Saving Liberty (Kissing #6) Read Online Free PDF Page B

call intimidatingly tall. Six-foot-four with hair that’s still got some black in between the silver. He has a way of looking at you that makes you feel like no one else in the world exists.
    “Great,” I lied. “Didn’t mean to disturb you. I just wanted to say I’m definitely coming tonight.”
    I saw the relief break across his face and it cemented my decision. I’d been cooped up long enough: I had to fight this thing.
    And then, just as I was feeling good, a hand landed on my shoulder. “That’s great news, Emily,” said the Vice President. “Good to see you getting back to your old self.”
    I gave my best fake smile and counted the seconds until I’d be free of his hand. I could feel my guts twisting, the wrongness throbbing down from each finger that touched me, like being plugged into evil.
    Let me tell you about the Vice President.
    Edward Kerrigan is handsome in a safe, bland sort of a way. He has curly blond hair that probably made him a really cute kid and big gray eyes that look good in photos, but are utterly soulless when you see them in real life. If you stranded a choirboy on a desert island at age eight and left him to grow up by himself with no parents, no moral compass, killing animals with his bare hands to survive, when you came back in thirty-five years he’d look exactly like Kerrigan.
    Other women go nuts for him: women in their thirties, even women in their twenties. I sometimes wonder if there’s something wrong with me because I can’t stand him. The guy’s got it all: he’s rich (and it’s not daddy’s money, like a lot of politicians: he built up his company from nothing and was CEO for years), he dresses well and he’s never been hit with a scandal. His wife is beautiful. His kids are adorable.
    And yet….
    Imagine the most enticing cake you’ve ever, ever seen. Smoothly frosted with thick chocolate frosting, intricately decorated with sugar flowers. It looks perfect. Everyone’s inviting you to take a big ol’ bite.
    But you know—you just have this instinct—that it’s a trick. That just beneath the frosting, instead of light, perfect, sponge, it’s a solid block of squirming, crawling maggots and roaches. It doesn’t matter how good it smells: the thought of biting into it makes you want to hurl. But only you know . Everyone else wonders what the hell’s the matter with you. Don’t you like cake?
    That’s how Edward Kerrigan made me feel. Every. Single. Time.
    The hand on my shoulder rubbed. Not in a sexual way. More like he was stroking a puppy. “I’m going to see to it,” he told me, “that those bastards can never do this again.”
    Both my dad and I stiffened because we knew exactly what he was talking about: The Guardian Act.
    It was the Vice President’s bill, the one he’d announced in response to the attack in the park. Lately he’d been all over the media talking about it, using phrases like a new era of security and leaving the bad guys no place to hide. The bill promised to end terrorism by putting a huge new security force on the streets, together with more surveillance. To a public in shock, it sounded like a good idea. And while there was plenty of opposition from grassroots protestors and people like the ACLU, the media were divided... and starting to lean his way. Stoking the public’s fear of more terror attacks was a good way to sell papers.
    My dad, like me, could see the true horror of what he was proposing: martial law... but much, much worse than anything our country had ever known after a disaster. Because the Vice President wasn’t proposing that we use the army to protect us: he wanted to use private military contractors. Tens of thousands of them, enough that there would be no way they could all be adequately trained. Every street corner would have a goon with an assault rifle on it, with the power to stop and search anyone they wanted. Suspects would be interrogated where necessary, and the bill contained passages that