He pulled away from me, shaking hands, giving his parents and sisters a hug.
I stood next to Blair and Mitch, watching as Will walked up to the stage, the crowd cheering with each step he took. He began the speech I’d written, and the crowd went silent. My heart burst with pride as he rocked it—pride at the man he was and pride for the fact that I’d played a role in his success.
We made an unbeatable team.
And then I heard my name, heard him calling me up to the stage with a smile that blinded me. It was his “trust me” smile, the one that hooked me at the Hay-Adams, the one I believed in, the one I fell in love with.
I walked into the spotlight, my head held high, my heart bursting at the seams, and took my place next to him.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
First and foremost, huge thanks to my amazing agent, Kevan Lyon, for believing in this story. I never could have done it without you. Thanks to my awesome editor, Kate Seaver, for falling in love with Jackie and Will and for giving me an incredible opportunity. Huge thanks to Katherine Pelz, Megha Jain, and the entire team at Berkley and InterMix for all of their hard work.
Thanks to all of the bloggers and readers who have helped make my publishing dreams a reality. Thank you to the amazing Monica Murphy for reading this book and writing a blurb for Jackie and Will’s story that brought tears to my eyes. Big thanks to my family and friends, especially my NA ’14 ladies, for all of their support. And thanks to my husband for always believing in me and not complaining (much) when the dishes don’t get washed because I’m on deadline. I love you, babe.
This book was inspired by my love of D.C. and politics, and my awe of the men and women who dedicate their lives to serving the political process. And most of all, to Rebecca, who drank cosmos with me at the W when I needed to do a little research, and who changes the world, one election at a time. I’m so proud of you and so honored to call you my friend.
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Read on for a sneak peek at the next Capital Confessions novel
PLAYING WITH TROUBLE
Available July 2015 from InterMix
Jilted at the altar for the best man, and reeling from the revelation that her father has a secret daughter, rumor has it Blair Reynolds has enrolled at Hannover School of Law here in D.C. Is America’s Princess trading in her tiara for a briefcase?
—Capital Confessions blog
Blair
I never hated law school more than I did at ten-thirty in the morning, Monday through Wednesday. There were plenty of reasons to hate law school—hundreds of pages of nightly reading, endless debates over a mythical property annoyingly referred to as “Blackacre,” the constant urge to vomit each time a professor called on me. The biggest one stood in front of me—tailored Canali suit, dark hair, dark eyes, darker soul.
“Ms. Reynolds.”
Oh god, he said my name.
I spent an hour, three times a week, mentally bartering with God to keep that man, that sadist, from saying my name. Each week he ignored me.
A collective sigh seemed to ripple through the room as my classmates realized they were spared the guillotine. Seventy-four pairs of eyes bore into me, waiting to see how badly I’d fail.
I rose from my seat awkwardly, my legs wet noodles as I pulled down the hem of my Burberry skirt, struggling to keep the flush on my cheeks from spreading all over my face. He was the only professor in the entire law school who made us stand when we answered a question. It was an old-school technique, one all of my other professors had abandoned, even for first-year students—1Ls—like me.
“Brief the case.”
Shit.
I’d read. I always read. But law school was the one place where that didn’t matter. No matter how prepared you were, they always pushed you for more than you knew, more than you had, until you were left feeling like your clothes had been stripped from your body, exposing your every naked imperfection to seventy-four peers.
Crying after class wasn’t uncommon; some students even broke down in class. We all sat on the precipice of an utter nervous breakdown, no more so than in our first-year torts class.
Your first year of law school was a hazing of sorts, an attempt to separate the wheat from the chaff. I’d heard all of the rumors, and figured they were exaggerated; after all, I was the daughter of one of the fiercest U.S. Senators. I’d grown up around scary. But there was scary, and there was scary, and unfortunately for me, law school was in the latter category.
If statistics were to be believed, about 20 percent of my classmates would drop out by the end of the first year. They’d be the lucky ones. The rest of us would push through, surviving on alcohol, junk food, and Valium. Just kidding about the Valium. The drug of choice here was Adderall, used to treat attention deficit disorder and to get 1Ls through three hundred pages of nightly reading. And not interesting reading with a large font, but less-interesting-than-watching-paint-dry, need-a-microscope-to-see-the-text reading. I’d never tried any kind of recreational drug in my life, but if anything pushed me to it, it would be law school.
The sadist stared back at me, an expectant smirk on his face. Fuck.
My language had considerably deteriorated since the first day of classes last month. My mother would have a coronary if she knew what went through my head now. This was what happened when perfect cracked and splintered. This was what happened when your life fell apart.
I started running through the facts, struggling to remember this one case out of the ten I’d read for his class alone. My hands itched to turn the page in my textbook so I could use it for reference, but our gazes caught across the large classroom, and the look in his eyes kept my hands still.
Weakness was his crack, and there was still enough of the old Blair Reynolds inside me to refuse to cede any more self-respect, beyond that which he took against my will.
I stood for fifteen minutes, an eternity, going through the facts of the case, the issue, the law, the conclusion. Stood while he fired questions at me in that voice of his—hard, cold, unflinching. Questions that led me farther down the rabbit hole into an abyss of confusion. Each time I floundered, his smile deepened, as if he got off on my nerves.
He probably did.
When it was over I sank down into my seat like it was a life raft and I’d been adrift at sea for months. My legs never wanted to stand again.
“Nice job,” my friend Adam whispered from the seat next to me.
“Thanks,” I whispered back, twenty-three years of manners warring with terror over being caught talking in class.
“Ms. Reynolds?”
My heart stopped.
Fuck me, why? Not again.
“Yes?”
His eyebrow arched expectantly. Like a puppet, my body automatically rose to a standing position. He had us well-trained, me more than anyone. I was little more than a poodle under his command. There were seventy-five people in our torts class, and we’d all done the math, on average we should be called on three times per semester.
He called on me every fucking week without fail.
“Why don’t you brief the next case as well?”
His gaze drifted to Adam sitting next to me, lingering there for a moment as if to say, you got yourself into this mess when you dared to speak during class. Technically, he should have called on Adam since he spoke first. I was only being polite by answering. That would have been fair. But the irony was, law school had little concern with fair or just. Ego ruled here, and none was bigger than Professor Graydon Carter’s.
So many words ran through my head. So far I’d learned nothing about torts. My class time was typically divided into four activities that consumed me for an hour: begging and pleading with God for Professor Carter not to call on me, creating inventive and filthy names I hurled at him in my head, and devising elaborate fantasies where I told him exactly what he could do with his questions. But t
he absolute worst, the moments I hated in every corner of my preppy little heart, were the moments when I fantasized about that voice saying other things to me . . . those eyes undressing me, those hands on my body.
It was the cruelest irony that the man I despised, the man who tortured me from the front of the classroom three days a week, was the hottest fucking thing I’d ever seen.
His voice, those questions, those eyes that looked at you like they stripped you bare, had me shifting in my seat, edgy and unfocused—
And he knew it.
Gray
This was my penance—
Three days a week, first-year torts in the morning, a medical malpractice seminar for third-year students in the afternoon. Six hours of teaching a week for a year. One hundred and fifty hours, now reduced to one hundred and twenty-six. Not that I kept count. It was a chance to erase my sins. The professional ones at least. The others? Beyond redemption.
The only thing that kept me sane stood in front of the class, stumbling over the case I’d asked her to read.
I called on her way too much. I knew it, and based off of the way her eyes fairly screamed “go fuck yourself” she knew it, too. But I’d always had remarkably poor impulse control, and like everything that came before her and annihilated my life, she was another thing that tempted me.
I’d noticed her the first day of classes. She’d sat in the front of the room, right in the center. I’d walked in late, this classroom the last place I wanted to be. To add insult to injury, it wasn’t even a good law school. I’d gone from the top of my law class at the University of Chicago, to a lucrative practice where I quickly made more money than my South Side background knew what to do with, to this. A shitty visiting professor job at a shitty law school, teaching a bunch of rich students who could afford to pay the school’s ridiculously high tuition, but weren’t smart enough, or motivated enough, to get into a good law school. But then again, I wasn’t exactly the authority on good life choices. If I were, I wouldn’t be here. It said more about my character than I liked, that at twenty-eight I’d already enjoyed a meteoric rise, followed by an even bigger crash.
I’d only found out about teaching the first-year class the week before school started. Visiting professors rarely taught 1Ls, but a professor had a medical emergency and Hannover was desperate. Currently ranking in the hundreds on the list of top law schools, they’d struggled to find a replacement with such short notice. So that was how I ended up walking into torts at ten-thirty Monday morning and seeing her.
That first morning I’d set my books down on the desk in the front of the classroom, looked up, and been knocked back.
The counselor my former law partners in Chicago made me talk to had said I had an addictive personality. He’d analyzed my behavior—racing my Ferrari down Lake Shore Drive until I lost control and smashed it into a pole, the marriage that ended to a wife who was colder than Chicago winters, the women, the partying—and said I had problems relating to others. He threw around words like “unemotional,” “cold.” All fancy words for saying what I’d known my entire life.
I was a bastard.
It wasn’t exactly a shock; I came from a long line of bastards, drunks, and philanderers. The only difference between me and the rest of the Carter men? I’d gotten out of the hellhole I’d grown up in. Or so I’d thought.
But it didn’t matter how expensive my suits were, how much I’d paid for my house in Georgetown, or the car I’d bought to replace the one I’d totaled—
I’d always be the boy from the rough neighborhood in Chicago. The one who got into bar fights, drove too fast, fucked girls with giant tits and curvy asses, knocked back too much scotch, and played way too hard. I’d tried to erase those parts of myself, or to push them down at least—
And once I saw her they came back up again.
Blair Reynolds.
They gave us a chart with all the students’ names and pictures. The second I saw her in my classroom I’d stared at that chart like a little boy with a crush. Then I’d looked at her, really looked at her.
She looked like money. Not my kind of money. The kind I’d earned through brutal work, no small amount of luck, and sheer force of will. The kind that couldn’t have picked a Picasso from a Monet, that dropped thousands of dollars at a strip club because those were the girls I was the most comfortable with. No, she looked like ponies, and ribbons in her hair, and cotillion, and ruffles.
She looked like a duchess.
And the bastard in me wanted her with a hunger that terrified me.
I wanted to consume her; I wanted to break her and put her back together again, because that’s what I did—I broke things.
I couldn’t, of course. This was the new me—my chance at salvaging the wreck I’d made of everything. So I stayed away from her. Except for the times when I absolutely couldn’t resist, and I had to call on her.
I figured I’d given up enough bad habits. I had to be able to keep one. And if I could only have one, then no fucking question, I wanted it to be her.
She stood in front of me, reciting the case, and it took everything I had to keep my body from responding to the sound of her voice. It was cool, and crisp, and elegant. Her voice danced over words and phrases, and I never could resist the urge to watch her mouth as she spoke.
I’d imagined myself kissing that mouth, fucking that mouth, capturing those lips. It was no wonder I operated in a constant state of near-arousal when she spoke. I ran through multiplication tables in my head to keep my body from responding.
Because it wasn’t just her lips that tempted me. It was her skin, soft and creamy, like fine bone china. I’d dreamed about her skin enough nights, of her legs tangled with mine, her flesh bare, a thin film of sweat covering her body as I drove into her. Dreamed of bending my head and taking one of her nipples between my lips, making her moan and cry out. Imagined her pulling me closer, begging for me to suck her harder, begging me to fuck her. I’d dreamed of wrapping that long, brown hair around my fist as she took me into her mouth. Dreamed of the look in those big brown eyes when she came.
She filled my dreams and fantasies, had since that very first day. I was consumed by her, and I’d never even spoken to her outside of class, our sole interaction limited to these days when I fired questions at her, and she answered in that haughty tone that screamed “I am royalty and you are a peasant”—in that voice that only made me want her more.
Silence filled the classroom.
Shit, she’d finished.
“That’s all, Ms. Reynolds.” I gave her a curt nod, indicating she could sit.
She sank into her chair with a grace I felt in my bones, and a new tension filled the classroom as everyone wondered who would be my next victim. The silence dragged, students squirming in their seats imagining the tortures I was preparing for them.
I stared at her—I rarely let myself think of her as Blair—it seemed too intimate, too dangerous. She had to be Ms. Reynolds. But I couldn’t resist the urge to look. She held my gaze without flinching, her only reaction the slightest flush on her face.
I lived for her blushes.
Her eyes were completely at odds with her rosy cheeks. Her eyes blasted back defiance and anger. They came alive while the rest of her was composed—pearl necklace, perfect outfit, elegant hair, fake smile. For fifty-nine minutes out of the hour during each class, she was untouchable. She wore her perfection like a mask that shielded her from the world, the seemingly unbreakable wall that kept everyone at bay. But there was always a minute—I made sure of it—when the mask came off, when the wall tumbled down. And in that minute, someone else looked at me. In that minute I undressed her and stripped her of the facade she presented to the rest of the world. For a minute every single week, I unraveled her.
The bastard in me fucking loved it.
Romance novels and politics are two of Chanel Cleeton’s greatest passions. What better than to combine them? Chanel received a bachelor’s degree in International Relatio
ns from Richmond, The American International University in London and a master’s degree in Global Politics from the London School of Economics and Political Science. She’s also a graduate (survivor) of law school—she earned her J.D. from the University of South Carolina School of Law. A summer cruise in the Caribbean changed Chanel’s life when she met and fell in love with a fighter pilot. One happily ever after later, she’s currently living an adventure with her husband and three pups.
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