“You’re sure about that?” the President challenged. “The additional subsidy we need to give the Russians to make this deal happen is going to hinder the short-term benefits to our economy. Mitch, we need this deal to last the duration if we’re going to see long-term growth.”
“I’m sure, sir.”
There was a discreet knock at the door of the Oval Office and a young woman came into the room, carrying a silver tray with coffee. I caught her out of the corner of my eye and flinched. My heart leaped into my throat. At a quick glance the woman looked like Connie Wyatt. This girl had the same tumble of golden hair, the same perfect smooth skin and the same lithe figure. I heard myself gasp.
The President heard it too. He frowned with a touch of bemused concern. “You okay, Mitch. You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”
I covered my confusion with a wobbly grin and shook my head ruefully. “It’s been a long week,” I said vaguely.
The President nodded. He took a mug from off the tray and the young staffer offered me the other. I accepted my mug without looking at her. She disappeared back out of the room.
The President sipped at his coffee while he stared reflectively through the tall glass windows into the Rose Garden.
“This is a big deal, Mitch,” he said at last. “The biggest, most broad-reaching trade agreement we’ve negotiated with the Russians since the end of the second World War. It’s been two years in development. I don’t mind admitting I’m relieved we’re over the last hurdle.”
I let a smile tug at the corner of my mouth. “The diplomats in Moscow have the final draft of the agreement. It’s my understanding the Russians will fly into Washington next month for the official signing.”
The President set his coffee down on the low table between us and nodded. He got to his feet and buttoned his coat. The meeting was ending. I stood and we shook hands. He smiled into my eyes and blasted me with the full force of his charm.
“I want you to be at that ceremony,” he said as he rounded behind his desk and glanced down at the next item on his agenda. “My office will send through all the details.”
Chapter 19
Mitch
When I reached my office, my secretary, Evelyn, stared up at me with a look of consternation on her face. She drew a sharp breath.
“Connie Wyatt is here to see you,” the tone of her voice was edged with awkwardness. “She’s waiting in there.”
Evelyn pointed to the closed doors that divided the reception area from the sanctuary of my personal office and shrugged her shoulders with exasperation. “I didn’t know where else to put her.”
I nodded. She handed me a wad of messages that had arrived in the few short minutes I had been with the President.
The corridors of the White House were filled with the bustle of activity and the hum of indistinct voices. I glanced at my wristwatch. It was just after four o’clock.
“Take the rest of the day off, Ev,” I said. “Tell the typist girls too. Go home, put your feet up and relax for the weekend.”
Evelyn smiled her pleasant surprise. She snatched up her coat and handbag and went into the adjoining room to share the news with the typing staff. I waited in the outer room until all three women had filed out into the hallway, and then I closed the door behind them.
And locked it.
As I pushed open the double doors into my private office, I saw Connie stalking across the floor in front of my desk, her arms folded, her mouth pinched. She was taking short steps, and her hair swished every time she turned on her heel. She looked up and saw me, and froze.
I went straight to a side table and poured myself a drink. I lifted the tumbler to my lips and swished neat whisky around my mouth, then swallowed. The raw scald of the spirit burned down my throat. I offered Connie a drink with a gesture. She shook her head.
She was angry. Her eyes were narrowed and slanted like arrow points.
“Thank you for coming into the office this afternoon,” I said. “I wanted to give you this paycheck.”
From a drawer in my desk I produced an envelope. I laid it on the polished desk top. Connie took up the envelope but did not bother to open it.
Her lips were quivering, and the flesh of her cheeks pale as marble. We stared at each other across the space. She was wearing the same tight-fitting denim jeans she had worn on the flight out of Moscow, matched with a pink sweater. She bunched her hands into little fists.
“You’re an asshole!” her temper seethed from between clenched jaws.
I arched my eyebrows, taken aback. Connie too seemed startled that the profanity had escaped her lips. She stared at me in wide-eyed bewilderment while the silence drew out for long seconds.
“You said you transferred me because the trade deal was finalized with Russia and that you were moving on to a new project, Mitch. But when I arrived, you had two women working in the adjoining room. Why wasn’t I kept on to do that work?”
I blew out a long breath. “I had my reasons,” I said stiffly.
Connie grunted. “Yeah,” the flash of anger glittered in her eyes again. “And the reason is that you’re an asshole.”
I came around the desk, strode straight past Connie and went to the internal office doors. I had left them open when I had entered the room. Now I closed them. Connie watched me, becoming wary.
“Why did you do that?” her voice got small.
“So we can have a private conversation, undisturbed.” My own temper was simmering just below the surface of civility. I had resolved to take the high moral ground in this meeting. Now I knew a different course of action was required.
I reached back into the desk drawer and withdrew a second envelope. I thrust it into Connie’s hand. “Open it.”
The hard tone of my voice made her flinch.
Connie
The bitter tone of Mitch’s voice lashed like a whip and startled me. In an instant all the bluster of my anger dissolved beneath his intimidating, dominating glare. He forced an envelope into my hand.
“What’s this?” I asked, hating myself for the squeak of uncertainty in my throat.
“Open it,” Mitch said again.
He stared at me, scrutinizing me as I fumbled with the sealed flap of the envelope. It was thin. I could feel the shape of a stiffened piece of cardboard inside. The blow-torch of Mitch’s penetrating eyes made me fumbling and flustered.
The flap of paper across the top of the envelope tore and I reached inside. It was just a single piece of board, the same shape as a businessman’s calling card. I removed it from the envelope.
It was blank.
“Turn it over,” Mitch said. His voice was strangely drawn and tight.
I turned the card in my fingers.
BABUSHKA
For a moment of pure white-hot terror my mind went blank.
I stared at the word – a word I would never forget – and as the realization of what this meant began to seep into the fogged numbness of my mind, my senses were suddenly overwhelmed. Shock punched the air from my lungs and left me reeling.
“What?” I wheezed. “You?”
I didn’t know how to feel. I felt the outrage of the deception and then the lifting relief that the Russian mafia would not come to America hunting me down to retrieve their money. Then I was struck by the outrageous realization that this man – the man I had fantasized about – had bought my virginity.
I reeled away from the desk, doubled over as though gripped by pain.
The card fell from my nerveless fingers. The breath sawed in my lungs.
Mitch stood still as a statue, his features carved in stone.
I started to shake and then sob. The relief and release of my fears was replaced by a whole new crisis.
I was free from the Russian mafia, and unburdened of the guilt of deceiving Mitch. He knew about the nightclub auction. Whether he despised me for that decision didn’t matter in that moment; he knew, and it was a heavy weight off my shoulders.
“Why?”
I asked at last in a small trembling voice.
“Because I wanted to preserve your integrity and also because I wanted to keep you out of danger,” his voice was grave. “You could have been compromised by Russian counter-intelligence operatives, Connie. You could have been blackmailed and the evidence of your actions used to force you to work against the best interests of your country. I acted to stop that from happening… and because I thought you deserved better than the likely result of your actions.”
It was a veiled reference to the idea of me giving my virginity in such sordid circumstances.
“Thank you,” I felt ashamed and embarrassed all over again. Mitch stood with his chin lifted, his features set like a noble knight who had gallantly saved the virtue of a medieval maiden. “But how did you find out?”
The corner of Mitch’s mouth tugged into the ghost of a dry smile. “Sergey told me,” he said.
“How did he know?”
I went back to the side table and refilled my tumbler with whisky. “When you called the nightclub, the son told his father what you had offered to sell,” he said abstractly. “But the father is mafia and the working relationship between the city’s criminal elements and Sergey’s people is tenuous and often strained. The old man was terrified that auctioning the virginity of an American girl who happened to be connected to the U.S. Embassy would bring down a hell-storm of government retribution. So he called Sergey. And Sergey called me. We met in a park beyond the walls of the compound.”
“But the bidding…?” I frowned and shook my head. I felt like I had been spun around in dizzy circles.
“It was one of Sergey’s men who did the bidding. I merely provided the funds that were required.”
“It was your money that the man bid for me?”
“Yes.”
“And I suppose Sergey called the police and told them to raid the hotel.”
Mitch shook his head. “No. There was no police raid. The men that burst into your room were Sergey’s agents. They faked the raid to get you quickly out of the hotel and back to the embassy.”
There was an antique sitting chair in a corner near the office doors. I drifted towards it and let my trembling legs collapse from underneath me. I hung my head, letting the wings of my fringe hide my face from the humiliation that burned like fire on my cheeks.
“The money…” I began, faltering through a sob of tears.
“Keep it.”
I looked up in fresh horror. “I can’t.”
Mitch shrugged. He swallowed the contents of his glass in a single gulp and the fumes of the raw spirit made his eyes watery. “Keep it,” he said again. “But in return, I want to know why. Why did you do that, Connie? Why did you take such terrible risks and subject yourself to the humiliation of being paid for sex in such a public way? Are you kinky? Do you crave some bizarre kind of arousal?”
I started to shake my head and the movement loosed tears from my eyes that trickled down my face and spilled from my chin. It took me a long time to gather my composure, all the time feeling the withering heat of Mitch’s bewildered eyes upon me.
“I can’t tell you why,” I said at last. “And I can’t just accept the money you paid for me.”
Mitch ignored my offer to return the money he had bid for my virginity. “You can’t tell me why you did it… or you won’t tell me why?”
“I won’t.” I lifted my chin and set my lips into a trembling line of defiance. “But I’m not a bad person, Mitch. Just believe that much, please.”
Chapter 20
Mitch
I felt the pull of compassion and decency towards where Connie sat, huddled and sobbing. She was weeping like her heart was breaking. I went to her and put a stiff arm about her shoulder. I could feel the heave of her shoulders as the tears came upon her, and I could sense the heat of her flesh through the thin fabric of her sweater. Beneath the touch of my fingers was the raised ridge of her bra strap. I stared blankly at the wall, dealing with my own demons of desire for her, while she slowly pulled herself together, sniffing and shuddering.
When at last she seemed settled, breathing in little shakes and gasps, I stepped back into the middle of the room and diverted my gaze out through the window. It was such an intimate moment of anguish that I felt like an intruder.
“Is that why you transferred me?” Connie asked in a meek whisper. “Were you worried about my actions impacting on your career, Mitch? Were you trying to distance yourself from me in case someone found out, and the scandal reached you?”
I turned on my heel and fixed her with a cold stare. I felt the truth leap impulsively to my lips and I could not snare the words before they were spoken.
“I wanted to distance myself from you, not because of any scandal, Connie – but because I want you. I want you the way a man wants a woman… and I know that’s not possible while we work together. It was all I could do to keep myself away from you.”
Connie stared across the office at me in stunned silence, her gaze enigmatic, her expression solemn but changing now to something else as the tension-charged silence drew out.
Shock showed in her eyes and then dawning realization glowed on her smile. It seemed to draw her from the chair, and she came towards me with a dreamy kind of determination. Her face lifted to mine, her lips parting.
I tried to reel away but a storm-surge of physical arousal drove us together. It came from far away, like the gale of a wind. I could feel my whole body stirred by the velocity of it. The walls of my resolve tumbled, and with it went the last of my reason and will.
I took her mouth fiercely, despising myself for the inability to resist the temptation of her. I felt a kind of guilty infidelity, as though I was betraying the vows I had made to uphold my own honor.
Connie’s mouth matched the hunger of my own. I felt her arms dangle around my neck and she lifted herself on the tips of her toes, her breath on my lips, the subtle scent of her filling my senses. I probed her mouth with the flick of my tongue and she went limp in my arms, our bodies pressed hard together, the arousal intense enough to strike sparks.
When at last I broke away from her she swayed towards the empty space where I had stood. I seized one of her wrists. Her lips were puffy and swollen.
She placed her other hand flat against my chest.
“Mitch –” but she said no more. Instead she gazed up at me silently and the dazzling blue of her eyes seemed to darken to the color of the unfathomable depths. Along the line of her jaw I saw the soft throb of her pulse. She opened her mouth to continue. Her lips were inflamed and she dabbed at them with the tip of her tongue to moisten them.
“No more,” I said. My voice sounded strange and husky in my own ears. “This is not what I had intended, and it’s not the reason I bid for you, Connie.”
Connie
My body felt like it was on fire. Every inch of my flesh tingled with desire.
I wasn’t going to accept ‘no’.
Not now… not when I was this close to Mitch and my lips still sizzled with the fire of his kiss.
He had been such a surprise. I had never truly appreciated the height nor the strength of him. His hands on my body had been firm, controlled, and in the brief moment we had embraced he had awakened within me an intense physical hunger. I could still taste him, and a shudder ran through me.
I pulled myself back within the circle of his arms, and his hands came around me in reflexive response. I crushed my cheek against the muscles of his chest, inhaling the masculinity of him.
My fingers were around his back, splayed and clutching at him through the fabric of his suit. Between us I felt the instinctive hardness of him as his body responded treacherously despite his reluctance.
“I can’t accept the money, Mitch,” I said, and then leaned away with my upper body to scrutinize his eyes. The movement drove my hips against the swell of his cock and the thrust of him maddened me.
“I want you to have it,” he said.
I lowered my voice to a
manipulative whisper. “Let me repay you in the way I should,” I dangled the temptation and let the offer hang in the fragile silence. “You bought my virginity, and unless I give it to you, I’ll never be able to accept the money in good conscience.”
“You don’t need to –”
I cut him off. “I do need to. For my sake,” I said with feeling. “It’s the only way I can scrub my conscience clean and move on from everything I endured in that nightclub.”
Mitch said nothing. I heard the tortured shudder of his breath as he exhaled. I sensed the last shreds of his resolve were unraveling and I swayed my hips gently so that my lower body brushed harder against the throb of his erection.
“And if we can complete the transaction,” I chose my words carefully, wrapping my sinful hunger for him in harmless language, “then afterwards, when I have paid my debt, I will tell you why I chose to auction myself, and what I plan on doing with the money.”
Mitch looked pained. His voice was hoarse with disbelief. “You’re trying to blackmail me?”
“No,” I pressed my cheek against his chest again, feeling the tripping frantic beat of his heart. “I’m trying to entice you.”
Mitch threw his face to the ceiling; his eyes screwed shut, his fists clenched, and his whole body drawn tight with his silent struggle. Then he reached into the pocket of his trousers and unhooked a key from a bunch he had been carrying.
“Here,” his face had changed, no longer drawn or creased by torment. The color had faded, and now, once again, he was composed, his mouth hard, his intelligent knowing eyes resolved. “This is a key to my house. I’ll message you the address. I want you to be there tomorrow night at seven.”
I took the key, but Mitch wasn’t finished. He pulled me back against him and kissed me again, drawing all the strength from my bones and leaving me weak and breathless.
“What clothes did you wear when you displayed yourself at the nightclub? I want you to wear the same thing.”
Daddy In Charge Page 11