Indecent Proposal (Boys of Bishop)

by Molly O'Keefe

  But tough was lonely. So was proud.

  And she had a lot of practice with those things, having lived alone with them for years. Exiled from every Christmas and birthday with her family. Weekends at home, Olivia’s performances, Dad …

  The thought of Dad got her to her feet.

  This was how she made things right with Dad. The money her lawyer was making sure she got—that would go a long way toward fixing what she’d done.

  She grabbed her leather purse. It used to be one of the nicest things she owned, but now, sitting on the granite floor under the chandelier, it just looked cheap.

  I don’t care, she thought. I don’t care how I look to these people. I have a job to do, a past to make right, and a future to secure.

  And I’m not stupid.

  “Show me where the fucking south parlor is. I need to get married.”

  Wallace pointed toward the door that Patty and Noelle had vanished through.

  “Right.” She threw her hair over her shoulder and crossed the foyer.

  “Ryan?” Wallace asked.

  “Yeah?”

  “You were right about my mom.” He was running a hand over that ugly tie. “She would have done this, too. For me.”

  It felt like a blessing. But maybe that’s what any kind of approval looked like when you were lying down flat at rock bottom.

  Whatever, she thought. I’ll take it.

  She winked at Wallace, which made him laugh, and she opened the door to the unknown beyond.

  Chapter 12

  Harrison saw Wallace tapping his watch in the study doorway. Harrison nodded and held up one finger.

  Wallace pulled an exasperated face.

  “Hey, Gibbs, I need to go.” He cut the analyst off in the middle of a discussion of language use in a new survey they were going to put out regarding fiscal responsibility. “Email me that poll data and I’ll look it over and call you back next week.” Gibbs agreed and hung up.

  “I take it she’s here?” Harrison asked, hanging up his cell phone and slipping it into his pocket. He’d been procrastinating, listening to doors slam down the hallway and not in any hurry to join the fray.

  Cowardly; he totally understood that.

  “She’s been here waiting for nearly forty-five minutes,” Wallace said, and Harrison gaped at the man.

  “Are you chastising me? The man who wanted me to pillory her in the New York Times?”

  Wallace shrugged, stepping farther into the mahogany-paneled office. It was on the first floor and therefore open to the public for tours, so it fairly reeked of formal inefficiency. But Harrison had never been comfortable in his father’s offices. Not since he was twenty-two. In the irrational fear he would be contaminated. Pulled offside by his father’s weakness.

  The joke’s on you, isn’t it. The weakness was already in him.

  Maybe that was why he was procrastinating, putting off the ramifications of his weakness. The utter reality of his failure.

  “I’ve changed my mind about her.”

  This honestly didn’t come as a surprise to Harrison. Ryan had the kind of tough-love charm that Wallace would adore. Hell, Harrison had adored it for one night.

  Tell me who your best isn’t good enough for.

  “Don’t tell me you’re turning into a romantic.”

  “She went toe to toe with your mom,” Wallace said.

  Harrison paused while shrugging into his coat. “And she’s still here?”

  “She’s tough, man,” Wallace said with a shrug and a smile, like he was talking about some scrappy new pitcher for the Braves.

  In Wallace-speak, it was high praise.

  “We knew that.” He jammed paperwork into his briefcase, the amended marriage contracts he’d signed. No sex, separate rooms, she could leave if both parties agreed should he lose the election, the blood test Mother had insisted be included. This whole marriage was a farce. It wasn’t even a very good business arrangement since it was, at its core, a cover-up. “She is tough. Foolish and headstrong. Uneducated, a potential nightmare in the press, she has a loose-cannon brother with a criminal past, to say nothing of that Lip Girl thing. She may or may not be pregnant with my child. She may or may not have orchestrated this whole damn thing.”

  “You don’t really believe that, do you?” Wallace asked. “That she’s tricked you?”

  “Don’t act so horrified, Wallace. Twenty-four hours ago you were saying the same thing.”

  “Well, as your soon-to-be wife just reminded me, there were two of you in that room and only one of you knew who you were.”

  Harrison came abreast of his campaign manager at the door. “If that’s true and she didn’t know me, she quickly figured it out, didn’t she?”

  “Or her brother did and she really knew nothing about it.”

  What if that was the truth? he wondered, but then quickly decided it didn’t matter.

  “That doesn’t change the fact that I barely know her. But what I do know is she is without a doubt the worst possible wife for me.”

  “Yeah,” Wallace said. “If all you are is a politician.”

  “I’m a Montgomery,” Harrison said. “What else would I be?”

  The south parlor was the scene of a very strange tableau. Reverend Michaels and Mother sat on the love seat, their heads bent together. One might think they were praying, but Harrison knew better. Plotting world domination perhaps, or at the very least the destruction of one former bartender from Philly.

  Dad sat in a chair by the curtains, his tie and jacket gone. A drink in hand. And by the flush on his cheeks, it wasn’t his first. Ted was studiously ignoring everyone else in the room, particularly Ryan. As if just clapping eyes on her might hurt his approval rating.

  Or maybe he was thinking about Heidi, the young woman he’d used and discarded.

  Maybe he was feeling the edges of his own guilt.

  Ryan sat in one of the gold brocade Queen Anne chairs, her legs crossed, a flip-flop dangling from her toe. She was reading something on her phone, one finger twirling the end of a lock of hair.

  She was chewing gum.

  Loudly.

  In a house full of lies and pretense, she was startling, viscerally real.

  “I think I’m in love with her,” Wallace muttered.

  “Sorry I’m late,” Harrison said, stepping farther into the room.

  “Well, well, if it isn’t the Golden Boy.” Dad wasn’t slurring. Not quite. But his words were dipped in ugliness. Ryan lifted her head, a deer scenting danger.

  Harrison ignored him. Ignored him so hard he practically shook.

  “Not so sanctimonious now, are you, son?” Ted kicked his legs out in front of him, angling his head as if to study Harrison more clearly. “Tell me, how does it feel to be just as human as the rest of us?”

  Harrison threw his briefcase onto the chair.

  “Nothing to say to your old man? You know if you’d asked me, I could have told you. It’s never worth it, son.”

  “Ted!” Mother’s sharp voice rattled the windows, silencing her husband, who took his chastisement like he always did—with a healthy slug of bourbon.

  “It’s not too late to change your mind,” Mother said. She stood and approached him with her hands out. “We can think of another way out of this.”

  Suddenly, it seemed as if their roles were reversed and he was the one steeling himself, holding himself away from her so as to not get dirty with her barely concealed emotion. Her messy desire for more of him than he was willing to give.

  “There is no other way,” Harrison said.

  “Well, in that case.” Dad stood up, bracing himself on the chair until his legs were steady. “Congratulations, son,” he said, toasting Harrison with his glass, and then turned to Ryan. He fought the desire to step in front of Ryan and shove his father back into his evil, dark little corner, but that would require acknowledging the man. “Welcome to the family. Welcome all to hell.”

  “So romantic,” Ryan said
, and all three Montgomerys turned to stare at her. “Really, how can a girl refuse?” She stood up, tucked her phone back in her purse, and approached all of them. Like Daniel sashaying into the lion’s den. “The contracts have been signed. I’m totally bought and paid for, and while I appreciate a good family fight before any wedding ceremony, I’ve been waiting for close to an hour to get married. I’m exhausted. Sick. And my feet are swelling. So, I’d like to get hitched.”

  Everyone looked down at her feet. At her flip-flops.

  “Harrison,” Mother moaned. “You cannot be serious about this.”

  “I am.”

  Ryan stood there looking exactly like what she was—beautiful, yes. Stunningly so. Sexy and lush and vibrant. But she was broke, desperate, and uneducated. In terms of improving her life, she’d hit the jackpot with him.

  She wasn’t here because of any lingering emotional attachment he had to her from that night they’d shared. He didn’t share his sister’s romantic idealism, the desire to be anyone outside of his name.

  Ryan was here because Harrison had been weak.

  “Reverend Michaels,” he said. “If you would do the honors.”

  Married. I am married.

  She kept staring at the simple gold band on her finger, next to the very not simple diamond ring Harrison had slipped on with the band in a very slick sleight of hand that she doubted anyone had noticed. Engaged and married in one fell swoop.

  The diamond was at least a carat and made the diamond chip Paul had given her a lifetime ago seem ridiculous.

  “Where’d this come from?” she asked. “The diamond?”

  “My aunt’s.” He didn’t look at her, barely acknowledged her. “You’ll give it back if you break the contract.”

  Right. Contract.

  She was married to a man who’d ignored her for the last hour. If he hadn’t said her name during the ceremony, someone watching the event would not have known whom he was marrying. The icy moat he’d dug around himself was impenetrable and despite the sticky heat of Atlanta in the summer, she was cold in his presence and felt naked in her dress.

  As soon as Wallace had shut Harrison’s car door, Harrison had put up the privacy screen between the front and back seats and poured himself a scotch from the bar hidden in the seat between them. He’d given her a bottle of water, which sat in her lap, condensation making dark spots on her dress.

  And then he’d pulled a stack of papers from the briefcase on the floor beside his outstretched legs and didn’t look at her again.

  He was so big in the backseat, took up so much space. Air.

  She tilted her head back so she could breathe.

  “Are you going to be sick?” Harrison asked.

  His electric-blue eyes watched her in the darkness. It was the first time he’d looked at her since getting in the car. It was shocking, that gaze in the half-dark.

  My husband.

  That is my husband.

  “I’m fine.” Her voice croaked from exhaustion and disuse.

  The tinted windows made the dark outside seem darker, but it was obvious they were driving closer to the city.

  “Where do you live?”

  “A condo in midtown,” he said looking back down at the files in his lap. He took a sip of scotch.

  “Is it nice?”

  “Nice enough.”

  The silence was so thick she could scoop it up in her hands, like wet sand, and make a wall between them as real as the privacy screen between the front and back seats.

  “What happens tomorrow?” she asked, because she was perverse and he so clearly wanted her to be silent.

  “We’ll be giving a press conference at my campaign office. Before that there will be some people at my house to help us get ready.”

  “Your mother is getting me clothes.”

  He barely looked at her. “If that bothers you, tell her to stop. Eventually she listens.”

  “It’s fine,” she said. “Noelle will probably have a better idea of what I need than I will.”

  Harrison sighed. Ryan ran her hand over the water bottle in her lap, collecting moisture and then wiping it on her dress.

  “I made her angry, and I did it on purpose. I probably shouldn’t have done that.”

  “Everything makes her angry; don’t take it personally.”

  “I’m going to need all the friends I can get.”

  He huffed under his breath, giving her the impression that friendship and his mother were not going to happen. But she couldn’t stop thinking about the way Patty had taken her apart in the foyer. Obviously, Patty didn’t like her and that was fine, but that scene wasn’t just about not liking Ryan. It was about protecting her son. And Ryan had no clue what went into being a politician’s wife, but maybe that was part of it.

  Protection.

  Part of her job was to keep the illusion alive. To protect Harrison’s reputation.

  Any other time, she’d call bullshit on that. There were two people in that hotel room, and only one of them knew the whole story. But she’d taken the money. Signed the agreement.

  She was a politician’s wife.

  She thought of all the women standing next to disgraced politician husbands as they made their tearful apologies for screwing other women. Were they there out of love? Or because the heart of their relationship was much like the heart of Harrison’s parents’ marriage?

  Or her own.

  She’d survived physical science sophomore year at Flowers by cheating off of Denise Shimansky, so she would survive this by cheating off of Patty Montgomery.

  Which meant she was going to have to make nice. Or at least nicer.

  “Will someone be writing us a speech … or something?” she asked.

  “Wallace will have some remarks for us.”

  “Remarks—is that a fancy politician word for a speech?”

  That made him smile, and she felt that same stupid shot of accomplishment that she’d felt that night in the bar. A sense of pride in making this very serious man smile.

  Stupid, Ryan. Don’t be stupid.

  “I suppose it is. Are you okay in front of an audience?” he asked, as if just figuring out that it could be a problem for a future congressman to have a wife who was terrified of public speaking.

  “It makes me fart uncontrollably.”

  His entire face fell in horror and she couldn’t help bursting into laughter.

  “You’re joking,” he said, more demand than question.

  “Sometimes I get so nervous I cry.”

  “This isn’t funny, Ryan.”

  “Oh, but it is.” She wiped at her streaming eyes. The tension of the day made her laugh even harder until she was doubled up on the seat. “Oh God, your face. So perfect.”

  “Laugh it up,” he said dryly, but he started laughing, too. Well, not laughing, but smiling with his whole mouth, destroying just a bit of that icy chill around him, and it was such a wonderful release that she sort of stopped hating him. For just a minute.

  This must be what Stockholm syndrome feels like.

  “Seriously, though, are you going to be okay in front of cameras?”

  “I’ve done some modeling work. I think I’ll be okay. I’m just going to pretend I’m playing a character. A love-struck woman ready to stand by her man and drink tea and wave at people.” She gave him a smile and wave that was part Queen of England, part Dolly Parton. Warmth and distance, all in one gesture.

  “That’s … really good.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Why’d you stop modeling?”

  “I don’t know,” she said with a shrug, though she did know. She knew exactly why the work stopped coming, why her agent found it harder and harder to book a job for her. “I’ve been told I am not always the easiest to work with.”

  In the reflection of the window she could see him watching her. If she closed her eyes she imagined she would be able to actually feel the heat and weight of his gaze; that was how hard he was staring.

/>   “Doesn’t bode well for us, does it?”

  “I’m not sure anything bodes well for us.”

  He went back to his files and she went back to looking out the dark window at the interstate lights, and the silence went back to being uncomfortable.

  Part of what she liked about being a bartender was being able to read people. Being able to take all the clues they left in their body language and tone of voice, the way they held their drink or talked to their friends, and add all those things up into an impression. An idea of what they were like, what they wanted, what they were scared of.

  Usually within ten minutes of serving someone a drink, she knew why that person was drinking. And sometimes, what the person was thinking.

  But Harrison was utterly blank to her. Not only couldn’t she figure out what he wanted or what he thought, but he didn’t leave her any clues to even try to figure him out. He was a slick, handsome rich surface upon which she could get no footing.

  Tonight, however, his family had given her plenty of clues. Plenty of tells. And the story his family told was not a nice one.

  He’d grown up in a bowl, he’d said that night in the hotel. Without air.

  She wondered, watching him with narrowed eyes, if he was truly this nonchalant. This cool in the face of marrying a stranger. Or if it was a show. After watching his parents in action, she was leaning toward show. Because underneath Harrison’s calm surface she would never have guessed he had parents like that.

  Ted was a drunk. A bad one. Barely kept in line by his wife.

  And all they cared about was what the other was doing that might impact them.

  The only thing the Montgomerys seemed to do together was stare daggers into her flesh. How wonderful that loathing her was what they could agree on.

  I am the tie that binds.

  She traced a drop of water down the plastic side of her bottle and watched him from the corner of her eye.

  “That was quite a scene in there,” she said. “At the mansion.”

  He flipped over a page of his file. “Not quite how you imagined your wedding?”

  “I never imagined myself getting married again, but that wasn’t what I was talking about.”