry medical journal articles and heartfelt newspaper stories from parents of aspies, as people with Asperger’s syndrome referred to themselves. She’d come across a blog by a young college student who had Asperger’s and found some comfort in how grounded the young woman seemed to be, despite her different way of experiencing life, but ultimately, she’d had to accept that life with her beautiful son would be a series of never-ending challenges.

He’d have trouble making friends. He might never fall in love and have a life partner. He might find a job he loved but he just as easily might not. She’d fight with everything inside her to help him reach his full potential, but it was impossible to tell what that potential might be right now, when he was barely old enough to tie his shoes on his own.

“The Arabian horse has a concave nose,” Zachary announced, still looking at the sock drawer. He reached in and extracted the blue socks, showing no sense of triumph as he pulled the blue socks onto his small feet. “The Morgan horse is the first American breed of horse to survive to this day.”

“He’s been reading his horse book again?” Stacy asked Charlotte.

Charlotte nodded, her shaggy red hair bouncing with the movement. “He was pretty insistent about reading it to me at bedtime. His reading is getting to be downright amazing.”

“I know he must have been disappointed not to take a riding lesson yesterday.” Stacy had been taking him for lessons every Monday and Thursday for a few weeks now. Lindsay Kemp at the Long K Ranch had started giving riding lessons to disabled children a few years ago. While Zachary’s problems were more developmental than physical, riding at the Long K had turned out to be good therapy for him. He loved horses enough to make the effort to interact with Lindsay in order to learn better how to deal with the horses.

Maybe she could sneak him down to the governor’s stables later this week. One of the groomsmen there, Trevor Lewis, had let Zachary ride one of the governor’s gentler horses a few times before. He seemed to know a little about Asperger’s syndrome—something about a cousin who had it—and he accepted Zachary’s idiosyncrasies without making a big deal about it.

“Charlotte, I’ll finish up getting him ready for school. You go ahead—I know you need to get there earlier than the children do.”

Charlotte taught Zachary and a small number of other students with learning challenges. One of the draws for Stacy when she was considering taking the job with the governor was the Cradle to Crayons day care. The reputation of its special education curriculum was excellent. Everyone Stacy had asked about the school had concurred—Zachary couldn’t ask for a better learning environment.

These days, Zachary was her reason for everything she did.

Charlotte had been a godsend. Once she’d learned about Zachary’s Asperger’s syndrome, she’d gone to work studying up on the condition and how best to work around his lack of social skills to make sure he was prepared for elementary school when the time came.

Stacy wasn’t sure she was ready to think that far ahead.

“He’s had breakfast, but he hasn’t brushed his teeth,” Charlotte warned. “His lunch is packed already—”

Stacy gave her an impulsive hug. “I don’t know how to thank you for this. Just tell me what I owe you.”

“Work in a couple of hours volunteering at the school over the next few weeks and we’ll call it even,” Charlotte said. “It was good for me to do this. It gave me a better understanding of how to deal with Zachary during school hours. It’s like on-the-job training.”

Stacy walked Charlotte to the door. “I’ll work out a volunteer schedule as soon as I get the governor settled back into some sort of routine.”

“I imagine that’ll take some doing,” Charlotte said with a wry grin as she headed out the door.

You have no idea, Stacy thought, closing the door behind Charlotte.

“WHAT DO YOU THINK?” Harlan leaned over Vince Russo’s shoulder, growing impatient with his fellow agent’s continuing silence. Vince was Corps Security and Investigation’s go-to guy when it came to explosives. If anyone could tell them anything interesting about the undetonated bomb Stacy had found in the debris, it was Vince.

“It’s basically an Iraqi-style IED,” Vince answered flatly.

Harlan released a long, slow breath. He’d thought so as well, at first glance, though his experience with explosives hadn’t been as hands-on as Vince’s had been. A former navy SEAL, Vince had set—and defused—his share of explosive devices during his time in Iraq.

“Can you tell anything else about it?”

“It’s a common make of phone—something you could find in just about any store in America. The cops will be able to see if the phone can be traced to anyone.” Vince looked up at Harlan. “It’s not likely. The device is fairly cobbled together, but whoever made it knew what he was doing. It’s a miracle he didn’t set it off before the bomb squad got there to disarm it.”

“I was wondering about that myself—” The door to the agents’ bull pen opened and Parker McKenna wheeled Bart Bellows through the door in a manual wheelchair.

Vince and Harlan both rose to greet their boss, hurrying to shake his hand.

“Aren’t you still supposed to be in the hospital?” Harlan asked, worried about how pale the older man looked.

“Hell, if Lila can talk her way out of a hospital bed, I’ll be damned if I’m going to laze about in Austin all day.” Bart directed his sharp blue-eyed gaze at Harlan, nodding his head toward the corner. “Let’s talk, McClain.”

Harlan wheeled Bart with him to the corner, away from the other agents. “What’s up?”

“The governor asked me to get you to her ranch for lunch.”

“Why?”

“I reckon she might want to thank you again in person.”

Harlan shook his head. “I didn’t do much of anything. She should thank her aide. She’s the one who crawled into that maze and got things done.”

He’d found it hard to get Stacy Giordano off his mind over the past few hours. Her gritty courage had impressed the hell out of him, but it was the pale, troubled expression on her face when he’d left her there at the hospital to start the long drive home to Freedom that had stuck with him through the intervening hours. He knew next to nothing about her, really, but he had a gut-level sense that she was a woman under an enormous amount of pressure beyond her demanding job.

Stop it. She’s not your problem. You have all the problems you need.

“Well, be that as it may, she asked for you to be there, and you’re going. Because that woman may well be the next president of the United States, and you don’t say no to someone who might wield that sort of power someday.”

“Fine. I’m up for a free lunch.” It would be a real pleasure to eat something that didn’t come straight out of a can or a microwave plate.

Bart gave a satisfied nod and started wheeling himself back to where the other men had gathered around Vince’s computer, looking at the bomb.

Harlan joined them, catching the tail end of what Vince was telling Parker. “The setup is pretty typical of what the al Antqam were using a few years back.”

“Al Antqam?” Bart asked.

“Loosely translated, it means Sons of Vengeance,” Harlan answered, not looking away from the computer screen. “They were a particularly vicious sect working out of the Anbar Province. Gave us a whole lot of trouble for a while.”

“I know that.” Bart’s voice sounded hoarse.

Harlan looked up and saw that the old man had gone as pale as milk. “Bart, are you okay?”