Waiting only until she went limp, he flipped her to her belly and bit her on the shoulder hard enough to get her attention.
“Oh, God,” she breathed.
“You didn’t think we were finished, did you?”
He grabbed her hips, pulled her up on all fours and drove into her from behind. She was so slick his vision faded with the pleasure.
He could never get enough of this.
Not if he lived a million more years.
Increasing his tempo, he pumped his hips until their cries drowned out the slapping sounds and the small of his back began to ache.
More. He still needed more.
Sweat trickled down his forehead and into his eyes. It was all over both of them, his and hers, mingling together, as primal, earthy and sexy as sunbathing nude on the beach. Good. He wanted her marked because she was his and he was hers.
Reaching down, he squeezed her dangling breasts, one and then the other, until her spasms began again and she nearly bucked him off onto the floor.
With her inner muscles clenching hard around him, sucking him even deeper inside her body, he came with a hoarse cry that went on forever.
Chapter 18
Chapter 18
L iza woke facedown on the bed with the sheets tangled around her hips, weak sunlight filtering in through the blinds and John’s lips pressed to the small of her back. Even though the clock flashed the ungodly time of five-forty, she smiled and stretched like a cat.
“Wake up, sleepyhead.”
Oh, man. His husky morning voice was sexy beyond belief.
She looked up and was surprised to see him dressed in shorts and a T-shirt, a soccer ball anchored to his hip by one muscular arm.
“I’ve got to go.”
“Go? You need to come back.” Propping her head on one arm, she bent one leg into the sheets, rolled her shoulder back and gave him her best sex-kitten pose.
John blinked. Viewed. Swallowed hard and cursed.
“Don’t do this to me, darlin’. I had to sneak back up to the house, change, and sneak back down here. Now I’ve got to sneak out for my soccer game. I’m already late.”
Liza pouted even though she was deliciously sore and could use the reprieve.
“Why didn’t you wake me up?”
“You needed to sleep.” He stared down at her, a shadow dimming the bright happiness in his eyes. “We need to decide how we’re going to work this.”
“I know.”
“Today.”
“I know.” She loved him all the more for his patience. “I need just a little more time.”
He nodded. “Rumor is, my staffers are already sending out their résumés. I wouldn’t be surprised if some of them try to get on board with Senator Fitzgerald—”
Liza scowled at this outrageous disloyalty.
“—so if I’m going to suspend my campaign, I need to do it.”
“Okay.”
“I’ll see you on the plane?”
“Yeah,” she said.
Satisfied now, he smiled and leaned in to kiss her goodbye. “I love you.”
Liza, who’d never been one for flowery words when she could help it, especially in the cold light of day when there was no liquor involved, flushed and cleared her throat.
“Me, too.”
“What was that?”
“Me, too.”
“I can’t hear you, Liza.”
Burning with mortification and grinning like an idiot, Liza dove under the sheet. “I love you, too, okay? Happy?”
Judging from his chuckle as he left and shut the door behind him, he was.
Surfacing, Liza climbed out of bed. By the time she’d emerged from the shower, she could hear the whoops and yells of several male voices and, opening the blinds on the far wall, she saw John and his staffers charging across the green clearing at the bottom of the hill, the black-and-white ball flying between them and a huge smile on John’s face.
Her heart contracted.
What should she do?
She thought about her career and the fifteen-million-dollar offer. She thought about the money she’d already earned and saved and the fact that she was burned out by the lifestyle and the travel and had been for a while. She thought about John’s candidacy, her absolute belief in his chances of winning and the country’s need for his leadership. She thought about using her platform as first lady to attack the terrible problem of Alzheimer’s.
Most of all, she thought about how John was nothing like Kent and how she’d felt yesterday when she thought he was going to die. She thought about building a life with him and having children with him.
There was no decision to be made.
With one eye on the time and the other on John’s exuberant face outside her window, she picked up her cell phone and dialed her agent in New York to tell him that she was turning down the network’s offer for the anchor’s job and would be resigning from her position as senior Washington correspondent.
Takashi met up with Liza on the tarmac a couple hours later. The expression on his face, which was some combination of anger and worry, jolted her even before he grabbed her by the elbow and steered her a few feet away from the other waiting journalists. Everyone was vibrating with an excited buzz that told her something big had happened, something bad.
“Where the hell have you been? Why haven’t you answered your phone?”
Liza, who, following the difficult phone call with her agent, had all but floated through her morning and was still basking in the glow of John’s love, felt the first prickling of alarm.
“I slept late,” she lied, feeling a nasty twinge of guilt for having ignored the persistent chirp of her phone. “What is it?”
“Nothing good.”
Her mouth dried out. She didn’t like the warning in his voice or the way worry now seemed to edge out anger as his predominant emotion. This, whatever it was, was nothing she wanted to hear, but she’d never been a coward and she wasn’t going to start now.
“Tell me.”
“Well, the first thing’s that we’re going to Richmond, not Washington.”
“Richmond? Why?”
“They haven’t said, but I’m thinking that the good senator wants to nurse his wounds with his sister.”
“What wounds?”
“He was caught on camera engaging in a little hanky-panky last night at Heather Hill—”
Oh, God. Did they have shots of her and John and their heated discussion in the middle of the crowd? She knew they should have been more careful.
“—when one of the caterers snapped these with her phone. They’re grainy, but they’re authentic—we’ve checked. Now she’s shopping them around, trying to get the best price. We told her no, obviously, but she’ll find someone who wants to buy them. Probably a tabloid.”
He offered the pictures to Liza, whose reeling brain felt as if it was spinning in all directions at once. Swallowing hard, her arm leaden and slow, she took them and, with dread, looked down at the one on top.
It was a dark, grainy photo—the pictures had obviously been taken with a poor quality camera and without a flash—but there was no mistaking the people in it, and she had to stifle a cry of outrage and surprise.
It was John. With Adena. His senior adviser and a married woman.
They were all over each other.
No. It couldn’t be.
Hands shaking again—would her hands ever stop shaking?—Liza flipped through one sickening image after the other, all of which seem to have been taken over Adena’s shoulder.
John and Adena, in their formal clothes, sitting inches apart on a stone bench in a garden at Heather Hill, talking urgently. John, his face dark and intense and his arm around Adena’s waist as she buried her face in his neck.
Those two were bad enough, but then it got exponentially worse.
John, standing now, holding Adena in his arms.
Exactly the way he’d held Liza later that very same night. Last night.
> And the most painful of all, the slash of a knife right through her heart:
Adena tenderly cupping John’s face in her hands as she kissed him on one corner of his mouth.
No.
John could not have passionately held another woman in his arms on the very same night he made love to Liza. It just wasn’t possible.
A thousand times no.
Yes, said a sly, cool voice in the back of her mind.
Why else did Adena dislike her so much?
These pictures sure explained that behavior, didn’t they?
Here’s the proof that John never loved you any more than Kent loved you, said the sly voice. Believe it.
It all came rushing back to Liza in that one horrifying moment: her husband’s betrayals, magnified a million times. The stunned disbelief. The bottomless despair. The overwhelming rage.
Takashi was staring. She tried to speak, but the pain was so unbearable she could hardly even breathe.
“Photoshop?” Yeah, she was grasping at straws, but she had to.
“No.”
The pictures were authentic. Of course.
Liza almost fell to her knees then, almost wished for death so she wouldn’t have to endure this pain again. Not again.
All these years later and boy, she could still pick them, couldn’t she? She was still as blind and foolish when it came to men as she’d ever been.
Worse, everything she’d experienced with John last night was a lie. Everything he’d told her, the loving whispers, the pleading for her to consider the possibility of them having a joint future—it had all been a fairy tale worthy of the Brothers Grimm.
Liza wasn’t special, after all. And she was a fool for thinking she was.
No doubt the good senator, like countless politicians before him, had mistresses in every far-flung corner of the country. Because that’s what Liza was, wasn’t it? A mistress? One in what was probably a collection of many.
Bewilderment fueled her rage and added to her sense of betrayal. What about all his endless talk of their callings and being together? What about his offer to quit the race for her? What about his legendary moral code?
“Liza?”
“I turned down the anchor’s job for him,” she whispered.
Takashi’s golden skin paled to chalky white. “Jesus, Liza.”
“He offered to quit the campaign for me.”
His jaw dropped. It was obvious he couldn’t believe Liza had fallen for such a sorry line, and Liza felt so foolish now that her humiliation was complete.
You’re the most important thing to me, Liza.
What’s your sign, Liza?
She’d heard both pickup lines in her lifetime—which one was the smarmiest? What kind of colossally stupid woman fell for either one? Pressing a hand to her throbbing temple, she swayed on the spot and tried not to pass out.
After a minute, an unstoppable hysterical laugh bubbled up to her lips.
“I thought we were going to get married.”
Takashi watched her with utmost pity and concern, especially when her ugly laughter continued and a couple of their colleagues looked around with open curiosity in their eyes.
Taking her arm, he pulled her a couple more steps to the side and passed her a handkerchief from his back pocket. “Pull it together, Za-Za. There’s more.”
“More. Great.” Choking back what was going to be a sob rather than a laugh, Liza dabbed her eyes.
“This isn’t his first go-round with Adena, apparently.”
What?
“I’ve made some calls to a couple of staffers from his first campaign. None of them were willing to speak on the record about the affair, but they were together then, too. This was before Adena was married.”
The world swam out of focus, and Liza clutched Takashi’s arm for support.
“But…he was married then.”
Takashi said nothing.
It didn’t matter. There was nothing he could say that would repair the mutilated remnants of her personal and professional lives or change what she was: a woman so criminally stupid that she’d given up her life’s ambition and actually thought she’d marry a man who had another mistress and had cheated on his first wife. She’d actually thought John would be faithful to her.
She turned away, unwilling to let Takashi or anyone else see the bitter tears in her eyes. Inside her head, she heard her father’s voice.
You always screw things up, don’t you, girl?
Yeah. She always screwed things up.
“Have you seen the pictures, Senator?”
“Senator, do you have any comments about the cheating allegations?”
“When will you issue any additional statements, Senator?”
John paused at the end of the aisle, stepped aside so the flight attendant could shut the door behind him, stared into the blinding lights of what seemed like a thousand cameras and waited for the uproar to die down, which took quite a while.
He did his best to keep his face serene and unconcerned as the sharks circled around him, but it was no easy job. His press corps had never been quite this frenzied, not even yesterday after the botched assassination attempt.
One shark in particular held his attention. Liza was in her regular seat at the back of the plane with Takashi. Staring at him with shattered eyes that told him how hurt she was, how shaken.
He had to explain to Liza. Screw the rest of these vultures.
Resisting the urge to grab Liza, throw her over his shoulder and sprint with her into the restricted section of the plane, where it was safe, he raised a hand for silence.
“I’m not having an affair with Adena Brown, nor would I ever have an affair with a married woman. That’s all I have to say right now. I’ll issue a more detailed statement later.”
This lack of information, naturally, pleased no one. Chaos erupted again as soon as he paused to catch his breath, and one detached voice rose over all the others.
“Where is Adena Brown today, Senator?” Liza stood, the better to address him over the heads of all the people in the rows in front of her. “We haven’t seen her get on the plane. Is she still on your staff?”
John’s gut contracted into a painful knot. Every inch of ground he’d gained with Liza last night was gone, every ounce of trust destroyed. His head spun with how quickly he’d lost his greatest prize—how easily she’d slipped away from him when he hadn’t seen any danger coming.
But he would get her back. Oh, yes, he would get her back.
“She’s home in St. Louis for a few days, spending time with her family.”
Liza’s flat eyes showed no expression. “What about the other part of my question, Senator? Is she still on your staff?”
“I’ve accepted her resignation,” he said.
“Why?” Liza demanded. “Why should your chief strategist quit in the middle of a difficult primary battle if there’s no affair?”
“We’ll be issuing joint statements later.”
A collective groan rose up from the journalists, and he counted himself lucky that there were no rotten tomatoes nearby or he’d have been nailed. Taking his time, he walked up the aisle and paused at the doorway to the restricted section, just like he always did.
“We’ll have more information for you tonight.”
As he left, keeping his shoulders squared and his chin up, he could have sworn he heard a couple of hisses along with the mutinous muttering, but Liza was his only thought.
Glancing over his shoulder, he caught her gaze one last time and it impaled him, accusing now, unforgiving.
No more and no less than he deserved.
Chapter 19
Chapter 19
L iza’s summons to the front came the second they hit their cruising altitude. She went and took the pictures with her.
Déjà vu overwhelmed her the second she walked into the senator’s private cabin, and she remembered that first night she spoke with him alone. It seemed like a thousand years ago and yet a few
things remained achingly familiar. The space was still cozy, the music sexy and evocative. Al Green sang his heart out on “Let’s Stay Together,” and Liza wished she had a baseball bat so she could smash the nearest speaker.
He stood in the middle of the cabin, waiting for her and doing a remarkable imitation of a man who cared—all tight jaw, thin lips and worried eyes. As though he was hurting as much as she was.
Man, he was good, she thought, watching him, her heart breaking again and again in an endless loop worthy of the movie Groundhog Day.
He was really, really good.
He opened his mouth once, shut it and opened it again. Floundered.
She waited, giving him time to get his lies in order.
“I’m sorry,” he finally said.
This didn’t deserve a response.
“I know how it looks, Liza, but I’m not Adena’s lover.”
“Oh?”
Having nothing better to do to pass the time during this short flight from Columbus to Richmond, she decided to play along for a minute and see what happened. Why not? Maybe compare outrageous falsehoods and see who was better at them, him or her ex-husband. Which of the men she’d loved was the best liar? They could run a contest.
“When did you stop being Adena’s lover, pray tell?”
He paled but didn’t deny the relationship entirely. “When we’d been married for about a year, Camille and I separated for about six months because we were both young and ambitious and were spending way more time on our careers than we were on our marriage. We talked about a divorce and I did something really stupid—I had an affair with Adena. She’d been working on my campaign way back when I had my unsuccessful run for office. And then Camille got sick.”
Liza said nothing but remembered what he’d told her:
I wasn’t a perfect husband.
“Camille’s getting sick put things in perspective real fast.” He did a great job with the whole misery and shame thing, hanging his head and looking sorry for the day he’d been born. “I realized how much I loved her and how much I had to lose. How immature and selfish I’d been. I told her about the affair and asked for another chance. She forgave me. We were together until she died. Closer than ever, if you can believe it.”
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