“I also knew what to expect with Caroline and Jack tonight. They’re amazing.”
Dinner had gone well, all things considered. Though I had a headache from all the back and forth. Maybe that was why Jack and Caroline had such an active sex life. If all they did was talk all day they’d wear themselves out.
“They barely let you get a word in edgewise,” I said.
“That doesn’t matter. They were appraising me. Seeing if I could keep up.”
Had he passed that test? “Does your brain hurt now? Because mine does.”
“No.” He squeezed my hand. “They’re protective of you, and it shows. In very good ways. I can see why you’re all so close.”
“It wasn’t always like that.”
He looked abashed. “I, uh, might know that already. Political gossip, you know.”
Gossip in general was a scourge but the political variant was a thousand times worse. Jack and I could act as buddy-buddy as we wanted in person but it wouldn’t absolve us of some of the rumors that had dogged us in the past. I hadn’t liked Jack when I first met him, nor had I bothered to hide my opinion from Caroline.
Our disagreements continued until well after the two of them left Congress and he became governor of Pennsylvania. I’d never intended to air my dirty laundry or make it publicly known that I didn’t quite get along with my best friend’s husband. It had just… happened. Funny how the passage of time and the evolution of perspective could change things. Now I could call Jack a close friend without a hint of equivocation.
“Go on,” I said.
“I know not to believe everything I read. That’s common sense, you know? I take everything ever written about politicos pre-Santos with a grain of salt, because everything seemed so much less malicious back then. But I stumbled across this article a few months ago about what happened when you were in Canada. And why you went there in the first place. From a legitimate news source,” he added hastily.
Oh boy. No. Not now. Tom had come up a couple times during dinner but there was no way I was ready to have a full-blown conversation about what I’d gone through the past three years. “Alex, I’m not sure we should talk about this just yet.”
“No, I don’t mean… that. I just think you can tell a lot about a person by the decisions they make when no one is watching, or what they say when no one is listening. You don’t need to take yourself to task for anything you may or may not have done during the Santos Administration. You took your best friend’s children across the damn border to keep them safe, at great personal risk. And”—I could almost hear him gulp—“at substantial personal cost. That’s the kind of character I can only wish to possess, and I hope that someday I can prove myself worthy of you.”
You already have. And wasn’t that realization enough to make me feel like a fraud. “I need to confess as well, lest you think my character more fully developed than it actually is.”
“You didn’t make the tiramisu the other night.”
“How did you…?” One look and I knew. “She told you. Little snitch rat.”
“Technically you’re the rat since you passed off her dessert as your own.”
“I can’t cook,” I said. “Or bake. If this relationship goes long-term, we may have to hire a service or something if you want to ensure we get fed on a regular basis.”
“Why not tell me to begin with?”
“You asked for tiramisu. Tiramisu is good. Therefore, I got you tiramisu. Also, I didn’t lie, since you asked if it was homemade and I said yes. I just failed to point out that it was not actually made at my home and by my hands.”
He nodded solemnly. “I am taking notes on this depth of character I have determined you possess. What shall we call it?”
I laughed. “Politicians can change with the wind. Let’s work that in somewhere. Did she tell all while you two were cleaning up after dinner?”
“You’re not a politician anymore. You said it yourself. And she did, in fact, spill the beans in the kitchen when I asked her about the amazing torte she made.” He laughed. “Once she told me, that exchange you had during dinner suddenly made a lot more sense.”
Perhaps I should have come clean during the meal, but once she dug in her heels, I had to double down too. It was only fair. “Caroline can’t cook either, you know. Her character is about as shaky as mine.”
“Your character isn’t the only thing I’m interested in.”
Oh. Really. Now we were getting somewhere. “The driver doesn’t eavesdrop, in case you were wondering.”
“I was not, but now I have something new to worry about anyway. So, thank you?”
“You’re welcome.”
“Christine.” He turned to face me. “I have another confession… I kind of am a political fanboy. In the sense that I’ve had an unrequited crush on you for years.”
“Before you even knew me?”
The corners of his lips turned up, ever so slightly. “Have you looked at yourself in a mirror? Do you know how stunning you are? And now I know you, at least partly, and I find you even more attractive than I did before.”
“You had a crush on me,” I said.
“Yes. Have I admitted too much?”
“No,” I said. For once, a man admitting long-suppressed feelings of attraction didn’t bother me. I found it pleasing. Very pleasing. “Do you consider that crush requited now?”
“I don’t know.” He brushed his thumb across my jawline. “What I do know is that I’d like to kiss you. If that’s okay?”
“Now?”
“Preferably.” He loosened his tie. “I’ve wanted to do it since you bumped into me that first time we met.”
“You smelled good,” I said, remembering. He still smelled good. It wasn’t only the cologne.
“So did you.” Alexander pressed his lips gently, oh so gently, against my cheek. “When I first met you I thought, this woman could be my… friend,” he whispered.
I struggled with a million things to say, none of them sexy. “I don’t want to be friends. I want more.” So very, very much more. I closed my eyes. “Is it weird for us to be talking about it like this? Shouldn’t we just do it?”
“If you insist,” he said, and brought his lips to mine.
He tasted like chocolate torte and carnal decadence, and it didn’t take more than a second or two for me to realize he knew exactly what he was doing. His tongue teased my lips and I opened them, hearing a moan; I wasn’t sure if it was his or mine. The seat beneath us creaked as we moved together. His hand drifted toward my cheek. A light touch. Gentle. Affectionate. Yet possessive. And his mouth was nice and soft.
I needed to do something. Get more involved. He didn’t really have hair. What was I supposed to do with my hands?
Shoulders. He had nice shoulders. I wrapped my arms around his shoulders and leaned in.
And then it registered that I was necking with an attractive man in the back of a Lincoln Continental and didn’t give a flying snitch rat about our age difference anymore.
“Is this okay?” he whispered.
If he’d had hair, I would have yanked at it and told him to get back to business. Instead I bit his bottom lip. “Is that enough of a hint?”
He kissed me once more on the lips before moving to my throat. “Fair enough.”
“Stop talking,” I said.
So he did.
Chapter 10
Alexander had survived an evening with Jack and Caroline, which might have been his biggest obstacle to overcome. The beauty of dating someone flush with cash and time to spare was that we rarely had conflicts when trying to arrange ways to spend time together. I’d debated whether to finally go out in public with him; I didn’t want him to deal with the hassle of my agents and any accompanying attention, but I also didn’t want him to think I was somehow trying to hide our… whatever it was from the rest of the world.
I proposed a trip to the theater. Easy enough. We wouldn’t have to interact with many strangers unless we wan
ted to, and once the lights went down it would be hard for anyone to stare or surreptitiously take pictures of us on their phones. I’d texted Caroline with the details of where we were going so she could keep an eye on any suspicious social media postings. I didn’t want some unflattering photo to start trending without my knowledge.
And no, those were not the things I wanted to worry about while trying to have an entertaining time with Alexander. I wasn’t quite ready to put a label on what we were, but I knew I wanted to keep seeing him.
When the performance was over, we sat quietly, holding hands as the rest of the attendees filtered out.
“It’s pretty early,” he said.
Was there a proper, urbane way to ask him to come back to my place while still hinting that it was a purely non-sexual invitation? I wasn’t sure. “Would you like to see my condo?” I asked. “It’s not far from here.”
“Oh,” he said. As if he’d forgotten that we’d all but dry humped in the back seat of a car the previous week. “Sure.”
“I don’t mean, that is—”
“Christine.” He kissed the back of my hand. An appreciated gesture, since I’d been a little jealous when he’d done the same thing when meeting Caroline. But there was definitely something more in the way he did it to me. “I’d like to see where you live. Makes sense, right? You’ve seen my place.”
“I’m sorry about the selfies.”
“Who wouldn’t want to have their picture taken with a former president? You handled it perfectly.”
Thankfully the requests had been few and far between. Resting bitch face had served me well yet again.
It had rained while we were in the theater, so traffic was a little slow leaving. I managed to pass the journey leaned against Alexander’s shoulder as I watched his face reflected in the lights of the city. “Did you enjoy the play?” I asked.
He kissed my forehead. “Absolutely. But I’d go just about anywhere to spend time with you.”
“Good,” I said. “Because there’s this monster truck rally next weekend and—”
“I know you’re kidding, but I would gladly attend such an event with you.”
I wasn’t sure that was really our scene, but I’d file it away for next time. I snuggled closer to him. “This is nice,” I murmured.
He wrapped both arms around me and I closed my eyes, letting his heartbeat drown out all the other noises of the city until we pulled up to my building.
“Thought you drifted off there,” Alexander said.
I might have, if the drive had been any longer. I also hoped I hadn’t horribly mussed my hair. A woman had to have priorities. I reflexively patted my head.
“You look great,” he said. “Like you’ve had a fulfilling tumble in the back seat.”
I frowned at him. “I am not amused.”
He laughed as he opened the entryway door. “You cannot fool me, Madam President. I can tell that you are.”
Two of my agents took their usual spots next to the night security man. “I’ve got a small detail upstairs as well,” I explained to Alexander.
“Not inside the condo?”
I pressed the button for the penthouse unit. “Mr. Guardiola, I am a lady and do not care for what you may be inferring.”
“But seriously, they stay outside, right?”
I’d started out this evening deciding I wouldn’t sleep with this man. At least, not yet. Soon. But not tonight. His unruffled humor was rapidly causing me to change my mind. “They do,” I said. “We’ll be completely alone.”
He put his arm around me. “Perfect.”
I had an embarrassingly hard time finding my keys once we reached my condo. Hitting all the right notes, I was. It was just where I lived. No big deal. No judgments. He’d made all of that clear before.
Except that you could tell a lot about a person by how they lived. How they decorated. The colors they used and the schemes and the styles. I’d taken very few personal possessions from the house in Bryn Mawr, putting the remaining items in storage for Susannah to go through later and leaving the rest of it in the hands of a capable estate liquidator.
My condominium was, in a word, antiseptic. Maybe that was too harsh a description, but it was modern, sparse, and very, very white. I hadn’t done much with it but if I was honest with myself, interior decorating wasn’t high on my list of priorities. The place had new furniture, dishes, and appliances, and I had access to what I needed when I needed it. Why would I worry about anything else?
I flipped the light switch when we finally got inside and bit my lip, awaiting his reaction.
“Well,” he said. “It’s very bright. Well lit. Great views of the city.”
“You hate it,” I said.
“It’s not what I expected. It’s a bit… sterile.”
Which was a much better descriptor than antiseptic, though both were pretty damn accurate. “I haven’t been here that long.”
As if three months weren’t sufficient to make a place your own. It had taken much less than that when I was in Canada with Caroline’s children, and under those circumstances money and resources had been tight. I wasn’t going to begin to think about why I wasn’t able to achieve the same vibe by myself.
He’d already started looking around. “Two beds, two baths?”
I nodded. “Nothing spectacular. There’s a pool and a gym downstairs in the common area, neither of which I use.”
Alexander gravitated toward the side table in the living room, where most of my prized possessions were located. He glanced at a framed picture of Marguerite and Sophie taken while we were in California with their parents, then picked up a photo of Caroline, Jack, Tom, and me at Jack’s inaugural.
“Two very striking couples,” he said. “Tom was a handsome man.”
I didn’t know why it made me uncomfortable to hear him compliment my husband, but it did. It hurt even more to hear him use the past tense.
Alexander picked up the photo next to it. Jessica in a cap and gown. “Your youngest daughter,” he said.
“She graduated from Lehigh with honors. Played basketball all four years. Dyed her hair purple right before graduation because she knew it would irk me to no end. I never saw her natural color again.”
“She had your sense of humor,” he said. “And what I assume was the same shade of blonde as you.”
He was correct on both counts, though the latter was an easier guess to make. “How can you tell that from a photo?”
He put it back down. “I just can. That’s a nice picture of Susannah and her husband. And their kids. Twins?”
I have grandchildren. What am I doing with this man? Grand. Children. “Yes. It’s been an adjustment.”
“Having grandkids or coping with the idea of them?”
I laughed. “Both.”
He glided over to the other side table, where only a single photo stood. “Your mother?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“You look like her.”
I didn’t look a thing like her. “No, I don’t.”
“You do.” He studied me carefully, then scrutinized the photo again. “You have that same look in your eye.”
Oh boy. “What kind of look?”
Alexander pressed a warm hand against my back. “You both look like women shouldering a lot of pain they wish they didn’t have to carry.”
I was not ready to cry in front of this man. “I—”
He pressed his lips to my cheek. “I didn’t mean to upset you. Sometimes I notice things. But that doesn’t always mean I should say them out loud.”
“My mother had a rough life,” I managed.
“And you?”
Like he didn’t already know the answer to that question. One parent was conspicuously absent from the family funtime photo jamboree. Alexander had to have noticed. “I had an unpleasant childhood.”
“Are you comfortable talking about it?”
Not particularly, but that didn’t mean I shouldn’t try anyway. My upbr
inging ranked considerably lower than the deaths of my husband and youngest child on the Chrissy Ordeal Countdown. “I grew up in Flint, Michigan. An only child. Have you seen the documentary Roger and Me?”
“Once or twice.”
“Well, it was pretty much a carbon copy of that, mixed in with some alcoholism and continuous verbal abuse. To this day I refuse to ride in anything manufactured by General Motors.”
“That must have made being an all-American Republican politician quite difficult.”
I nodded. There were a lot of GM luxury vehicles in D.C. “Even now, if the car service sends a Cadillac, I tell them to turn around and send a different driver. They already know me well enough not to bother sending a Buick. Pretty ridiculous, huh?”
“Not at all,” Alexander said quietly. “I assume your mother bore the brunt of his anger?”
Because he knew the unpleasantness was all at the hands of my father. “Flint in the 1980s was not the best place to be. Add an unemployed, unstable man with a drinking problem to the mix and…”
“How much verbal abuse?”
What an odd question, even if it wasn’t unexpected. “Oh, a very healthy smattering. Not all of it verbal.”
His expression darkened. “Did he hit you?”
I blinked rapidly, sneaking a glance at my mother's picture. “He never hit me.”
Alexander didn’t miss the connection. “She was a strong woman,” he said.
I shook my head. “Alex—”
“I know. I won’t push it. Just don’t discount the sacrifices your mother made to keep her child safe.”
I knew all about the power and control wheel, about the ways women were trapped in relationships by economics or education or, yes, children. I’d done my best to champion federal funding for domestic violence prevention while in Congress. None of that could erase the very real touchstone of my own existence. “She did her best,” I managed.
“I take it both parents are no longer here?”
“Dad died decades ago. I didn’t go to the funeral. Mom passed a little after that. She never left him, even after I offered to help her get out.”
“Do you resent her for it?”
I swiped under an eye with my pinky finger. “It wasn’t her fault. She did what she thought was right. I’m just sorry it affected my relationship with her. My father can go screw himself, though.”
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