“I knew Walter, I knew your nickname was Dutch, and I knew Boston. So I Googled all three and came up with industrialist Walter Dutch Harber. I called repeatedly but they would never put me through to you. I even went to Boston, to Harber Industries, but they wouldn’t even give me an audience with you.”
Dutch rolled his cold glass across his suddenly hot forehead. He could feel her pain, could feel it as if it was as much his as hers. But she went on.
“So that’s why I founded Block by Block Raiders. I was determined to give voice to the voiceless, because during that time I felt so out of control. I felt like I had no voice.”
“Were you angry with me?” Dutch asked her.
“No, sir,” she said.
“Bullshit,” he said.
She stared in his eyes. “Yes,” she admitted. “Very.”
“Felt you had given me what I wanted,” he said this as he continued to rub the glass against his forehead, as his eyes trailed down the length of her, remembering her in his arms, “then when it was time for you to be helped, I wasn’t available.”
“It wasn’t about that night. That night was on both of us. But when they wouldn’t even let me speak to you because I wasn’t high enough on some ladder of influence, that was a bitter pill to swallow.”
And just like that, after listening to her, after watching her, that powerful connection he felt to her that night in Miami Beach, came flooding back like a tidal wave, and sucked him in. Without thinking about the consequences, without calculating the cost, he reached out and pulled her so firmly into his arms, so protectively, that he sat his glass down and pulled her onto his lap.
The tears that she had been fighting not to shed, came freely for Gina when he pulled her into his arms. And she sobbed openly. She felt so embarrassed that she kept apologizing.
“Don’t,” Dutch urged her, holding her, handing her his handkerchief. “You don’t have anything to apologize for.”
She wiped her eyes and looked into his. He smiled, those lines of age showing on the side of his beautiful, kind eyes. “After the awards ceremony, when your assistant told me you wanted to see me, I thought I was being called into the principal’s office for punishment,” she said with a smile of her own. “Certainly not to tell my life story like this.”
Dutch put his hand on the side of her adorable face. “No, that wasn’t the reason I called you back here. But I had considered giving you a good spanking.”
“Why?” she asked, still smiling. “Because I told you the truth about those budget cuts?”
“You were brutal,” he said. “But that’s not the only reason.”
Gina could see the lust in his eyes. She could feel her own lust rising. “Why else would you want to spank me?” she asked with laughter in her eyes.
He stared at those eyes, and then down at her lips. He began moving toward her lips. “So I can see that tight ass of yours wiggling beneath me,” he said, his heat penetrating every inch of her, “ when I fuck you again.”
As soon as he said those words he put his mouth on hers and kissed her with a jarring kiss. So passionately he kissed her that she clutched onto him in a death grip of an embrace. It had been so long ago, so long forgotten, that now it felt as if they had first made love only yesterday.
He reached inside her pants and her panties and began massaging her mound and then her clit, rubbing softly and then harder and harder, her body jerking with the sensations, her growing wetness thrilling Dutch.
“Oh, sir,” she said as he massaged her, as those sensations began to pulsate with higher and higher intensity.
But he didn’t stop there. With his free hand he reached inside her suit coat and lifted her purple blouse and matching bra. And he began kissing and sucking her breasts, the heat becoming almost unbearable with every lick, every massage, every kiss he seared onto her.
And just as that unbearable heat had him so caught up that he actually considered taking her right on that yellow couch they sat upon, knocks were heard on the door.
Dutch stopped all movement. He had to take a moment first and regain control his erratic breathing. Only then was he able to help Gina reconfigure her clothing and get off of his lap. Her breasts were still so wet that she feared the saliva would seep through her blouse.
“Yes?” Dutch yelled, able to appear surprisingly calm, it seemed to Gina, considering the tornado they had just been whirled into.
Max Brennan, the man she recognized from TV as the president’s best friend and chief of staff, walked into the room.
“Mr. President,” he said, his small, tired gray eyes glancing at Dutch, but staring at Gina. “Sorry to disturb you, sir, but we need to get started.”
Dutch stood up, wiping his hands with his handkerchief, and in standing, caused Gina to stand, too. But unlike Dutch, she felt flustered and knew she looked it.
“Is everybody assembled?” Dutch asked him.
“They’re assembled in the Situation Room now, sir, yes, sir.”
Dutch exhaled, opened his suit coat, and placed his hands inside his pant pockets. He had another long day ahead of him. But when he turned to tell Gina that he had to go, and saw that bewildered look in her eyes, he turned back to his chief of staff. “Give me a moment, Max,” he said.
It was obvious to Gina that Max really didn’t want to give him another second with her, but he didn’t exactly have a choice. He eyed her suspiciously again, as if it was all her fault, and then left back out of the room.
Dutch looked at her. “I have a meeting.”
“I understand.”
“You understand, don’t you?”
“Yes, sir, of course.” What Gina didn’t understand was why he was wasting time still talking to her. She didn’t know a lot about the White House, but she knew enough to know that when they were assembling in the Situation Room, it was serious.
“I want you to have dinner with me tonight,” he said to her. It was a spur of the moment thing, something he hadn’t even expected to say just a moment ago, but wasn’t about to take it back.
Gina was hesitant and it showed.
“You can lobby me some more,” Dutch said encouragingly. “I make no promises, however, on what I’ll do when that bill hits my desk. But I’ll listen to your concerns.”
That was at least something, Gina thought, although she also knew that having dinner with him could be bad for her emotional health. Especially the way they were just going at it already. She could only imagine what it would be like tonight. But she couldn’t turn down this chance to air her very serious grievances about that budget bill. “What time?” she asked.
Dutch looked upward. “It’s probably going to be one of my long days. Christian will come for you, say, around ten? ”
Ten at night? That seemed a little late to her. But she wasn’t exactly talking about a typical date. “Okay,” she said with a nod of assent.
“You wait here. Chris will be in to take you where you need to go.” He kept his hand on her arm, however, and began caressing it. “What do you have on your agenda today?” he asked her.
“Lobbying Congress about that dangerous budget bill, what else?”
“Alone?”
“With a friend. I came to DC with a friend.”
Dutch studied her. “Your boyfriend?”
Boyfriend? How could he think she’d have a boyfriend the way she was allowing him to kiss on her, to fondle her? “No,” she said.
“Husband?”
“No, of course not,” she said. “She’s female. Her name is LaLa.”
“What-what?”
Gina smiled. “Loretta King. She works with me.”
“You take care of yourself around this busy town, you hear me?”
“Oh, don’t worry about me. I know my way around.”
Yes, you do, he wanted to say. But he leaned against her and kissed her on the lips, instead. When he stopped and looked into her eyes, he smiled that smile she was becoming reacquainted with. “I’ll see y
ou tonight,” he said with a squeeze of her arm, attempting to make clear to her that she won’t be sorry, and then headed in that calm, but hurried gait of his, for the Situation Room.
Only Gina felt as if she was the one in a situation.
FIVE
LaLa was right. Nobody in DC wants to be around a loudmouth. That was why, in every congressional office they ventured into, no congressman or woman would see them. They were continually relegated to aides and back-benchers with no pull, who met with them to avoid any backlash for not meeting with them, but with no intention of providing any help or reassurances. The Block by Block Raiders could go to the devil, as far as those congressional staffers were concerned. One, an aide in the office of their very own Congressman Cannon of Newark, said it best: “You insulted the President of the United States, Gina. What did you expect?”
That was the refrain. All day long. What did she expect? Even LaLa got in on the chorus. “It’s true, you know,” she said as they sat in a café on Capitol Hill to re-think their strategy. They had set aside two days, today and tomorrow, to remain in DC and lobby Congress hard. Now it looked as if they were wasting their time.
“What’s true,” Gina said, drinking her cappuccino and putting a bright red X next to the name of yet another congressman who wasn’t interested in their plight, “is that our doors will have to close sooner rather than later if we can’t get some reassurances of no more budget cuts. We could operate, however thinly, on the appropriations from their last round of cuts, and from the donations from the few private sponsors we still have left, but we can’t take another hit. For real.”
“I know all that,” LaLa said. “I’m not talking about that. I’m talking about what happened this morning at the White House, at the awards ceremony.”
Gina knew what she meant. She just didn’t want to deal with that, especially with what happened afterwards. “What I said was the truth,” she said. “I’m not backing down from that. BBR is in trouble because of all of their cuts, and his lack of leadership.”
“I know what you’re saying, Gina, you know I do. But Fox News ain’t looking at it that way. They’re playing that tape over and over again as a way to hurt the president. ‘Even members of his base hates him now,’ is what those reporters at Fox keep saying, playing it up like it’s all about how ineffective he’s been since he took office.”
“And your point is?”
“Your criticism of President Harber has played right into the conservatives’ hands.”
“Okay, okay. I get it. But I still stand by every word I said.”
LaLa looked at her. “And what about tonight?”
Gina hesitated, then looked at her friend. “What about it?”
“You sure that budget bill is all he has in mind?”
Gina declare if LaLa wasn’t psychic. Did she see him kissing her today, sucking her breasts, massaging her? Was LaLa hiding in the room? “What in the world else would he have in mind, La?” Gina asked, determined to keep her cool. “He’ll meet with me, and then tell the press he gave my grievances a full airing, that’s all this invitation is about.”
“Nope,” LaLa said, shaking her head. “Ain’t buying it. No ma’am. If all he wanted to do was to listen to you gab about some budget bill so he can say he met with you, then he would have let that meeting after the awards ceremony do. But no, he meets with you after the ceremony and also invites you to dinner? Nall, girl, LaLa smells a rat in that stew. That man wants to talk to you all right. Pillow talk to you.”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“He’s single and you’re single,” LaLa continued, “so ain’t nothing wrong with it. I’m not saying that. But girl, you messing with the sho’nuff big times now if you gonna be messing around with that dude.”
Gina frowned, crossed off another congressman’s name. “Well I guess I’d better be careful not to mess around with him, then. Right?” she said.
LaLa stared at her. “Right,” she said, with little conviction, too.
+++
It seemed like she’d caught this show before. There they were, her and Christian, sitting in the president’ private residence at the White House, waiting for what was now nearly two hours, for him to arrive.
“Where is he?” she finally asked Christian, who was seated patiently, as if he was accustomed, in his role as one of the president’s personal aides, to waiting. “Is he even here at the White House?”
“Yes, he’s here. It’s just that things come up.”
Of course Gina understood that. But dang. It was coming up on midnight. That man had to be exhausted. “Has he eaten?” she found herself asking before she had a chance to think about it. If she would have thought first, she would have never gotten this personal with the man’s aide.
“Probably not,” Christian said, his concern showing. “That’s one of the things that worry me about him. Sometimes he’ll go all day without eating much. Sometimes it gets so bad I have to tell Mr. Brennan about it and he has to get on his case.”
“Max Brennan, the president’s chief of staff?”
“And best friend, yes, ma’am. He’s the only one who can be blunt with the president.”
“You can’t?”
“Oh, gosh no! He’ll fire me in a heartbeat I even think about coming at him like that.”
“You mean to tell me he’ll fire you for telling him the truth?”
Christian thought about this. “Not for that, exactly. But for disrespecting the office of the presidency. That’s real important to him. He doesn’t care whether people respect him as Dutch Harber, but he cares an awful lot if they disrespect him as President Dutch Harber. It’s all about the office, the representation of the people.”
Gina’s heart dropped. “Did he feel I disrespected the office when I, to use your phrase, told him off at the awards ceremony?”
Christian didn’t want to go there, and especially not with one of the president’s females. But this one was turning out to be kind of different. She didn’t seem as eager to share her body with the president the way all of the others had, and she’d stand up to him without giving it a second thought. “I don’t know if he thought you were disrespectful,” he finally said, “but I know it bothered him.”
She already knew that much. “And you don’t think he’s eaten?” she asked Christian.
“I know he hadn’t all the times I’d been with him today, and that was up until a couple hours ago, when I went to pick you up.”
Gina stood up, causing Christian to stand. “What is it?” he asked her.
“Is there a kitchen around here?”
“A kitchen?”
“Yes. Where they cook food?”
Christian smiled. “But the president has a chef, ma’am.”
“I know that, Christian. Work with me, little brother. I thought I’d see what’s in the kitchen and whip him up something quick.”
Christian looked mortified. “I don’t think that’s allowed, ma’am.”
“I’m not going to poison him! You can watch me the whole time. But you said yourself he probably hadn’t eaten all day. That’s not good.”
“No, it’s not,” Christian found himself agreeing with her.
“So take me to the kitchen and let’s see what we can whip up for him.”
Christian was reluctant, more like terrified if you asked Gina, but he escorted her into a small, private kitchen within the residence and watched as she pulled together some kind of pasta/vegetable dish that had him yearning to taste it. She was, in fact, allowing Christian to taste a spoonful when they both looked up and saw the president standing there.
“Sir?” Christian said, mortified. “We were just--”
“We thought you’d be hungry,” Gina interrupted. “So viola,” she said, “we whipped up a dish.”
Dutch stood at the doorjamb, his body leaned against it to avoid falling on his face in exhaustion. He could tell that both Christian and Gina were waiting with bait
ed breath. He smiled. “Sounds great,” he said, pushing from the door and moving into the kitchen. “I’m famished.”
Christian breathe again, and Dutch told him he was excused for the night.
“Hey,” Dutch said after Christian left, and he began moving toward Gina.
“Hey yourself,” she replied and closed her eyes in anticipation when he leaned over and kissed her on the lips. Then he looked at the food in front of her. “Um,” he said, “it smells good.”
“Have a seat and try some,” she said.
He removed his suit coat, flapped it over the kitchen chair, and took a seat at the small table. Gina found it almost gratifying, this image of the president with his coat over his chair, preparing to eat her food. She only hoped he liked it. Her food always tasted bland to her. But others, like Frank, one of her business associates, for instance, swore by it. She could give those Top Chef contestants a run for their money, he always said.
THE PRESIDENT'S GIRLFRIEND Page 5